Importance Of Being Free: How Are Twitter & Facebook Being Prosecuted in Christian West & Islamic Middle East

Governments of the ‘Free’ World are using psuedo-free technologies like Twitter and Facebook with draconian laws like NDAA to draw out dissidents and reactionaries.

NGOs backed by Western regimes used social media for regime changes. | By Joep Bertrams, The Netherlands – 1/18/2011 12:00:00 AM; source & courtesy – cagle.com

ven while the media of Christian-West has trumpeted how Western technologies like Twitter and Facebook brought down regimes in the Islamic world, Western media has limited the coverage of social media’s impact in its own backyard.

Further Intimidation

The signing of the NDAA by Obama is a gigantic steps towards further intimidation of US citizenry by its own Government. Already armed with extraordinary powers, pervasive technology and a secret-plus-uniformed police force of 40 lakhs, the further legislation points towards another round of intimidation.

The hounding of the Australian Julian Assange across the world, by Yumm-Rika is stuff which fills the annals of State persecution in the West over the last 1000 years. Bradley Manning’s inhumane solitary confinement, naked for most of a year has not drawn the ire of the Free World.

Facebook and Twitter have been fnded by the US Treasury department through the Federal Reserve, via its various franchisee banks. | Cartoon By Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant – 5/23/2012 12:00:00 AM; souce & courtesy – msnbc.com

Justice & Freedom

Encroachments on media and individual freedom has occupied minds across the world.

Even in India.

Is it time to do some quantitative numbers on how governments across the world are trying to control social media.

Indian news-consumers, inward looking, are sated with mass-produced news churned out by Western news agencies – like Reuters, Bloomberg, etc. Some Indian news outlets go further and syndicate content from CIA-controlled media like New York Times.

Western Media Controls

While the booking of a case and questioning of two girls for eight hours drew the ire of India’s Supreme court, what was happening in the US? Brandon Raub, a US marine was ‘committed’ for ‘psychiatric’ evaluation by FBI and CIA – on the basis of his Facebook posts.

In Mumbai, India, these policemen have been suspended for prosecuting one case. Indian courts sprang to cartoonist Aseem Trivedi’s bail application. EVM-activist Hariprasad found Indian courts sympathetic.

That reminds me of Vikram Buddhi.

Vikram Buddhi languishes in an American prison because he said George Bush murdabad (meaning Death to George Bush) on the internet – in support of Iraqi Muslims. Hardly any Indians have supported Vikram Buddhi even now after being in prison for nearly 5 years now.

While the brutal killing of the American diplomat at Benghazi has stunned the West,  the horrific dagger-sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was met with glee in the West.

China has funded and promotes its own social media – competing with Western media, | By Paresh Nath, The Khaleej Times, UAE – 10/8/2012 12:00:00 AM| source & courtesy – cagle.com

Rocking in a Free World

More than 2 crore people (20 million) face the American Justice system each year. With more than 2 crore people (20 million) in either prison, on parole, probation or facing prosecution.

Nearly a 100 countries in the world have a population that is lesser than the number of US citizens in prison, on parole or probation, or under prosecution by the State.

Every 11th person of working age in the US is either in prison, parole, probation or being prosecuted for some offence caused to the State.Every 11th person of working age in the US is either in prison, parole, probation or being prosecuted for some offence caused to the State.

Social Media In The Free World

Most people are not aware that secular Great Britain, has prosecuted, fined, imprisoned nearly 5,000 people in the last three years for making ‘insensitive’ comments on social media.

When form overwhelms function. Is medium reall-ly becoming the message. | By Peter Nicholson, The Australian, Sydney, Australia – 8/6/2012 12:00:00 AM; source & courtesy – cagle.com

Are Indians able to see the Christian link in secular Switzerland, which is afraid that a third mosque in Switzerland will change the national character of Switzerland?

Or an Angela Merkel confirms on television that multi-culturalism has failed? Denmark is willing to pay Muslims money to emigrate out of Denmark?

A two-and-a-half year legal battle over a “joke” posted on Twitter that landed its author with a criminal record returns to the high court on Wednesday in front of the most senior judge in England and Wales.

