Tag: penalties

Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

By Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) In 1883, Alfred Thayer Mahan laid out the brutal truth of global power: Whoever rules the waves rules the world. He wasn’t just talking about fleets of warships. He was talking about chokepoints—the narrow passages through which the vast majority of the world’s trade must pass. Control them, and you don’t need to launch an invasion. You can starve an economy and restrict military sealift without ever firing a shot.

Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

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Trump orders military to plan invasion of Panama to seize canal: report

US Seizing Panama & Greenland Aimed at China (archived)

Stranglehold: The Context, Conduct and Consequences of an American Naval Blockade of China

Offshore Control: A Proposed Strategy for an Unlikely Conflict

Italian Legislators Seek To Secure Their Existence And Future For Italian Children By Outlawing English Use By Citizens

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Betweens.

Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision to return Italy to its nationalistic roots.

Italian Legislators Seek To Secure Their Existence And Future For Italian Children By Outlawing English Use By Citizens

Reminds me of somewhere else.

Bill to Ban Tik Tok Would Give Government Sweeping Powers to Crackdown on Tech

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Bill to Ban Tik Tok Would Give Government Sweeping Powers to Crackdown on Tech

A person who violates the act could be fined up to $1 million or punished with up to 20 years in prison. The broad and vague definitions in the legislation caused many to wonder if people could be handed such harsh punishments for using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to get around future government censorship that could come as a result of the bill.

A spokesperson for Warner insisted that the legislation wasn’t designed to target individual users and pointed to the language that says someone “must be engaged in ‘sabotage or subversion’ of American communications technology products and services, creating ‘catastrophic effects’ on US critical infrastructure, or ‘interfering in, or altering the result’ of a federal election, in order to be eligible for any kind of criminal penalty.”

But the bill will give the Commerce Secretary the authority to deem what is considered “sabotage or subversion” or any of the other threats listed above. The legislation has grave implications for civil liberties and could be used against any individuals or tech and media companies the Biden administration, or any future administration would want to target.

Previously:

Tik-Tok bills could dangerously expand national security state

Peace activist sentenced for criticizing German war policy in Ukraine

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The Berlin-Tiergarten District Court sentenced peace activist Heinrich Bücker in January for speaking out in public against Germany’s war policy in Ukraine. The verdict is a massive attack on the basic democratic rights of freedom of speech and assembly. It is reminiscent of the persecution of anti-militarists in the Weimar Republic who—like Carl von Ossietzky—opposed the rearmament of the Reichswehr (armed forces).

Peace activist sentenced for criticizing German war policy in Ukraine

H/T: George Galloway

Related:

Conviction for a commemorative speech for the attack on the USSR against Heinrich Bücker, Coop Anti-War cafe Berlin (in German)

Netanyahu Says US Must ‘Reaffirm’ Alliance With Saudi Arabia + More [Abraham Accords]

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Netanyahu Says US Must ‘Reaffirm’ Alliance With Saudi Arabia

The incoming prime minister said that he wants to build on the Abraham Accords, which his former government signed in 2020 to establish diplomatic ties with Bahrain and the UAE. Netanyahu said it’s “up to the leadership of Saudi Arabia if they want to partake in this effort.”

Saudi officials recently reaffirmed that they seek a Palestinian state as a precondition for normalizing with Israel. But in order to form a coalition government, Netanyahu gave Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, an ultranationalist settler, sweeping powers over the West Bank.

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