New Rumble Channel Established For Release Of Jan. 6 Security Video By Congress

by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The GOP-controlled Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight has established a Rumble channel and released the second batch of security video from Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

The first few videos were posted to the Rumble channel on Dec. 5. By the next day, the collection grew to 135 clips—each about 10 minutes long. The channel had nearly 700 followers on Dec. 7.

The committee released the first batch of 90 CCTV clips on Nov. 17 on its House of Representatives website. The two websites now contain nearly 40 hours of the more than 40,000 hours of video from Jan. 6 held by Capitol Police.

"As promised, we're releasing more U.S. Capitol Police CCTV video footage from January 6th to ensure full transparency and accountability," said U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight. "Every American may access this and future footage on our new Rumble video page."

The new batch of videos all come from Camera 0908, housed high on the west dome of the Capitol. The aerial footage starts just after midnight and ends about 11:55 p.m. on Jan. 6.

The video includes the flow of protesters from the Ellipse during and after former President Donald Trump’s speech, the breach of the first police line, and the violence on several levels of the west front of the Capitol.

Capitol Police have a network of more than 1,700 security cameras inside the Capitol Building and across Capitol grounds. The agency has consistently opposed (pdf) public release of the CCTV footage.

When he announced the release of up to 44,000 hours of Jan. 6 video, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pledged to regularly update the website with “thousands of hours of footage.”

“To restore America’s trust and faith in their government, we must have transparency,” Mr. Johnson posted on X. “This is another step towards keeping the promises I made when I was elected to be your speaker.”

Enthusiasm about the video rollout was tempered by the announcement that the subcommittee would blur any identifiable faces.

"As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Mr. Johnson said during a press conference on Dec. 5.

That decision drew fire from both sides of the aisle and media across the political spectrum.

Former Rep. Lynn Cheney (R-Wyo.), onetime ranking member of the now-defunct Jan. 6 Select Committee, blasted the idea of blurring the video.

“I think that we’re experiencing a situation where Speaker Johnson is somehow attempting to suggest that there is something in these tapes that would change the facts of what happened,” Ms. Cheney told CNN on Dec. 5.

Defendants in Jan. 6 criminal cases have criticized both the rollout of video and the blurring of faces.

“Johnson is flat-out lying about concerns people might be charged if the footage isn't blurred,” defendant Will Pope, who writes as Free State Will on X, said on Dec. 5. “Congress already gave all the un-blurred video to the DOJ! Motion to vacate this Pinocchio.”

Conservative social media influencer “Catturd” agreed in a post to his 2.1 million followers on X.

“This is 100% to blur out all the feds,” wrote Catturd, whose real name is Phillip Buchanan. “Like the FBI doesn’t have copies of these. What a ridiculous lie.”

A senior congressional aide defended the blurring in a statement to the Epoch Times.

"Unfortunately, there are groups whose sole purpose is to ruin the lives of anyone who was at the Capitol on January 6, whether they have been charged with a crime or not," the aide said. "To protect innocent individuals from groups like this, it makes sense to blur small portions of the footage where faces are identifiable as best as possible before posting footage online. And any American can set up an appointment to view the unedited, unaltered footage at the Subcommittee offices.”

The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans published an editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning Walt Handelsman rapping its home-state representative.

The three-panel cartoon, also posted on X, shows Mr. Johnson at a dais speaking about the facts and truth of Jan. 6. In the final frame, Mr. Johnson says he wants to be "crystal clear," while his image is badly blurred.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-rumble-channel-established-release-jan-6-security-video-congress

"Beyond Shocking": ACLU Will Represent NRA In Free Speech Supreme Court Case

 The American Civil Liberties Union, a left-wing advocacy group, has returned to their roots in defense of an ideological enemy: the National Rifle Association. This move is part of their ongoing effort to remain relevant and defend Americans against First Amendment violations by an overreaching federal government. 

"We're representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York's Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA's First Amendment rights. The government can't blacklist an advocacy group because of its viewpoint," the ACLU announced on 'free speech' platform X. 

ACLU made it very clear that they "don't support the NRA's mission or its viewpoints on gun rights, and we don't agree with their goals, strategies, or tactics. But we both know that government officials can't punish organizations because they disapprove of their views." 

ACLU and NRA have joined forces as the Supreme Court agreed to hear the gun rights advocacy group's free-speech challenge to what it alleges New York officials encouraged banks and insurance companies to blacklist it after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

"The NRA might be thought of as the 800-pound gorilla on the Second Amendment," NRA lawyer William A. Brewer III said, adding, "Clearly, the ACLU is the 800-pound gorilla on the First Amendment."

