In July 2021, I posted here about the new smartphone company bankrolled by Blackwater brutalizer Erik Prince.

Back in June, Erik Prince — founder of the notorious private military contracting corporation behind the Nisour Square massacre, brother of former education secretary Betsy DeVos, and son of the MLM pioneer Edgar Prince — announced his latest business venture on Steve Bannon's radio show: a standalone mobile device called Unplugged, designed to allow "patriots to communicate securely." — Read the rest

Erik Prince is the billionaire mercenary who behind the private military contracting empire of Blackwater and their many war crimes. He's also the brother of US education secretary Betsy Devos (who in turn is married to the guy who pioneered pyramid schemes) and has served as a kind of "shadow advisor" to Trump, including an effort to privatize the entire war in Afghanistan and an alleged secret trip to the Seychelles to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin. — Read the rest

Genie Ogden writes, "Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince (previously) was invited to speak at Beloit College last night, by the right wing group Young Americans for Freedom. A couple of weeks ago, a Beloit student who is Muslim posted on the internet that he was angry – about the shootings of fellow Muslims in New Zealand, and then about the YAF bringing Erik Prince to speak. — Read the rest

Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater (now rebranded "Xe") is building a stealth, American-led mercenary army in the United Arab Emirates "with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom." The business plan, at least in part, appears to be to help autocratic regimes crush popular democratic uprisings—a response to "Arab Spring." — Read the rest

Adam Ciralsky's Vanity Fair profile of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater ("a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees") reveals that Prince was a spy for the CIA while he was at the same time raking in over a billion dollars as a government contractor in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. — Read the rest

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince support Russia, not because Putin called either of them a genius, but because the "anti-woke" dictator has no tolerance for LGBTQ.

They applaud Russia because Putin "ain't woke – he is anti-woke." — Read the rest

I've always enjoyed reading and writing detective fiction; really, if any story has a noir vibe, I'm in. I'm certainly not alone in, but I've also found it curious considering how little we actually hear about modern day private investigators. Sure, the Pinkertons are still around busting unions and providing private security for rich people trying to escape the effects of climate change. — Read the rest

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee just released their fifth and final report on Russian involvement in the 2016 US Presidential Election. The nearly-one-thousand-page tome is more damning than the Mueller Report was, on many fronts — and even more notable due to the fact that sitting Senators from both parties signed off on the content. — Read the rest

Corinthian Colleges, Inc. was yet another for-profit university that screwed over hundreds of thousands of people with pyramid schemes that promised a higher education at the end of some labyrinthine maze. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and the U.S. — Read the rest

• Trump-linked businessman testified in Mueller probe
• Search of 3 iPhones seized from George Nader in 2018 via search warrant turned up child pornography, say feds

Hereditary millionaire war-criminal and brother of Betsy DeVos Erik Prince (previously) is full of good ideas: after founding the disgraced mercenary company Blackwater (and several subsequent reboots thereof), he proposed that the US could withdraw its military from Afghanistan and instead pay him to occupy the country with a mercenary army that would brutally subjugate its people on America's behalf.

On Friday, GoFundMe said it plans to close Brian Kolfage Jr.'s campaign to pay for Donald Trump's border wall.

Last night Carla and I attended a screening for an upcoming National Geographic documentary called Science Fair, about the International Science and Engineering Fair. It's a terrific movie about smart young scientists from around the world. One thing I learned watching it is that students in Germany pay almost nothing to attend college. — Read the rest

Cambridge Analytica may be out of business thanks to bad publicity, but "Emerdata" is a new company, whose board includes the daughters of Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Cambridge Analytica; disgraced former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix is on its board of directors, and much of Cambridge Analytica's C-suite has packed up their desks and moved into the Emerdata offices.

George Nader, the international businessman of mystery who is now cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller, was indicted in 1985 on obscenity charges involving child pornography.

Nader is a political operative who was seen frequently at the White House during the early days of the administration of President Donald Trump. — Read the rest

Multiple White House sources have told reporters that the Trump administration has been negotiating with Erik Prince (founder of the war-crimes plagued mercenary firm Blackwater; brother to pyramid-scheme billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy Devos) and ex-CIA operative John R. Maguire to assemble a private army of deniable, off-the-books spy/mercenaries who could target Trump's "deep state" political enemies in the USA, and kidnap and render similar figures overseas.

Though Puerto Rican law prohibits ownership and bearing of most long-guns and especially semiautomatic weapons, the streets of the stricken US colony now throng with mercenaries in tactical gear bearing such arms, their faces masked. They wear no insignia or nametags and won't say who they work for, apart from vague statements in broken Spanish: "We work with the government. — Read the rest

Erik Prince is the creepy-rich war criminal/ex-CIA agent who founded Blackwater and put John Ashcroft in charge of its ethics department (no, seriously), whose rap-sheet includes reckless, corrupt, murderous, genocidal violence, conducted with near-total impunity.

A U.S. Federal appeals court today threw out the murder conviction of former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten, who had been sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 2007 massacre of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.

Slatten and other former staff of military security contractor Blackwater (renamed Xe Services, now Academi, run by Erik Prince, brother of Trump DOE chief Betsy DeVos) were the focus of a high-profile legal case that has stretched on for a full decade. — Read the rest