The Assange Case Explained Simply

One of the most common reasons I hear from people on their reluctance to wade into the Assange debate is that they don’t understand it. It looks like a complicated issue to them, so they leave it to the experts.

In reality, the complexity of this case is a complete illusion. It’s very, very simple. It only looks complicated because many years of media distortion have made it appear so.

The US government is trying to extradite a journalist and prosecute him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes, with the long-term goal of normalizing this practice.

That’s it. That’s the whole entire thing. So simple you can sum it up in a single sentence. In a single breath. The most powerful government on earth setting a legal precedent which would allow it to extradite any journalist anywhere in the world for exposing its malfeasance would unquestionably have a massive chilling effect on journalism everywhere in precisely the area where press scrutiny is most sorely needed. It’s not any more complex or nuanced than that.

The Assange issue is simple. What makes it seem complicated is the lies people have been fed by the media class whose job is to manipulate the public into consenting to the agendas of the US power alliance and its war machine.

Because of this mass-scale smear campaign, you will be told that Assange is “not a journalist” and should therefore not be defended as such. This is first of all objectively false; providing the public with factual information about the powerful which helps them understand their world better is the thing that journalism is, which is why Assange has received many awards for journalism. More to the point, Assange wouldn’t need to be a journalist for worldwide press freedoms to be gravely threatened by his prosecution for publishing authentic documents about the US government.

You will be told that Assange “helped Trump win” with WikiLeaks publications that harmed the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and should therefore not be supported. But the Assange extradition case has nothing to do with the 2016 WikiLeaks releases; the entire case revolves around the Chelsea Manning leaks from years earlier about the US military’s scandalous abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. More to the point, only the most infantile of narcissists would believe it’s legitimate to imprison people for hurting your preferred candidate’s political campaign.

You will be told that Assange is being prosecuted for “hacking” and not journalism because the US indictment alleges that Assange tried to help Manning crack a password while taking classified documents. But it does not allege that Assange made any attempt to help Manning gain access to those documents; the indictment says that Manning already “had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst,” and that Assange’s attempts would only “have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures.” As explained in 2019 by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee (the latter of whom happens to despise Assange), this means Assange was engaged in the standard journalistic practice of source protection. Anyone who says Assange tried to hack into US government servers is either lying or misinformed.

You will be told that Assange is a Russian asset because of still-unproven allegations by the US government that the Kremlin was behind the 2016 releases, but this claim is completely baseless and, again, completely unrelated to the 2010 Manning publications for which Assange is actually being prosecuted. No serious media publication has ever reported that the Assange extradition case has anything to do with the 2016 WikiLeaks publications, but because so many people heard Assange’s name mentioned during the mass media’s discredited Trump-Russia collusion narratives you’ll constantly see people assuming that one is related to the other.

Do you see how that works? Do you see how what’s actually happening with the Assange case is extremely simple and easy to understand, but all the narratives justifying his persecution make it necessary to engage in a bunch of complicated counter-arguments? This obfuscation didn’t happen by accident, which is why I refuted as many such distortions as possible in this long article written after Assange’s imprisonment.

The most powerful government in the world trying to lock up a foreign journalist for telling the truth about it is as insanely tyrannical an abuse as you could possibly come up with. It’s as obvious as it gets. The Assange case is so simple and so common sense it should be one of the most mainstream, normie positions anyone could possibly have, right up there with believing racism is bad and child molesters should be stopped. It’s only because imperial spinmeisters muddy the waters with lies and distortions that this isn’t happening.

Everyone should oppose the agenda to normalize the imprisonment of journalists who embarrass the US empire. This shouldn’t be a job left to fringe bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers, it should be happening in every sector of society, across the entire political spectrum. The fact that a very large sector of the population fails to see this as a priority issue shows you just how brainwashed the empire’s propaganda engine has made us.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/12/16/the-assange-case-explained-simply/

 

Fact Check: Biden Claims He Brought Country Back from Brink of Financial Collapse

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

JOHN CARNEY

21 Oct 2021

1:24

CLAIM: “Under my Administration, we’ve gone from the brink of financial collapse to historic job growth. We have a lot of work to do still – but this is progress,” President Joe Biden tweeted Thursday.

Verdict: False.

Jobless claims remain well above their expected long-term average of 270,000 and never once during Biden’s administration did they fall below 300,000 prior to this month. Total employment remains below its prepandemic level and the prime-age employment to population ratio is still depressed.

