Category Archives: English

Posts in English or with significant English parts

Democracy, English, News, USA

White House gossip: Trump may be Putin’s quisling

There is a resistance twitter account called @RoguePOTUSStaff which appears to legitimately be from someone(s) inside the White House. Today the account tweeted the following about the call to Putin:

6 hours ago

More

insistence to monitor Putin call was due to concern POTUS hasn’t told full story about Putin attempts at blackmail.

After call, do not seem to have had any fears allayed. POTUS behavior during call said to be suspicious.

urging POTUS that if Putin is compromising him to allow them to help. POTUS continues to deny, despite firm intelligence.

These “rogue twitter accounts” now extends all over the federal government, and reveal a profound disdain to Donald Trump. But what is sustaining him is the Authoritarian Party, in “alternative facts” known as the Republican Party, and they do so because he is too focused on food and TV to ay attention to what he is signing. He doesn’t give a rats ass about their pet issues. They have someone signing deeply unpopular executive orders, and he has pillars of support that sustain him in power. That is how dictatorships are established.

Democracy, Editorial, English, USA

Hope Restored

With the 637-city, multimillion women’s march today, hope has been restored in the ability of the silent majority to stand up and defend Liberal Democracy against the intolerance and demagoguery that the fascists use as a wedge to take and hold power. Having said that, today was not a victory per se, it was just the rejoinder of the struggle. This was just the end of the beginning.

The women’s march in Washington D.C.

Where to go from here? Run for office! The crucial positions to take are all those relating to elections, on all levels from precinct to supervisor of elections. The fascist strategy is to deny minorities their right to vote, and to gerrymander. To be able to compete for the seats in the legislature and executive, the people must first safeguard the election process. No elected office is too insignificant to be worth fighting for.

Editorial, English

Melania, I don’t care if you were an escort, but stop acting like one!

Melania the nude model who married Donald Trump, threatens to sue anyone calling her a hooker. I don’t care if she was a hooker or not, it is beside the point. Hookers are also people. What matters is how a person behaves. What matters is her standing up for her dignity – and she is not doing it by suing media, she would be doing it by telling her lying, cheating, sexually assaulting husband to behave like a man.

Melania: It is your husband who is disrespecting you. If you want to be taken  seriously, stand up and be a WOMAN in the relationship! Stop acting like a paid escort!

 

Democracy, Editorial, English, USA

Will Americans wake up in time?

When a democracy turns into a dictatorship the rules change. If the democrats realize in time what is going on, they will act decisively and stop it. “Predict the end, prevent the beginning.” But if they refuse to take in what is happening, if they bury their heads in the sand, then the dictatorship will take root. Let me give you an example. Bill Palmer runs an anti-Trump group of 150k people on Facebook which used to be pro-Hillary (and he also writes the Palmer Report). As a democracy activist I have not just one but several Facebook accounts, everybody has that in dictatorships, so I joined that group with different accounts, and one after the other was blocked. At the same time I had Bill as a friend on Facebook, so I asked him why I was blocked. When time passed without a reply I started suspecting that someone was blocking people without his knowledge, and published the warning mentioned below. After about seven weeks he replied and the exchange below took place.

My advice to all Americans who are fighting against the authoritarian regime under Trump (it is already here) is to stay united, and to engage each other in open discussions. Name calling is what the Trumpistas are doing. Blocking someone who is trying to debate is the stuff of dictatorship, and is only helping Trump. The only legitimate reason to block someone is when that person is trying to destroy the debate. What we want is the debate! Not a monopoly of ideas, but a meeting of opinions.

Not once did Bill Palmer explain what “conspiracy theories” he has talking about, nor did he ever respond to any of my posts or comments. If you want democracy, act as a democrat, that is the first lesson. Second lesson is, don’t ever trust a person who doesn’t respect the norms of democracy – such as Donald Trump.

Unfortunately I don’t see the leadership abilities in the Democratic Party that it needs. There is a lack of spine, a lack of “full speed ahead damn the torpedoes” mentality. And that is the only thing that can save America now: Courage. Lots of civil courage.

