“Where is the line between a successful global business, in-demand services and consolidation of big data – and attempts to harshly and unilaterally govern society, replace legitimate democratic institutions, restrict one’s natural right to decide for themselves how to live, what to choose, what stance to express freely?” Putin wondered.

“We’ve all seen this just now in the US. And everybody understands what I’m talking about,” he added.

The Russian leader was apparently referring to the crackdown by Big Tech corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, mostly on Donald Trump and his supporters, during the recent presidential election in the US. The companies, which, according to some critics, sided with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, blocked President Trump’s social media accounts over accusations of inciting violence, with the same being done to many pages of groups and individuals who’d backed him.

However, one-sided bias claim voiced by some might be an overestimation – the accounts of Democrats supporters were also subject to restrictions, but on a much smaller scale.

Conservative Twitter-like platform Parler was also forced offline, and now there are calls to block the Telegram app as well.

These events have shown that Big Tech companies “in some areas have de facto become rivals to the government,” Putin said.

Billions of users spend large parts of their lives on the platforms and, from the point of view of those companies, their monopolistic position is favorable for organizing economic and technological processes, the Russian president explained. “But there’s a question of how such monopolism fits the interest of society,” he stressed.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/513768-putin-slams-big-tech-in-davos/

Homeless VP: Mike Pence is Couch-Surfing With Officials After Leaving Washington, Report Says

After the inauguration of Joe Biden, the official announced that he and his wife Karen would return to his hometown in Indiana. The former VP, however, didn't say exactly where they'd be staying.

Former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence doesn't have a permanent place to live in, Business Insider reported citing Republicans close to the official. According to them, the Pences had nowhere to go after they moved out of the vice president's residence at the US Naval Observatory. An adviser to Donald Trump went as far as to say that the former official is homeless.

The individual is among several Republicans who are vexed that the former vice president has neither a permanent place to live nor a job. Some officials even wondered whether the family was couch-surfing with officials in Indiana where Mike Pence was governor from 2013 to 2017.

One Pence aide said the family plans to balance their time between Indiana and Washington for the next six months and after that will permanently move to Indiana. The aide, however, refused to name the exact location. Two Republicans close to the former vice president said the Pences are staying at his brother's place in Columbus, Indiana.

Another source told Business Insider that the family is staying at a renovated cabin the incumbent governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb, uses as a retreat. But for that Pence needs permission. Holcomb's spokesman did not respond to questions about whether the governor had allowed the former vice president to stay at the cabin.

Public records show that in 1999 he bought a single family home in Edinburgh, Indiana. In 2000, when he won a seat in Indiana's second congressional district, the family moved to Washington where it lived for a decade before returning to the state. When Pence became governor the family did not move to their home, but instead rented a luxurious mansion.

Financial disclosure forms that he filed every year after becoming vice president showed he didn't own any property, including the house in Edinburgh. It is not clear when the family sold it.

Business Insider reported that the family had not owned a home in a decade. The outlet cites Donald Trump's vetting team, who said that unlike other officials, the Pences never became rich and even had financial problems in the past. They reportedly lost $700,000 when his brother's oil company went bankrupt. The family reportedly struggled to build a solid nest egg while paying for their children's student loans.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202101271081894071-homeless-vp-mike-pence-is-couch-surfing-with-officials-after-leaving-washington-report-says/

Read from top. May be Pence could bludge off Biden... see: https://english.pravda.ru/news/world/145563-joe_biden_homes/

It was bound to end like this. The United States and its NATO partners went into Afghanistan in the first place to subjugate and plunder with imperial swagger. 

Now that the whole criminal enterprise has collapsed 20 years later, the recriminations are intense and bitter. 

There were extraordinary scenes in the British parliament this week and among other European capitals. Politicians across the board have been slamming US President Joe Biden’s administration for the disastrous failure in Afghanistan.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was recently referring to Biden as “dear Joe” has taken to blaming his administration for the mess that has hit the fan this week as Western states rush to evacuate embassies. 

French President Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are worried about a deluge of refugees from Afghanistan. 

Biden, as well as his predecessor Donald Trump, are being blamed for the collapse of the NATO-backed regime in Kabul which has been swept away by the Taliban insurgents. 

Boris Johnson said the British and other NATO members had no choice but to cut and run from Afghanistan because the Americans had preemptively done so. 

How hilarious! So much for “Global Britain” being a world power for good alongside its American “special partner” and their “shared values”. A British navy flotilla currently on a world tour is seen to be as useless as a rubber duck in a bathtub. 

British lawmakers and former military chiefs are livid from the United States’ rapid withdrawal from the Central Asian country which blindsided other NATO members.

Other European politicians are decrying that it is the worst failure in the history of the NATO military alliance formed in 1949.

Indeed, the main culprit for the debacle in Afghanistan is Washington. But it is delusional for the Brits and other NATO members to try to shift the blame entirely. They all went into that country using the alliance’s so-called Article Five collective defense clause. The war and 20-year occupation were illegal from the outset having no mandate from the UN Security Council nor any plausible self-defense claim. 