The economy was not on the brink of financial collapse when Biden took office. Real Gross Domestic Product grew at an annualized rate of 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2020 as the economy rebounded from the brief but sharp recession that straddled the first and second quarters. It grew at a 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter of this year,  the economy grew at a 6.4 percent rate. In the second quarter, the economy grew 6.6 percent. It has since slowed dramatically, with the Conference Board estimating an annual rate of 3.5 percent.

The country was on the brink of a financial collapse in 2020 but it was pulled back from that brink while Donald Trump was still president.

https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2021/10/21/fact-check-biden-claims-he-brought-country-back-from-brink-of-financial-collapse/

 

The ‘degrowth’ delusion

By

 Ivo Vegter

 -

Aug 31, 2021

https://dailyfriend.co.za/2021/08/31/the-degrowth-delusion/

The idea that economic growth cannot, and should not, continue, is gaining widespread support. It is based on grave misconceptions, and entirely deluded about economic reality.

‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of economic growth. How dare you!’

When a then-16-year-old Greta Thunberg prissily lectured the assembled worthies at a United Nations climate summit in New York on 23 September 2019, one might have expected the adults to recognise that a high school girl might be passionately rebellious and anti-establishment, as we all were at her age, but probably has little to teach us about money and economic growth. Instead, she won prizes and accolades.

The irony that the girl who accused world leaders of having stolen her dreams and her childhood grew up in a country with one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world was entirely lost on them.

Unlike the children who mine the cobalt to make her iPhone, Thunberg was sufficiently well-connected to borrow a fancy racing yacht built for the Monaco-based sailing team of Benjamin de Rothschild. This was a blatant act of virtue-signalling, so she did not have to fly to New York. While the eyes of the world were on her, her skipper and crew flew back home from New York, to be replaced by a new crew which flew to New York to bring the yacht back.

Once in New York, she was able to borrow a Tesla from Arnold Schwarzenegger, because who doesn’t have the Governator on speed dial?

She emotionally blackmailed her mother into giving up her dream of singing opera because it involved flying, and, according to her father, drew energy from this, like a little angry climate vampire.

She is the very picture of wealth and entitlement, and yet millions of gullible adults swooned over her insolent rants about things she did not understand, like money and economic growth.

Prosperity without growth

Thunberg is but one manifestation of a ‘degrowth’ movement that has deep roots but has become widely popular in recent years.

The New Yorker wondered, in February 2020, whether we can have prosperity without growth. Scientific American, two months ago, published an article entitled The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth. Nature Communications published a ‘perspective’ entitled Scientists’ warning on affluence in June last year.

In Daily Maverick last Sunday, one Natale Labia pondered the ‘degrowth’ movement and the complex role of economic expansion on a changing planet.

The idea of ‘degrowth’ is based on a number of misconceptions. One is that economists are deluded by the idea of infinite economic growth in the face of finite physical resources.

I addressed this concern recently in my article about the Limits to Growth, a book which was highly influential in the degrowth movement. Back in 2010, I wrote about the same idea in a pair of columns, Go ahead, have a baby, and A glass half-full.

The proponents of degrowth not only misunderstand the tension between economic production and the scarce resources it employs, but they also fail to grasp human nature. At least, one hopes they fail to grasp human nature, because if not, one can only conclude that they are evil.

Dystopia

In a world in which aggregate GDP must decline, which is the meaning of degrowth, no company can produce more this year than it did last year. To prevent it doing so, one could, for example, tax 100% of the excess revenue. Of course, for a new company, this means it cannot grow at all, so there will be no motive to start new companies. So only existing companies will continue to exist, until they, too, shrink out of existence.

That means there will be no more innovation, except by scientists employed by the government’s Department for Innovation, inventing things that the government thinks would be useful, like autonomous drones firing depleted uranium shells at wedding parties or new headdresses for politicians.

There must also be a limit on what the wealthy are allowed to earn, save, invest, and spend. Limiting the spending of rich people might take them into a state of zen peacefulness in which neither desire nor need cloud their day, but it also means the people who make things rich people buy will no longer have jobs. So, they will need to go on state support. Also, you need to force rich people into that zen state of indolence in which they may not produce nor consume too much, because by nature, people won’t choose to do that.

To determine what is too much, we’ll need people like the WWF to make up numbers and create alarming infographics ‘proving’ that we consume five or seven or nine times what the planet can really support.

So, we end up with a totalitarian state in which everyone’s production and consumption is strictly regulated by the state. Those who won’t work will have to be forced to work at gunpoint. Those who are productive working at gunpoint will have to be forced to surrender what they produce, again at gunpoint.

