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“Weasel Words” – Stella Assange Challenges US Over Julian’s Fate

Stella Assange claims US diplomatic assurances offer no real protection for Julian under the First Amendment.

Stella Assange has once again urged the Biden White House to give up on prosecuting her husband Julian Assange, at the same time accusing the US authorities of resorting to “blatant weasel words” when addressing the issue of granting the WikiLeaks founder First Amendment protections.

In a post on X, Stella Assange said that a diplomatic note from the US that was supposed to provide assurances regarding Assange’s future if extradited to the US did not succeed in doing that.

When it comes to the First Amendment, the note amounted to being “a non-assurance,” Stella wrote, which did not override the prosecution’s claim her husband had no rights guaranteed in this respect because he is not a US citizen. Instead it now only said that he can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if he finds himself in custody in the US.

At the same time, the note contained “a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty,” the post said. (Reuters cited the document as stating that “a sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed.”)

The note “does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism,” Stella Assange wrote.

The “assurances” note she is referring to was requested by the British, as a court there is getting ready to issue its final decision regarding Assange’s ability to again appeal extradition. The High Court in London previously said a new appeal would not be possible if the US side provided “certain guarantees.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Let’s talk about Civil War

Let’s talk about Civil War

The movie, I mean.

Mrs. Woe and I went to see Alex Garland’s Civil War last Sunday evening.1 It’s worth seeing, and if you’re going to see the movie, see it on the big screen at a good theater. We saw it with Dolby Cinema and it was a powerful experience. Our seats vibrated with every gun shot, every helicopter, every explosion. Neither of us had experienced such a visceral war movie since Saving Private Ryan.

Warning: The remainder of this essay will contain spoilers for the movie.

Kirsten Dunst walking through an open field with soldiers tents a military planes flying overhead

After finishing Civil War, my wife and I discussed its politics. Both of us agreed that Garland had done such a good job of making the movie sufficiently opaque that an average American of either Blue or Red persuasion could enjoy it. Most people would, we felt, look no deeper than the superficial message: “civil war bad.”

But we also both concluded it was, at its core, a left-wing movie. “Given the movie’s left-wing sentiments, the progressive critics must have loved it,” I thought. “Let’s see what they have to say!”

So I opened up Wired.com to read its review, entitled
The Troubling Politics of Alex Garland’s Civil War:

When director Alex Garland sat down in 2020 to write his new movie, Civil War, he was clearly worried about the polarization of American society. The Covid-19 pandemic was just beginning to take hold, and former US president Donald Trump was still in the White House. It was a much different country from the one in which Garland is releasing his biggest film to date.

Garland [has] created… a far-right fantasy recruiting tool. In Civil War, Garland’s apocalyptic US features a country ostensibly stripped of partisan labels, where both the left and right become intolerant of each other and turn deadly….

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Great Campaign Against the Great Reset

Great Campaign Against the Great Reset

Historic Louisiana Senate Leadership (SB133); Jason Jones’ seminal book is now published.

Louisiana Says ‘No Way’ to the Great Reset’s Latest Power Grab, and the Next One That’s Coming

Guest Editorial by Jason Jones

In a first, the Louisiana Senate has passed a bill that would block international political organizations and the Federal government from imposing tyrannical policies upon the people. In our resistance struggle against the globalists and their “Great Reset,” Louisiana’s bold move is historic. It will either inspire or shame legislators in other states to do the same, in defense of their voters’ rights.

The Global Power Grab

Remember the COVID panic? How “saving lives” was used as a club to knock out and render useless key Constitutional protections, from freedom of religion and speech to freedom of assembly and our right to choose our own medical treatments? The globalists haven’t forgotten. That panic was meant to serve as a test run and a precedent for dismantling every barrier to the direct rule over Americans by unelected foreign bureaucrats. Just wait for the next “accidental,” purely “natural” pandemic to suddenly strike us, just before some crucial election.

We won’t be silenced again, the way Woke corporations working with the Biden regime strangled honest debate over COVID, the vaccine, and potential methods of treatment — giving WHO appointees the power to censor prominent epidemiologists and ordinary citizens on social media. No, now we’re speaking up, and fighting back, writing into law renewed protections against the next global power grab, whatever pretext its architects use.

The next pretext is already here, and doesn’t require bioengineering in China. It’s the Climate Cult. Elites in Europe and America are using the very same strategies and rhetoric that were test-driven during the COVID panic to argue that “climate change” is a “public health emergency” which equally trumps our basic rights and freedoms…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Officials Dodge Their Own Surveillance Law

EU Officials Dodge Their Own Surveillance Law

Leaked documents suggest EU officials seek immunity from their own controversial online surveillance laws, raising accusations of hypocrisy.

