AcidiclyBasicGlitch

“Fetterman?” one speaker yelled from a stage near the steps of City Hall.

“Jagoff!” protesters shouted back in unison.

“Fetterman?”

“Jagoff!”

in Fetterman’s case, it describes a politician who campaigned as a Bernie Sanders–loving populist and vowed to help Democrats advance their priorities past the party’s two obstructionists, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—only to reprise their roles once in Congress and cozy up with Republicans.

“He ran in the 2022 primaries against Joe Manchin, and now he’s become Joe Manchin,” says Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic operative in Pennsylvania. “An unprincipled Manchin.”

He’s sided with Republicans on denying immigrants due process, voted to confirm a 2020 election denier to lead the Department of Justice, and approved a GOP budget that freed Trump to slash spending without oversight. His recent actions have enraged progressives, mystified colleagues, and alarmed former and current aides.

Link without paywall: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-attorney-hired-epstein-lawyer-215602325.html

A firm that represents Pete Hegseth and once represented Donald Trump now employs the co-executor of the disgraced financier’s estate.

In the summer of 2022, Donald Trump badly needed criminal-defense lawyers. Tim Parlatore, who was already working for the former president on an unrelated civil matter, joined the team defending Trump after an FBI search found classified government documents stored at his Florida estate. Parlatore had represented prominent Trump allies in their interactions with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attacks; that was helpful, because Trump also faced charges stemming from the riot. Parlatore was a star lawyer in Trump world, so it’s more than a little surprising that, in the fall of that year, he hired a close associate of one of the most notorious villains in the extended MAGA universe: Jeffrey Epstein.

Before he joined the Parlatore Law Group, Darren Indyke was Epstein’s personal attorney for nearly a quarter century and reportedly among his closest associates and advisers. Parlatore’s decision to hire Indyke appears to have escaped public notice. But Indyke, by his own account, has been working for the firm since October 2022.

The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.

But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.

Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.

To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

Well you're going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀

Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother blasted her late accuser as a “monster” and declared he “shed no tear” over her suicide during a fiery interview Friday.

Ian Maxwell, the 68-year-old older sibling of convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, insisted his sibling was in jail because of what he called the lies of Virginia Giuffre.

Prior to her death in April, she had consistently alleged Maxwell had solicited her for sex with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his high society friends, including Prince Andrew, when she was 17.

“My sister’s been banged up for five years. It is very, very largely due to the actions, lies of this woman. I shed no tear for Virginia Giuffre,” Maxwell told British radio station LBC.

He went further still, “I think I know who the monster is here. It certainly isn’t my sister.”

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in regions near Russia in response to threats from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

"I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that," Trump said in a social media post that called Medvedev's statements highly provocative.

He said he ordered the submarines moved "just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances."

Trump and Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, traded taunts in recent days after Trump on Tuesday said Russia had "10 days from today" to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or be hit, along with its oil buyers, with tariffs.

Medvedev on Monday accused Trump of engaging in a "game of ultimatums" and reminded him that Russia possessed Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities of last resort after Trump told Medvedev to "watch his words."

Fuck dude, Medvedev is famous for running his mouth and making these kinds of threats about WWIII, but the logical thing to do would be to just "retaliate" by going through with tariffs before the 10 days to show you won't be threatened, right?

Instead of Trump playing another game of "You think you're crazy, I'll fucking show you crazy..."

This week on Behind The Lens, complex zoning and permitting processes mean residents of the Lower 9th are in the dark about what the plans for revitalization of the Alabo Street Wharf might mean for them. Sunrise Foods International has announced plans to convert the wharf there into the first dedicated organic port in the country. But neighbors to the facility have been left in an information vacuum.

And the New Orleans Police Department appears to be using more than 5,000 cameras along with facial recognition software throughout the city, despite a ban on the technology by the New Orleans City Council, says our special guest Matthew Wollenweber, a New Orleans based security engineer, raising serious privacy concerns.

Here is a timeline of how the facial recognition ban/ordinance/ordinance violation/proposed new ordinance/wherever the fuck we are now (I'm not really sure where that is bc the city just skipped a city council meeting and seems to be just pretending this isn't happening/completely silent at the moment) went down.