(Never forget that all government regulation and taxation is ultimately dependent on the threat of lethal force. Try resisting arrest for tax evasion, if you don’t believe me.)

Rationing

In the midst of it all sits someone like Ebrahim Patel or Rob Davies, planning in fine detail exactly what everyone wants or needs, and then rationing it out to make sure they don’t exceed their ‘fair share’.

People will be dependent on government for all their material needs and need government permission for all they want to do.

Every human impulse to create a better life for themselves, or their children, or their community, will have to be stifled, since all of them might lead to unauthorised economic growth that makes poor little rich girls like Greta Thunberg cry.

In defence of Labia, he recognises that degrowth seems like a very ‘first world’ idea.

‘It is all very well for the overwhelmingly well off in Europe, the US and Japan to advocate the benefits of being post-growth,’ he writes. ‘They are, after all, the beneficiaries of the longest and most environmentally destructive economic boom in history, the latter half of the 20th century.’

Unlike the Western elites who guiltily wring their hands about their own prosperity, Labia acknowledges that economic growth has been shown to be necessary for lifting millions out of poverty. That is, indeed, a fact.

However, he still wants to put politicians in charge of what kind of growth would be permissible, and what kind must be suppressed.

‘Either way,’ he writes, ‘policymakers – particularly in developing countries such as South Africa which face particularly extreme looming environmental and humanitarian catastrophes – need to be far more explicit about what kind of growth should be pursued and what growth should be specifically avoided. If green growth is the future, then surely there must be a rapid prioritisation of “green” over “growth”.’

So, the spectre of Patel and Davies planning our economy remains very real in Labia’s vision of selective, ‘sustainable’ future growth.

Eastern Bloc

The world certainly does face environmental problems, although they are often exaggerated either for nakedly political aims, or for the sake of raising millions from guilt-ridden rich people.

Those environmental problems would get a lot worse if the state were put in charge of the economy, in order to enforce negative aggregate growth, ‘sustainability’ and ‘fairness’. To see why, we need look no further than the industrial wastelands of the former Eastern Bloc, or even present-day China.

Doing away with capitalism, as degrowth proponents want to do, actually is much worse for the environment than capitalism is.

The solution to the world’s environmental problems is not to turn the economy over to central planners who get to decide exactly how much of what people may produce or consume.

On the contrary: as the correlation between the Environmental Performance Index and GDP per capita shows, the solution is to encourage as many people as possible to get rich, so they will have the means to solve these environmental problems for themselves.

We need to encourage more growth, not less. Without the rich, the poor will never have jobs. Without more growth, the poor will never get rich. And without prosperity, we will forever be mired in a destructive, exploitative relationship with our environment, as billions of people scrabble just to put food on the table.

The proponents of economic growth are not deluded. On the contrary. It is those who think degrowth is both desirable and possible who are deluding themselves.

 

BBC’s predictions of climate change destroying sport by 2050 join rich tradition of failed eco-doomsday warnings

Graham Dockery

is an Irish journalist, commentator, and writer at RT. Previously based in Amsterdam, he wrote for DutchNews and a scatter of local and national newspapers.

FILE PHOTO: People take part in a Fridays for Future protest outside the Austrian Economic Chamber, in Vienna, Austria, May 14, 2021 © Reuters / Lisi Niesner

Flooded football pitches, scorched tennis courts, no more Winter Olympics, and an end to outdoor sport as we know it. If this scary imaginative future sounds like needless, made-up fear-porn, that’s because it is.

‘Sport 2050’ is the BBC’s latest attempt to ratchet up its viewers’ fear levels, using fictional sports news from the year 2050 to demonstrate just how seriously climate change allegedly threatens to impact the sporting world. By highlighting its effect on sport, the BBC states that it hopes to reach “readers who may not otherwise have engaged with the science of, or news around, climate change.”

Among a glut of doom-laden videos released on Monday is a make-believe sports news report that shows a world in turmoil. “Torrential rain” has closed football pitches in England, heat and “wildfire smoke” have postponed the Australian Open, and the Winter Olympics in Chamonix is canceled, due to a lack of snow at the French ski resort.

Furthermore, the BBC envisions shorter World Cup football games, with fans only allowed to attend if they’ve traveled “sustainably” to get there. Curiously, electric cars are considered sustainable – presumably the environmental impact of mining the cobalt and lithium to power these vehicles doesn’t count.

