Merkel's despicable support of Erdogan threatens freedom of speech in Germany

A few weeks ago, a famous political satire program in German TV, dedicated this song to the Turkish dictator Erdogan:

No big deal, right? The same humorist, Jan Böhmermann, has made similar satirical songs on many other political figures, German or otherwise, for example Donald Trump or Yanis Varoufakis (which I liked so much I mirrored in this blog).

Well, the issue has gotten out of control. The Turkish dictator demanded Böhmerman, using a forgotten legal backdoor, section 103, that forbids criticism of foreign leaders. In order to reach the courts, the demand had to be approved by Chancelor Merkel. She signed it, just like she signed, along with all other EU leaders, giving Turkey millions of euros, which will go to the DAESH or to corruption or both, after Erdogan used masses of Syrian and Afghan refugees as a blackmail tool in a well-known development that has been at the forefront of the European and global news in the last months. 

As result, Böhmerman suspended his very successful satiric magazine, asking viewers to watch cat videos online instead. 

The conflict has not stopped there. Yesterday, Pirate Party's regional leader Bruno Krahm was placed under incommunicado arrest after daring to read the lyrics of the song in a public demonstration for freedom of speech at Berlin, which marched behind a banner that read: "No power for Erdogan, freedom against Erdogan". 

It has also been known that the Turkish embassy in the Netherlands is pressing Turkish expatriates to report any online comments against Erdogan or his authoritarian Islamo-Fascist regime.

I am pretty sure however that this story will end with the head of Merkel and that of her beloved friend Erdogan served on a cheap platter for the delight of us all. One head at a time anyhow and Merkel's is no doubt going to be the first one, as she has chosen to protect with her robust body the much weaker one of her Turkish crony. We Europeans are not at all in the mood for fascism. Bye Angela, good riddance.

V for Varoufakis (humor)

This is just hilarious:

Pity is that down here in real Earth, Yanis has actually been forced to swallow a lot of crap and Schauble is laughing (if he can laugh at all, does he?) on his wheelchair. 

I take the opportunity to demand from Germany the payment of its war debt and reparations not only to Greece but also the Basque Country (remember Gernika!) and from Britain to return the stolen Parthenon marbles. Otherwise they should expect their share of the Greek inducted debt to be canceled in return - or so I hope. 

Greece is still at the crossroads: be Europe's Haiti or be Europe's Cuba? I think the answer is clear.

Those warmongering russkies!

Hilarious but very real if you happen to have enough patience to put up with Minitrue's propaganda machinery (aka "free media").

Found at Global Research.

Bravo Greece!

Tasio today at Gara.

Note: I'm probably arriving to the end of my phase as blogger but, while I take a final decision, there's reason to celebrate and hope these days. Thank you Greece for facing Imperialism once again with such courage! Europe owes many things to Greece but it's not just ancient history and the Neolithic: it's also today. Bravo!

No to fracking demand reaches the stratosphere

No kidding. The mascot of the fiestas of Vitoria-Gasteiz, Zeledon, traveled to the Earth's stratosphere with all his paraphernalia (wine bag, beret and umbrella) and with a strong message: FRACKING EZ (no to fracking in Basque).

Zeledon in space against fracking (more images at La Otra Mitad)

It is no photoshopping: the puppet is part of a balloon sent by the pupils of a course imparted by the astronomical difussion group La Otra Mitad (the other half). This is the third such course and the third such estratospheric ballooon sent by this modest group of Basque enthusiasts of Astronomy. The first one, Haziak 1, carried no icon, while the second one, Txantxiku 1, brought to the near space a fluffy frog with a Basque national flag.

Haziak 2, which is this balloon carrying Zeledon and the anti-fracking message, was launched from Vitoria-Gasteiz on Saturday at 11:50 (CET), climbing to 33 kilometers before exploding above the Sierra of Cantabria at 13:38. The equipment fell near Cenicero (La Rioja) around 14:10.

La Otra Mitad is in the process of compiling a video on this modest Basque astronomical feat, as well as analyzing the scientific data gathered by the balloon. 

Among other abusive late Capitalist impositions, the authorities are trying to implement the highly destructive method of oil production known a fracking in the Araba region of the Basque Country. As usual the vast majority of the population is against it but the oligarchs manage to force-feed their decisions by legal imposition and without any referendum.

Source: Naiz Info.

We shall not live under fear

I will have some news soonTM on what will happen with my political blogging activity, although I admit I have not cut all corners yet. But meanwhile...

