OMG! 4 King Wild Dog Destroy Hyena Save Cubs, Hyenas Surrender Because Wild Dog Power Is Too Great!

Captura de ecrã 2021-01-29, às 10.34.54

These hedge funds have got torched by the Wall Street Bets army that targeted their short positions in GameStop

Wild Dogs and Hyenas - The Rivals

Stocks for me but not for thee: 
          Redditors playing the stock market is problematic
                                                  but, if a Democrat does it, no big deal

is a game and tech journalist from the US. Aside from writing for RT, he hosts the podcast Micah and The Hatman, and is an independent comic book writer. Follow Micah at @MindofMicahC 
RT New on January 28, 2021 at 17:23

Accusations of fraud were thrown about when Redditors played the stock market and destroyed hedge funds. None were to be heard when Nancy Pelosi bought into Tesla after President Joe Biden announced his anti-fossil fuel policies. 

People have been bidding money in the stock market for over a hundred years. There have been many stories about people substantially increasing their wealth by doing so. Despite some people's issues with Wall Street and the culture surrounding it, there's nothing illegal about getting involved in stock trading. In fact, most financial advisers will recommend it. However, when the subreddit r/wallstreetbets took to the market to make substantial short-term gain in a move that worked against hedge funds, there were cries to get the government involved. 

What hasn't been reported-on nearly as much is that Joe Biden and John Kerry announced yesterday that the federal government plans to make moves that will severely damage the energy and automotive industries in the short term. Kerry himself has been criticized for a "learn to code" – almost the modern “let them eat cake” – attitude towards the people likely to lose jobs because of the Keystone Pipeline being halted. In the wake of this, no one is talking about Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi investing substantially in Tesla. Tesla is one of the companies that seems like it could benefit greatly from what the executive branch wants to impose.  

Just this morning, the app RobinHood, which is meant to allow people without substantial funds to get into the market, is now canceling the ability to purchase stocks that r/wallstreetbets were purchasing. Last night, I decided to get in on the fun and check to see what would happen. I purchased stock in both AMC entertainment and the Naked Brand Group and suddenly both purchases were canceled.  

So a lowly journalist/comic book writer such as myself cannot play the market to increase his wealth but career politicians are allowed to? The way free market is supposed to work, my money is just as green as Nancy Pelosi's. If I want to purchase stock in a company and bet with or against the market I should be able to. 

The response has been outright ridiculous. Looking through mainstream headlines, the Reddit investor crowd is being called “trolls” and a “mob,” and their behavior explained with “Trumpism.” Immediately a call was raised for stricter market regulation to prevent this from happening again.

That’s an abhorrent hypocrisy – especially considering how much dirtier it looks when Nancy Pelosi's longtime friends who just now happened to be in control of the executive branch tank a market while she invests money in the competition to improve her own wealth.

It’s quite simple. These big government types do not like to see people get out of  “their lane.” The instant that people beat the ‘elites’ on their own turf, by playing the market in a way the ‘elite’ cannot control or benefit from, there are calls for big government to get involved. On the flip side, no one says a word when actual industries get harmed and politicians get richer because of it. Where the heck is the standard?

As it stands, it’s looking like this battle is just beginning. The little guy is now hungry to play the game and make their life better. The big dogs who don't want the little guy to ever earn a seat at the table need to be held accountable. I mean, playing the market like this might benefit all of those people that are about to lose their jobs because of the Democrats. Is it so bad if they want to learn to trade?

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Original and the readers comments here.

Croesus on the pyre, Attic red-figure amphora, 500–490 BC, Louvre (G 197)

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Tomada de posse de Joe Biden e Kamala Harris.

O Actual Processo Revolucionário Em Curso, APREC, é liderado pelos Globalistas.

Por Álvaro Aragão Athayde | coisas & loisas | 28 de Janeiro de 2021, á(s) 15:32 UTC 00:00 | original aqui 
Via Álvaro A Athayde | Telegram | 28 Jan at15:37 | original here

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A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege | The New Yorker

America’s First Revolution Is Happening Now
By Paul Craig Roberts | Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy | January 19, 2021

Hear me out and you will understand the title.