Paul Chambers, an unemployed former trainee accountant, is appealing against his conviction for tweeting that he would blow up Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport unless it reopened so he could fly to see his new girlfriend.

Lord Judge, Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams. It brings the number of judges and magistrates who have considered Chambers’ case up to nine, spread over seven days in court since his tweet on 6 January 2010.

During snowy weather, Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport had closed, threatening to derail Chambers’ plans to fly to Belfast to meet Sarah Tonner, a woman he had met on Twitter. He tweeted on the publicly accessible feed: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Chambers was convicted and fined £1,000 on a charge of “sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to the Communications Act 2003″.

He has since won the support of Twitter-using comedy stars including Al Murray, Graham Linehan and Stephen Fry in his fight against his conviction and they have helped raise about £30,000 to cover legal costs.

After the tweet was spotted by a member of staff at the airport, Chambers was arrested and convicted by a district judge at Doncaster magistrates court in May 2010. After the verdict, Chambers said the tweet was “like having a bad day at work and stating that you could murder your boss, I didn’t even think about whether it would be taken seriously”.

An appeal at the high court in September 2010 failed and a subsequent appeal in front of two high court judges in February 2012 ended inconclusively when the court took the unusual step of ordering the appeal to be rerun.

Chambers has argued that the conviction was “a steamroller to crack a nut”. He will be represented by crime and civil liberties barrister John Cooper QC and Sarah Przybylska.Lawyers for the Crown Prosecution Service argued: “The message was posted at a time when the potential threat to airport security was high. It was capable of being read by members of the airport staff and members of the public as a threat to airport safety and public safety.”

In dismissing his first appeal in September 2010, judge Jacqueline Davies said the message was “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed”.via Twitter joke case returns to high court for fresh appeal by Paul Chambers | Law | guardian.co.uk.

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Why Cant The US Extradite Julian Assange From London?

Has YummRika overplayed its hand in L’affaire Julian Assange. Has US control over media made L’affaire Julian Assange into a non-issue?

The persecution of Julian Assange has eroded West’s liberal image. | Cartoon titled Genie Assange out of the bottle by Patrick Corrigan, The Toronto Star – 12/10/2010 12:00:00 AM; source & courtesy cagle.com

On a recent visit to Queensland – Assange’s home state – the US ambassador in Australia said the US could have him extradited as easily from Britain as from Sweden, only they weren’t bothered. Bob Carr, the Australian foreign minister, is equally relaxed: the reluctance of the US to extract Assange from the UK, he’s said, is proof of its dying enthusiasm for the chase. Carr can always be relied on to stick to the script, but the idea that the US could get Assange from the UK as easily as Sweden has to be tested not simply against the views of Assange’s lawyers and helpmates, but those of John Bellinger, for example, a former legal counsel for the State Department, who told AP television news in 2010 that bringing charges against Assange while he was still in the UK would put a loyal ally on the spot by generating a rival extradition request. Better for the US to sit it out: ‘We could potentially wait to see if he is prosecuted in Sweden and then … ask the Swedes to extradite him here.’ Assange’s people add that, unlike the British, the Swedes have an extradition treaty with the US which allows for ‘temporary surrender’ of suspects wanted for serious crimes, even if they are also charged in Sweden. This arrangement ought to be called the ‘Panama track’, after a 2008 diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Panama City to Washington – courtesy of WikiLeaks – which sets out the advantages clearly:

Under this procedure, the suspect is ‘lent’ to the US for prosecution on the condition that they will be returned for prosecution in Panama at the end of their sentence. This procedure is much faster than a formal extradition, and has proven so successful, that [the Drug Enforcement Administration] sometimes designs operations to bring suspects to Panama so they can be arrested in Panama and turned over to US authorities quickly.