Do as I say – not as I do. That’s the essence of a leak that claims to expose high-ranked EU officials as more than simply politicking hypocrites when it comes to implementing the extremely controversial legislation affecting online privacy and encryption.

Namely, interior ministers from EU member countries reportedly want to exempt themselves – but not only – from the looming Child Sexual Abuse (CSAM) Regulation (aka, “chat control“), expected to be adopted as early as in June.

Pushed by supporters as being exactly what it says on the tin – the proposed new rules are at the same time criticized as a vehicle for indiscriminate mass surveillance of everyone’s online communications, and a way to weaken true encryption deployed by platforms – a vital component of internet security, once again, affecting everyone who goes online, children included.

German member of European Parliament (MEP), Pirate Party member, and lawyer Patrick Breyer, who has been investing a lot of time and energy in drawing EU public’s attention to the dangers that come with the regulation, is now quoting leaked documents published by the French site Contexte, which may or may not prove the context of the already troubled proposed rules, just got even worse.

That’s because, according to Contexte, “EU interior ministers want to exempt professional accounts of staff of intelligence agencies, police and military from the envisaged scanning of chats and messages.”

In addition to ministers, police, and spies, anything that’s labeled as “professional secret” is also supposed to be exempt from this highly invasive (when it comes to everybody else in the EU) type of content scanning.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Purpose Of War According To George Orwell (1984)

The Purpose Of War According To George Orwell (1984)

Some food for thought from George Orwell’s ‘1984’…

Does anything really ever change? (emphasis ours)

The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2020: The Year The System Showed Its Real Face

2020: The Year The System Showed Its Real Face

As we grew up, nearly all of us were inundated with stories of our glorious national fathers, our beautiful democracies, and so on. And being young, we for the most part believed them. The system gave us our prosperity, our comfort, our medicine, our sense of importance.

Soon enough we learned that the system was also stupid and perverse, but we found a way around that contradiction by blaming one segment of the system or another: The Blues or the Greens or the Reds were the problem; it could not, must not, be that the system itself is the problem.

Then came 2020, and the system revealed its true face.

I suppose I should be fair and add that the system wasn’t always as rotten as it is now, but regardless, it wasn’t able to prevent the rot that overtook it.

2020, In A Nasty Little Nutshell

The system would like everything except the daily outrages (one for the Blues, one for the Reds) to go down the Memory Hole. So I think it’s important to recap the revelations of 2020:

The system decreed who could work and who couldn’t. This was not done democratically; it was done by edict. “Democracy” did nothing to stop it.

People were arrested for going to church or synagogue. This was the real disgrace of the police forces. Are there any orders from their paymasters they won’t enforce upon us?

Political gangs roam the streets, beating, threatening and burning. Make no mistake, these are covertly authorized political gangs, serving political ends. This vile tactic goes back to ancient Rome at least, where gangs of thugs beat opponents in the streets.

“Science” said one thing then the opposite, supporting whatever power wanted...

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fact Checkers Caught Looking the Other Way (Again!) As Pfizer Nabbed Spreading Vaccine Misinformation and “Bringing Discredit” on the Entire Industry

Fact Checkers Caught Looking the Other Way (Again!) As Pfizer Nabbed Spreading Vaccine Misinformation and “Bringing Discredit” on the Entire Industry

Pfizer’s COVID vaccine corruption adds further evidence that fact checkers are the pharmaceutical industry’s partners in crime.

A UK pharmaceutical body has accused Pfizer of “bringing discredit” on their entire industry after Pfizer’s senior executives promoted the COVID vaccine on social media before it had even been licensed, breaching the regulatory code five times by making misleading claims, ignoring industry standards, and marketing unlicensed medicines.

This is the sixth time the body has reprimanded Pfizer over COVID-19 vaccine promotion, a list that includes an incident in late 2021, when Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was found to have given misleading statements about children’s vaccines during a BBC interview. That same year, CNN Business named Bourla “CEO of the Year,” and his estimated worth is now over $35 million.

Last week’s ruling against Pfizer by the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) further emphasizes the breadth of Pfizer’s lies about their COVID vaccine. PMCPA found that Pfizer began violating industry standards in 2020 to promote their COVID vaccine, meaning Pfizer was misleading the public about their vaccine throughout the pandemic, even before announcing preliminary results of their COVID-19 clinical trials in late 2020.

How bad are we talking here? Put it this way: PMCPA’s blunt rulings against Pfizer are doubly surprising because the UK pharmaceutical industry set up PMCPA in 1993 as a self-regulating body that is staffed with industry insiders. One wonders how more often the PMCPA would have called out Pfizer for violating regulations if it was actually independent of the very corporations it’s supposed to watch over.

Seriously, people. It’s that bad.

But prepare yourself, it’s gonna get worse.

