In a rare successful deal with Iran, the Biden Administration secured the release of five US citizens held in Iranian prisons in exchange for the release of $6 billion in Iranian assets seized by the United States. Predictably, US Republican politicians lost their minds over the deal. Also today: Blinken green-lights Ukrainian missile strikes deep into Russia - what could go wrong? Finally: Biden's thuggish Energy Secretary strands young family so she can re-charge her electric car. Watch today's Liberty Report... read on...
In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that “the public is not going to accept restrictive coronavirus mitigation measures again, regardless of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or other public health authorities say.” Ponnuru adds his speculation that “we’re not going to return to social distancing or shut down schools.”
Bad news for government, but great news for the US. If there’s an upside to the lockdowns that never, ever made sense (Ponnuru’s National Review formerly thought they did), it’s that government has forfeited a great deal of the little credibility it had.
Why did the lockdowns never make sense? They didn’t simply because reality travels exponentially faster than government bureaucrats, along with health agencies staffed by government bureaucrats. It’s all a reminder that the more threatening anything is, including a virus, the more superfluous is government action of any kind. To say that government must arrogate power to itself in times of what it deems “crisis” is to suggest that left to their own devices, people free of government guidance will do stupid things, including stupid things that threaten their health and lives.
Actually, it’s when crises are greatest that government must sit on its hands the most, and for obvious reasons. Crises imply an information vacuum that can only be filled insofar as people are freely arriving at all manner of decisions that create the essential information without which we operate blindly. read on...
What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the prosecutor opened a new criminal investigation and sent my attorney an official notice explaining the gravity of the additional charges.
The charges are of the utmost gravity. I am officially accused of “relativizing” or “minimizing” the crimes of the Nazis … by republishing the two Tweets that I originally tweeted.
During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.
His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:
"The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.
"The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders." read on...
It has been 22 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. The attacks launched the "global war on terror" that the neocons had been itching for. Media propaganda solidified the lie that "they attacked us because we are rich and free." And to this day there has been no national discussion as to why 9/11 happened and how we can prevent the next one. Also today: blockbuster new JFK assassination revelations and Californians are getting sticker shock on move toward reparations. Today on the Liberty Report... read on...
The July military coup in the west African country of Niger has once again brought attention to the fact that the US government runs a global military empire that serves Washington’s special interests, and not the national interest. read on...
Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposéby the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.” read on...
This week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, to 22 years in jail for the crime of “sedition” arising out of the January 6 protests at the Capitol. It wasn’t the first time that the judge, Timothy Kelly, meted out a high jail sentence for the sedition offense. Last week, he handed out an 18-year sentence to Ethan Nordean, one of Tarrio’s co-defendants. Last May, another D.C. federal judge, Amit P. Mehta, sentenced leader of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, to 18 years for the federal crime of “sedition.”
Those high jail sentences for what amounts to a protest gone awry are so ridiculous that they serve as an excellent advertisement for the abolition of sedition laws, which have no place in a genuinely free society.
The federal crime of “sedition” is akin to the local crime of “disorderly conduct.” It is designed to give federal authorities the ability to severely punish people who have committed no real crime to justify severe punishment. read on...
The Musk vs ADL (and the censorship industrial complex) battle escalated further this morning with the X/Twitter owner highlighting a new article from Newsweek saying that "ADL Has Lost Its Way":
"The ADL taught me that nastygrams from Jew haters were just the price we pay for liberty, worthy of being filed and forgotten," writes Ron Coleman in the op-ed.
"This is not Weimar Germany; it is America. We have a First Amendment, we have civil rights, we have a working democracy.
That is part of the good we have done.
"But" Coleman explains, "the ADL no longer believes this..." read on...
Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.
In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.
In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”
One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning. read on...
