Month: June 2022

Putin’s America

I am not an American and I don’t live in America. This gives me the advantage of the outsider’s view because It is sometimes very hard to see the obvious when you are immersed in a culture or any institution for that matter.

With this outsider perspective I look at the current attacks on democracy in America. These attacks are by no means exclusive to America but they are more pronounced in America because in contrast to other countries they mark such a deviation from America’s founding principles and ideas that they just are more noticeable than anywhere else.

For example, you wouldn’t be surprised or shocked to see the Chinese goverment locking its citizens in their homes but you would be shocked and surprised to see it happening in Australia.
China is a country that has never known democracy in its long history which spans millenia. It was either ruled by emperors or by communist dictators while Australia is a country that was viewed until very recently as a liberal Western democracy.

Naturally, because of man’s flawed nature and because of man’s limitations everything man creates is flawed and imperfect.
However, of all the countries in the world, imperfect and flawed as it is, America was the best when it comes to individual rights and liberty and it was among the best when it comes to the rule of law. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

America resembles in more than one aspect Putin’s Russsia. The resemblance goes so far that I chose the provocative title “Putin’s America”.
The weaponization of the state apparatus, especially the intelligence apparatus against the political or ideological opposition, the control over the media, the censorship and selective enforcement of the laws based on political calculations has reached in America a level that is not much different from Putin’s Russia, if we exclude the poisoning and killing of political opponents.

In America many of the rioters of 1/6/2021 are still imprisoned under appalling conditions without a trial. You may say that they deserve it but in a democratic country, governed by the rule of law, even terrorists, child rapists and traitors have the right to a trial which establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that they committed the crimes of which they are accused.

The 1/6 hearings which are illegitimate and which are done in illegal ways are the American version of Stalin’s show trials and kangaroo courts and they are the culmination of a long process which started under Obama when the IRS was weaponized to go after the tea party and when intelligence services, the department of justice and law enforcement were used to spy illegally on the Trump campaign and on Trump himself.

Obama’s goverment in collusion with the DNC used a completely bogus story made up of whole cloth (the Steel dossier) to justify the spying on Trump and on persons in his orbit both before and after the presidential election. The intelligence apparatus leaked disinformation to a complicit media which was more than willing to spread it and “enhance” it with their own conjecture, wild conspiracy theories and downright lies.

All this was done to pressure, discredit, sabotage, if possible topple Trump and, more importantly, obstruct the implementation of his agenda by his administration as well as to force a bogus special investigation upon Trump, further impeding the goverment’s business. The Mueller investigation turned out to be a big nothingburger which nevertheless had done the damage it was intended to do.

This weaponization of the intelligence apparatus against the political opposition is precisely the thing you would expect to see in Putin’s Russia but not in a constitutional republic like the USA. Putin, a former KGB agent, was brought to power with the help of the KGB successor, the FSB, and he had never any qualms about using the intelligence services to go after his political opponents.

In Biden’s America things have gotten even worse. The FBI is used to go after and to intimidate political opponents like mothers who are expressing their speech too loudly and too forcefully in school board meetings. The Biden admin demanded censorship from the social media which were more than willing to implement this censorship for their own reasons but also because in exchange for being allowed to make money like pirates, especially during the pandemic at the expense of small businesses, the big tech giants have to censor in favor of the goverment under the guise of fighting misinformation.

Again, this reminds me of Putin’s Russia where oligarchs are allowed to get filthy rich by plundering the country’s resources but in return they have to act as Putin wishes.
The latest attempt to crush free speech was the attempt to launch a Disinformation Governance Board to combat “misinformation.” aka a mistry of truth.
Also, under the Biden administration the FBI spied on 3.3 million Americans without warrant. You can bet your bottom dollar that the collected information will be weaponized for political ends.

