Category Archives: Politics

fundamental humans rights (unless we decide to use them for leverage), by el gato malo

Posted on February 13, 2023 | Leave a comment

When the government recognizes your “right” to something from the government, they violate someone else’s right to their own income to provide it, and they can take it away when they want, regardless of your supposed right. From el gato malo at boriquagato.com:

a tour of towering hypocrisy

it’s a funny thing about the authoritarian left: they speak in grand platitudes about fundamental human rights to all manner of things from speech to healthcare to education. they proclaim “my body my choice” and “human dignity” as foundational tenets.

and yet the minute they want something, this all goes out the window. what was moments before the axis mundi of moral society is now a point of leverage to arm twist you into submission to their demands as object lesson # 33,971 is applied on that most structural of power symmetries:

a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take everything you have.

what 5 minutes ago was the very intrinsic essence of your allegedly inalienable entitlement as a human is now theirs to withhold until you comply.

how many more lessons are you going to need before you wake up and smell the soy-child demagogue?

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the people pushing these intrusions are deeply fascist and totalitarian. they have dreams of dictatorship.

note that this request for pervasive “papers please” (absent the please) is not “offered” nor sold as desirable.

it is simply demanded.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Governments, Morality, Philosophy, Politics

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Pentagon Wants To Return Special Ops Propagandists To Ukraine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

As increasingly stupid ideas are contemplated by our rulers, like making war in Ukraine and the use of nuclear weapons, they have to amp up the propaganda to overcome people’s well-founded aversion to such ideas. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future. 

“The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials,” writes the Post’s Wesley Morgan. “If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.”

Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives “on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east” to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.

“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as “a person in the Special Operations community.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Who Benefited From This Chaos? By Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on February 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

Power and money flowed to a select group during the Covid travesty. From Jeffrey Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Two years ago on this day, I posted a piece that was very hard to write. It concerned precisely who was benefiting from the lockdowns, masking, and all that was associated with it, including school and business closures and travel restrictions.

As much as we would all prefer for everyone to be concerned about big issues like public health and human rights, it’s sadly the case that industrial interests (and even ruling-class evildoers) sometimes prevail over both.

Obviously, most people all over the world have lost so much over three years, not only health and income but also hope. It’s tragic. Meanwhile, many others seem to have made out like bandits during the biggest transfer of wealth in the shortest time in the history of humanity.

(null xtract/Pexels)

Many groups and sectors had a kind of hankering for a pandemic. They turned a widespread and mostly manageable pathogen—doctor/patient relationships and reasonable cautions on the part of the vulnerable—and converted it into the basis for a global panic of compulsion and coercion that overthrew centuries of progress in law and liberty.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

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Censorship Operations: Covid, War, and More, by William Spruance

Posted on February 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government has become a massive censorship operation, trying to stifle us “domestic terrorists.” From William Spruance at brownstone.org:

censorship operations

Wednesday, Congress held a hearing on Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post and its coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While House Republicans focused on issues like shadowbanning and government collusion with Big Tech, Rep. Jamie Raskin and other Democrats advocated for increased censorship from Silicon Valley companies.

Raskin argued that the committee would be better served focusing on “the real threats of massive Russian disinformation and white nationalist violent incitement on social media.”

Like the Biden Administration’s usurpation of the First Amendment, Raskin’s cohort’s goal is censorship and the accompanying augmentation of state power, not challenging the veracity of opponents’ arguments or claims.

In “Shouting Covid in a Crowded Theater,” I discuss how officials in the Biden Administration use wartime rhetorical strategies to slander dissidents. In doing so, they conflate dissent with threats to public safety to censor critics.

When discussing public health, the regime consistently uses labels of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But the more we learn about government operations, the more it appears that these labels are references to inconvenience, not falsity.

This strategy extends beyond the country’s COVID response.

Wednesday morning, Seymour Hersh published “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.”

