Archive for January, 2021
AMERICANS WILL NOW STAND UP EVERY MORNING AFTER RISING FROM BED, COME TO ATTENTION AND SALUTE THEIR NEW AMERICAN RUSSIAN-STYLE PRAVDA ANTHEM AND FLAG LIKE THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA AND GUTLESS GOP
Facebook announced it would ban and remove photos and videos from the protest at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The social media platform claims that photos and videos from Wednesday’s events violate Facebook’s policy of “promotion of criminal activity.”POLL: Did the results of the Georgia election surprise you?
Immediately following the Capitol protest, Facebook and Instagram locked the account of President Donald Trump for 24 hours for “two policy violations.”
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube deleted videos from President Trump addressing the Capitol chaos, where he instructed his supporters to “go home,” and declared that “we have to have peace.” He also continued to press the narrative that the election was stolen from him.
Twitter released a statement on Wednesday that read, “In regard to the ongoing situation in Washington, D.C., we are working proactively to protect the health of the public conversation occurring on the service and will take action on any content that violates the Twitter rules.”
Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said the company deleted Trump’s video over the risk that it would increase the risk of violence.
“This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump’s video,” Rosen wrote on Twitter. “We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1346950532372393985&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theblaze.com%2Fnews%2Ffacebook-ban-capitol-protest-content-trump-account&partner=rebelmouse&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
“The violent protests in the Capitol today are a disgrace,” Facebook said in a statement on Wednesday. “We prohibit incitement and calls for violence on our platform. We are actively reviewing and removing any content that breaks these rules.”
Facebook also issued its “response to the violence in Washington,” where the social network announced it would ban and remove photos and videos from the Capitol protest.
“Let us speak for the leadership team in saying what so many of us are feeling,” wrote Rosen and Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management. “We are appalled by the violence at the Capitol today. We are treating these events as an emergency.”
Facebook proclaimed that it has been “searching for and removing” certain content, including “praise and support of the storming of the US Capitol,” “incitement or encouragement of the events at the Capitol, including videos and photos from the protestors,” and “calls for protests — even peaceful ones — if they violate the curfew in DC.”
Facebook claimed that photos and videos of the Capitol protest “represent promotion of criminal activity which violates our policies.”
Facebook also implemented “emergency measures,” including “automatically disabling comments on posts in Groups that start to have a high rate of hate speech or content that incites violence” and “using AI to demote content that likely violates our policies.”
“Facebook and Instagram have both begun blocking content posted to the #StormTheCapitol hashtag,” TechCrunch reported.
The social media giant concluded by saying, “We’re continuing to monitor the situation and will take additional measures if necessary to keep people safe.”
Facebook did not enact a similar policy of banning images and videos during the protests and riots that have been occurring regularly since late May, following the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.
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You’re not one of ‘Those’ People, are you?!?
This particular ‘gun fear’, out of many, is far more subtle than the rest, and more pervasive as well. There is a bedrock cultural message that civilized good, honest, hard-working people, and especially with women, are supposed to be caring, nurturing and (above all else) non-violent…and that gun ownership negates all of the above. People who discover that you own a firearm or are thinking of buying one will subtly (or not-so-subtly) indicate that this says something bad about your moral fiber. That, perhaps, you aren’t the nice person they thought you were.
For the record, loudly enough so ‘they’ in the cheap suits and seats can hear, I state: There is no conflict between firearms ownership and being a caring, nurturing, non-violent person. Firearms cannot supernaturally possess you and turn you into a different woman than you were before. In fact, gun ownership can and will bolster your ability to be a caring, nurturing, nonviolent person by helping keep you alive if you are ever forced to defend your life.
Whether or not to own a gun, what kind of gun, where you’ll keep it, and when you’ll carry it, are all matters of personal choice. It can also be assured that people are perfectly capable of handling firearm safely and effectively, no matter what ‘they’ say, and especially with the training and mindset. PERIOD!
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When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are ruled by criminals
“Truth is Treason in an Empire of Lies.” – George Orwell
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and NSA agent Edward Snowden. These two men released information to the American people that implicates those, both elected representatives and unelected bureaucrats, in crimes against the people. Yet, despite the massive amount of evidence against the actual criminals, to date, no one has been brought to justice. However, these men remain either in exile or imprisoned and their lives sought after by the very criminals they sought to expose.
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote a recent piece on what the imprisonment of Julian Assange reveals about freedom and tyranny in the US.
Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.
Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process — because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it. The observation apocryphally attributed to socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned for her opposition to German involvement in World War I and then summarily executed by the state, expresses it best: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
The metric to determine whether a society is free is not how its orthodoxy-spouting, well-behaved, deferential-to-authority citizens are treated. Such people are treated well, or at least usually left alone, by every sovereign and every power center in every era, all over the world.
