Day: January 14, 2020

by William Skink

Thanks to an alert reader we now know that Johnny Lee Perry, the 29 year old man involved in an altercation at the Poverello Center that left Sean Stevenson dead, has a warrant out for his arrest in either another county in Montana, or another state (more likely another county).

We know this because Perry was booked on an extra-jurisdictional warrant yesterday at 10:44pm, processed, then released on January 14th at 11:36am.

To be fair, this warrant could be for anything. For example, if I hadn’t paid the bullshit traffic ticket I got the other day for obstructing a turn lane (thanks to our inadequate transportation infrastructure) I would have a warrant and could be taken to jail if stopped again by law enforcement.

That said, I continue to be amazed this guy is not being charged with at least aggravated assault for KILLING another person in a fight while presumably under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.

Let’s do a quick recap: Perry has no permanent address in Missoula, he wasn’t cooperative on the night of the altercation with police when asked to blow for intoxication, and now he’s in and out of jail again because he’s wanted for doing something unlawful somewhere else.

So, after this second arrest, in which Perry had to be stupid and/or impaired enough to come into contact with law enforcement again, will he maybe face a high bond to keep him in County detention while the County Attorney’s office figures out if they want to charge him with?

Nope, Perry gets a warm place to stay for the night and is out the next day in time for lunch. What the hell is going on here?

The County Attorney’s office is not obligated to wait for an autopsy report in order to file charges against Johnny Lee Perry. They must need more information because they are lacking in some other area to make a case.

In a crowded homeless shelter I would think there would be enough people with direct knowledge about what happened. I would also think, if there are witnesses, that they might be scared to be seen as “snitching” if they talk to the authorities, the same authorities who released the guy directly involved in less than 24 hours after his initial arrest!

Thank you, Allie B, for bringing my attention to Perry’s latest contact with the criminal injustice system.

If anyone else would like to contact me directly with information, my email is willskink at yahoo dot com.

Stay tuned…

by William Skink

While Democrats continue their self-defeating identity politics schtick, with Elizabeth Warren’s campaign hoping to smear Bernie out of contention with the claim he told Warren a woman can’t win the presidency, Whitney Webb has an article up at Mint Press about a shadowy tech firm with ties to Israeli intelligence running doomsday election simulations. From the link:

Much of the rhetoric since the last presidential election in 2016 has focused on the issue of foreign meddling by U.S. rival states like Russia, while China has emerged as the new “meddler” of choice in American corporate media as the 2020 election approaches. Though time has revealed that many of the post-2016 election meddling claims were not as significant as initially claimed, the constant media discussion of foreign threats to U.S. democracy and electoral processes – whether real or imagined – has undeniably created a climate of fear.

Those fears have since been preyed upon by neoconservative groups and the U.S. military-industrial complex, both of which are hardly known for their love of demcratic processes, to offer a series of ready-made solutions to these threats that actually undermine key pillars of American democracy, including independent reporting and voting machine software.

However, many of the very same media outlets and groups that frequently fretted about Russia, China or another rival state meddling in U.S. democracy have largely ignored the role of other nation states, such as Israel, in efforts to sway the last U.S. election in 2016 and meddle in numerous elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia in the years since.

If people in this country are truly concerned about protecting American democracy from foreign meddling, then there should be serious questions raised about this tech company and why they are running doomsday election scenarios. Here’s more from the article:

Cybereason has — with little fanfare — been promoting extreme election day scenarios since before the 2016 election. Cybereason’s first mention of these tactics appears in a September 2016 blog post written by the company’s CEO and former Israeli government contractor Lior Div — a former leader of offensive cyberattacks for the IDF’s elite Unit 8200 and a former development group leader at the controversial Israeli-American corporation Amdocs.

Div wrote that hackers may target U.S. elections by “breaking into the computers that operate traffic lighting systems and interfering with the ones around polling stations to create massive traffic jams, “hacking polling companies,” and “targeting live election coverage on cable or network television stations.” A follow-up post by Div from October 2016 added further meddling tactics such as “cut power to polling stations” and “mess with a voter’s mind.”div

Two years later, Cybereason held its first election meddling simulation, touting many of these same tactics, in Boston. The simulation focused on local and state responses to such attacks and saw Boston-based Cybereason invite Massachusetts state and local officials as well as Boston police officers and a former police commissioner to participate. “Twitter accounts spreading fake news,” “turning off a city’s closed-circuit cameras,” “hacking self-driving cars and navigation apps,” and “targeting a city’s 911 call center with a DDoS attack” were all used in the simulation, which saw Cybereason’s “ethical hackers” attempt to disrupt election day. Media coverage of the simulation at the time framed it as a necessary preparation for countering “Russian” threats to U.S. democracy. Like the more recent simulations, the mock election was canceled and voter confidence in the electoral process was devastated.

I recommend reading the whole article, especially if you claim to care about the integrity of US elections.