Monthly Archives: February 2020

Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four, by Craig Murray

Posted on February 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

Craig Murray reports on the fourth day of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing. From Murray at craigmurray.org.uk:

Please try this experiment for me.
Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”.

Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”.

Firstly, congratulations on your acting skills; you take direction very well. Secondly, is it not fascinating how precisely the same words can convey the opposite meaning dependent on modulation of stress, pitch, and volume?

Yesterday the prosecution continued its argument that the provision in the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty that bars extradition for political offences is a dead letter, and that Julian Assange’s objectives are not political in any event. James Lewis QC for the prosecution spoke for about an hour, and Edward Fitzgerald QC replied for the defence for about the same time. During Lewis’s presentation, he was interrupted by Judge Baraitser precisely once. During Fitzgerald’s reply, Baraitser interjected seventeen times.

In the transcript, those interruptions will not look unreasonable:
“Could you clarify that for me Mr Fitzgerald…”
“So how do you cope with Mr Lewis’s point that…”
“But surely that’s a circular argument…”
“But it’s not incorporated, is it?…”

All these and the other dozen interruptions were designed to appear to show the judge attempting to clarify the defence’s argument in a spirit of intellectual testing. But if you heard the tone of Baraitser’s voice, saw her body language and facial expressions, it was anything but.

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GOOGLE’s Creepy Line, by MG

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Google delves deeper and deeper into the dark arts. It truly is “sinister.” From MG at theburningplatform.com:

The Creepy Line is a particularly sinister term used in an unguarded remark by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2010. In hindsight, what is most disturbing about the comment is how casually he explained Google’s policy regarding invading the privacy of its customers and clients.

“Google policy on a lot of these things,” Schmidt says about 45 seconds into the introduction, “is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Time pointer needed.

The Creepy Line is an 80-minute documentary available through several options available at the link below.  For now, it is available for free at Amazon Prime, but I’m not sure how long it will be offered there considering many current concerns regarding censorship of anti-establishment themes on various social media platforms.  This film offers a very frank look at the number one source of news in our country: Facebook and Google.

https://www.thecreepyline.com/

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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Socialized Medicine Is Not the Answer, by Doug Casey

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Socialized anything is not the answer except to the question: what inevitably makes any situation worse? From Doug Casey at caseyresearch.com:

Editor’s note: One of the biggest topics facing Americans today is the issue of healthcare… and whether the government should play a role in providing it.

It’s unlikely this debate will fade away soon… as the coronavirus crisis continues to spread throughout the world and across America.

So in today’s Conversations With Casey, our founder Doug Casey addresses the question of whether the government should be involved in healthcare… and explains why our current system is essentially “criminal malpractice”…

Daily Dispatch: Previously, we discussed health, so I want to stay on that subject. In particular, I want to focus on a part of the health industry that I know interests you – or perhaps frustrates you, would be a better way to put it – regarding State involvement with healthcare, including socialized medicine.

One of the big talking points among Democratic candidates is their championing of more government involvement in healthcare. In your view, does that create more problems than it helps to prevent?

Doug Casey: Well, in the first place, don’t call it healthcare. That’s something you provide for yourself through proper diet, exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle. The State likes that term because it sounds friendly and positive; the average person wants to believe that “they” will somehow keep him in good health, for free. What they actually provide, at best, is medical care – which is about medicines and surgery, trauma and disease. Nobody wants to be reminded of those things. So don’t confuse it with healthcare.

Apart from that, only an idiot wants the State involved in medicine; socialized medicine is not the answer to health problems. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that it’s the cause of many of these problems. It reduces the efficiency of medical care to that of the Post Office, Amtrak, or your local DMV. The fact that US medical care is no better than, but between twice and 10 times the cost of similar care in, other places in the world is 100% the fault of the government’s laws and regulations.

Getting the State involved in medicine is criminal malpractice.

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The only questions that should matter in the Assange extradition battle, by Elizabeth Farrelly

Posted on February 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

Julian Assange’s extradition trial has assumed an air of unreality as attorneys debate the patently obvious, such as whether or not Assange has been accused of a political crime. From Elizabeth Farrelly at smh.com.au:

Even in my bleakest moments I’m glad I’m not Julian Assange. Seven years trapped inside the embassy opposite Harrods, with fake news in the air and police in the bushes. (Yes, I was there. I saw them). That alone would send me mad.

