conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. —JFK...

voltaria

With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the US Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups.

Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however. Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died.

Take returning Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, for example. More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared.

Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded - after thousands of civilians were killed.

As we were unfortunately reminded during the last four years of the Trump Administration, the personnel is the policy. So while President Trump railed against the “stupid wars” and promised to bring the troops home, he hired people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to get the job done. They spent their time “clarifying” Trump’s call for ending wars to mean he wanted to actually continue the wars. It was a colossal failure.

So it’s hard to be optimistic about a Biden Administration with so many hyper-interventionist Obama retreads.

While the US Agency for International Development (USAID) likes to sell itself as the compassionate arm of the US foreign policy, in fact USAID is one of the main US “regime change” agencies. Biden has announced that a top “humanitarian interventionist” – Samantha Power – would head that Agency in his Administration.

Power, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council staff and as US Ambassador to the UN, argued passionately and successfully that a US attack on the Gaddafi government in Libya would result in a liberation of the people and the outbreak of democracy in the country. In reality, her justification was all based on lies and the US assault has left nothing but murder and mayhem. Gaddafi’s relatively peaceful, if authoritarian, government has been replaced by radical terrorists and even slave markets.

At the end of the day, the Bush Republicans – like Rep. Liz Cheney – will join hands with the Biden Democrats to reinstate “American leadership.” This of course means more US overt and covert wars overseas. The unholy alliance between Big Tech and the US government will happily assist the US State Department under Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with the technology to foment more “regime change” operations wherever the Biden Administration sees fit. Finish destroying Syria and the secular Assad? Sure! Go back into Iraq? Why not? Afghanistan? That’s the good war! And Russia and China must be punished as well.

These are grave moments for we non-interventionists. But also we have a unique opportunity, informed by history, to denounce the warmongers and push for a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/january/18/the-unwelcome-return-of-the-real-purveyors-of-violence/

See also: "eat my shorts" — joe biden wrote the "patriot act"...

By Gus Leonisky at 19 Jan 2021 - 8:00pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
Login or register to post comments

whether trump is an idiot or we do not like him...

Biden and power by force

by Thierry Meyssan

The seizure of the Capitol by supporters of President Trump is presented as an attempted coup, while he is still in the White House. On closer inspection, it could be the other way around. Freedom of speech has been confiscated by an illegitimate power in favour of Joe Biden.

The Usual hype

In every presidential election in the United States, we are told that the incumbent was a monster, that we are sorry for the crimes he committed, but that a new day is dawning for humanity with the rise of a new leader. The only exception is the election of Donald Trump in 2016. At that time and even before he was sworn in, we were told that this billionaire was elected following a regrettable mistake, that he was misogynistic, homophobic, racist, that he did not embody the "country of freedom", but the supremacism of the "little whites" and the interests of the rich. For four years, we were constantly being convinced that this diagnosis was right. He was called a liar and his ideas and achievements were ignored.

This time, the insurrection on Capitol Hill allowed the dominant news agencies to add a layer to it. The outgoing president, Donald Trump, is unanimously accused of destroying democracy, which the incoming president, Joe Biden, will of course restore. Are those who remember the elections of George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama ready to be fooled again?

Yes, because the shock caused by the capture of the Capitol is such that one is willing to believe anything. If the United States is inexorably heading towards civil war [1], what will become of us Westerners?

This is why we did not want to see the crisis that is beginning to unfold. Only a few Greek newspapers had recently explained the reasons for the anger, which we have been dealing with for five years already (i.e. before Trump’s election).

This is also why we don’t want to look it in the face and we are satisfied with the blind comments that this shameful episode will not have a tomorrow. But who can believe it? It is true that things will calm down for a while and the repressive machine will crush the January 6 demonstrators, but it will only be a postponement and the civil war will not be long in coming.

Non-Westerners have already understood that the United States has such internal problems that it will no longer be able to set itself up as a model for the world, let alone give lessons in democracy to those it wants to subjugate.

Undemocratic elections

In the 2000 presidential election, the bewildered world watched as the Supreme Court chose to ignore the recount of the Florida ballots. In accordance with the Constitution, it declared that it had no business interfering with a state’s ballot and was constrained only by Governor Jeb Bush’s decision that his brother George W. Bush had been elected by his constituents. Twenty years later, the world is watching the dismissal of 60 appeals filed by Donald Trump alleging massive fraud in many states.