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 Pipelines exploded in September 2022. The Nord Stream 1 has delivered natural gas from Russia to Europe for over a decade, and Russia was developing the Nord Stream 2 at the time. Outlets like The New York Times called the explosions “a mystery.”

The sabotage presented a major energy crisis for the United States’ European allies. Europe imports nearly 40% of its gas from Russia, and the Nord Stream 1 was responsible for delivering approximately one third of that supply.

Now, Hersh reports that “the United States executed a covert sea operation” with Navy divers to sabotage Russia’s pipelines with explosives.

For a less obsequious press corps, this should have been an easy story to crack.

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Posted in Crime, Government, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The War of Terror of a Rogue Superpower: Cui Bono? By Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 11, 2023 | 1 comment

The Seymour Hersh story is a big deal in the Global South. If those nations weren’t alienated from the American empire before that story, they are now. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

When it comes to the Global South, what the Hersh report imprints is Rogue Superpower, in giant blood red letters, as state sponsor of terrorism.

Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report  not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief.

Arguably the most incandescent nugget in Hersh’s narrative is to point ultimate responsibility directly at the White House. The CIA, for its part, gets away with it. The whole report may be read as the framing of a scapegoat. A very fragile, shoddy scapegoat – what with those classified documents in the garage, the endless stares into the void, the cornucopia of incomprehensible mumbling, and of course the whole, ghastly, years-long family corruption carousel in and around Ukraine, still to be completely unveiled.

Hersh’s report happened to pop up immediately after the deadly earthquakes in Turkey/Syria. This is an investigative journalism earthquake in itself, straddling over fault lines and revealing countless open air fissures, nuggets of truth gasping for air amidst the rubble.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The Best Speech I Never Gave. by Scott Ritter

Posted on February 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

The military-industrial complex has to be dismantled. From Scott Ritter at scottritterextra.com:

Scott Ritter pulls out of the Feb. 19 anti-war rally

The Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

[Note: I was going to speak at the Rage against the War Machine rally, scheduled for February 19 at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. For personal reasons, I will no longer be speaking.

In short, I have decided to take one for the team.

I wish all participants and attendees at this rally to have a very successful event, and hope that it can serve as the start of something even bigger down the road.

This is the speech I was planning to deliver at the rally. I think it would have done the event proud.]

Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to address you today.

I speak to you from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a place of history filled with gravitas worthy of the task we have set for ourselves at this time in our collective history: to stand up—no, to rage—against a war machine that has perverted the very definition of what it means to be an American.

We stand here today at the very nexus of this war machine. To our right, just over the Potomac River, lies the Pentagon, a structure built at a time when America called upon its collective might to defeat the scourge of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but which has since then morphed into the very symbol of evil itself, a breeding ground for weapons and plans that are used by the other partners, in what has become known as the military-industrial complex, to spread malfeasance around a world we once protected, but now enslave through a process of perpetual conflict used to sustain the American war machine.

And who are these other partners? Before us, past the monument to our founding father, George Washington, stands the Capitol of the United States, where the people’s representatives fund, in great secrecy, the nefarious schemes cooked up in the bowels of the Pentagon.

And to our left stands the White House, the seat of Executive authority, where individuals we invest with singular authority betray the trust of those who put them there by concei

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Military, Morality, Politics, War

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FBI Collusion With Twitter ‘Shocking,’ Witnesses Tell Panel at ‘Weaponization’ Hearing, by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Posted on February 11, 2023 | 2 comments

There is no place for a government agency to be telling a private entity what it can and cannot publish in a country that has a functioning First Amendment. From Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., at childrenshealthdefense.org:

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday heard testimony from Congress members and ex-FBI agents who criticized government agencies for colluding with media and Big Tech to censor Americans.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday heard testimony from eight witnesses, including Congress members and former FBI agents, during what NPR described as “the Republican majority’s push to ramp up scrutiny of the Biden administration.”

