The Patriots

by Randy DeSoto

Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein reportedly personally approved the Monday morning FBI raids on President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s home and offices.

The New York Times reported that the FBI seized emails, tax documents and records, some of which are related to Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the November 2016 presidential election.

According to The Times, a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller proceeded Rosenstein’s decision to green light the raid.

The Justice Department obtained a search warrant from a federal judge in New York, which would have required prosecutors to argue the FBI would likely find evidence of criminal activity.  A source told The Times that the documents identified in the warrant date back years.  Trump took the DOJ to task on Monday night during a meeting at the White House with his national security team.  He noted that Rosenstein approved a renewal of a FISA warrant, which authorized the FBI to continue surveil Trump campaign associate Carter Page during the early months of the new administration in 2017.

Asked by a reporter if Rosenstein would keep his job, Trump did not respond.  However, the president did voice his frustration with Sessions and Mueller. “(Sessions) should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have put a different attorney general in,” Trump said. “So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country, but you’ll figure that out.”

Sessions’ recusal led to Rosenstein taking over Russia investigation, which resulted in his appointment of Mueller as special counsel.  The president said the Mueller investigation is “an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for” and called Mueller’s actions against Cohen “a disgrace.”

RELATED: Former Board Member Dershowitz Hammers ACLU for Support of Trump Attorney Raid

Attorney–client privilege is dead!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2018

Asked whether he will fire Mueller, the president replied, “We’ll see what happens,” and, “Many people have said you should fire him.”

by John D'Aloia

A previous TRACKSIDE described New Zealand government reform actions as reported by Maurice P. McTigue in an article entitled "Rolling Back Government" printed in the April 2004 Imprimis, published by Hillsdale College. Space limitations prevented relating other actions taken by McTigue and company.

The reformers believed that subsidies make people dependent, dependent people lose their ingenuity, and dependent people become more dependent. McTigue’s example was sheep farming. Lamb was selling for $12.50 per carcass on the market and the taxpayers were kicking in another $12.50 per. In a one-year period, the government pulled the plug on the subsidy. Sheep ranchers put their heads together and developed a product that, within four years, brought $30 per carcass. By 1999 the price was $115 per carcass. It was forecast that eliminating the subsidy would result in corporate farming eradicating family farms. The opposite happened - corporate farms declined and family farming expanded. Inside the beltway, are you listening?

The New Zealand educational system was failing. More and more money was poured into the system while achievements headed south. McTigue said "It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money." They found that only 30 cents of every education dollar reached the classroom. (The educrats were well fed.) They eliminated all Boards of Education, and placed each of 4,500 schools under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of students at the school. They gave each school a bag of money based on the number of students with no strings attached to the bag. Private schools got the same bag of money, allowing parents to choose which schools got the money for their children. Within 18 months, the large achievement disparity between public and private schools evaporated as teachers were empowered to teach - and realized that without students in their classrooms, they would be without employment. Within three years, New Zealand students went from being 14 or 15 percent below their international peers to 14 or 15 percent above them in academic performance. In Topeka, are you listening?

Every one who has had an encounter of a close kind on a highway with a deer (my encounter was more than close), and farmers, will like the New Zealand approach to managing deer. For 120 years, New Zealand tried to eliminate deer, loosed on the land when they were imported by the English for hunting. The deer were an invasive species - keep that term in mind for it is another ecofascist power play. The reformers authorized farmers and ranchers to farm the deer if they could catch them and keep them behind eight-foot high fences. Voila! The government spent not one cent since on deer eradication and New Zealand has 40 percent of the world’s venison market. In Topeka, are you listening? I think not - many, many sessions ago, a Kansas citizen brought a somewhat similar idea to the dome and was scarcely given the time of day. Why? A private-market solution is a direct threat to the entrenched bureaucracy which exists on the concept that government owns the state’s wild animals. If private citizens can own and manage wild animals, rangers, wardens, and offices in Topeka are superfluous baggage.

I wish McTigue had a bit of influence in Topeka. Not only is Kansas the "High Tax Point on the Prairie", we are spending ourselves into the poor house. The Guv’s staff has estimated that the "short fall" (such a genteel term for spending what you don’t have) for FY2010 would be $188M increasing to $400M in FY2011. Caleb Stegal, in an article posted on Kansas Liberty.com on July 2^nd,longed for the good old days when Kansas had a conservative Democrat for governor. He wrote: "[She] abhorred waste in government and the burden of taxation. She vetoed tax increases and used her line-item to strike bloated deficit spending. She balanced the budget and forced an "existing resources" budget through a recalcitrant state legislature which increased general fund spending by only one-half of one percent. (Pause and let that sink in, especially in light of our current GOP-controlled legislature which treats the mere mention of holding to 3% budget increases with the tantrums of a spoiled child.)"

If Kansas Republicans cannot summon up the will to establish a McTigue-like program to straighten things out, perhaps we can find another Governor Finney.

See you Trackside.

Reprinted from the Old Eponym site in honor of former Editor John D'Aloia 

Excerpts reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu. Subscriptions are free upon request.

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

In 2017, we find ourselves caught between the incredible and Earth-shaking potential of exponential technology — and a million minds, pulling the reins, trying to tame the beast and train it to build out their particular vision of the future.

One such vision is horrifyingly articulated in an article promoted by the World Economic Forum late last year.