The civil liberties group's national legal director, David Cole, said, "It's never easy to defend those with whom you disagree. But the ACLU has long stood for the proposition that we may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it."

The question of when government advocacy violates the First Amendment is before the justices in another case this term. That one concerns the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade social media companies to delete what the government said is misinformation about topics like the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election.

In its petition seeking Supreme Court review, the N.R.A., represented by Mr. Brewer’s firm and Eugene Volokh, a prominent First Amendment scholar, said the appeals court’s ruling could have sweeping consequences. -NY Times

Here's what X users are saying: 

ACLU continued on X: "If the Supreme Court doesn't intervene, it will create a dangerous playbook for state regulatory agencies across the country to blacklist or punish any viewpoint-based organizations — from abortion rights groups to environmental groups or even ACLU affiliates." 

Read the NRA's petition seeking Supreme Court review below:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/beyond-shocking-aclu-will-represent-nra-free-speech-supreme-court-cas

Brits May Be Forced To Take Selfie Before Watching Porn

 by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Brits may be forced to take a selfie and upload it to an adult website before watching porn under new rules to protect children.

Ofcom could force websites to use “facial age estimation” technology to confirm users are age appropriate.

Such technology is seen as more “privacy-friendly” because it would avoid viewers having to upload personal IDs or credit card information.

However, the shame aspect of having to take a selfie in order to watch hardcore pornography is very likely not just to prevent children accessing such material, but adults too.

Porn websites assert that they delete the selfies immediately after confirmation.

Users who look under the age of 25 may have to provide further ID information to access adult websites.

Studies show that a quarter of children in the UK have seen porn by age 11, with the average age children first see it being 13.

The new rules are expected to be enforced in 2025 after a period of review.

“Pornography is too readily accessible to children online, and the new online safety laws are clear that must change,” said Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive.

“Regardless of their approach, we expect all services to offer robust protection to children from stumbling across pornography, and also to take care that privacy rights and freedoms for adults to access legal content are safeguarded,” she added.

A workaround for people who want to avoid having to take a selfie might be to check out Ai influencers, which are verging on being pornographic anyway.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/brits-may-be-forced-take-selfie-watching-porn

Canada's surging cost of living fuels reverse immigration

The dream of making it big in Canada is turning into a battle for survival for many immigrants due to the high cost of living and rental shortages, as rising emigration numbers hints to newcomers being forced to turn their back on a country that they chose to make their adopted home.

Trudeau has made immigration his main weapon to blunt Canada's big challenge of an aging and slowing population, and it has also helped fuel economic growth. That drove Canada's population up at its fastest clip in more than six decades this year, Statistics Canada said.

But now a reversal of that trend is gradually taking hold. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show.

The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), an immigration advocacy group. While the numbers went down during pandemic lockdowns, Statistics Canada data shows it is once again rising.

While that is a fraction of the 263,000 who came to the country over the same period, a steady rise in emigration is making some observers wary.

For a nation built on immigrants, a rising trend of people leaving Canada risks undermining one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau government's signature policies, which granted permanent residency to a record 2.5 million people in just eight years.

Reuters spoke with a half a dozen people who have either left the country or are preparing to do so, because of the high cost of living.

Cara, 25, who came to Canada in 2022 as a refugee from Hong Kong, now pays C$650 ($474) in monthly rent for a single-room basement apartment in Scarborough, north of Toronto, which is about 30% of her monthly take-home salary.

"I never realized that living in a Western country, you can only afford renting a room in the basement," she said. She declined to give her real name because she fled Hong Kong after participating in the 2019 protests triggered by a now-abandoned extradition bill.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canadas-surging-cost-living-fuels-110000750.html

Gaza fighting intensifies after US vetoes ceasefire in UN

 Israel pounded the Gaza Strip from north to south on Saturday in an expanded phase of its two-month-old war against Hamas, after the United States wielded its U.N. Security Council veto to shield its ally from a global demand for a ceasefire.

Thirteen of the Security Council's 15 members voted for the resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire that was blocked by Washington. Britain abstained.

Since a truce collapsed last week, Israel has expanded its ground campaign into the southern half of the Gaza Strip by launching the storming of the main southern city Khan Younis. Simultaneously, both sides have reported a major surge in fighting in the north.

Residents of Khan Younis said on Saturday that Israeli forces were ordering people out of another district just west of positions the Israelis stormed earlier this week, suggesting a further assault could be imminent.

The vast majority of Gaza's 2.3 million residents have already been forced from their homes, many fleeing multiple times. With fighting raging across the length of the territory, residents and U.N. agencies say there is now effectively nowhere safe to go, though Israel disputes this.