State Violence Is The Norm

State Violence Is The Norm

Rewilding is the solution

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about centralisation as a violent force. In short: state violence. It’s hard not to think about at the moment, given Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, backed by America’s imperialist agenda who, along with their British allies, have been dropping bombs on Yemen because the Houthis dared destabilise shipping in the red sea as protest against genocide. It’s hard not to think about state violence when one state is taken to international court by another who knows first hand the bloody scars of apartheid only for that genocidal state to decry the court as discriminating against them—only to launch a series of attacks on neighbouring countries. It’s hard not to think about state violence when one of those countries responds in violence.

It’s hard not to think about state violence when environmental defenders are being killed, locked up and branded ‘terrorists’ in an obvious move to mobilise intensifying criminalisation of civil protest. It’s hard not to think about state violence when children are going hungry in wealthy nations, energy companies are raking in mind-boggling, record-breaking profits at the expense of a stable society, and police are murdering women.

These are particularly awful examples, but state violence is the norm. In his phenomenal essay on legal interpretation, Violence and the Word, Robert Cover astutely pointed out the law’s fundamental violence as “commitments that place bodies on the line.” The state only upholds its alleged order with a willingness to commit violence against its civilians—to lock them up. Of course, all this is done in the name of protecting citizens, supposedly (although a cursory exploration of past legal cases shows the courts’ main priority has long been the protection of private property)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yanis Varoufakis Banned from Germany as Berlin Police Raid & Shut Down Palestinian Conference

Yanis Varoufakis Banned from Germany as Berlin Police Raid & Shut Down Palestinian Conference

As Germany intensifies its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, we speak with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, one of the planned speakers at a conference in Berlin last weekend that was forcibly shut down by police. The Palestine Congress was scheduled to be held for three days, but police stormed the venue as the first panelist spoke. Germany’s Interior Ministry had also banned some conference speakers from even entering the country, including Varoufakis, the Palestinian British surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta. “This is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice,” says Varoufakis.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As the official death toll in Gaza nears 34,000, we begin today’s show looking at Germany’s intensifying crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices. On Friday, police in Berlin shut down a three-day Palestinian conference just moments after it began. In addition, Germany’s Interior Ministry banned several speakers from even entering Germany or addressing the Palestine Congress conference remotely. The Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta opened the conference, but his remarks over a live stream were cut short when Berlin police raided the conference site.

SALMAN ABU SITTA: We have never seen before these daily scenes, one massacre after another, homes demolished over the heads of the occupants, bodies pulled from under the rubble, surviving child with all his family killed. We have never seen before people deliberately denied food and water, children starved to death and killed when rushing to get food. We have never seen before all means of life systematically destroyed — hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, libraries, ancient monuments, mosques, churches, universities, cemeteries, bakeries, apartment build—

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Palestine Congress

April 15, 2024

The Palestine Congress

Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again!

Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed to “hate,” and would have been exposed to “hate,” had the Hate Police not sprang into action.

You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

OK, what happened was, some pro-Palestinian activists organized a “Palestine Congress,” and attempted to discuss the situation in Gaza, and call for solidarity with the Palestinians, and so on, right here in the middle of Berlin, the epicenter of European democracy, as if they thought they had a right to do that. The German authorities were clearly intent on disabusing them of that notion.

Early Friday morning, hundreds of black-clad Hate Police descended on the congress location. Reinforcements were called in from throughout the nation. Metal barricades were erected on the sidewalks. Hate Police stood guard at the entrance. The German media warned the public that a potential “Hate-Speech” attack was now imminent. Berliners were advised to shelter in place, switch off their phones and any other audio-receptive communication devices, and wad up little pieces of toilet paper and ram them deep into their ear canals to prevent any possible exposure to the “hate.”

Sure enough, minutes into the congress, the anticipated “Hate-Speech” attack was launched! A Palestinian activist — Salman Abu Sitta — who had written an article that allegedly “expressed understanding of Hamas,” and thus had already been placed on the official German “No-Speak” list, started speaking to the congress on Zoom or whatever. Or … it isn’t quite clear whether he actually started speaking…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Funds Ukraine Groups Censoring Critics, Smearing Pro-Peace Voices

U.S. Funds Ukraine Groups Censoring Critics, Smearing Pro-Peace Voices

American taxpayers are footing the bill for Ukrainian NGOs focused on smearing proponents of a diplomatic solution as “Russian disinformation” agents.

Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is taking place not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield – to win hearts and minds.

A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just sought to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer are among the critics on both the left and the right who have been cast as part of a “network of Russian propaganda.”

But the figures targeted by the Ukrainian watchdog groups are hardly Kremlin agents. They simply have forcefully criticized dominant narratives around the war.

Sachs is a highly respected international development expert who has angered Ukrainian officials over his repeated calls for a diplomatic solution to the current military conflict. Last November, he gave a speech at the United Nations calling for a negotiated peace.

