Mr. Universe's Revolutionary Roundup

For those who weren't here for the last two weeks, Mr. Universe is a character from the science fiction movie Serenity. It's from him that I get my name "Can't Stop the [Macedonian] Signal:"

Dystopianmovies.org describes him as

...the ‘Mr Wikileaks’ of the Serenity world. He maintains a secret base with his own intelligence station and transmitter from which he broadcasts his defiant messages of freedom, exposing the misdemeanours of the ruling Alliance regime.

I was going to omit this intro, but decided to keep it in honor of my lead story:

A key witness in the Julian Assange case broke down and confessed that his testimony was a pack of lies he created in exchange for immunity. In a sane world, this would collapse the case and eventually result in Julian being freed. Let's hope it does him some good. Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk and Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points discuss the issue:

More Breaking Points: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Young Americans are basically sick of capitalism and think socialism might be worth a go. Too bad SCOTUS just made a decision against unions: they ruled against organizers having access to farmworkers. Why? Private property! Get off my lawn!

I'm impressed by Jordan Chariton and Status Coup for going on the ground and talking to ordinary Americans about homelessness. This is an interview with a resident of North Fork Mobile Home Park in Louisville, KY. She wants people to know how the city government illegally shoved a dirty development deal through. It shut down the mobile home park she'd lived in for over 20 years in order to benefit a billionaire developer.

The gents at Hard Lens Media talk about a U.S. Naval Counterterrorism training document that says "socialists must be eliminated."

"Can anyone get me the numbers on how many socialists have been terrorists? Oh, right. It's none."

They also talk more about Steven Donziger, the lawyer who took on Big Oil and won--after which Chevron put him under house arrest. Yes, a private oil company essentially trumped up a charge which was then held up by a corrupt judge. As a result, the guy who won a human rights case against Chevron is legally forbidden to leave his house because Chevron got butthurt.

"There was a big chemical fuel leak in Ecuador that killed a lot of people, especially the native population in Ecuador. And Steven Donziger took Chevron to task and won. And what was his reward? Two years of imprisonment."

This is a misdemeanor charge on the strength of which they've kept him imprisoned in his house for two years.

Lee Camp of Redacted Tonight and Moment of Clarity takes a broader look at what is wrong with The Young Turks. I drop this here because I think Camp has something useful to say about the problems with media in general:

There's a new social media platform in the works, called Panquake "the social media platform that could change everything." Lee Camp talks to its founder, Susie Dawson:

Jimmy Dore reports on censorship. In a fairly brazen move, the U.S. Gov seized Iranian news websites.

Also, censorship continues at home. The ban was only for 24 hours, but I want to mention that Frank Conniff of Mystery Science Theater 3000 got banned from FB b/c of a Hitler joke. The reason I think this is noteworthy is that Conniff is a Hillary supporter, and, though I love his comedy work, entirely establishment in his political leanings. If he can get banned, anybody can.

In other news, unsurprisingly, turns out Kashoggi was killed by operatives trained in US. Still not surprising but even more revolting--they were trained by a private security firm owned by a private equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management.

Well, Cerberus did keep people from escaping from hell, I guess. 10 out of 10 for the name, fellas. Very appropriate.

Personally, I think this may have happened before, in 2014, when James Foley was killed. God knows I didn't watch the video of his death more than once, but the guys shouting in Arabic seemed to me somehow false, like B actors given a gruesome script and told to act like terrorists. I'm not saying they didn't kill him, but they sure as hell didn't look or act like any Middle Eastern radicals I've ever seen (starting with the Iranian hostage crisis in the 70s). But I'm no expert.

Graham Elwood, on The Political Vigilante, talks about the effects of climate change on the Florida Keys. Ron Placone of Get Your News On With Ron, joins him. It's rather grim, so don't click on it if you need to protect your headspace today!

Aaron Mate recently returned from Syria and Lebanon. This is a little old--six days--but Mate interviews four Palestinian refugees to get their perspective on the Israel-Gaza conflict and the refugee experience. They were denied visas by the U.S. government--apparently the government doesn't want people to hear what they have to say:

This is lovely, from Niko House's MCSC network and the show "Marty & the Bro:" worker-owned cooperatives are succeeding during the pandemic.

Hope you guys are all doing OK this morning!

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Raggedy Ann's picture

Great line up! Can't wait to go back to listen/read!

It's raining here in the land of enchantment. It rained yesterday and I woke up to rain. So lovely when it happens here in the high desert of the southwest. Looks like we get rain until mid-morning - so very unusual and so very welcome!

Enjoy the day! Pleasantry

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11 users have voted.

"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Raggedy Ann

Best news I've had since I found that worker co-op video!

Smile

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10 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

The phrase of the day is "Relentlessly cheerful."

