Fred Meyers to stop selling guns and ammo in ALL of its stores.

Courtesy of the Seattle Times:

Fred Meyer is dropping guns and ammunition from its retail stores. 

Friday’s announcement follows the Portland, Oregon,-based chain’s decision about two weeks ago that it would no longer sell firearms and ammunition to buyers under age 21. Fred Meyer said in a statement it is working to phase out the firearms category after evaluating customer preferences.

A growing number of retailers including Kroger, Walmart, L.L. Bean and Dick’s have tightened gun restrictions or cut ties with the National Rifle Association after February’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida. However, several outdoors specialty chains continue to sell assault-style rifles. 

Fred Meyer, which carries general merchandise in addition to groceries, has 132 stores in four states. It is a division of The Kroger Co.

Damn, this is fairly huge.

Fred Meyer is my preferred one stop shopping destination, and it has bothered me for years that in order to get to the paint or electrical section I have to walk by a display that looks exactly like the  one pictured above.

There is no way to continue saying that these Parkland students are not having an impact. Because clearly they are indeed.

But still there is so much work to be done, as evidenced by this tweet this morning from Sarah Kendzior.

Rural Alabama gas station. I was there getting a Snickers. pic.twitter.com/eGraFplA43

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) March 18, 2018

Yeah, that's a little obscene.

While the Trump Administration stands idly by Russian hackers threaten, not just our information, but also our very infrastructure.

Courtesy of Fast Company:  

On June 13, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified to the Senate Intelligence committee about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. After fielding hours of questions about his knowledge of the plot, Sessions was greeted by an abrupt change in topic from Senator John McCain. “Quietly, the Kremlin has been trying to map the United States telecommunications infrastructure,” McCain announced, and described a series of alarming moves, including Russian spies monitoring the fiber optic network in Kansas and Russia’s creation of “a cyber weapon that can disrupt the United States power grids and telecommunications infrastructure.” 

When McCain asked if Sessions had a strategy to counter Russia’s attacks, Sessions admitted they did not. 

In a normal year, McCain’s inquiries about documented, dangerous threats to U.S. infrastructure would have dominated the news. His concerns are well founded: in recent years, Ukraine’s power grid has been repeatedly hacked in what cybersecurity experts believe was part a test run for the United States. Russian hackers have also hacked many centers of U.S. power, including the State Department, the White House, and everyone with a Yahoo email address in 2014, the Department of Defense in 2015, and, of course, the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, state and local voter databases, and personal email accounts of various US officials in 2016. 

But while the role of hacks in the election is the subject of several ongoing probes, the hacks of other U.S. institutions and infrastructures have been largely ignored by the Trump administration, even as the hacking became more aggressive throughout 2017. In June, shortly after McCain’s testimony, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI released an urgent joint report stating that U.S. nuclear power stations and other energy facilities had been hacked. In July, Bloomberg and the Washington Post confirmed that the hackers worked for the Russian government. 

While U.S. government officials stressed that the public was not yet at serious risk, claiming the hackers had not yet gained the ability to control the grid, intelligence officers warned that infrastructure attacks by a hostile state can also operate as a form of political leverage. Most analyses of the 2016 election hacks have framed leverage in personal terms: kompromat stolen from hacked emails used to blackmail individuals into submission or to humiliate officials as part of a propaganda campaign. Less examined is the form of leverage McCain raised at the Sessions hearing: the possibility of vital infrastructure, like the power grid, being crippled, potentially causing massive financial and humanitarian consequences. In this formulation, an entire government could ostensibly be held hostage to another government’s whim out of fear of triggering a cataclysmic attack.

You know if I were Putin, I would try to get an agent into a position of high authority who could be guaranteed to look the other way while I worked on crippling America.

I am not sure who that might look like...

...but I have a fairly good idea.

