Friday 29th of March 2024

democracy...

democracy
Cyberspace Plus Trump Almost Killed Our Democracy. Can Europe Save Us?

Donald Trump has been impeached for trying to kill the results of our last election, but we should have no illusions that whatever happens at his trial, the weapon he used is still freely available for others to deploy. It’s a realm called “cyberspace” — where we’re all connected but no one is in charge.


By Thomas L. Friedman



Trump, like no leader before, took advantage of that realm to spread a Big Lie, undermine trust in our electoral system and inspire an attack on our Capitol. We need a democratic fix for cyberspace fast.

China has figured out how to project its autocratic system and Communist values into cyberspace, to enhance its growth and stability, better than we’ve figured out how to project our democratic values into cyberspace to enhance our growth and stability. And we invented the damn thing!


If we don’t figure this out fast, we’re going to fall behind China economically, because the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the digitization of everything, making cyberspace bigger and more important than ever.


How did this happen?


When cyberspace, which is made up of the sum total of all the apps running on the internet, first blossomed in the 1990s, it seemed so benign. The worst thing going on there was that a guy named Bezos was selling books on a site named after a river in Brazil — and it didn’t always collect state sales taxes. But a new breed of bloggers and websites quickly emerged, utterly free to speak their minds, and there was also gambling and porn and entertainment — and just about anything else you’d find in the digital version of a Wild West saloon.


Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/opinion/cyberspace-democracy-europe.html


Oh, please, Thomas… Trump did not do such thing as to try to kill the US democracy. He only challenged the result of a vote, which the US always do in countries we don’t like the result of elections thereof. Trump actually showed you the medicine that the USA has been dishing out to such countries, himself included. 

But the US de-mo-cra-cy has been moribund since Ike Eisenhower left the job to the first Catholic/hypocrite who took the rein. I say hypocrite because despite his political rectitude and good ideas, JFK was not a moral person in his relationships with other women than his wife. (Marilyn Monroe, actress and icon — Judith Exner, mob mole — Inga Arvad, ‘spy’ Dane “Inga Binga” — Anita Ekberg, actress — to name just a few). And he got assassinated for political reasons, most likely by his own “people” — not by a rogue idiot…

At this stage let’s say that the Dulles brothers, who “actually” ran America, did not like him.
The Mafia did not like him.
The CIA and the FBI hated JFK…
The White Russians did not like him for canoodling with the communists…

Thereafter the USA had a conga line of useless loonies and a sex pervert that tried to stuff up democracy as much as possible in other countries. The summit of this hypocrisy was not Trump. Name any president before Trump and you win the jackpot.

Trump was not a politician and this is why he’s been impeached once more, for nothing much really. George W Bush (and his friends Blair and Howard) should have been impeached for lying and having killed more that 5,500 US troops, not counting the amputees, and more than one million Iraqis plus created hardship for about 4.5 million people in that country. But impeaching Bush would have stirred the rotten bucket the US is. Impeaching Trump is a piece of cake. Even his own lawyers are making a mockery of him...

The US democratic thread is only an illusion of crap relying on the colours of balloons every four years — cyberspace or no cyberspace… People vote for the same robber barons with different clothing: Democrats or Republicans. 

To some extend you can thank Trump for having lanced the rotten boil of democracy that had grown on the butt of America.

Impeach Trump as much as you like, please. 

What will happen next? Well, Joe Biden will soon stuff-up the good-will of the really genuine US democratic people. For starters, Biden should stop the pursuit of Julian Assange... Why? Carrying on a vindictive attack on Assange only show that one prefers to cover the dirty work of the USA rather than accept the annoying truth. Yes the truth hurts. Accept it... And Joe Biden knows the truth too well, but he can’t face it. He is a hypocritical Catholic. Catholics are extremely gifted at finding excuses for the inexcusable — or begging for forgiveness when they have been caught out. Mind you, not only the Catholics, but all the religious evangelical nuts as well, especially in America. But for the Catholics, fudging stuff is ingrained in the hierarchical system.

So what about the US democracy?... 

It is an oxymoron, Trump or no Trump… You can harp about it, and tell stories — you’re in the lalaland of Father Christmas, Santa Claus, of the non-stick frying pan, the Tooth Fairy and of the Gnomes at the bottom of garden...

China will overtake you, whether you like it or not. Not only that, economically, China has already overtaken the USA… The only way we can still make believe to the contrary is to count fictitious values, in dollars…

Wakey wakey...

And when Trump is finally impeached because of traitors to the GOP cause — traitors who believe in feathering their own nest with a dubious morality rather than stick to their allegiance, traitors who will be lauded as “brave” by duplicitous Democrats — Ivanka Trump will be your next president after the Kamala Harris disaster.

Ivanka is a formidable woman and whether you like her politics of not, she is far more intelligent than her dad, has far more compassion that he could fathom in a golf-bag, and she can drive tanks through the democrat ranks as well as those of the Republicans… Impeaching Trump only opens her oyster... I could be wrong...

Will she bring de-mo-cra-cy? Not really. The system is broken because presently greed and control is more important than justice.
...

the naked truth...

liberty

 

Humans owe a huge debt of gratitude to lab rodents, but only now are we discovering just how many thanks are in order.

In a first for laboratory science, a new report has attempted to quantify how many rats and mice are sacrificed for the sake of research annually — and it’s staggering.

In terms of biomedical research alone, US labs rely on over 111 million mice and rats annually, according to the study by veterinary researcher and author Larry Carbone, now appearing in Scientific Reports. The two vermin make up 99% of the whole of common lab mammals.

Animal activists and science advocates are at odds over the new statistic, Science Mag reported Friday.

“If the numbers are anywhere near correct, the amount of pain and suffering that’s occurring in these animals is completely unacceptable,” said Sue Leary, president of Alternatives Research & Development Foundation (ARDF), who works toward reducing the number of animals in labs. Their own estimate was much less: about 23 million.

Rats and mice are not explicitly covered by the Animal Welfare Act (1966), Leary pointed out, which is enforced by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Prior to 2002, when Congress formally excluded certain animals from protection, the USDA declined to track most birds, rats and mice — meaning there has never been a US agency in charge of tracking lab rats and mice.

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/01/18/more-than-100-million-rats-mice-used-in-us-labs-report/

 

And cockroaches. Let's not forget the cokroaches and other insects used in labs as well to make sure our crops are "Genetically Modified certified" (Yippie!) and starve our spiders to death by inventing wholesale poisons... Our rats and mice breeders are rich...

the shadow of democracy...

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election


A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”


In a way, Trump was right.


There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.


The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.


Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.


For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.


The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”


This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”


That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

 

Read more:

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

 

 

See toon at top.