Follow that with 10 months’ solitary in what former British diplomat Craig Murray calls Britain’s Lubyanka, the ultra-grim high-security Belmarsh Prison. There, Assange has been subject to such harassment, arbitrariness, strip searches and abuse that both the UN Special Rapporteur and a group of more than 60 British doctors were impelled to protest his “torture” and his fellow inmates petitioned for his release from solitary. And now a bizarre hearing-cum-trial-by-public-opinion ending in possible extradition, a potential 175-year penalty and likely death in a harsh foreign jail. Why? For telling the truth.

We’re familiar with people being chewed up and spat out by a government-media mobocracy. Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Richard Jewell, details such a story. Accused of planting the 1996 Atlanta bomb (when in fact he’d saved people), Jewell was eventually cleared, but not before his life was ruined.

Assange is charged with espionage. His life and psyche are already in tatters because such accusations, regardless of outcome, propel you into the nightmarish geopolitical stratosphere where law, politics and public opinion merge into a toxic soup.

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Billionaire Paul Singer Seeks To Kick Out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em. Maybe this is how the voices shut out of the big social media sites will get their voices reinstated. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Some will say it’s long overdue. We would agree.

According to Bloomberg, billionaire Paul Singer’s activist hedge fund Elliott Management has taken a sizable stake in Twitter and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey. As part of its activist campaign, Elliott has nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, and while there are only three seats becoming available at this year’s annual meeting Elliott wanted to ensure that it nominated enough directors to fill all three seats or any other vacancies that may arise.

Initially, Elliott reportedly approached Twitter about its concerns privately “and has had constructive discussions with it since then”, although the hostile turn of events suggests that discussions were not all that “constructive.”

Elliott’s push to revamp Twitter comes at a pivotal time – just as Twitter cracks down on alternative voices, silencing and suspending anyone who disagrees with the company’s ultraliberal, virtue signaling ethos without as much as a second thought. As an example of Twitter’s unprecedented anti-conservative bias we can point to the recent tweet of the company’s associate General Counsel Jeff Rich, who in direct breach of his own employer’s Terms of Service, recently urged his followers to “cull” Trump from the herd, in what appears to have been a clear appeal to assassinate a sitting US president.

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The Afghanistan ‘peace deal’ riddle, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Don’t expect too much from any Afghanistan peace deal. The Taliban want the US out, the US military wants to stay. From Pepe Escobar at asiatimes.com:

As far as realpolitik Afghanistan is concerned, with or without a deal, the US military want to stay in what is a priceless Greater Middle East base to deploy hybrid war techniques
In this photo taken on February 21, youths and peace activists gather as they celebrate the reduction in violence, in Kandahar. A week-long partial truce took hold across Afghanistan on February 22, with some jubilant civilians dancing in the streets as the war-weary country prepared for this coming Saturday’s planned agreement on a peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Photo: AFP / Javed Tanveer

Nearly two decades after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan post-9/11, and after an interminable war costing over $ 2 trillion, there’s hardly anything “historic” about a possible peace deal that may be signed in Doha this coming Saturday between Washington and the Taliban.

We should start by stressing three points.

1- The Taliban wanted all US troops out. Washington refused.

2- The possible deal only reduces US troops from 13,000 to 8,600. That’s the same number already deployed before the Trump administration.

3- The reduction will only happen a year and a half from now – assuming what’s being described as a truce holds.

So there would be no misunderstanding, Taliban Deputy Leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, in an op-ed certainly read by everyone inside the Beltway, detailed their straightforward red line: total US withdrawal.

And Haqqani is adamant: there’s no peace deal if US troops stay.

Still, a deal looms. How come? Simple: enter a series of secret “annexes.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, War

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NATO: From Covert Sponsor to Artillery for Terrorists in Syria, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

The US can’t allow its terrorist proxies in Syria to be defeated or it will lose its all important “presence” in that nation. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

NATO member Turkey was recently caught out providing artillery support for terror groups in Syria’s Idlib province; now leader of the NATO alliance, the United States, is hinting at Russia and Syria holding dialogue with the terrorists to curb the upsurge in conflict.

As Syria’s endgame closes, the protagonists and their proxies are coming more clearly into focus. NATO’s covert shadowy connection with the jihadist insurgents it has sponsored for regime change is being flushed out as the Syrian army and its Russian ally home in on the last stand of the terror groups.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov this week ruled out any mediation with Tahrir Hayat al Sham (HTS), the main terrorist network holding out in Idlib in northwest Syria. Lavrov was referring to comments made earlier by US envoy James Jeffrey who suggested that HTS was “not a terrorist organization any more” and therefore might be included in negotiations for de-escalation.