You will not feel the sting of Silicon Valley or other institutional censorship as long as you affirm the latest COVID pronouncements of the World Health Organization and Dr. Anthony Fauci (even as those decrees contradict the ones they issued only a few months earlier), but you will if you question, refute or deviate from them. You will not have your Facebook page deleted if you defend Israeli occupation of Palestine but will be banished from that platform if you live in the West Bank and Gaza and urge resistance to Israeli occupying troops. If you call Trump an orange fascist clown, you can stay on YouTube for eternity, but not if you defend his most controversial policies and claims. You can vocally insist that the 2000, 2004 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections were all stolen without the slightest concern of being banned, but the same claims about the 2020 election will result in the summary denial of your ability to use online tech monopolies to be heard.
Censorship, like most repression, is reserved for those who dissent from majoritarian orthodoxies, not for those who express views comfortably within the mainstream. Establishment Democrats and Republicans — adherents to the prevailing neoliberal order — have no need for free speech protections since nobody with power would care enough to silence them. It is only the disaffected, those who reside on the fringes and the margins, who need those rights. And those are precisely the people who, by definition, are most often denied them.
Similarly: powerful officials in Washington can illegally leak the most sensitive government secrets and will suffer no punishment, or will get the lightest tap on the wrist, provided their aim is to advance mainstream narratives. But low-level leakers whose aim is to expose wrongdoing by the powerful or reveal their systemic lying will have the full weight of the criminal justice system and the intelligence community come crashing down on them, to destroy them with vengeance and also to put their heads on a pike to terrorize future dissidents out of similarly stepping forward.
Journalists like Bob Woodward, who spend decades spilling the most sensitive secrets at the behest of the ruling class D.C. elites, will be lavished with awards and immense wealth. But those like Julian Assange who publish similar secrets but against the will of those elites, with the goal and outcome of exposing (rather than obscuring) ruling class lies and impeding (rather than advancing) their agenda, will suffer the opposite fate as Woodward: they will endure every imaginable punishment, including indefinite imprisonment in maximum-security cells. That is because Woodward is a servant of power while Assange is a dissident against it.
All of this illustrates a vital truth. The real measure of how free is a society — from China, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to France, Britain and the U.S. — is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated. Royal court vassals always end up fine: rewarded for their subservience and thus, convinced that freedoms abound, they redouble their fealty to prevailing status quo power structures.
Whether a society is truly free is determined by how it treats its dissidents, those who live and speak and think outside of permissible lines, those who effectively subvert ruling class aims. If you want to know whether free speech is genuine or illusory, look not to the treatment of those who loyally serve establishment factions and vocally affirm their most sacred pieties, but to the fate of those who reside outside of those factions and work in opposition to them. If you want to know whether a free press is authentically guaranteed, look at the plight of those who publish secrets designed not to propagandize the population to venerate elites but, instead, those whose publications result in generating mass discontent against them.
That is what makes the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange not only a grotesque injustice but also a vital, crystal-clear prism for seeing the fundamental fraud of U.S. narratives about who is free and who is not, about where tyranny reigns and where it does not.
Assange has been imprisoned for almost two years. He was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by British police on April 11, 2019. That was possible only because the U.S., U.K. and Spanish governments coerced Ecuador’s meek President, Lenin Moreno, to withdraw the asylum extended to Assange seven years earlier by his staunch sovereignty-defending predecessor, Rafael Correa.
The U.S. and British governments hate Assange because of his revelations that exposed their lies and crimes, while Spain was enraged by WikiLeaks’ journalistic coverage of and activism against Madrid’s 2018 violent repression of the Catalan independence movement. So they bullied and bribed Moreno to throw Assange to the wolves — i.e., to them. And ever since, Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, a facility used for terrorist suspects that is so harsh that the BBC asked in 2004 whether it is “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.”
Assange is not currently imprisoned because he was convicted of a crime. Two weeks after he was dragged out of the embassy, he was found guilty of the minor offense of “skipping bail” and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law. He fully served that sentence as of April of this year, and was thus scheduled to be released, facing no more charges. But just weeks before his release date, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled an indictment of Assange arising out of WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and war logs that revealed massive corruption by numerous governments, Bush and Obama officials, and various corporations around the world.
That U.S. indictment and the accompanying request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial provided, by design, the pretext for the British government to imprison Assange indefinitely. A judge quickly ruled that Assange could not be released on bail pending his extradition hearing, but instead must stay behind bars while the U.K. courts fully adjudicate the Justice Department’s extradition request. No matter what happens, it will takes years for this extradition process to conclude because whichever side (the DOJ or Assange) loses at each stage (and Assange is highly likely to lose the first round when the lower-court decision on the extradition request is issued next week), they will appeal, and Assange will linger in prison while these appeals wind their way very slowly through the U.K. judicial system.