In Assange’s favour is the suggestion that any charge against him would also have to apply to Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, as WikiLeaks’ US partner for the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the outlet for its diplomatic cables. As Chase Madar explains in The Passion of Bradley Manning, none of the material that Manning allegedly leaked is top secret. Out of roughly 250,000 diplomatic cables, for instance, 15,000 to 16,000 are ‘secret’ and fewer than half are classified. As classified files go, they pale by comparison with the papers Daniel Ellsberg leaked in the thick of the Vietnam War. Finally, there is a view in the administration that the leaks have not compromised national security. (The documents that make this case – one originating from the White House – are themselves classified, and Manning’s lawyer has already subpoenaed some of them.)

Even so there are reasons for Assange to be cautious. Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a written statement for the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month that he had indeed ‘caused serious harm to US national security and he should be prosecuted accordingly.’ That might mean little in an election year, but what of the alarming trove of email traffic at Stratfor, the private security and ‘global intelligence’ firm in Texas, which was obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous and released by WikiLeaks six months ago? Among the 5.5 million messages, several relate to Assange and one of them, from Fred Burton, the company’s ‘vice president for counter-terrorism and corporate security’, says simply: ‘Not for Pub – We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.’ True or false, this is not the kind of assertion Assange can afford to take lightly.

via Jeremy Harding reviews ‘The Passion of Bradley Manning’ by Chase Madar · LRB 19 July 2012.

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• US brands Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ‘enemies of the state’ (rt.com)

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Peaceful America in a Disturbed World: How Obama Will Win his Second Term

How is it that things are so eerily favorable for an Obama reelection.

So unfair to the US | Cartoon by Bendib, source bendib.com | Click for source image.

Euro-Forest fires

Euro-zone on the verge of a break-up, says main-stream English media. British and American leaders repeat ad nauseam the global catastrophe if the Euro-currency breaks up.

Islamic World afire

Middle East is in flames. After a one-year struggle, Egypt has finally chosen a President. See how ‘we’ handled Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden. As for Pakistan … In case, Syria or Iran take one wrong step …

Just one wrong step.

Even Julian Assange is running now.

Hot BRICS

BRICS are a major problem. China’s leadership change is struggling with Bo Xilai scandal. China’s economy is in trouble – and tanking. Putin’s election has been facing protests for 6 months now. By the way,  which wife of Jacob Zuma is coming for the G20 summit.

These pretentious poseurs – the BRICs.

See where they are.

The largest emerging markets, whose economies grew more than four-fold in the past decade, are making losers out of everyone.

For the first time in 13 years, the real, ruble and rupee are weakening the most among developing-nation currencies, while the yuan has depreciated more than in any other period since its 1994 devaluation.

Investors are fleeing the four biggest emerging markets, known as the BRICs, after Brazil’s consumer default rate rose to the highest level since 2009, prices for Russian oil exports fell to an 18-month low, India’s budget deficit widened and Chinese home prices slumped. Investors are bracing for more losses as economic growth slows.

Currencies from Brazil, Russia and India will probably decline at least 15 percent by year-end, said Jen, the former head of global currency research at Morgan Stanley.

Brazil’s real lost 12 percent so far this quarter, the biggest drop among the 31 most-actively traded currencies tracked by Bloomberg. The 11.5 percent depreciation in the ruble and 10 percent drop in the rupee was almost twice the retreat in the euro. China’s yuan, which was kept unchanged during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, fell 1.2 percent since March after the government widened the amount the currency is allowed to fluctuate each day.

A decade after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC, China has become the second-largest economy while Brazil, India and Russia are among the 11 biggest worldwide. Their combined gross domestic product rose to $13.3 trillion last year from $2.8 trillion in 2002 as their share of the global economy increased to 19 percent from 8 percent, according to IMF data. Together, they control $4.4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, about 40 percent of the total.

The MSCI BRIC Index (MXBRIC) of shares has surged 281 percent during the past decade, compared with 34 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) as the real and the yuan strengthened more than 30 percent. Local-currency debt in the BRIC nations returned an average 86 percent in dollar terms since data for JPMorgan Chase & Co. indexes on all four countries began in October 2005, versus a 48 percent increase in U.S. Treasuries. (via BRICs Biggest Currency Depreciation Since 1998 to Worsen – Bloomberg).