All of the NATO powers are guilty of war crimes from the two-decade aggression in Afghanistan, including the mass killing of civilians and running detention-torture centers. Trillions of dollars funded by taxpayers were squandered, given as subsidies to military companies, while hundreds of thousands of lives were destroyed. Millions of Afghans have been made homeless. 

In the end, the Americans wanted out of their quagmire which they had created 40 years ago when they sponsored the rise of the Mujahideen against a Soviet-aligned government in Kabul. The Mujahideen were the forerunners of the Taliban* and the Al Qaeda* terror network which has since metastasized in several countries giving the US and NATO a pretext for invading. 

The British and the other European governments are now left in the lurch to deal with the public anger and shame over the Afghanistan debacle. 

If there is possibly one positive thing to come out of the catastrophe and criminality it is the public realization that the United States and its gang of NATO accomplices are a rogue organization that is a threat to world peace and not, as they preposterously claim, to be about upholding defense, security and “rules-based order”. 

Afghanistan started as an imperial criminal enterprise. Now that the charade is exposed, we can expect all the culprits to scurry for cover. And in their scampering for alibis, the knives are out for the king rat – the United States. 

*The Taliban and al-Qaeda are terrorist organisations banned in Russia and many other countries.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/202108191083659750-nato-knives-out-for-us/

See toon at top....

Washington’s 19-year-long war campaign in Afghanistan was one “big lie” that only benefited America’s military industrial complex and private contractors, Hrafnsson said. The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said it was not the ongoing chaotic withdrawal of the US and its allies that was now a surprise, but the fact that mainstream media did not catch on to the lies which prolonged the war long ago.

WikiLeaks published a trove of documents that “all painted a true picture of what was going on in Afghanistan 11 years ago,” Hrafnsson said, referring to the so-called Afghan War Diary – a collection of internal US military logs, diplomatic cables and CIA documents covering the period between 2004 and 2010.

The leak that included a total of 91,000 documents was considered one of the biggest in US military history. It did hit the headlines at that time, eventually leading to the arrest and prosecution of whistleblower Chelsea Manning and put WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange in Washington’s crosshairs.

Yet despite the document dump, somehow the general perception of the Afghan war did not change and “the lies continued,” Hrafnsson said, calling such a state of affairs “astonishing.”

“It is extremely surprising how long this went on,” the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said, calling the war “an extraordinary 20-years-[long] lie.” It became the “forgotten war,” overshadowed by another US military adventure – the war in Iraq, he believes.

Discussions about what was truly going on inside the country were “largely avoided” until the Washington Post exposed it all over again by publishing the so-called Afghan papers in 2019, he said.

The documents, obtained by the Post through Freedom of Information Act requests, painted a picture of a sustained effort by several US administrations to mislead the American public on the engagement in Afghanistan.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/533076-afghanistan-war-extraordinary-lie-wikileaks/

Read from top.

Let's not forget that though Afghanistan was not on the original list of seven countries — Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan — It became part of the "forever war" system. I am often reminded that not all journalist follow the dumb official line, too few of them question it. The most shoking is the fate of many people, now forced to live (if they are not shot dead) under the Taliban ugly Sharia law.

Read from top.

There’s a maxim in sports that you are not as good as you look when you win, or as bad as you look when you lose. It aims to give athletes an even-keel attitude instead of riding an emotional roller coaster. 

No doubt there are Democrats and well-meaning others giving similar advice now to the Biden White House. The president’s team is understandably shaken by the horrific events in Afghanistan and must fear it will never regain its footing and public trust. 

But what if the sports approach isn’t valid in this case? What if the Biden team is every bit as bad as it looks? 

Having been in office eight months, its successes are so minimal and its mistakes so glaring that doubts exist across the political spectrum about whether the president is up to the job. The doubts recall warnings about Biden from two people who know him best. 

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f- -k things up,” Barack Obama reportedly said. 

Then there’s Robert Gates’ charge that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” 

Such devastating views take on added significance in light of Biden’s obvious frailties and cognitive decline. The resulting leadership vacuum is so apparent that a well-connected Dem who asked a White House confidant how Biden could have chosen such an uninspiring roster of top aides was told Biden didn’t make the choices. 

....

Near tears at one point, Biden was seen hunched over the podium, clutching his briefing binder with both hands, his face a sea of grief. 

My first thought was that he looked like a beaten man. 

My second thought was that beaten men make terrible presidents and disastrous commanders in chief. 

Virtually every president has suffered the anguish of visiting wounded soldiers and consoling grieving families. It’s the worst possible part of the job, but is bearable when the lives lost have been in service to a thoroughly planned, well-defined military objective. 

The bloody events in Kabul had none of those virtues. Biden’s arrogant inflexibility about leaving on an arbitrary deadline and the serial failures in planning and execution are leading even some Gold Star parents to denounce him. 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/28/in-the-midst-of-a-white-house-breakdown-goodwin/

Read from top.

assange