So my question is what are the Republicans, who are currently just standing around with their thumbs up their butt, going to say in their defense when one of these cyber attacks takes down part of our power grid, or shuts down the monitoring systems on a nuclear plant, or blocks communication between the tower and planes approaching an airport?

Sorry?

Expert on authoritarian regimes suggests that Donald Trump might be using Russian hacked emails to blackmail Republican politicians.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

“The RNC was hacked,” Kendzior said. “We don’t know what happened with those e-mails. We know that Lindsey Graham’s personal e-mails were also hacked and we know that Trump has a long track record of blackmailing and threatening those who he sees as his political opponents. That goes back throughout his entire career.”

Kendzior reminded Reid that many Republicans benefitted in 2016 from millions of dollars of dark money donated by Kremlin-aligned Russian nationals living in the U.S. and that Graham is one of those politicians.

“I think what concerns me most is that they seem afraid,” she said of the Republicans gathered to heap compliments on Trump this week. “They seem unable to stand up for themselves. They lack all dignity.” 

“Trump has berated them, he has insulted them,” Kendzior said. “He’s often gone after their wives and their family members, saying terrible things and yet they prostrate themselves to him. What kind of leader are you? What kind of man are you?”

Let me start off by saying that in almost any other circumstance I would file allegations like this under "bullshit."

But these are not any other circumstances.

Donald Trump appears for all the world like a Mafioso.

And let's face it using hacked emails to control your subordinates is exactly the kind of tactic that a mob boss would use to maintain control and to keep associates under his heel.

There is no proof for this, but I am open to hearing what anybody else comes up with to explain Trump's ability to totally subjugate the entire GOP.

And keep in mind that they are not simply bending to his will, they are genuflecting at his feet.

Journalist Sarah Kendzior explains that the end of net neutrality may also signal the end of the resistance against Donald Trump.

Courtesy of the the Globe and Mail: 

We Americans may be a captive audience to our reality-TV star who thinks he's an authoritarian, but we are a chatty audience, and our loquaciousness has been our salvation. For nearly a year, we have exercised First Amendment rights like we were working a defibrillator on democracy's damaged heart. We debunked lies, catalogued crimes, demanded justice and created a vast, informal movement dedicated to the pursuit of truth over alternative facts. 

But that may be about to end. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission announced it was planning a sweeping rollback of net neutrality, allowing corporations to decide what content is available online while pricing most citizens out of equal access to information. 

For nearly a year, America has stood at the crossroads of a damaged democracy and a burgeoning autocracy. If net neutrality is destroyed, we will cross firmly into the latter, and our return is unlikely. 

The threat to net neutrality highlights the reliance on social media and an independent press for political organizing in the digital age. Should net neutrality be eliminated, those avenues will likely become curtailed for much of the public or driven out of business due to loss of revenue. Without the means to freely communicate online, citizens will be far less able to challenge the administration. It doesn't matter what cause someone prioritizes: The elimination of net neutrality will impede the ability to understand the cause, discuss it and organize around it.

She's not wrong.

The best bulwark we have against fascism is our 1st Amendment which has now evolved to include our ability to communicate online in a variety of social media platforms.

Including this one.

This is one of those moments in history where a people are confronted with a choice which may determine the survival of their society as it exists in the present.

Just imagine for a moment what it would be like if Donald Trump and his cronies were able to use their connections to big telecom companies to put the squeeze on CNN, MSNBC, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Politico, etc., and quiet their voices to a low murmur in the background.

If you do not think that is ultimately the plan then you have not been paying attention.

P.S. For those of you who do not know who Sarah Kendzior is, here is video of her going off on a representative from Breitbart.

This video went viral again, so a little context. It's from a late Nov 2016 panel at the News XChange conference in Denmark. I was responding to Matthew Boyle of Breitbart, who is seated at the end of the row. https://t.co/OCMuaglwvD

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 26, 2017

We are dealing with a lot of important issues right now, but arguably net neutrality is one of the MOST important.