There is a difference between a rebellion and a revolution.  A rebellion is what occurred in the thirteen colonies in the late 18th century.  A revolution is what occurred in Russia in 1917.

A rebellion occurred in the colonies, because the subjects of the king in the colonies were treated differently constitutionally and in law from subjects of the king in England. The colonists had no representation in Parliament and no voice in how they were ruled.

The rebellion resulted in political independence but not in a change in the belief system. The colonists held to belief in the rule of law to which government is held accountable and to Blackstonian legal principles.  The legal and political principles that the English had fought for from the Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the people’s power to govern themselves through representatives in Parliament, were enshrined in the Constitution.  The United States is the Constitution. If the Constitution is set aside and not followed, the United States is a different entity.

For the United States to break from the Constitution is a revolutionary act in comparison to the 18th century rebellion demanding equal treatment for English colonists.

The essence of a revolution is a collapse in the system of beliefs that hold a country together

A revolution is what occurred in Russia in February, 1917.  Most people think that the Czar was overthrown by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but this is not the case.  The Czar was overthrown by the collapse in the belief system that defined Czarist Russia.  The collapse in the belief system resulted in the February Revolution.  The Czar’s military forced him to abdicate in March.  A Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky became Prime Minister of a provisional government.

The Bolsheviks’ October Revolution was directed against this provisional government.  It was not a revolution, because the revolution had already occurred.  It was an unseating.  The Bolsheviks’ question to the provisional government was: “Who chose you?”  The obvious answer was that they had chosen themselves.

If asked the same question, the American Establishment’s answer is the same as the Russian provisional government’s answer.

The structure of belief that defined Czarist Russia was destroyed by the Russian liberals who used the Czar’s need of their support for World War I against Germany to agitate for a Constitutional Monarchy, as existed in England, where the monarch retained some power, but legislation was in the hands of a parliament.  Rather than the source of law, the monarch was accountable to law.

The Russian liberals placed a high value on their agenda.  In their pursuit of their agenda, they became increasingly aggressive in their condemnations of the Czar’s resistance.  Unaware or dismissive of the Czar’s promise to his father not to alter Russia by relinquishing power, the liberals’ denunciations became unsettling to the mass of the Russian people, who kept expecting retaliation from the Czar against those committing sedition against him.

But the Czar could not retaliate, because without the liberals and their organizations the war effort would be impaired.  The Czar did not realize the impact on the population of unanswered accusations.  Russians concluded that the accusations must be true as the Czar failed to act against his accusers.

I have given you a brief explanation. You can get the complete story if you can find a copy of Russia 1917, The February Revolution by George Katkov.

As a post-graduate at Oxford University, I got to know George Katkov and benefitted from many conversations with him.  Katklov was a don at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.  It was St. Antony’s that arranged for me to give a Special University Lecture at Oxford on January 20, 1969, a special treat for a graduate student.  Even then truth had to struggle its way.  Now it has little chance.

This brings us to America’s First Revolution now unfolding.  How did it come about?  It came about because decades of liberal assaults in the name of one “progressive cause” or another destroyed the structure of beliefs that define the United States.  Today we can see with our own eyes, if we open them, that there is no longer any such thing as academic freedom, free speech, freedom of association, privacy, due process.  People are fired from their jobs and sentenced to economic peril for merely expressing their opinions or attending the wrong rally or using disapproved pronouns.  Those who insist on electoral integrity, the basis of democracy, are demonized as “enemies of democracy.”  Legislation is pending that will be used to define any dissent from controlled Establishment explanations as subversion.

You can add to the list.  But a long list is unnecessary to show that no important institution in America any longer believes in the liberties and protections guaranteed by the US Constitution or in democracy itself.  Not the universities, the bar associations, the media, the courts, the political parties or the Congress.

It is this destruction of belief that constitutes the First American Revolution. The consequences are yet to be fully felt.

Original here. No reader comments. 
Republication here. With readers' comments. 
Another republication here. Also with readers' comments.