Analysis, Democracy, English, USA

Fascism came through the Internet

Social media are the new public space of the world. We cannot allow private corporations to be the masters of what we can or cannot say online, since that is tantamount to FASCISM. Take this example: This image was deleted by Facebook without any motivation or due process, just referring to what they euphemistically call “Community Standards.” For 7 days they blocked me, removing everything I had published on Facebook, much of it warning of the risk of fascism under Trump.  Did Facebook silence me to cover their behinds from retaliation from the president elect? How can we ever know that Facebook is NOT playing nice to Trump, helping him to silence free speech? How can we know that we are not in fascism already? Simple answer: We can’t.
The image that caused Facebook to suspend my account and remove all that I had published, most of which was warning of the risk of fascism under a president Trump.

My conclusion is that every democracy needs a social media ombudsman to prevent fascism, but in the United States it may be too late already. When public space moved from the street to social media, the free speech protections did not keep up. Whoever controls the online space controls what the People knows, believes, and thinks.

Authoritarians like Putin, Maduro, and Trump don’t write laws to control the Internet corporations; they just let them know what they expect and that if they don’t preemptively do what the Leader wants, there will be “consequences.” It’s a brave new world.

Analysis, Democracy, English, USA

Putin’s coup d’état in USA is war, treason

The head of a country, the person who represents the country, is called the Head of State. To replace the head of state by illegal means is called a coup d’état. The head of state in the United State is the President. The election of a president is not allowed to involve foreign influence, yet Russia clearly decided the outcome by waging a full scale dirty election campaign, in which the hacking of the Democratic e-mails was just the tip of the iceberg. The Russian involvement was therefore an act of war, since it illegally changed the head of state in another country.

The realization that it was an act of war is crucial, since in war it is unconstitutional to give aid and comfort to the enemy. That is defined as treason. Treason trumps the First Amendment but it only applies in war. Those in the Trump campaign and in media who have spread the Russian propaganda lies, and who have disputed U.S. intelligence in order to get Trump elected, have committed treason, a crime punishable by death.

The base of the Statue of Liberty would make a good place to execute the traitors by firing squad since it would create a powerful imagery and be seen by millions.
The base of the Statue of Liberty would make a good place to execute the traitors by firing squad since it would create a powerful imagery and be seen by millions.

While the President weighs the options for how to deal with Russia, he should start by declaring it an act of war so that justice can be made at home. Those who put a kleptocratic fascist in the presidency have to pay a heavy price for their crime. It is not the voters’ fault because they based their decision on what they heard, read, and saw, and that was largely foreign propaganda, as a result of media outlets like FOX News. More than one in that outfit should therefore be charged with treason.

Democracy, English, News, USA

Lawsuit seeks recount in Florida

A non-partisan group has filed a suit to force a recount in Florida. The brief outlines serious concerns that a nation-state adversary (read: Russia) may have hacked the election. It was filed just before the deadline that expired Friday night. If you are interested, here are some potentially suspect vote-by-mail and early voting data from Florida that you can analyze statistically, and here you can download the election results.

There are also recounts ongoing in Wisconsin (in one of the first counties they found that 5 out of 8 electronic voting machines had their seals broken, which is a no-no), in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, and lesser known, in Nevada where Clinton actually won, that recount was filed to see how reliable the vote count is and it’s a good thing because it will help us see if there is a statistical difference in pattern between where she won and where she surprisingly lost.

UPDATE: The Excel file with preliminary results provided by the Florida department of elections fails to indicate total number of votes cast or number of invalid votes in the race. There is thus no way of checking (yet; this will become available after Dec. 17) if there was a systematic elimination of votes in order to affect the outcome of the election. This is a crucial figure in any election result, and it is beyond disbelief that Florida does not publish it. It places Florida on par with or worse than your typical Banana Republic in terms of election transparency.

Colombia, Editorial, English, Venezuela

Who is Peace Prize Winner Santos?

Many things can be said about Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia and former minister of defense who was rewarded with (not awarded, rewarded) the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. But I’ll stick to what I personally know. In 2014, Santos’s military invited two acquaintances of mine, members of the Venezuelan non-violent resistance Operación Libertad, to visit a military base where the below photo was taken. Later Santos extradited these two to the dictatorship in Venezuela where they were thrown in the most infamous torture site, known as “The Tomb”. They are still there.

Gabriel Valles y Lorent Saleh en un base militar en Colombia en 2014.
Gabriel Valles and Lorent Saleh in a military base in Colombia in 2014. 