Just like in Putin’s Russia the laws are selectively enforced by the Biden administration. Never mind that it enforces only the laws it wants to enforce and that it refuses to enforce other laws like immigration laws. It enforces some laws only against persons it wants to target politically. Political violence from the Left is ignored while misdemeanors by the political Right are punished with the full force of the law as if they were acts of terrorism.

The 1/6 hearings are reminiscent of the case against Alexei Navalny, the leader of the opposition against Putin. The way the (un)Democrats follow Putin’s text book is uncanny. Just as Navalny was designated an extremist by the Moscow prosecutor, the Democrats try to do the same with Trump and his supporters. When Navalny barely survived a poisoning with a nerve agent, Putin went ahead with plan B and put him into jail.

This is precisely what the Democrats want to do with Trump. Like Putin, they want to take out their most dangerous political enemy by simply putting him into jail or if that fails to at least convict him of a crime so that he can never run for President again.

Now, some may say that the United States is still a constitutional republic. On paper, yes but it doesn’t matter what you call yourself. It only matters what you really are.
On paper Russia is a democracy but in truth it is a dictatorship. Putin calls it a “managed democracy”. By using the intelligence services, law enforcement and the courts to take out political opponents and by completely controlling the media, Putin has turned Russia into anything but a democracy.
Remember that communist/socialist East Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic and that the brutal North Korean dictatorship calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As I said, the problem of antidemocratic forces gaining strength is not exclusive to America. In some European countries, Australia and New Zealand it’s much worse.
In Europe, though, the rapid erosion of democracy is not so much done trough the intelligence apparatus but through other means. However, this is too big of a topic for one post.
Suffice it to say that Germany has launched the equivalent of the “ministry of truth” that the Biden administration wanted to launch.

Democracy is unter attack everywhere and although I’m not willing to give up hope and give up the fight here in Europe, it is also true that democracy has a far better chance of survival in America because the spirit of liberty is still stronger there, much stronger than in Europe.

Note: When I’m talking about democracy I’m talking about all kinds of Western democracies, including the American constitutional republic.
What I mean is goverment of the people, by the people and for the people with inalienable rights for the individual.

Anyway, America has still a good chance of turning from Putin’s America into Washington’s America again.

Diabetes, Doctors And Dogma

Today I want to share a video that might change your life.
If you are from the USA you have a very good chance of falling within the 50% of the population who have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Dr. Sarah Hallberg explains in this TEDx-talk how you can REVERSE diabetes to the point where you don’t need no more medication by simply changing your diet.

No, its not voodoo or some scam. In a nutshell, you have to adopt a low carb diet by replacing carbs with FAT. Dr. Hallberg gives a very plausible explanation. While carbs increase the glucose in your blood sharply and protein raises the glucose level only moderately, fats raise the glucose level almost not at all. Therefore, the cause of the problem is avoided altogether. Even if you have no diabetes or pre-diabetes you can avoid developing type 2 diabetes by changing your diet.

Why then have you never heared of this diet? Why then does the ADA recommend a carb intake of 40 to 65 grams per meal?
Dr. Hallberg gives a refreshingly honest answer. Aside from the usual resistance to change the other big reasons are diverse agendas, conflicting interests and money.

Ah, those where the days when doctors could openly talk about these things without being burned at the stake as heretics and science deniers. Those were the wonderful days when they were not ostracized and character assassinated for speaking the simple truth that science and medicine are done by flawed humans with less than noble agendas.

Those were the days when real scientists and real doctors were not thrown into the social media gulag for diverging from the prevalent orthodoxy. Those were the days when they were not branded as conspiracy theorists for failing to worship science as a religion which is not to be questioned. Those were the days when fake scientists like Fauci were not allowed to proclaim their rapidly changing opinions in pope-like fashion ex cathedra as infallible truths.

What a difference seven years make (video is from 2015).
Rest assured that if this video was about the wuhan virus it wouldn’t stay on youtube and Dr. Hallberg wouldn’t be invited to TED in the first place.