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Webinar Relações Bilaterais União Europeia-África

Gabinete do Dirrector | Instituto Universitário Militar | 15 de Janeiro de 2021

O Instituto Universitário Militar (IUM) realiza no próximo dia 26 de janeiro, às 14h30, um Webinar que pretende discutir as relações da União Europeia-África, centradas nas questões políticas, económicas e securitárias.  

O painel será composto: Marco Cruz, Tenente-Coronel e Coordenador do Núcleo de Estudos Militares Europeus; Sónia Ribeiro, Docente e Investigadora do Instituto de Estudos Políticos da Universidade Católica Portuguesa; Francisco Fadul, Coordenador do Núcleo de Estudos Militares Africanos; e João Vacas, docente do Instituto de Estudos Políticos da Universidade Católica Portuguesa e consultor da Abreu Advogados. Com moderação de Luís Bernardino, Tenente-Coronel e membro da Direção do Centro de Investigação, Desenvolvimento e Inovação da Academia Militar (CINAMIL).

A participação é gratuita (INSCRIÇÃO OBRIGATÓRIA – comunicacao@ium.pt) e terá transmissão em direto via Zoom, podendo ser colocadas questões e comentários. O link para o Webinar será enviado após inscrição.

O evento é organizado pelo Centro de Investigação e Desenvolvimento do IUM (CIDIUM).

Original aqui.

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© Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Without Democracy in the U.S.,
Can the Simulacra of Democracy Survive Elsewhere?

Trump walked into the DC ‘Forum’, and ended ‘stabbed to death’, as had Julius. It has been truly Shakespearean, Alastair Crooke writes.

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 17, 2021

The ‘Ides of March’, they came early this year – on 6 January, at least for one current U.S. ‘Caesar’. What happened; how it happened; who concocted the Capitol events, will be long debated. However, the daggers had long been sharpened for Caesar, well before the invasion of the Capitol. In a sense, the stage was already set – Trump walked into the DC ‘Forum’, and ended ‘stabbed to death’, as had Julius. It has been truly Shakespearean.

It was well-known that Trump might well reject the election results, because of postal ballot potential fraud (as postal ballots assumed their disproportionate 2020 electoral predominance). The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) precisely (purposefully?) had taunted Trump last June with its forecast of a contested election in which Trump would lose – after “all of the mail-in ballots had been tallied”. The TIP then had turned to the prospective tactics and tasks for forcefully ousting a President-in-denial from the White House. (The media and ‘platforms’ had been participants in this early war-gaming of how to deal with a Trump, who contested the election result, and questioned the legality and authenticity of postal ballots).

It needn’t have been this way – but no compromise on rules on postal balloting was attempted (rather, the reverse). In any event, the Capitol invasion now stands as a major psychic event (the “Insurrection”) searing the American consciousness. Apart from unnerving the legislators, unused to experiencing a sudden loss of security, the invasion has become the sacrilege to a ‘sacred space’ (with all the additional connotations of America’s exceptional, divine mission). The daggers were gleefully plunged in – Trump is impeached again; he is to be tried in the Senate after the Biden inauguration; and he and his family, may expect the legal dismemberment that will follow.

The ‘Blue State’ has – from Trump’s first election – been determined to crush him. That is underway. And somehow sychronistically, we now have the Tech digital deletion of Red America from social platforms, with talk of a ‘purge’ and cultural ‘re-education’ for his supporters (and their children), as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President (and the Capitol now has taken the air of a theatre of war, with troops and weapons strewn about its corridors): “Trump”, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy, from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack”.

Here is the key first implication to that ‘psychic event’ – not just for Americans, but for the world spectating the unfolding events: Biden has called for measures against “domestic terrorism”, and used language that is usually reserved for combat with an external enemy state – language such as accompanies major wars. This is ‘revenge cycle’ material. In the case of two nations, literally at war, they do do this. This is a part of it. They hope to resolve their conflict through humiliation, repression and the forced submission of the other (i.e. Japan after WW2). But America is, at least nominally, one nation. What happens when a single nation splits, with one turning the ‘seditious’ elements into an ‘alien other’?