The last time I spoke to Lorent Saleh he told me about being invited to a Colombian military base.  Apparently this invitation was the cause for their extradition. But who is the commander in chief of the military? President Santos, of course. So he was ultimately responsible for their visit, and then he extradited them supposedly because of that visit(!).

Now as regards “peace”, for peace to be made there has to be war first. But Colombia is not in a civil war. Colombia is plagued by a terrorist group that is armed and supported by Castro on Cuba. Castro also supports and controls Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, and Venezuela cooperates intimately with FARC. So when Santos engaged in “peace negotiations” with FARC, with facilitation by Cuba, Venezuela, and Norway, it was really a negotiation to rewards a foreign-backed terrorist group. Santos is a quisling!

Norway was used as a pawn to give legitimacy to this charade. There is no reason to suspect that the Norwegians acted with malicious intent, because they are acting against their own national interest. You see, the bad guys in this deal are intimately allied with Putin’s Russia, so what Norway did—in the negotiations and in rewarding the quisling with a Nobel Peace Prize—indirectly helps Russia, Norway’s enemy.

Analysis, English

What Russia wants in Syria

Russia wants a navy base. Period. It’s not a mystery. If you understand that Putin is supporting Assad for the purpose of having a navy base with a harbor that doesn’t freeze in the winter, and that is not cut off from the rest of the world by straights guarded by NATO, then Russia’s behavior becomes totally predictable and understandable.

How do I know this? Easy. Putin said as much. In 2008 if my memory does not fail me, he announced plans for a new oceanic fleet by 2020, with navy bases in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela. Then came the Arab Spring and wiped away Kadaffi in Libya, and created civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

Russia already had a small base in Syria that seemed about to be lost, just like Sevastopol in Crimea would be lost when the treaty with Ukraine expired. Which is why Putin installed his man as president, but he was ousted in an uprising in 2014. So Putin invaded Crimea in order to hold on to Sevastopol. After that victory he turned to Syria and decided to hold on to that base as well, which is why he has backed Assad for a year now. Another stop gap measure has been a cooperation with Iran, using one of their bases in the Indian Ocean.

Libya and Yemen are out of reach now, but Venezuela is un unknown case. The area where the base presumably would be built has been closed off for civilians, and there are a lot of work going on under foreign direction. Not Russian though, but Asian. Tensions have gone high recently when foreign work leaders have pushed local crews beyond what they deem acceptable.

Analysis, English

The Quagmire in the Levant

Russia is bombarding Aleppo because Putin wants a navy base in the Mediterranean, and his ticket to that is to keep Assad in power in Damascus no matter the cost. There are moderate rebels striving for a modern state, there are islamic extremist rebels, and there are some ethnic Turks and Kurds. This comes on top of the previous conflict in Iraq with Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds fighting each other, each with their links to kinfolks in other countries in the region.

The most problematic of these circumstances is the Kurdish case. It is the largest ethnic group in the world that does not have a country, a nation state. Their land is split between four countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Turkey is helping the moderate rebels in Syria against Assad but their main foe is the Kurds. Apparently the situation is as follows:

Russia's enemies: 1) moderate rebels, Kurds; 2) ISIS. Friends: Assad.

Turkey's enemies: 1) Kurds; 2) Assad; 3) ISIS. Friends: Moderate rebels.

USA's enemies: 1) ISIS; 2) Assad. Friends: Moderate rebels, Kurds.

There is one factor and one factor only that prevents the West from showing a united front, and it is the Kurdish problem. The fact that Turkey is insisting on subjugating a large tract of Kurdish land.

Turkey would have a lot to win on reconsidering its stance on Kurdistan. They would get more stability, and stability leads to economical development. It could also open the doors for EU membership. Furthermore, it would give them a friendly eastern neighbor that can act as a buffer to Iran, a very useful buffer since there are Kurds on the other side of the border as well, inside Iran. A Kurdistan created with pieces from present Iraq and Turkey would put Teheran on the defensive. By removing this problem from the table, all efforts could be focused on defeating the bad guys in the Levant (a people wanting sovereignty is not a bad guy!). It seems that it’s in Ankara’s interest to reconsider the Kurdish question.