Israel has blocked Gazans from fleeing along the main north-south route down the spine of the narrow strip, and is shunting them instead towards the Mediterranean coast.

In Khan Younis, the dead and wounded arrived through the night at the overwhelmed Nasser hospital. A medic ran out of an ambulance with the limp body of a small girl in a pink track suit. Inside, wounded children wailed and writhed on the tile floor as nurses raced to comfort them. Outside, bodies were lined up in white shrouds.

A house in the city was engulfed in a roaring blaze after being struck overnight.

Zainab Khalil, 57, displaced with 30 of her relatives and friends in Khan Younis west of the Israeli positions, said troops had ordered people in nearby Jalal street to leave, "so it might be a matter of time before they act against our area too. We have been hearing bombing all night."

"We don’t sleep at night, we stay awake, we try to put the children to sleep and we stay up fearing the place would be bombed and we’ll have to run carrying the children out. During the day begins another tragedy, and that is: how to feed the children?”

Nassar and another southern hospital, al Aqsa in Deir al-Ballah, reported 133 dead and 259 wounded between them in the past 24 hours, raising an official toll already at nearly 17,500, with many thousands more missing and presumed dead.

There were no new figures on Saturday for dead and wounded from other parts of Gaza, including the entire northern half, where hospitals have ceased functioning and ambulances often can no longer reach the dead.

"We believe the number of martyrs under the rubble might be greater than those received at hospitals," health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra told Reuters.

Fighting in the north has been its most intense in parts of Gaza City and settlements on its northern edge, where huge explosions could be seen from across the fence in Israel. Northern Gaza families were posting messages on the internet pleading with emergency crews to venture into Gaza City to rescue loved ones still trapped there.

"We appeal to the Red Cross and the civil emergency to immediately go to Attallah house. People are besieged inside their house in Jala street in Gaza City, near Zaharna building. The house is on fire," wrote members of the Attallah family.

U.S. SEES 'GAP' BETWEEN ISRAEL'S PLEDGES AND OUTCOME

Israel launched its campaign to annihilate Gaza's Hamas rulers after the Iran-backed Islamist group's fighters burst across the Gaza border fence on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing 240 hostages in a rampage though Israeli towns.

It says it is limiting harm to civilians by providing them with maps showing areas that are safe, and blames Hamas for causing civilian deaths by hiding among them, which the fighters deny. Palestinians say the campaign has turned into a scorched-earth war of vengeance against the entire population of an enclave as densely-populated as London.

Washington has said it told Israel to do more to protect civilians in the next phase of the war than it did so far. This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was a "gap" between Israel's promises to protect civilians and the outcome on the ground.

But Washington has continued to support Israel's insistence that a ceasefire would only benefit Hamas.

"We do not support this resolution's call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war," Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood told the Security Council before exercising Washington's veto.

Ezzat El-Reshiq, a member of Hamas' political bureau, condemned the U.S. veto as "inhumane." Israel's U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan said in a statement: "A ceasefire will be possible only with the return of all the hostages and the destruction of Hamas."

The White House on Friday said more could be done by Israel to reduce civilian casualties and the U.S. shared international concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

"We certainly all recognize more can be done to try to reduce civilian casualties," White House national security council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

https://news.yahoo.com/gaza-fighting-intensifies-us-vetoes-232941741.html

We All Have PTSD

 by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Two years ago, reports started appearing that compared the effects of lockdowns with post-traumatic stress disorder. As it turns out, one of the symptoms of PTSD is forgetting what happened. It’s an evolved trait that helps the human mind cope with terrible things. Our brains are good at blocking it out. I will explain the neuroscience behind this in a bit but first an anecdote from this morning.

I was speaking to the director of a childrens’ choir and he was speaking about an age gap in his singers. The lead singer just graduated high school, and the next oldest singer is 14, which creates huge problems for the choral competence. I hesitated to do it but I finally just observed that this 3-year gap fits exactly with the lockdown period, child masking, and Zoom school.

He began to speak about what it was like to train a choir on Zoom and then conduct masked singers outdoors on winter nights. He recalled the attacks and the difficulties, and then his voice trailed off.

“Actually I’ve blocked out that whole period of life from my memory. I won’t think about it anymore. Anyway, I need to circulate a bit here but good seeing you.”

That was that.

It got me curious about the relationship between selective memory and trauma. For a long time now I’ve noticed that when this subject comes up, the response is either to quickly change the subject, which is common, or dig deeper into what seems like a bit of catharsis. Some people have so much to share, so many painful memories, so much shock and abuse to report, that once they start they cannot stop talking.