That means that — absent a pardon by Trump or the withdrawal of the charges by what will become the Biden DOJ — Assange will be locked up for years without any need to prove he is guilty of any crime. He will have been just disappeared: silenced by the very governments whose corruption and crimes he denounced and exposed.
Those are the same governments — the U.S. and U.K. — that sanctimoniously condemn their adversaries (but rarely their repressive allies) for violating free speech, free press and due process rights. These are the same governments that succeed — largely due to a limitlessly compliant corporate media that either believes the propaganda or knowingly disseminates it for their own rewards — in convincing large numbers of their citizens that, unlike in the Bad Countries such as Russia and Iran, these civic freedoms are guaranteed and protected in the Good Western Countries.
(The ample evidence showing that the indictment of Assange is the single gravest threat to press freedoms in years, and that the arguments mounted to justify it are fraudulent, has been repeatedly documented by myself and others, so I will not rehash those discussions here. Those interested can see the article and video program I produced on this prosecution along with my op-ed in The Washington Post; Laura Poitras’ New York Times op-ed last week on the indictment; former Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Guardian op-ed calling for Assange’s immediate release; the editorial from The Guardian and column from The Washington Post’s media reporter Margaret Sullivan condemning this prosecution as abusive; and statements from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Columbia Journalism Review, and the ACLU warning of the serious dangers to press freedoms it poses).
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The UN Soils Itself On Its 75th. Anniversary
As the United Nations concludes its 75th birthday year, it is hard to be optimistic about the international body. Established for the cause of preserving peace and meaningful diplomacy, the U.N. was also supposed to be a guardian for human rights.
But judged against its founding charter, the U.N. isn’t just a failure. It is a sad joke.
On Jan. 1, China, Cuba, and Russia will become members of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Yes, China, which has imprisoned 2 million of its Uighur citizens in gulag reeducation camps, sterilized thousands, and used the rest for de facto slave labor, is donning the U.N. human rights mantle. Cuba, a dystopia tolerated by the Western media elite for its creaking art deco façade, sees many of its best and brightest choose to brave shark-infested waters in search of better lives. Vladimir Putin’s Russia wages a very thinly veiled war on all who question the Kremlin. Whether it’s Novichok nerve agents and Alexei Navalny, open windows and journalists, or gang attacks on gays, Putin’s Russia despises human rights.
It is not simply alarming that these governments are joining the Human Rights Council, but that so few governments and organizations are bothered by it.
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This is to be expected, of course. The Human Rights Council has a perpetual fetish for attacking the Middle East’s only truly pluralistic democracy, Israel, but has long been happy to ignore the far greater sins of others. Previous honorees of the Human Rights Council circuit include Venezuela. A nation blessed with the largest oil reserves of any nation on Earth and some of the highest child mortality rates on Earth.
A joke indeed. But not a funny one. This isn’t simply a question of human rights. It’s a question of life or death.
When one considers the genocidal tragedies that the U.N. has failed to address, a notable and ignominious trend becomes apparent. Namely, the U.N.’s utter failure to resolve these tragedies. Rwanda, Bosnia, and Syria are now sorry examples of the U.N.’s embarrassing inadequacy. More ominously for the world, the forces arrayed against the collective international community in each of those crisis scenarios were comparatively weak. To have prevented genocide, then, would not have required some extraordinary feat but rather the observation that the U.N. charter was being shredded and that a credible response was possible. Instead, either by inherent dysfunction of callous choice, the U.N. sat idle and accepted avoidable massacres and misery. No wonder that so few Uighur Muslims have any confidence that the U.N. will now take up their cause with energy. They rightly believe that the U.N. will choose to bend the knee in pursuit of new donations from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing, after all, sees U.N. favor as a cheap and easy way to paper over its human rights atrocities.
But the challenges go beyond human rights. In the face of repeated and successively increasing Iranian breaches of nuclear arms agreements, the U.N. sits idle. In the face of escalating Chinese circumvention of North Korean sanctions, the U.N. sits idle. U.N. officials like to blame the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members for these issues. But the truth is that the U.N. itself is to blame. Its leaders, now and before, have failed to address the broken structures that sit at the heart of their organization. They should act. But they won’t. They’re happy instead to make speeches and then return to the extensive and expensive budgets afforded to all U.N. staffers. It is extraordinary, for example, that so much of the U.N.’s money continues to be spent in New York City and Geneva rather than out in the field where it might, just might, save lives and make the world a slightly better place.
The U.N. doesn’t deserve many birthday presents. Not this year, at least. And likely not next year.
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PROJECT RODS FROM GOD
FOR ANY NATIONS SUCH AS CHINA THAT SHOULD FEEL THE NEED TO TRAMPLE THE U.S., DON’T WORRY BECAUSE THE U.S. WILL FIGURE IT OUT, SO DON’T MESS WITH US.
fox files 
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