Someone sent me this news link on the absolutely megalomaniac and scaringly Orwellian logos of the actually megalomaniac and scaringly Orwellian US program Total Information Awareness (TIA).

The truth behind the threat:
"Whoever grabs too much, squeezes too little"
(Castilian saying)

In my infancy universe, the TIA was actually a Spanish mockery of the CIA in which two rather dumb and useless secret agents always ended up doing it wrong. While this may not be the case anymore at all, I can't but find ridiculously pretentious the propaganda distilled by those logos and the equally propagandistic TV series The Last Enemy, which aims to justify such totalitarian control.

In fact, the striking issue with all US civilian surveillance programs is that their real aim seems to be to instill fear, because they cannot obviously process such a huge amount of data, even with the help of the most powerful computers. Absolute control is absolutely impossible, science and reality demonstrate once and again.

While the White House and the Pentagon may be doing their best to look as scary as Hitler, or even worse, the reality is much more like Chaplin narrated it in his awesome movie The Great Dictator. They are just apes like us and they bleed exactly like us and that means that they also slack exactly like us and commit brutal errors exactly like us. "They" are not perfect at all. In fact the system tends to select rather imperfect but obedient minions, what makes them extremely vulnerable to degeneration.

That's probably why they attempt to project a very scary shadow. Of course their megalomania and totalitarianism is very scary but, as Orwell correctly said, fascism cannot succeed where people can still laugh at the goose step.

And all those scary icons are nothing but their pathetic form of goose step and their goal is clearly to instill fear. 

But we shall not live under fear, rather we live with much higher emotions: LOVE and RAGE! 

And a good laugh, of course.

[Was false news] Uruguayan President rejected from international act after being confused with "commoner"

Correction: this news was false. My apologies for the error.

Webguerrillero published today a formal correction: the whole news was accidentally taken from a humor site and they did not notice. Ironically many "serious" media through the world took it as real.

President Mujica at home

The President of Uruguay José "Pepe" Mujica was impeded to attend the inauguration of his Paraguayan colleague Horacio Cartes, after security confused him with a "commoner". 

For some reason Mr. Mujica, who lives a very simple life, without any luxuries whatsoever, arrived late to the inauguration, after the rest of the Uruguayan delegation had already entered the event. Security personnel were not able to recognize him and did not let him enter. 

Luckily the Chancellor arrived then with his credentials and he was allowed in.

Afterwards excuses were issued:

We knew well who was Mujica and that he was very austere... What we did not know was that he was so extremely so. Please put yourselves in our skin, seeing that a plain commoner wanted to enter in a place with so many important people, without accreditation and alone rang all alarms and forced us to impede him access.

You get it, right? There are two kinds of people: oligarchs and commoners, and among all Presidents on Earth, only Mujica (and surely Evo) is like us, commoners.

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

LOLSpain: government sues Anonymous

This one goes in the category humor, no doubt. The reactionary People's Party (PP) in power in Spain with a mere 10 million votes (and quickly declining to a trickle) has reacted to the diffusion by Anonymous of the "Bárcenas papers", which reveal double accountancy, systematic bribes by constructors and illegal over-salaries to ministers, by suing them[es]. 

The documents mostly reveal the double accountancy practices of the hyper-corrupt party but there are also lists of their affiliates and party workers with all the relevant data (ID number, address, phone numbers, bank accounts, etc.)

Without even a smirk the beleaguered PP attorneys sued Anonymous for a crime of revelation of secrets. By doing this they admit that the papers are real and therefore all them are criminals.

As for Anonymous, you know: "we are legion". 

I was recently discussing the issue of NSA surveillance and all that and my argument goes in the sense that, per the unwritten Book of Chaos, total control is impossible no matter how hard they try, what in this case applies in the form of so much information, yet so few brains and computer power to parse it. You can't cage Chaos: you lost before you even tried.

As the besieged ministers repeat once and again: this damages the Spain brand. I hope it does, Mr. Minister, death to Spain!


PS- At the time of posting this I do not know yet where to find the Anonymous leak, but I will update as soon as I have it.


Update (Jul 12): while there is an alleged torrent file at The Pirate Bay, this one is in fact an executable (.exe instead of .torrent) so I don't feel safe downloading it. 

However Diagonal newspaper has created a wiki to parse and analyze all the data (excepted the illegal personal data). This seems to me the safest reference so far (h/t to Javier).