But the implied message from the BBC is clear: ignore the contradictions, buy the Tesla, eat the bugs, shoot your dog and stop reproducing, all in the name of saving your beloved sports games.

Now, ‘Sport 2050’ doesn’t explicitly push these solutions, but it doesn’t have to. The media and system writ large use a twin-pronged strategy to force unpopular climate policy on the masses: scare the bejesus out of them with predictions from scientific ‘experts’, then offer the kind of repulsive ‘solutions’ mentioned above. You wouldn’t choose to chow down on a bowl of cicadas, but when the environmentalist elite threaten to take your sport away, well, you may just be more amenable to the idea.

Putting all that aside, just how realistic is the BBC’s depiction of 2050? Discussing the very much unsettled science of climate change would fill volumes, but based on the past predictions of so-called ‘experts’, the BBC is probably peddling pure fiction, and playing into a tradition of doomsday alarmism that would make the preachers of the Rapture proud.

Here’s four times the eco-experts got it spectacularly wrong:

‘Arctic ice will wipe out Canada’

Before ‘global warming’ was in vogue, global cooling was all the rage. According to the Chicago Tribune in 1923, Professor Herbert Gregory of Yale University told the Pan-Pacific Science Congress that Arctic ice would soon creep south, rendering Canada and much of North America uninhabitable. Gregory wasn’t even the first scientist to predict an icy apocalypse. The New York Times in 1912 cited scientific warnings of a new ice age, and all the way back in 1895 warned that “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again.”

Nearly 100 years since Gregory’s warning, Canada very much exists, and the New York Times and its ilk have consigned the idea of a cooling planet to the memory hole.

Doctor Doom says ‘England will not exist’ by 2000

Though talk of a new ice age persisted throughout the 20th century (Time Magazine helpfully informed readers “how to survive the coming ice age” in 1977), one man played an outsized role in shifting discussion to how we’ll all boil, not freeze.

His name was Paul R. Ehrlich, a biologist and advocate for population reduction. “In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” he wrote in 1968’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ On the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, Ehrlich proclaimed that “in 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” He presumably cackled with glee as he wrote that year that four billion people would perish in the “Great Die-Off” of the mid-1980s.

An Earth Day lecture in 1970 © Flickr / University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability

In 1971, he prophesied that “by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people… if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” 

Ehrlich’s predictions make Greta Thunberg’s cries of “stolen futures” seem cheerful, and despite being repeatedly proven wrong, he’s still around, calling in 2008 on the US government to impose a China-style limit on family size and throw the most over-consuming Americans “the hell out” of the country.

Al Gore warns of shrinking ice. Ice grows instead

Failed presidential candidate and successful climate alarmist Al Gore made environmentalism mainstream again with the release of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006. Gore spent the next couple of years suggesting that the North Pole’s ice caps could disappear by 2013, a scenario that he warned in the movie would lead to hundreds of millions of people being made refugees.

It was never clear how Gore arrived at 2013 as his doomsday date. At a 2009 lecture in Copenhagen, he attributed it to “some of the models” studied by one researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School. After the lecture, the researcher in question disputed Gore’s claims, and Gore’s office called the date a “ballpark” one.

By 2014, the North Pole’s ice cap had grown by 1.75 million square kilometers – an area the size of Alaska. The extent of Arctic sea ice has fallen since, but is still within averages of 1981 to 2010.

Mad Max in the Midwest

Some scientists are so confident in their assessments that they don’t peer 30 years into the future. In 1990’s ‘Dead Heat’, Princeton geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer and activist Robert Boyle predicted that by 1995, the greenhouse effect would heat North America and Eurasia to such an extent that drought, crop failure and food riots would ensue.

“[By 1996] the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers,” they wrote.

A view of West Mitten Butte Monument Valley, Arizona © Wikipedia

After their predictions inevitably didn’t pan out, Oppenheimer remained defiant. “On the whole I would stand by these predictions… as having at least in a general way actually come true,” he told Fox News in 2010. 

They didn’t, and according to NASA, rainfall actually increased slightly during the late 20th century. 

Like most millenarian preachers, the prophets of climatic doom rarely admit they were wrong. Instead they revise their predictions, set a new ‘end of the world is nigh’ date, and begin the cycle of fear anew. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2019 prediction that “the world will end in 12 years” (which she later defended as “sarcasm”), Extinction Rebellion’s warnings that “billions will die,” and Greta Thunberg’s tearful excoriations of world leaders for triggering a “mass extinction” are all built on a rich tradition of speculative climate fiction.