Asian Tigers are de-fanged and without claws for now. Japan is stagnating for the last 20 years now. With Hugo Chavez dying of cancer and Castro speaking in less than 160-character haikus, there are no noises from Latin America.

That leaves us only with Yumm-Rika!

US soldiers trying to prop up the house of cards | Cartoon by Clay Bennett; taking off on the iconic Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima Pulitzer Prize photograph taken on February 23, 1945, of US Marines raising the US flag | Click for image.

Pax Americana

But the US economy seems to on the mend.

Unemployment figures have reduced. Oil prices are declining. Dollar has gained against nearly all currencies. Gold prices (in USD) are down – and dollar is stronger.

You want a Black President. Y’all will get one for two terms. Hell! You want a purple-colored President, we got one for ya …

You got what yer wanted.

Now can we jes git back to work …

One question … any answer

For the rest of us, with so much pain and mayhem in the world, the only only question left was

“One has no clue where it is going to end,” Ashok said in a June 22 phone interview from Mumbai. “The uncertainty and the volatility is the biggest concern.”

Try this answer.

Till US elections are over.

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Anguish In The Free World – Julian Assange Prefers Ecuador

There is deep anguish in the West over that Julian Assange believes that Ecuador may offer him the freedom that the Free World is not willing to do. Listen to the Assange interview on abc radio.

Click on the green coloured link below.

Julian Assange is about to spend his third night in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as he awaits a decision on his bid for asylum.In his first interview since arriving at the embassy, he tells us why he chose to seek asylum in Ecuador.

via Julian Assange exclusive – Breakfast – ABC Radio National Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Assange News Blackout: Wonder How This Works

Julian Assange may finally hammer home the point that Desert Bloc systems are usually either a Military State or a Police State. US happens to be both.

This document dump has made the US react in a manner that makes it look very fragile. | Cartoonist Adam Zyglis of Buffalo News, courtesy – Politicalcartoons.com; source: msn.com | Click for image.

Hide the beast

All of today’s newspapers in Mumbai, buried the news about Julian Assange’s defection to Ecuador to inside pages, in hidden corners, where it would attract least attention.

Based on the file dump that Bradley Manning, allegedly passed onto Wikileaks, what we have now are excruciating details. Instead of the broad outline earlier, we now have the actual skeleton and structure of Pax Americana.

Thanks to Julian Assange. Not to forget Bradley Manning.

Expose the beast

Globally, military bases are at

the heart of a global American empire that employs some 1,000 bases outside the United States. Their purpose: To ensure that no matter who governs in Asia, Africa or around the world, the US military would be in a position to “run the planet” from its chain of strategic island bases. (via Chagos: The heart of an American empire? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English).

More assassinations, covert operations, killings and bombings than by any other regime, military, terrorist – or even a criminal group. In more than 50 countries in any month. Even if we ignore the 120 that is being waved around.

U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye, Nick Turse (an) investigative reporter found out that, on any given day, American commandos are carrying out secret missions in 70 countries — by the end of the year, that number is likely to reach 120.

Evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite, waging a secret war in about 60% of the world’s nations: Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret unit within the U.S. military — U.S. Special Operations Command SOCOM — has grown into a combined force of startling proportions.

SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and shadowy missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations. (via How Do We Stop the Relentless Expansion of the American Empire? | AlterNet).

2 million people in US prisons. Human beings. All of them. US has more human beings than animals in captivity. More than in any dictatorship. More surveillance cameras and telephone tapping in the US, Britain and Europe than in any dictatorship in the world.

With one law-breaker or law enforcer, for every 17 adult males, the US is a world leader. For the 70 million American males in the 18-60 years of age who are the predominant target; 17 apex American secret service agencies that track these 70 million people. The biggest secret service in the world, the largest prisoner population, in addition to one of the largest police forces in the world, make US clearly a leader of the ‘Free’ World.

Never in Soviet history were there more than 4 secret service agencies in the USSR. Today the US has 17 agencies form what the US calls Intelligence Community. A large rainbow of agencies – CIA FBI, NSA, DEA, DOE, Bureau of ATF, DIA, NRO, NIMA, CTC. NPC. INR. DOE Intel., Army Intelligence et al litter the global scene. Some US Govt. cables, from Wikileaks, quoted US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates on Russia as an “oligarchy run by the security services”.

