Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

It’s a particularly ugly Monday as many will be nursing those Super Bowl hangovers today.

The Humbling Of Emmanuel Macron

By Justin Raimondo

French President Macron, a fanatic environmentalist, decided to revise the fuel tax code so that the small urban cars beloved by his circle had their tax reduced, while fuel for trucks and more industrial uses went up as much as 30%. It was a deliberate insult to the rural working poor who must drive long distances.

Macron went out of his way to convey his contempt for the rural voters who did not vote for him. The original reduction was actually intended for long-distance fuel, but Macron changed it around at the last minute to punish this use.

The French “Deplorables” reacted swiftly and not with the usual threat to strike: they simply started an insurrection. No preliminaries. They call themselves Yellow Vests referencing the safety vests required by French law of all motorists to signal emergency: yes, they declare: there IS an emergency going on!

We are continually told the rebels are “Right wing” – the evidence being opposition to taxes, yet they have no aversion to receiving government largesse-provided it’s distributed fairly.

I would remind you of the context in which all this happened: the aftermath of Macron’s anti-nationalist reaction to Trump’s America First doctrine.

Read the entire article HERE.

Totalitarianism: Buying A Hammer Now Makes You A Terrorist In The UK

By Mac Slavo

If you need a hammer for any reason, the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism policing unit will consider you a potential terrorist. They are also asking that anyone who sees someone doing something suspicious, like purchasing a hammer, to report it to the enforcers.

Buying a hammer is suspicious and is potentially an indicator of criminal activity according to the Tweet below posted by the U.K. Counter Terrorism Policing office.

It’s hard to see in the Twitter photo, but the guy looking at the hammer also has a few knives in his shopping basket. That’s apparently supposed to be a context clue that he’s maybe a very bad person, if not a terrorist. The U.K. has a borderline-comical campaign going on trying to convince young people not to carry knives around. According to Reason, there’s actually a very logically and likely explanation for needing some knives and one hammer. The man might be a chef doing some work in his restaurant, but the point of this ad campaign is that they actually don’t want you to think of the most likely explanation. They want you to be suspicious and live your life in fear of other’s everyday activities. Complete with the scary “Life Has No Rewind Button” motto. Reason further pointed out that the entire video ad is actually a lot more sinister; not because it’s eerie at all, but it’s a bit horrifying what the UK counter-terrorism police demand you feel is “suspicious” behavior: like taking out the trash.

Read the entire article HERE.

Super Bowl Ads Lecture America On Girl Power, Wind Power And Objectifying Mermaids

Via The Daily Caller

Super Bowl advertisers used the massive platform to lecture Americans on a number of topics — from using clean energy and respecting the media to the proper treatment of mermaids in the age of #MeToo.

CBS, the network that hosted the big game, promoted “girl power” with an ad about girls playing football — and sponsor Budweiser took the time to note that the world-famous St. Louis-based company is now brewing its signature beers with wind power.

Google advertised its translation feature with an ad focused mainly on how the ability to understand each other can bring people closer together. The image it showed when talking about how some language can be hurtful or divisive — police officers in riot gear at a protest — did not go unnoticed.

Read the entire article HERE.

Roger Stone Names CNN Journalist Who He Suspects Tipped Network Off to Raid

Via Big League Politics

Saturday evening, Big League Politics’ Luke Rohlfing caught up with Roger Stone to discuss a variety of topics, including who Stone thinks tipped CNN off to the FBI raid at his Florida home.

“I think Josh Campbell of CNN, who’s a former special assistant to James Comey, and I think he should be questioned under oath by the Senate Judiciary Committee to find out how it is possible, because we now know that CNN’s truck arrived roughly 30 minutes before the FBI strike force,” Stone said. “I’m hopeful that Senator Graham will get to the bottom of that, because since they were executing a search warrant, the leak of that search warrant in advance violates the law.”

Stone also discussed the effect the raid has had on his family, particularly his wife.

“She’s traumatized, as you might expect,” Stone said of the raid. “She’s not guilty of any crime, but she was rousted from the house. She’s not allowed to use her cell phone all day. She’s not allowed to even go in the bathroom without be watched. She cannot go to the bathroom without being observed. Yet she’s not accused of any crime. Seems to me to be a violation of her Fourth Amendment rights.”

“They took her computers,” Stone continued. “They took her electronic devices. This is an extraordinarily police-state oriented overreach, but I think it’s backfired very badly on Robert Mueller and the deep state.”

Read the entire article HERE.

NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party

By Glenn Greenwald

To justify its claim that Tulsi Gabbard is the Kremlin’s candidate, NBC stated: “analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted ‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

What NBC – amazingly – concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: that same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.’”

That fraud was overseen by New Knowledge’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan. At the same time Morgan was fabricating Russian troll accounts and using them to create a fraudulent appearance that Putin was trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate, he was exploiting his social media “expertise” to claim that Russians were interfering in the Alabama Senate election. In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled.

Read the entire article HERE.

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