Timeline of predictive policing and facial recognition surveillance in New Orleans:

~2012-2018: Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology

2015: Meet The Man Who Runs New Orleans’ Entirely Privatized (And Controversial) City Surveillance System

2017: ProjectNOLA plans to expand crime camera network, work more closely with New Orleans officials

2018: Months after end of ‘predictive policing’ contract, Cantrell administration works on new tool to ID ‘high-risk’ residents

2020: New Orleans City Council bans facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech

2022: Mayor Cantrell moves to reverse bans on facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech

2023: Wholly ineffective and pretty obviously racist’: Inside New Orleans’ struggle with facial-recognition policing

May 2025: Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

June 2025: City camera technology not useful for facial recognition: Project NOLA founder

Lagarde says he believed a proposed new ordinance would “free up NOPD to tap the Project NOLA network without concern” as needed.

Future surveillance across America as of 2025:

June 2025: Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison

Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime. Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata—cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

The New Orleans City Council is considering Ordinance 35,137 that would authorize the continued use of the live facial recognition system implemented by Project NOLA. Project NOLA, a non-profit organization, runs a centralized surveillance system that has equipped New Orleans with more than 200 facial recognition cameras at various establishments and residential locations. The program, run by a former officer, was until recently, sending law enforcement live, real time alerts of people identified by facial recognition from predetermined lists. The use of Project NOLA’s live facial recognition system by the New Orleans police was a clear violation of a preexisting 2022 city council ordinance that limited the use of facial recognition technology to searches involving specific cases with violent crime. The 2022 ordinance did not allow for the use of live facial recognition or the mass deployment of the technology. Despite the police’s clear violation of the ordinance, the New Orleans City Council is considering a new ordinance to sanction the mass deployment of live facial recognition.

The possibility that New Orleans will officially implement mass surveillance via facial recognition would be an about-face that would see New Orleans go from a 2020 ordinance that rightly banned facial recognition because of the heightened risk of false positives for Black people to embracing a dystopian future of a dragnet facial recognition surveillance that treats everyone as a suspect. This opens the door to a level of intrusion that we’ve only seen in authoritarian governments. The intrusion will not stop at our faces, Project NOLA can not only track faces, but also clothing, cars, and bikes. The kind of surveillance presents a real threat to our privacy, civil liberties, and undermines our democratic values.

The use of live FRT surveillance would make everyone a suspect and go against democratic values. This type of mass surveillance would undermine individual freedoms and citizens’ ability to freely engage in social and political activity. The European Court of Human Rights unanimously concluded that highly intrusive technology (e.g. real-time dragnet facial recognition surveillance) is incompatible with the ideals and values of a democratic society governed by the rule of law. Mass deployment of live facial recognition suppresses dissent and disproportionally targets marginalized groups.

Sanctioning the indiscriminate use of live facial recognition would destroy the previous guardrails around this technology and would be the first major American city to specifically allow live facial recognition.

The award covering the next decade is one of the largest DoD contracts ever, cementing the tech firm’s role in warfighting for years to come.

The U.S. Army issued Palantir a contract Thursday worth up to $10 billion over the course of the next decade.

The new contract, the largest ever awarded to the software and data analysis company, cements Palantir’s role as a major processor of data for the military. It comes on the heels of an additional $795 million the military allocated earlier this year to put into its artificial intelligence targeting software, Maven Smart System.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/43174082

WaPo article: Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Also there just happens to be a state law that goes into effect tomorrow that threatens all state employees (including law enforcement) with jail time for ignoring federal immigration orders. Like, idk, refusing to hand over access to your city's real time facial recognition tracking surveillance.

It was literally made to target the sheriff bc of the federal consent decree saying local police don't deal with immigration matters. Small government's biggest supporters at the state level have decided that it's necessary to help the federal government enforce immigration orders on the city.