As I wrote earlier, from a US legal perspective, Al Gore and then Donald Trump lost. But from a democratic point of view, they probably won. To tell the truth, it is impossible to know exactly, but given the results of the other elections that were held at the same time, there is little doubt about that. The only thing that can be said is that there is nothing democratic about this election: the counting of the votes is done by the governors, who in many federal states choose the civil servants or private companies that will do the counting. On the contrary, if the system were democratic, the counting would be done by citizens in public. Everyone could see ballot boxes being taken from the polling stations to a counting centre where officials opened them and then closed the curtains to prevent citizens from finding out more. No one can question the sincerity of these officials, but no one can guarantee it either. A democratic election can only exist in transparency. Therefore, this election is legal under US law, but simply not democratic.

Turnarounds

To understand the events, we must observe two reversals of the situation that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

In mid-December 2020, President Trump organised a meeting at the Oval Office with the participation of General Michael Flynn. Flynn outlined his idea of martial law for transparent elections [2]. Most of the councillors present were opposed, despite the change of leadership in the Pentagon. Two weeks later, on 4 January 2021, the 10 former defence secretaries still alive signed a brief op-ed in the Washington Post [3]. They assured that all those who tried to introduce martial law would have to answer to the Justice Department. The unanimity of the former Secretaries of Defense attests that martial law was feasible and real. According to the Post [4], which reconstructed the meeting on the basis of the confidences of the former defence secretaries (who did not attend but were informed), President Trump never contemplated staying in power through the use of violence. On the contrary, he filed complaints and supported various legal actions to have the election annulled. He was preparing to campaign to return to the White House in 2025 [5].

Vice-President Mike Pence, who was under heavy pressure from the Jacksonians, made his position known on January 6, the day the two congressional assemblies met in joint session [6]. He noted that his role as presiding officer was purely ceremonial and that it was not his job to decide the dispute, even though a certain reading of the Constitution theoretically gives him the right to do so. He therefore deferred to the parliamentarians. To do otherwise would have opened the smouldering civil war. At times like these, everyone knows what he or she can lose, and few people, particularly among the notables, are willing to take such a risk. As soon as this position became known, several important members of the Trump team resigned. The Jacksonians experienced these reversals as cowardice and betrayal of their ideals and their homeland.

A few hours later, Donald Trump held a meeting, not far from Congress, to denounce once again a "stolen election" and announce his return for the 2024 campaign. He never called on his supporters to take Capitol Hill, although some may have understood it that way.

Taking the Capitol

Some groups that were marginalized during the meeting tried to enter the Capitol. According to the videos, the Capitol police let them in without any real resistance. The demonstrators initially behaved deferentially in this place, which is sacred to them. However, they had been infiltrated by a group of Antifas. Without knowing why or how, things suddenly got out of hand. The hemicycle was invaded and parliamentarians’ offices were ransacked.

Anyone who has lived through a civil war knows that this is the worst thing that can happen. Like the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who lived through the first English civil war, they all believe that it is better to suffer a tyrannical state than to be deprived of a state (The Leviathan [7]). Taking the Capitol and eventually overthrowing the US "order" is an act with terrible consequences. It has not gone that far. The police who had allowed the demonstrators to enter the building suddenly and successfully pushed them back.

President Donald Trump himself called for calm, but without his wife. According to the US national religion, God’s blessing - and thus peace and prosperity - must descend through the president and first lady [8] on the "chosen people". By choosing to speak on his own, Donald Trump has challenged the national religion.

Reactions in the US

Democratic congressmen, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, immediately accused President Trump of having launched his troops on an assault on Congress. They proposed to impeach President Trump, even though he had only 13 days left in his term, through the 25th Amendment, paragraph 4 of the Constitution. This move, which they had previously discussed, would remove his right to stand for re-election.