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5 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

is as telling as what it reports on. Coming here and reading the crimes our corporate government gets away with is surreal, unbelievable. We're told it can't happen here, that one party is the party of rights and freedoms (but continues the policies of the other party) over and over.

If it isn't blared over and over in the 24 hr. "news" cycle on every outlet it can't be worthy of notice. Every day there must be thousands of incidents of corruption and injustice, and like the wealthy skipping out on taxes, it's all legal, nothing to see, move along if you know what's good for you.

P.S. Firefly/Serenity is amazing. Of course, Fox messed up the schedule, and order of episodes, and then cancelled it because not enough people saw it.

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9 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Snode

Resistance fiction.

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4 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

He is one of my comedy heroes. I don't know why, but his comedy just hits me on the right level. But, I had to stop following him on any social media in 2015 because he was such a Hillary supporter. It kind of broke my heart a little. Not that I need everyone to feel as I do about politics, but so many of his posts were the same insufferable pro-Hillary/anti-Bernie crap you'd see everywhere else and I just didn't need it. (Strange that he was a writer for the Jimmy Dore show for a while, IIRC.)

It's still interesting that he got a ban, even for 24 hours. This is exactly the point that so many of us have tried to make, that once the banning starts, it'll be hard to stop. Frank strikes me as having that liberal mindset which applauded banning of Alex Jones and Trump. Wonder how he feels about that now?

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8 users have voted.

Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Dr. John Carpenter

I absolutely *loved* TV's Frank, and always wished Conniff the very best because he gave me so much through that show. And I, too, experienced heartbreak over his political position in 2016. I actually had an exchange with him that rubbed salt in the wound: I asked him, honestly, to make his case for Hillary and tell me all the positive reasons that he wanted her to be President. His response? "If you need to ask, you'll never know."

I don't know how he feels now, but his response still seems to be focused ire at CPAC. Not that I don't have my own ire toward CPAC, but for that to be his response NOW suggests that he's not inclined to look away from the traditional (and somewhat outdated) left/right opposition to examine the up/down opposition that is far more relevant.

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5 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Not exactly a true co-op, but heading down the same path.

https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership

Decentralizing the power.
A different way of structuring society.

Thanks Can't Stop!

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7 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@QMS

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3 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Unfortunately it is likely to get worse.

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7 users have voted.
Granma's picture

Reading this news, it feels like we are living in a science fiction movie. I wish some heroes were coming to save us.
The amount of corruption in every area of our lives continues to astound me. Even more surprising is that so few people seem to see it, or see it for what it is.

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12 users have voted.
Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Granma

I tried to find some positives to insert in there, with some success.

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6 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Granma's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal it was just my morning mood that made it seem surreal.

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4 users have voted.

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9 users have voted.

@humphrey https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/06/fbi-fabrication-against-...

On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.

The defence had not only to gather evidence from Iceland, but had virtually no access to Assange to take his evidence and instructions, as he was effectively in solitary confinement in Belmarsh. The defence had requested an adjournment to give them time to address the new accusations, but this adjournment had been refused by Baraitser.

She now refused to accept Gareth Peirce’s affidavit setting out these facts.

What had happened was this. The hearings on the Assange extradition in January 2020 did not seem to be going well for the US government. The arguments that political extradition is specifically banned by the UK/US extradition treaty, and that the publisher was not responsible for Chelsea Manning’s whistleblowing on war crimes, appeared to be strong. The US Justice Department had decided that it therefore needed a new tack and to discover some “crimes” by Assange that seemed less noble than the Manning revelations.

To achieve this, the FBI turned to an informant in Iceland, Sigi Thordarson, who was willing to testify that Assange had been involved with him in, inter alia, hacking private banking information and tracking Icelandic police vehicles. This was of course much easier to portray as crime, as opposed to journalism, so the second superseding indictment was produced based on Thordarson’s story, which was elaborated with Thordarson by an FBI team.

The difficulty was that Thordarson was hardly a reliable witness. He had already been convicted in Iceland for stealing approximately $50,000 from Wikileaks and with impersonating Julian Assange online, not to mention the inconvenient fact he is a registered sex offender for online activities with under-age boys. The FBI team was in fact expelled from Iceland by the Icelandic government, who viewed what the FBI was doing with Thordarson as wholly illegitimate.

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enhydra lutris's picture

Thanks. Nothing to add at the moment, just thanks.

be well and have a good one

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6 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

Hope the re-entry continues apace. Smile

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0 users have voted.

"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Raggedy Ann's picture

Great line up! Can't wait to go back to listen/read!

It's raining here in the land of enchantment. It rained yesterday and I woke up to rain. So lovely when it happens here in the high desert of the southwest. Looks like we get rain until mid-morning - so very unusual and so very welcome!

Enjoy the day! Pleasantry

up
3 users have voted.

"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11