The article, written by young Ida Auken, was published ahead of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils.  It details a techno-utopian circular economy, which, on the surface, sounds great. In the circular economy, products are turned into services. Everything is Uber-ized. So, of course, nobody owns anything and all non-ownership is transparent.

“When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods.”

The devil, of course, is in the details. And a tiny, unavoidable glint of darkness emerges halfway through the article:  “Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

Ah, I see.

In this scenario, without privacy, forget about freedom of speech, assembly or the basic ability to form one’s own opinion about the nature of things.

If the politicos are still at the top of the food chain, if the sociopathic wolves still guard the chicken pen, we wonder, what would this society look like?

The flow of information would likely be managed to the bit. Models of reality would be shaped in real-time. Maps would be mistaken for the territory, as nobody would have a reason to think different.

“Free” education would perfect the art of brainwashing. A.I. programs would parse through text messages, emails and social media, in search of “problematic” language. And those deemed a threat to the civility and order of the “Free Society” would likely be, at best, casted out to live with the rurally deplored or, at worst, hanged (humanely as possible, of course) in the public square.

Think of all of those meandering thoughts which run through your mind, of which you cannot control.  Now imagine that any one of them could be used against you. Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, I have no privacy and life couldn’t be more terrifying.

Fortunately, privacy isn’t dead. And technology is a wild beast which might prove impossible to tame completely. In fact, for those willing to put in the work to protect themselves, there are plenty of options to keep your information safe and protected from prying  eyes. Today, to talk about one tool you should add to your privacy arsenal, we invite Simon Black of Sovereign Man.

Read on.

Here’s a FANTASTIC Security Tool You Really Should Know About

By Simon Black

Chances are you probably use a cloud service to store at least a portion of your files. Dropbox. iCloud. Microsoft’s OneDrive. Mega. Box.

There’s so many of them these days. And a few of them, like Switzerland-based Tresorit, focus heavily on privacy and security to keep your data safe.

But let’s be honest– privacy is definitely not a top priority among most of the top cloud providers.

Dropbox states right on its own website that the company has direct access to your files.  ensitive company data. Financial records. Intimate photos. Personal information. Password files. Cryptocurrency keys.And even if you delete the files, the backup copies are STILL stored on Dropbox’s servers.

(It’s not just Dropbox– most of the major cloud services operate this way.) This presents a significant amount of risk from multiple fronts.

Hacker threats are nearly ubiquitous these days. Hardly a month goes by without another announcement of some major data breach… and we only hear about the big ones in which millions of people are affected.  One of the latest hacker trends is when attackers gain control of your mobile devices by calling up your mobile carrier and convincing them that they’re you.  This allows them to reset passwords and easily gain access to your emails and files.  Then of course there are legal risks.

If you’ve never been sued, congratulations. Let’s hope it stays that way. If you have been sued, congratulations. It means that at least someone thinks you’re successful. Broke people typically don’t get sued. Bear in mind that the ‘justice’ system today has very little to do with justice.  It’s about government prosecutors or some twisted, amoral, money-hungry lawyer convincing 12 strangers on a jury that you’re a terrible person.  And during the discovery process of a lawsuit, EVERYTHING is up for grabs. A court can literally subpoena your entire life, including your emails, files, financial records, etc. Chances are they can find something in all that data to make you look bad.

Then there’s the other never-ending issue of government spying and the NSA archiving every kilobyte of data that passes across the Internet. It might be easier to simply CC the government on every email you send and add their email address as an authorized user of your Dropbox account. Despite all these known risks, though, and the constant stream of stories about hackers and government spying, few people take steps to safeguard their data.

(As an example, according to a study by Keeper Security, the most common password is 123456. Not exactly hacker-proof.)

But there are some very simple tools available that can help.

One of them is called Cryptomator, which came to my attention from a close friend of mine who works in the US Army’s cyberwarfare divison, which was established to defend government systems against foreign hackers. Cryptomator is free, simple program which encrypts every single file you store on a cloud server. Let’s say you use Dropbox to sync files between your laptop and the cloud.

Ordinarily, your files are stored unencrypted on your laptop, and they’re accessible by certain Dropbox staff through the cloud servers. Cryptomator encrypts the files on BOTH ends, i.e. the file that’s stored on the Dropbox servers is encrypted, AND the file stored locally on your laptop is encrypted.

Dropbox employees who try to access your data would see nothing but gibberish. And anyone who gains physical access to your laptop would see nothing but gibberish.  Only you have the ability to unlock the files.

Now, this sounds like a cumbersome process… having to constantly encrypt and decrypt files, enter passwords, etc.  But it’s not. Cryptomator has created a streamlined platform where you can group files together in ‘vaults’. Then you can decrypt an entire vault, attach it to your file system, and easily re-encrypt it when you’re finished. You can see an example in this video.

Try it out if you’re interested; the software is free, available on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iPhone.  Plus it’s open-source, meaning that anyone who knows the Java programming language can download the source code and verify that the software contains no backdoors or malware.

[Ed. note: This article originally appeared on the Sovereign Man blog, right here at this link.]  Chris Campbell is the Managing editor of Laissez Faire Today. Before joining Agora Financial, he was a researcher and contributor to SilverDoctors.com.  The article is published under a creative commons license here.