However, the text invoked should not apply in this case: it concerns a disability attributable to the health of the President. The debates at the time of its adoption concerned the heart attack which prevented President Woodrow Wilson from fulfilling his duties at the end of his term of office (2 October 1919 to 4 March 1921) and the stroke - less serious - of President Dwight Eisenhower (24 September 1955 to 20 January 1961) which temporarily deprived him of some of his faculties and led him to share his powers with his vice-president Richard Nixon.

The ruling class felt the wind of the cannonball blowing. Whether the capture of Capitol Hill was a failure of its police force, as they try to persuade us, or whether it was organized under a false flag by Donald Trump’s enemies, those who conceived it have the capacity to overthrow institutions and sack their entire staff.

Reactions abroad

After a century of US domination, the rest of the world still doesn’t know what they are. It doesn’t know that the Constitution was written to establish a regime inspired by the British monarchy and that it was rebalanced by 10 amendments that guarantee people’s rights. The country that Alexis de Tocqueville describes in Democracy in America [9] is the country of this compromise, a country of freedom, but this balance was upset during the Obama years. Blinded, the rest of the world did not see that the United States has reverted to what it was in the first four years of its foundation: an oligarchic system, this time in the service of a class of international billionaires. It deliberately ignored the plight of the former middle classes, the grouping of the population by cultural affinity and the preparation of two-thirds of the population for civil war.

The Chinese media cannot help but notice the double standard when comparing photos of the Hong Kong assembly being taken by a high-voltage crowd with those from Washington. While the Russian media, busy with the Orthodox Christmas party, smiled disillusioned at their historic rival on land.

For their part, the Western media have embraced without reservation the neo-Puritan "cancel culture" that destroys all republican symbols and replaces them with others glorifying minorities, not for what they do, but because they are minorities. In doing so, they have identified a little more with the ideology that oppresses "America" [10]. As submissive vassals, they presented the US election as if their readers were going to participate and Joe Biden as their new master.

Reacting to the events on Capitol Hill, European leaders are taking their dreams for granted: German President and former head of the secret service, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said that armed pro-Trump protesters had taken Capitol Hill; while the French President and former secretary to a well-known philosopher, Emmanuel Macron, denounced an attack on the fundamental principle of democracy "One man, one vote".

No. With few exceptions, the Capitol demonstrators were unarmed.

No. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for equality among citizens of any state.

Yes. It is the US ruling class that despises democracy and the Jacksonians who defend it.

Already the very great fortunes that stand behind Joe Biden have seized power. They have put an end to freedom of expression. They "preventively" closed the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch accounts of the White House, President Trump and his supporters in order to "prevent them from calling for further violence" (sic). In doing so, they have arrogated to themselves the powers of Justice and have escaped the Trump decree of 28 June 2020 enjoining them to choose between the status of neutral carrier of information or that of committed producer of information [11].

Thierry Meyssan

Translation

Roger Lagassé

https://www.voltairenet.org/article211917.html

--------------------------

By Glenn Greenwald

How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler

In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.

As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic

By Gus Leonisky at 19 Jan 2021 - 8:25pm
Login or register to post comments

voltaire: my buddy uncle rupe...

Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire mogul behind Fox News, took issue with the silencing of debate on social media, saying censorship had hobbled discourse with “awful woke orthodoxy”.

Mr Murdoch, 89, made the rare public remarks during a brief video to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Australia Day Foundation. The clip was posted online by the Herald Sun, owned by the media mogul’s News Corp.

“For those of us in media, there is a real challenge to confront,” he said. “A wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate and ultimately stop individuals and societies from realising their potential.”

The US Capitol riot on January 6 was followed by a purging of the social-media accounts of then-President Donald Trump and others, drawing complaints of censorship. On Monday, Twitter said it would seek to police the service more vigilantly for misinformation and introduced a new feature called Birdwatch.

Fox News and other conservative outlets are under fire for fueling uncertainty about the US presidential election, which critics say contributed to the storming of the Capitol. Mr Murdoch’s own son James Murdoch has joined the outcry, telling the Financial Times that outlets “that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years”.

In his remarks from the award ceremony, Rupert Murdoch said a “rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility”.

Bloomberg

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/rupert-murdoch-slams-woke-culture-in-australia-day-speech-20210126-p56wxz.html

Read from top.

the other mobs of lepers...