Orleans sheriff to stick with immigration policy in spite of new state law

Watched the entire fucking criminal justice meeting on June 30th. Here is probably the most relevant clip of the whole 4ish hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lolxh5/clip_of_lesli_harris_asking_the_right_questions/

Finally this article came out July 10th and one of the council members said exactly why a promise from the police didn't address the real issue.

New Orleans councilmember against facial recognition expansion

Welp, guess what today is? Tried to watch the criminal justice meeting, but there is nothing scheduled.

I have no fucking idea what is actually happening with the proposal. Or if we will even hear anything before the vote. Or if we're just supposed to pretend none of this is happening?

I'm assuming they're still voting on it August 7th? Maybe? Given how little public opinion seems to matter at the city, state, and federal level in 2025 compared to corporate money, maybe we're just supposed to pretend this was never a thing that happened.

WaPo article: Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Also there just happens to be a state law that goes into effect tomorrow that threatens all state employees (including law enforcement) with jail time for ignoring federal immigration orders. Like, idk, refusing to hand over access to your city's real time facial recognition tracking surveillance.

It was literally made to target the sheriff bc of the federal consent decree saying local police don't deal with immigration matters. Small government's biggest supporters at the state level have decided that it's necessary to help the federal government enforce immigration orders on the city.

Orleans sheriff to stick with immigration policy in spite of new state law

Watched the entire fucking criminal justice meeting on June 30th. Here is probably the most relevant clip of the whole 4ish hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lolxh5/clip_of_lesli_harris_asking_the_right_questions/

Finally this article came out July 10th and one of the council members said exactly why a promise from the police didn't address the real issue.

New Orleans councilmember against facial recognition expansion

Welp, guess what today is? Tried to watch the criminal justice meeting, but there is nothing scheduled.

I have no fucking idea what is actually happening with the proposal. Or if we will even hear anything before the vote. Or if we're just supposed to pretend none of this is happening?

I'm assuming they're still voting on it August 7th? Maybe? Given how little public opinion seems to matter at the city, state, and federal level in 2025 compared to corporate money, maybe we're just supposed to pretend this was never a thing that happened.

Here is a free link to the full article:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/how-trump-s-personal-attorney-wound-up-investigating-the-epstein-case-at-doj/ar-AA1JDDdx

The relationship between Trump and Blanche has been a financially significant one. Blanche’s law firm was paid $9.2 million by Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, between April 2023 and December 2024, for work on cases that included the trial about payment of alleged hush money to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, according to federal election records. Trump was found guilty in the hush money case, which has been appealed and is being handled by other attorneys.

The Justice Department did not respond directly to questions from The Washington Post about whether Blanche consulted a government ethics official regarding an interview with Maxwell. Instead, the department sent a written statement from spokesman Gates McGavick that said, in full:

“Any suggestion that Todd Blanche has acted unethically while serving as Deputy Attorney General is baseless and defamatory. This gossip column relies on innuendo and the word of an agenda-driven political hack to push a false narrative. This is not a serious article.”

Some of Blanche’s ex-colleagues are surprised by what they see as his transformation from the independent litigator they knew to one they say seems willing to prioritize his loyalty to Trump.

Mimi Rocah, who previously co-led the White Plains division in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York with Blanche, said that it is “completely inappropriate and wrong” for him to interview Maxwell — both because of his relationship to Trump and because it is a job that should be reserved for prosecutors on the case, not a Justice official at the highest level.

Unless interview transcripts are released, it may be impossible to know whether and how much Blanche pursued questions about Trump’s possible mention in the Epstein files. For his part, Blanche has insisted his loyalty is to the Justice Department.

"This Department of Justice does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, nor from responsibility to pursue justice wherever the facts may lead,” Blanche said in a July 22 statement on X.

A group representing several major airlines alongside travel companies and airports is opposing a Senate bill that would require the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to generally use manual ID verification at security checkpoints instead of facial recognition.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), would broadly restrict TSA’s ability to use biometrics and facial recognition, carving out a few exemptions for the agency’s PreCheck and other Trusted Traveler programs. Passengers may still opt in to the use of facial recognition at the checkpoint.

In a letter Monday to Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the air industry groups said the law was a “step backward” and that facial recognition technology made security screenings far more efficient.