Going by above data, it would be easier, to describe the USA, using those words.

All this data and words was probably never going to be enough.

But Julian Assange’s defection from the West to Ecuador, will be remembered.

Why

After Julian Assange walked into Ecuador’s embassy, as the doors shut behind him,  the sound reverberated across the world.

Some never heard the sound. Some never understood it. But to those to whom it mattered, their teeth are grinding with rage. Sparks flying out of their hooded eyes.

One very ominous sound, it was.

Defection from the Free World to the a Ecuador is pretty damning!

For the Free World.

Rather interesting was my own Yahoo email box. A Syrian fighter-pilot defects with an outdated MiG plane to Jordan was on the front pages – but Assange news was not there. Not even on trending topics.

I wonder how this kind of news management works.

Snap shot of my Yahoo! Mail page | Date: 2012-06-21 | Time: 21-11-40 hr IST | Click for larger image.

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The True & Unreal Story of Julian Assange

Captain Ahab will go down with his ship trying to take-on Whale #Assange.

The ‘real’ case of Julian Assange| Creative credits embedded; Image source & courtesy – rightardia.blogspot.in | Click for image.

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‘Opportunist’ China’s Help Rejected By EU

China finds that its US$3 trillion forex hoard cannot buy what it wants.

China's US$3 trillion are not enough to make European defense purchases. | Image source and courtesy - dantomozei.files.wordpress.com; first published at http://en.cnci.gov.cn//HtmlFiles/News/2011-2-25/13348.html in China Daily on 2011-2-25 | Click for larger image.

European policymakers are irked by what they call the opportunism of China’s apparent wish to trade some of its vast foreign wealth for increased influence.

“The idea that Europe is desperate for China’s money is wrong,” one senior euro zone monetary official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“I don’t like all this talk of Europe begging China for help, because Europe has the resources to solve its own problems if it can find the political will,” the source said.

China’s leaders, meanwhile, must show their citizens that giving some of the country’s $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to Europe is a good thing — especially given the country’s exposure to the 36 percent decline in the nominal value of the U.S. dollar over the last decade.

China had offered help in return for European support to grant it either more influence at the International Monetary Fund, market economy status in the World Trade Organization, or the lifting of a European arms embargo, said the sources, both of whom have direct knowledge of the matter, including one who has ties to the leadership in Beijing.

Granting China market economy status that would, under WTO rules, make it harder for Europe to apply trade sanctions against Chinese imports. China accepted its designation as a non-market economy when joining the WTO in 2001.

And China has been relatively restrained in not demanding publicly that Europe scrap an arms embargo against China — introduced after the 1989 military crackdown on student-led, pro-democracy protests centred on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square — in return for financial assistance to end the debt crisis.

China fears that the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis could trigger trade friction with its biggest export market and hurt its exports and economy. (via Exclusive: Politics stymie China’s EU aid offer: sources | Reuters).

Pot calling a kettle black

A text book case.

What makes the EU act pricey – while country after country is going down the bankruptcy route? What is making the EU feel superior?

Is a two-party democracy much superior or better than 1-party democracy?

Just because the heads of EU countries are selected from two sets of power-mongers (what else is a political party?) – instead of one as in (Communist Party) China, does not make EU any better or superior. Try as much as I can, there is little difference I can see between China and the EU.

Except gloss and polish.

View from China | Cartoon by Illustration: Liu Rui; Source and courtesy - globaltimes.cn; Published on 08:23 December 28 2010 | Click for source image.

West is the Best

The West does have more skills when it comes to ‘settling’ rivals.

You only have to look at the way in which Sweden has fixed a rape case against Julian Assange. China is still a few decades behind EU and USA in mounting an operation – such as the Swedish ‘Trojan’.

None of China’s three demands are either bad in principle or prudence. But it does make me wonder. China’s US$3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves is not enough if it wants to buy EU defence products.

Compare this with the US and EU eagerness to sell defence items to India.

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