Today’s political landscape is looking more and more like the classic Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch.
You know the one, John Cleese walks into the shop to complain about the parrot he’d just been sold was dead and he wants his money back. The shopkeeper, Michael Palin, insists it isn’t.
Hilarity ensues.
The Dead Parrot sketch is one of the high points of Python’s particular blend of absurdism and social commentary that transcends its time.
The world will face more widespread and intensified surveillance, but this time it could be framed as something for our own good, for the good of humanity.
Just as contemporary activist movements rely on platforms, so too does authoritarian populism. Platforms have played such a significant role in the success of this current wave of global authoritarianism that one might even call it platform authoritarianism. Where Trump had Twitter, President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil had WhatsApp; more specifically, Bolsonaro rose to power through a regressive movement that lived not just in the streets but was organized and composed on countless WhatsApp groups — a contemporary, more networked version of the classic revolutionary cell structure, perhaps. The attempted genocide of the Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar was also partly organized and encouraged on Facebook. And, more mundanely, platforms are used routinely by specialist data analysis groups — whether they are private companies such as the infamous Cambridge Analytica, or state-sponsored, like the “Bear” groups linked to Russian security intelligence — to attack, undermine and even hijack democratic systems, from national elections to referenda, using enormous quantities of intimate user data for targeted political advertising, misinformation and voter suppression.
Deep State operative and former CIA director John Brennan has a new home at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, Real Raw News has learned.
A source familiar with Trump’s war on the Deep State and mission to invalidate a fraudulent presidential election told RRN that U.S. military assets loyal to Trump arrested Brennan on 25 March and flew him to GITMO for processing. He will be held as an enemy combatant while awaiting a military tribunal, our source said.
“I can’t speak to the logistics of the operation or where Brennan was nabbed, but Trump had gathered overwhelming information proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brennan had committed atrocities against the American people. And we’re talking about a lot more than his role in the whole Russian collusion scandal,” our source said.
Sometimes it gets difficult for developers and companies to understand that obtaining the license of the source code doesn’t give them the right to use the trademark of projects which includes — name, logo and other branding accessories, stated in the company’s blog post. This has been an issue with open-source licensing, where it includes copyright and patent laws. However, it leaves out the trademark licenses.
I may cringe at Steele’s language sometimes and he and I may never agree about Bernie Sanders being a sheepdog who sold out for a beach house, but I will proudly set aside our differences and fight the manipulations of the deep state by his side, because until the unelected power establishment is overthrown, our ideological differences are functionally irrelevant. Until election integrity is restored and the American people have a voice in what happens to their country that isn’t nullified and neutered by unelected oligarchs, the only fight that makes any sense is against those oligarchs, and if all anti-establishment factions come together and put everything they’ve got into that fight, we can win.
So while trying to promote “unity”, the official leader of the Democratic party and the unofficial leader of the Democratic party together illustrated perfectly the only real political division existing in rank-and-file America today: those who pretend that America is a democracy wherein people get to use their votes to determine the direction in which their nation will move, and those who recognize that the most powerful nation in the world is in fact controlled by a few ruling elites who are not answerable to elected officials in any meaningful way.