We do not know. But hatred is intense, both toward Trump and the ‘deplorables’. And now, these sentiments are reciprocated in the wake of the President’s humiliation, at a contents-free impeachment, reached in few hours. What seems certain is that the course of events likely will lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of ever greater polarisation.

The rise of Trumpism has created a new radical Manicheanism amongst the liberal élite. Tech, with its algos feeding like-minded material to the like-minded, has a lot to do with this digital and ideological divide. But the bottom line is that this divide is (falsely) cast as a death-struggle now underway between a monolithic liberalism and a monolithic illiberalism.

This carries a huge message for Russia, Iran and China (and others) – the U.S. is deeply divided, but its ‘new mission’ will be a ‘moral high-ground’ war against illiberalism – at home, firstly – and then overseas.

Yet of greater – and wider – significance is that the ‘noble lie’ – the mask concealing the cynical arrangement that is American ‘democracy’ – has been stripped away. The crucial import was underlined by the German FM, Heiko Maas, when he observed: “Without democracy in the U.S., [there is] no democracy in Europe”.

What might have Maas meant? Possibly, he was referring to the angry 75 millions of Red America that have now grasped the shocking magnitude of the fraud played on them. By fraud here is not a reference to the particular claims about 3 November, but to the much bigger fraud of a system rigged in the interests of the Establishment. This has been one of the basic props to the engineered consent upon which public order and social stability in America and Europe has rested for decades: the naïve belief in the democratic essence of the system.

This prop is being overturned by the ‘Blue State’ precisely in order to savour a sweet revenge on Trump for pulling aside the mask on so much else of ‘Establishment America’. Trump laid bare how corrupt the ‘swamp’ had become, and he articulated Red America’s deepest concerns and frustrations about off-shored jobs, economic precarity and ‘forever wars’. They, in turn, had projected their exasperation, bitterness, and illusions back onto him, turning him, by default, into their standard-bearer.

Yet – astonishingly – this toppling of the pillar of an engineered ‘noble lie’ is being done precisely by those (the Establishment), who one might have thought, had the most interest in keeping it intact. But they cannot resist it. They just cannot forgive ‘outsider’ Trump’s intrusion into their neatly constructed illusions: trashing their elaborate ‘construct’ of reality, simply by magicking up new ‘facts’ to contest their ‘science’.

Isn’t this what is so frightening for Merkel and Maas? The EU has its own, more fragile, ‘noble lie’. It is this: States – by relinquishing a portion of their sovereignty – might hope to participate in a ‘greater sovereignty’ (i.e. the European Project), and still believe that it is ‘democratic’.

This cynical European arrangement only stands if Merkel and Macron can hold up American ‘democracy’ as the guiding principle to the European Project (however misleading that may be). But now, with the ‘lights going out’ in the ‘City on the Hill’, and with only a broken democracy ideal under which EU leaders may shelter, how will the dreary formula of a diluted sovereignty, with no real democracy; with no roots in the ground below; with the EU moving to ever closer oligarchy, and led by an unaccountable, and secretive ‘politburo’, survive?

The point is that European ‘democracy’ is also rigged towards Germany and the élites. And ordinary Europeans have noticed, (especially when only one part of the community bears a disproportionate burden of the Covid economic pain). The élites fear Trump: he may lay it all bare, for all to see.

Some EU leaders may hope that Trumpism will be so completely crushed, and its voice silenced, that Europe’s own fracturing engineered public consent can be contained. Yet they must know, in their hearts, that recourse to identity and gender ideology (as pretext for greater state-ism), will only armour-plate the bubbles and divisions because they prevent people from hearing each other. It is the post-persuasion, post-argument politics of polarisation.

For sure, the rest of the world are taking close note. They will not be accepting moral lectures from Europe in the future (though undoubtedly, they will still get them), and states will look to build ‘public consent’ around quite different ‘poles’ – loose concerts of states, traditional culture and the historic narratives of their communities.

Original here.

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