This morning on Antiwar Radio: Hassan El Tayyab about how you can help force Biden to end the war against the humans of Yemen. That’s at 8:30 Pacific time, 90.7 FM @KPFK in L.A. kpfk.org
Blog
Jeff Deist of the Mises Institute Interviews Me About Enough Already
Cop Kills Boy
Kevin Gosztola: No Pardons For Edward Snowden Or Julian Assange
“NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who was the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act under Trump, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou pursued pardons. They were effectively denied as well. On January 17, the New York Times reported that an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Kiriakou a pardon would cost him $2 million. “I laughed. Two million bucks—are you out of your mind?” Kiriakou told the Times. “Even if I had two million bucks, I wouldn’t spend it to recover a $700,000 pension.” The report exposed a sliver of the corruption around pardons in the final days of the Trump presidency, as “several people with connections” to Trump apparently “accepted large sums of money” in return for clemency. Kiriakou said Trump was not the only president in history to encourage this kind of behavior. “Certainly, Bill Clinton did at the end of his administration well. But this just highlights how the pardon process in the United States is broken.”
More here
Cop Kills Cop
And gets away with it of course because not even government employees have any rights that another government employee is bound to respect.
And you wonder why BLM and the Boogaloo boys raise their fists together half the time: the government is evil.
Name Dropped
Some wonderful ridiculous woman made this hilarious song about us all partying at Tom Woods’ house:
Libya, North Africa Emerge As Cocaine Transit Hubs
You can’t stop markets – where their is a buyer their will be a seller.
The interventionists (mainly Samantha Power) in the Obama administration (the same ones that now populate the Biden Administration) used the cover of “Responsibility to Protect” to remove the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi thinking a new era of democracy will rise in Libya once he is removed. As Ron Paul wrote:
“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.”
Now you can add Libya as a transit point for drugs to Western Europe. Doubt they learned any lesson from this.
More here
The Memory Hole
Censorship has been in the news a lot lately. You have probably heard it mentioned in relation to Donald Trump. Twitter, Facebook, and many other online platforms permanently suspended his accounts last week. That’s pretty wild, but there is a lot more worth talking about than any one person losing their Twitter account.
In the past, censorship has taken many forms. Originally, it involved physically stopping people from speaking, either by violence or threat of violence. Then, as speech moved to paper it involved destroying scrolls and later books. George Orwell, in his classic book 1984 imagined a future where censorship happened by literally cutting portions out of newspapers and putting them into what he called a “memory hole” where they would be burned up and destroyed forever.
Today, we have experienced decades of the near free spread of information. The internet has been incredible for that. But, now people are realizing that the same tools which have been so incredible for the proliferation of information can also be used for the mass censorship of information.
In the past, censorship always involved a lot of work. If someone wanted to lead a censorship campaign, it involved getting thugs who would carry it out. They would have to physically find the people and materials that they wanted to censor and then they had to physically dispose of them.
Today, censorship happens at the push of a button. It doesn’t matter whether the contraband information comes from a powerful government official or any one of us regular folks. For better or for worse, the internet has become the public space. It is where we make friends, it is where we interact with people, it is where we keep in contact with family, and now it’s become more and more where we get our jobs done. This combination of censorship becoming so easy and our lives moving to such a large extent online has created a problem worth talking about.
While censorship used to involved trying to get rid of a few books or people, now we risk instantly having huge portions of our life ripped from us without warning and with no recourse.
I experienced this personally with a Facebook group. It was a group of us who met online, became friends, online, and interacted online. We built real relationships and even businesses along the way. We shared births and deaths and countless prayers. Yet, on our fourth anniversary (and just a few days before last year’s presidential election) Facebook permanently suspended our group. It was gone. We lost four years of personal and professional content. They accused us of the vague crimes of violating community standards and spreading fake news.
Our group certainly wasn’t the only one. Millions of people are losing years of their lives to big tech censorship. Donald Trump is only one drop in that ocean.
This goes beyond politics and tired arguments over public vs. private censorship. The source material of history is being ripped from us. Opposing voices are disappearing without any recourse. In an age where we thought that information would be unstoppable, we are watching the historical narrative be shaped in real-time.
Let’s not pretend that Donald Trump didn’t use Twitter as his primary venue for making public statements. Now, when people want to look back at his words they have to rely on third parties and backed up data since the source material has been removed. In a few years, when you share quotes from his tweets people will say, “Yeah, but how can you even be sure that he said that?” What will remain are the incessant fake news articles from the agenda-driven media painting Trump as a hopeless tyrant and anyone who doesn’t hate him as brainwashed Q people.
While you still can, I’d suggest you do whatever you can to back up your online data. It is very easy to download all of your data from both Facebook and Twitter. At the very least, get a copy of your own data before it is ripped from you. Don’t let your posts, your history, your interactions be memory-holed. And going forward, now is a great time to stop and consider where we are sending our data. If our lives can be so easily censored on these platforms, then maybe we shouldn’t rely so heavily on them.
Take control of your life and your online data. Don’t let yourself be memory-holed.
Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/50
TechnoAgorist on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@TechnoAgorist:8
TechnoAgorist on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@TechnoAgorist:8
TechnoAgorist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjWlrSuf4b4eApnFX9o82BA
TechnoAgorist is a production of the MLGA Network. Find more great content at: https://mlganetwork.com
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Podcasts