Mearsheimer has written extensively on international relations and is a skeptic of NATO expansion. He predicted that Western efforts to militarize Ukraine would lead to a Russian invasion.

Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning independent journalist who has criticized not just war coverage but media dynamics that suppress voices that run counter to U.S. narratives. “What they mean when they demand censorship of ‘pro-Russia propaganda’ is anything that questions the US/EU role in the Ukraine war or who dissents from their narratives,” Greenwald has observed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CIII–We All Believe What We Believe…Evidence Be Damned.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CIII

Teotihuacan, Mexico. (1988) Photo by author.

We All Believe What We Believe…Evidence Be Damned.

The following contemplation is my comment on the latest Honest Sorcerer post that explores personality ‘types’ and how these contribute to why we tend to hold such different views of our world.

Very interesting discussion and does help to explain a lot. And, again, you’ve provided me a springboard to share my own thoughts…

Perhaps these inherent differences (not necessarily hard-wired since I can see that my own answers to many of the questions on the test — which I took many years ago as well since my employer at the time regularly discussed and explored such things — have changed significantly over the years; I seem to have ‘come to the middle’ in many areas) are a big contributor to why I’ve come to hold that we believe what we believe, regardless of evidence or well-reasoned, counter-arguments.

In fact, being who we are with our complex cognitive abilities, we fight off non-confirmatory thoughts/ideas to reduce/avoid the stress/anxiety that can arise when our beliefs are challenged.

One of those beliefs I’ve certainly encountered when discussing ‘collapse’ with others is the idea that our pursuit of the perpetual growth chalice on a finite planet is just fine, thank you very much; please don’t regale me with your data and/or pre/historic and research-based examples of societal decline and/or overshoot…I will not listen or I will list off all the evidence of human progress and problem-solving abilities — particularly with respect to complex technologies — to prove my perspective.

And, of course, it doesn’t help the attempt to counter this notion of infinite growth on a finite planet when the ruling caste who significantly profits from the pursuit (in both monetary and power terms) cheerleads and encourages it at every turn and opportunity. I hear nothing but propaganda about the benefits of human expansion and development from my local/regional/federal politicians whenever they open their mouths and rarely, if ever, discussion of the knock-on, negative impacts except assurances that they will be minimal and/or overcome — yes, we are constructing a relatively expansive community upon these wetlands in this ecologically-sensitive area above important aquifers, but we’re putting a butterfly parkette in to benefit the environment…

For anyone agreeing with the herd and/or deferring to authority, as most of us do, or simply sitting on the fence, then it’s next to impossible to break with the majority perspective. I’ve given up my attempts to raise or even discuss the topic with most family members and others in my social circle — unless I am directly asked for my input. They simply do not want to even think about such a ‘depressing’ subject. Better to discuss and debate whether you think the Toronto Maple Leafs will make it through the first round of the upcoming hockey playoffs…

We even see such opposing views within the ‘collapse-aware’ communities, such as the Degrowth Movement, where a major core seems to hold that with just the right tinkering, and then widespread adoption, of ‘correct’ behaviours and technologies, humanity can solve the problems at hand — never recognising that it’s an unsolvable predicament that we might, at best, be capable of slightly mitigating for some small percentage of people.

It’s a right pickle and reminds me of a quote from a Richard Duncan article (an electrical engineer behind the Olduvai Theory of civilisational collapse):

“…according to the Olduvai schematic, world energy production per capita will decrease…[then] there will be a rash of permanent electrical blackouts worldwide. Consequently the vital…functions — communication, computation, and control — will be lost.
…Mother Nature then solves for us the (apparently) insuperable problem of the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons, which the human race seems either incapable or unwilling to solve for itself.”[1]

If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers). Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.

[1] See this.

Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 6

Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different, Part 6

February 16, 2023 (original posting date)

While I take a break from my Contemplation posts here is the sixth installment of chapters from the fourth book in my fictional novel series (that stalled a few years ago but have ready). I will continue to share some of these over the next little while. Here are the links to PDF files of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and now Chapter 6.

The storyline: Flowing from actual world events, a damaged environment, dwindling energy resources, and a manipulated market-economy all come crashing together in this tale about the social and individual impact of stresses that overwhelm a precarious and complex global system. Supply chain interruptions, border disputes, increased fascism, growing protest movements, and mass migration out of rural areas into cities dominant the new normal.

Basically, this is a tale (set in Canada) about the individual (and societal) reactions to a breakdown of our complex systems. Life is proceeding ‘normally’ for most while a marginalised minority are increasingly concerned about the unsustainability of our way of life. Governments begin to clash with domestic populations while the machinations of some of the ruling caste, especially around energy systems, is exposed. Chapters trace the lives and experiences of a handful of people during the timeframe of about 3 months before to 3 months after a grid-down situation…

Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?