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The Tiers of Woke Clowns, by Tim Hartnett

Posted on February 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

CEOs and their companies now have to be “woke.” From Tim Hartnett at lewrockwell.com:

Vivek Ramaswamy is not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant but he is a man and he did some ‘splainin. It’s not a good sign that it was necessary on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. Skepticism tends to be looked on with skepticism these days—popular culture is always ripening the harvest for confidence men.

The subject of Ramaswamy’s piece is another enlightened scheme for saving the world—from what we will all find out–as the vision unfolds. This time it goes by the Newspeak name “stakeholder capitalism.” The term is supposed to mean that righteous corporations will be raising the stakes above mere profit for shareholders. What it looks to be saving us from, as Mr. Ramaswamy is wont to point out, is that ever-present peril to democracy known as “one man one vote.”

A new, improved corporatocracy now has plans to look out for you–a guy with no stake in the company–just like Bill O’Reilly does. What kind of fascist could have a problem with that? It’s not like the last few generations have been immune to clandestine arrangements—engineered in opaque conclaves—to fix our broken world. The question is, if any of them are working, who are they working for? People who dare to question high flying priorities—under a banner of noblesse oblige that nobody voted on–are frequently heaved to the political kitchen bin. Anybody who can’t tell the difference between a CEO who stands for goodness itself, and a televangelist making the same claim, might not be employable once Mom and Pop’s finally get wiped out. Where’s the downside of that? What could Vivek, who is a CEO himself, be thinking?

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Trump Does The Taj, by Eric S. Margolis

Posted on February 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

Trump visited India and it didn’t go so well. From Eric S. Margolis at lewrockwell.com:

President Donald Trump’s 36-hour whirlwind visit to India this past week was designed to show Americans just how adored abroad their president really is.

Unluckily for Trump, his campaign stop at this behemoth nation of 1.3 or 1.4 billion proved a fiasco.

First came the terrifying Chinese coronavirus that so far has killed less people than the weekly toll on China’s dangerous roads, but the whole world went into a panic.  The US stock market, the underpinning of Trump’s popularity at home, took a crash dive even though the all-knowing president-physician assured Americans that the Wuhan virus was only a cold.

VP Mike Pence, who believes in Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark, was put in charge of combating the new virus.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Trade

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Hoppe: The In-Depth Interview, by Hans Hoppe and Jeff Deist

Posted on February 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

Hans Hoppe is an interesting thinker. From Hoppe and Deist at mises.org:

[This interview with Jeff Deist and Hans Hoppe will appear in the upcoming issue of The Austrian (March–April 2020).]

JEFF DEIST: Your recent talk in Vienna mentioned growing up happy but poor, the son of East German parents who had been driven west during the Cold War by the Soviets. Can you elaborate on the lasting impact their experience had on you, in terms of how you view state power and its attendant evils? Are you in some ways still influenced by their “eastern” roots?

HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: The fact that my parents were both refugees, ending up in the West by the accident of WWII, driven away and separated from their original homes in Soviet-occupied East Germany, played a huge role in our family life. In particular the expropriation of my mother’s family and its expulsion from house and home by the Soviets, in 1946, as so-called East Elbean Junkers, was a constantly recurring topic at home and assumed even more importance after the collapse, in 1989, of East Germany and the following German “reunification.” My mother, as many other victims of communist expropriations, then sought and hoped for the restitution of her property—in which case I would have been set for life. However, as I already knew and correctly predicted by then, this was not going to happen. There was to be no justice. But my parents were shocked and outraged.

The numerous trips we took to visit various relatives in East Germany confirmed my parents’ judgment of the Soviet system. Shortages, waiting lines, empty stores, inferior products, and lousy services. All around controls, spies, and informants. Everywhere grey ugliness and decay. A prison wall built around the whole country to prevent anyone from escaping. And commie-proles droning on endlessly about the great successes achieved under their leadership.

Yet as a little boy and a teenager I did not understand the reason for all this mischief and misery. Indeed, the East German experience did little if anything to shake my own leftist convictions at the time. East Germany, I thought, was just the wrong type of socialism, with the wrong people at the helm.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Economics, Governments, Law, Morality, Philosophy

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