Diagonal has also a series of dedicated articles (in Spanish):

• Filtrada la contabilidad del PP (PP accountancy leaked)
• La conexión canaria (the Canarian connection)
• Hacia una auditoría popular (towards a popular audit)
• Anonymous publica las cuentas del PP (Anonymous publishes PP accounts)
• Etc. (follow the links within the above articles)

Where is Edward?

Edward J. Snowden, of course.

Found at Webguerrillero[es].

Humor: the ideal worker

THE IDEAL WORKER

Hmmm... it seems that the company is not getting as much profit as it should... No more talk: tomorrow I fire myself without indemnification or anything...! And, if I even think of protesting, I call the riot police so they break my head open!

Author: Miguel Brieva
Source: Diagonal[es].

Humor: Spain's fundamental constitutional "rights" to the psychoanalist

Again the political cartoon artist Tasio nailing it:

Translation: 

Article 36.1 of the Constitution [of the Kingdom of Spain]

All Spanish citizens have the duty to work and the right to work, to the free choice of profession or trade, to the promotion through work and to a remuneration sufficient to satisfy their needs and those of their families, without in any case being allowed discrimination by reason of gender...

Psychoanalyst: You tell me...

Source: Gara.

Humor: European Court illegalizes historical Basque antifascist party

Tasio at Gara:

Strasbourg Court ratifies the illegalization of ANV [→ background]

Judge: And we have done it without violating your right to freedom of speech, nor your freedom of assembly, nor that of free association.

Judge: Only that you cannot speak, nor assemble nor associate. 

Citizen: I see.

Judge: These are the unweldable¹ mysteries of our democracy.

¹ Word play between Spanish insondable (unfathomable, from sondar: to sound [the depths]) and insoldable (unweldable, that cannot be welded, from soldar: to weld).

Humor: the fallacy of GDP (and Economics in general)

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal daily cartoon, very inspired as of late, which allows reposting:

Technically accurate is the phrase, indeed.

Useless is the word.

But hold, wonder and despair... it actually applies to the most important macroeconomic figure as described above: if a doll is made in China at the cost of $3, including export costs, and then sold in California at $10, guess how the resulting GDP input is divided... Indeed, $3 are added to Chinese GDP and $7 to US GDP. Yet the USA generated absolutely no real wealth in this transaction other than the act of selling (which has a much lower actual cost, say $1 or $2). 

So actually this useless but very real GDP is being created out of debt or printing money, what is about the same. Normally this would cause inflation and restore the balance somehow (at least that's the theory), however because of the privileged central position of the dollar in the World monetary markets the USA can export much of that inflation to wherever they use dollars. 

They are threading thin because you can only grow an ever increasing debt so much, tell Philip II of Spain, but they are threading nonetheless.

Double standards (cartoon)

From the sometimes genial Saturday Monday Cereal Breakfast daily cartoon (and weekly video), by James Weiner, who explicitly authorizes sharing:

Danger... pro-system gangs ravage Europe!

Could be labeled "humor", would not be so real

Danger... pro-system gangs ravage Europe!

Found at Borroka garaia da![es]

Scissors or rather... axe?

Tasio today at Gara:

The guy on the armchair is of course M. Rajoy, President of the Spanish Government.

Great Latvia "success" story

Fun, short and highly didactic video by Mark Fiore explaining IMF-EU economic theory with a practical example and cool cartoons: 




Hat tip to Naked Capitalism.

Vermont 'pigs' get labeled

As you may know legal slavery in the form of forced labor is way too common in the US prison system, which is extreme by all measures (number of prisoners, severity of sentences, etc.)

However now and then slaves, cunningly, have their masters humiliated anyhow. Vermont prisoners are forced to print the police badges of that state and they thought of a way to properly label them without being too obvious:

The pig is obvious, I think I also recognize other silhouettes

The above detail belongs to a badge like this one:

Source: Kasama.

Race and intelligence

Found at Protestation.org blog.

There's been major racist Neonazi agitation in Poland just after the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass. The institutional media like BBC and such depict it as a clash between factions and do not give it the relevance it deserves but for the antifascist media[es] it was the fascists terrorizing Warsaw in the name of "white Europe", of Polish nationalism, of homophobia, of judeophobia and of generic xenophobia.The clashes ended with more than 200 people arrested and severe material damage. 

The main difference between this and the Kristallnach is that there was resistance. Go antifascist Poland! Go antifascist Europe!

Airport security (humor by Zach Weiner, SMBC)

From the future, where terrorism is still an all-pervading menace that justifies all kind of weird abuses to citizens, via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Borrowed by inciting by the author himself, Zach Weiner, who even puts a code under each comic so we copy-share more easily, how anticapitalist!