Except this time, people with power are listening. The scientists and activists who spoke at Earth Day in 1970 could be written off as granola-eating crusties. When ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was released in 2006, gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs were still America’s vehicles of choice. Now, our leaders have promised to take action. Joe Biden has pledged to put the US on track for a fossil-fuel-free 2050, European leaders have vowed to ban the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2030. Carbon taxes, meat restrictions, and climate lockdowns are all being seriously discussed as policy issues.

When the conveniences you take for granted are eventually legislated away, you better hope that by some miracle, the eco-alarmists got it right this time.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/524240-bbc-sport-climate-change/

Sen. Tim Scott Exposes the Democrat Party’s War on Black America

 

Nolte: Sen. Tim Scott Exposes the Democrat Party’s War on Black America

52

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

JOHN NOLTE

30 Apr 2021

4:35

Tim Scott, a black United States Senator who in 2016 won 61 percent of the vote in the conservative state of South Carolina, who earned more raw votes and won by a wider margin than Donald Trump, has done more in just a few days to drag the racism of the Democrat party out into the sunlight than the feckless Republican party ever has.

On Wednesday night, during his brilliant rebuttal to His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s congressional address, and through the simple act of stating a truth, Scott smoked these racist monsters out and proved once again that racism is still very much a part of the Democrat party’s DNA, a DNA that stretches back to their creation of the Jim Crow South and their willingness to go to war to stop a Republican president from taking away their slaves.

“Hear me clearly,” Scott said. “America is not a racist country.”

With those nine words, Scott undermined everything that motivates today’s organized left, and to prove Scott wrong, to prove America is indeed a racist country, Democrats hurled the worst kind of racism directly at Scott.

Instead of addressing the substance of his argument, Democrats took direct aim at his skin color. For hours, “Uncle Tim” — a play on the slur “Uncle Tom” — was allowed to trend on Twitter, and the only reason it trended at all was Democrats, including countless members of the Blue Checkmark Mafia, who ensured it trended.

Cable news anchors smeared him for throwing “white Republicans” a lifeline, which is just a dog whistle screaming “Uncle Tom.”

It was a grotesque display but an illuminating reminder of just how far Democrats and their allies in Big Tech and Big Media are willing to go to, as they see it, keep black people in line.

For centuries Democrats have used these tactics against any black American who, as Scott himself said, dares to “step down out of your lane according to the liberal elite left.”

Today’s terrorist weapon wielded by Democrats is no longer a burning cross (the KKK was founded by Democrats). Instead, Democrats and their billion-dollar media, tech, and entertainment corporations use smear tactics and racist bullying campaigns. Black apostates are attacked as “Uncle Toms” as “sellouts” and “house n****rs” engaging in ”minstrelsy” and as “not really black.”

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is such a threat to Democrats that for 30 years he’s been smeared by one of the most racist stereotypes of all: the scary black predator. Over his support for former president Trump, Kanye West was relentlessly demonized by billion-dollar media corporations as insane. The examples are endless: Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Condi Rice, etc…

The disease of racism has never left the Democrat party. It’s still there and as toxic as ever. Scott accurately describes it as “liberal oppression.” Think about this, because I’m sure Scott has: it is modern-day Democrats who:

• encourage riots in predominantly black neighborhoods.
• believe white people should be allowed to smoke the brand of cigarettes they enjoy while black people should not.
• oppose school choice in favor of herding inner-city children into failing government-run schools.
• allow something as blatantly racist as “Uncle Tim” to trend on Twitter.
• “disappear” documentaries about esteemed black Americans because that particular black American dares hold beliefs Democrats will not allow blacks to hold.
• encourage black youth to give up on their dreams with racialist propaganda about how it’s impossible for blacks to succeed in America.
• call for the kind of boycotts that rob a predominantly black city like Atlanta of $100 million in business revenue.
• whose idea of criminal justice reform is to release violent criminals who prey disproportionately on black Americans.
• are desperate to flood the country with the illegal labor that takes starter jobs away from the inner-city kids who need them most and undermine the wages of the black working class.

And most damning of all…

“I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word, by progressives, by liberals!” Scott said in his Wednesday night speech, and within minutes Democrats were attacking him as “Uncle Tim,” Twitter was promoting it, and today no one has paid any kind of social or professional price for these overt acts of racism.

Well, hear me clearly: The only “systemic racism” that remains in this country comes directly from the Democrat party

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/30/nolte-sen-tim-scott-exposes-the-democrat-partys-war-on-black-america/