Established last month, the subcommittee — which has subpoena power — is formally tasked with examining how the executive branch investigates and collects information about U.S. citizens, including as part of “ongoing criminal investigations.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chairs the committee. He also chairs the House Judiciary Committee.

According to The Hill, Republicans formed the subcommittee “as a way to counter alleged abuse of a government they say is abusing its power to target conservatives,” while “Democrats see the committee as the weapon itself, a vehicle for the GOP to forward conspiracy theories that will mobilize the Republican base ahead of 2024.”

Two panels of witnesses testified Thursday. The first featured a slate of current and former lawmakers, including Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

The second panel included two former FBI agents, Thomas Baker and Nicole Parker, Jonathan Turley, J.D., a professor at the George Washington University Law Center and Elliott Williams, principal of The Raben Group, a prominent lobbying firm.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Politics, Tyranny

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A Star is Born! by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on February 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government stands accused of an act of war against it’s own ally, Germany, and nobody is making a peep in either country. The weirdness is overwhelming. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun

If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-frying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s sole remaining oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics, Privacy, War

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Righteous Tyrants, by Julie Kelly

Posted on February 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

Tyrants gotta tyrannize, but today’s version are bland mediocrities compared to those who tyrannized in the past. From Julie Kelly at amgreatness.com:

No, they’re not cutting off food supplies or building labor camps but these modern-day tyrants seek the same ends: crush the opposition and control the masses.

They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.

Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.

Not so with modern-day martinets. Our 21st-century tyrants possess nothing more than useless degrees from woke institutions and deep contempt for at least half the country, likely born out of a lifetime of social isolation. History, after all, shows that outcasts often seek revenge against their childhood tormentors later in life.

Such appears to be the case with the former Twitter executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Unimpressive by every measure—looks, personality, intellect, persuasiveness, grasp of the facts—the Twitter Four should serve as a reminder of what the defenders of freedom are up against. Thankfully, our enemies, while powerful for now, have the mental, physical, and emotional appeal of overcooked spaghetti.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli took the quasi-stand this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing to explain their roles in colluding with the government to suppress free speech during an election year, particularly related to the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI when the bureau used fabricated political opposition research to defraud a secret federal court and obtain a warrant to spy on Donald Trump, was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s general counsel after it was discovered Baker was vetting company files made available to independent journalists.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Tyranny

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The Pain of Listening To Twitter Censorship Testimony, by Dr. Naomi Wolf

Posted on February 11, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s difficult listening to the second rate hacks who tried to destroy your work and your reputation trying to justify themselves. From Dr. Naomi Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:

Nasty, Ill-Dressed Technocrats, I Want My Life Back

As I type, I am undergoing the excruciating experience of listening to C-SPAN, which is airing “Twitter’s Response to Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” The larger issue is: who censored Twitter, and why, and whether there was illegal collusion (there was) between Twitter and the US government.

So I finally am seeing them — up close, in real life, in person. I am finally able to look at the faces of the heretofore faceless technocrats who took it upon themselves to try to destroy my life and ruin my name.

I am witnessing, as I see them seated primly in rows in a Congressional hearing room, the very faces — the somber, ill-cut but costly blue suits, the bad wire-rimmed glasses, the judgmental expressions — of those who were personally responsible for the misery, trauma, reputational damage, shattered dreams, and loss of income, in my one life, over the course of last two and a half years.

Here at last are the very people who took it upon themselves, or who oversaw their colleagues, to single me out, to collude with the White House, and with Carol Crawford of CDC, and with DHS perhaps, to suspend me — following an accurate tweet of mine that warned women of menstrual harms following mRNA injection.

The positions of these people, the views of them — their self-regarding, self-satisfied, smug certainty that their rightness is the only rightness that could ever be — do not remind me of the testimony or views of actual Americans. They remind me rather of the affect of functionaries in a Stalinist show trial, or of the nameless bureaucrats in Kafka’s The Trial.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Horseshit, Media, Morality, Politics

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