This one comment from this one choir director got me suspecting that vast numbers of people might be trying to forget it all. This is how the political debates manage to pretend like this never happened, how the major media gets away with never bringing it up, and how people like Fauci still get high speaking fees, and so on. It’s not just that they are no-good liars; too often it’s because people really do want to forget.

This is how the number one most shared trauma of our lives is fading so fast into the national and global consciousness.

It’s a well-known feature of child or spousal abuse. The memories are so terrible and grim that the human mind develops the capacity for pretending like it never happened if only so that life functioning can continue. This is fine but actually the trauma is still there and feeds other forms of pathologies like substance abuse and attachment disorders and so on. The point of therapy is to come to terms with the reality itself in the process of healing.

Some years ago, a theory developed to explain this and it was tested on mice. I’m going to quote directly:

“Two amino acids, glutamate and GABA, are the yin and yang of the brain, directing its emotional tides and controlling whether nerve cells are excited or inhibited (calm). Under normal conditions the system is balanced. But when we are hyper-aroused and vigilant, glutamate surges. Glutamate is also the primary chemical that helps store memories in our neuronal networks in a way that they are easy to remember.

“GABA, on the other hand, calms us and helps us sleep, blocking the action of the excitable glutamate. The most commonly used tranquilizing drug, benzodiazepine, activates GABA receptors in our brains. There are two kinds of GABA receptors. One kind, synaptic GABA receptors, works in tandem with glutamate receptors to balance the excitation of the brain in response to external events such as stress.

“The other population, extra-synaptic GABA receptors, are independent agents. They ignore the peppy glutamate. Instead, their job is internally focused, adjusting brain waves and mental states according to the levels of internal chemicals, such as GABA, sex hormones and micro RNAs. Extra-synaptic GABA receptors change the brain’s state to make us aroused, sleepy, alert, sedated, inebriated or even psychotic. However, Northwestern scientists discovered another critical role; these receptors also help encode memories of a fear-inducing event and then store them away, hidden from consciousness.”

To test the theory, researchers infused the hippocampus of mice with gaboxadol, a drug that stimulates extra-synaptic GABA receptors. The mice were put in a box and given an electric shock. When the mice were returned to the same box the next day, they played with no memory of what happened the last time they were there. However, when scientists put the mice back on the drug and returned them to the box, they froze, fearfully anticipating another shock.

The lesson here is that “in response to traumatic stress, some individuals, instead of activating the glutamate system to store memories, activate the extra-synaptic GABA system and form inaccessible traumatic memories.”

Is this what has happened to humanity on a global scale, some kind of activation of our extra-synaptic GABA systems to permit the formation of huge barriers around our trauma to make our memory inaccessible? Perhaps.

At the time of Fauci’s strange deposition, I suspect that there was some brilliant madness behind the claim that he could not remember. He said it hundreds of times, again and again on every subject. It was strange, almost like he was training the rest of us to do the same, like some mad scientist modeling the correct way to think about what happened to us. In his view, we shouldn’t think about it at all.

We know we’ve been made the subject of some insane medical and political experiments. It’s perhaps also true that we’ve been made the subject of some malicious psychological experiments, like mice injected with drugs, put in a box, and then shocked. It’s like perhaps the ordering was different: we were put in a box, shocked, and then given drugs.

In any case, it all does indeed feel like PTSD, and it affected no population cohort as traumatically as it did the children. They are owed the truth about the trauma, however, and now. We must have honesty about this. The lies have to stop. We should not tolerate them at all. And the professional liars all need to be removed from their jobs immediately.

In our own lives, we really do need therapy that comes in the form of friendships, community, and physical fellowship with each other. Sadly, the people who need it the most are least likely to get it. I’m thinking of the many people who are still walking around masked up, fearing getting next to others, and otherwise hiding out in their homes in a sense of terror that something bad from the microbial kingdom is going to attack at any time.

The only people who benefit from our mass amnesia are the people who did this to us. We must remember. We must discuss. We must seek justice.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-all-have-ptsd

SEC Says Its Binance Case Should Advance Despite DOJ Settlement

 

• Regulator says admissions in recent settlement show merits
• Binance has asked for court to dismiss SEC’s lawsuit

The Securities and Exchange Commission says Binance Holdings Ltd.’s recent $4.3 billion settlement with the Justice Department and other US authorities bolsters its own case against the world’s biggest crypto exchange.

Despite not being part of the agreement, the SEC argued on Friday that the federal court in Washington hearing its case should weigh admissions by Binance and the firm’s former chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, in the Nov. 21 settlement. The firm and Zhao have asked the court to dismiss the SEC’s lawsuit.

Representatives for Binance and a defense lawyer for Zhao didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-08/sec-says-its-binance-case-should-advance-despite-doj-settlement