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It's Wednesday, October 9th.
Tonight: Ever since Kamala Harris was imposed on the Democratic Party and then the American public without a single vote being cast for her – other than the only votes that actually matter, namely, Obama-led Democratic elites acting in secret – her campaign has been most notable for its deliberate and continuous avoidance of taking a single substantive position on pretty much anything other than abortion, which she favors, and LGBT, whom she deeply loves – a fantastic ally. Other than that, there's really no substance at all. For more than a month, her website was completely devoid of any Issues page, and, finally, when one was added, it was more clichéd than a Stephen Colbert monologue about Donald Trump.
It's therefore unsurprising that Kamala – as she finally decided to submit to a media tour, albeit in the most friendly and adoring venues possible – continues to be unable to articulate a single substantive view that she maintains about virtually any policy issue. In fact, over several successive programs on which she appeared over the weekend, she was repeatedly asked by the most sympathetic interviewers possible the same completely predictable question: what would you have done differently or what would you do differently than Joe Biden, the barely sentient and highly unpopular incumbent under whose administration she serves? After all, her whole campaign is based on turning the page and changing. So, the obvious question is: What do you mean change from Joe Biden? In what way?
Despite the utter simplicity and complete predictability of this most basic question, she simply could not provide any coherent answer yet again displaying the complete emptiness that characterizes her political trajectory and her presidential campaign and that has squandered much of the goodwill that she compiled when she emerged as an alternative to two eighty-year-old men whom the public has long been saying was a choice they disliked.
Like her campaign, Kamala is a completely empty vessel of ideas, full of ambition and careers to be sure, but who has zero core or stable views, which became even more visible than ever over this weekend, which was intended to give the public some greater sense of who she is but ended up doing the opposite.
Then: five weeks ago, a single Brazilian Supreme Court justice notorious around the world for being an authoritarian censor, decreed that you Elon Musk’s X shall be banned from Brazil due primarily to the platform's refusal to continue to comply with a mountain of censorship orders that routinely emanate from that court and which contain no justifying explanation about why these accounts have to be banned, let alone any due process for anyone to understand or contest it. At the time, Musk declared that he would rather lose access to a market even as large and lucrative as Brazil if the only price for admission there was unjustly carrying out illegal censorship orders. X Brazil has had its ban for five weeks now. And the only people who could access it were ones willing to risk using a VPN, since the judge also said that using a VPN is basically illegal and would subject you to a $ 9,000-a-day fine for every day you've used it, which is higher than the median Brazilian income. The problem for Musk became that the longer access inaccessibility to the Brazilian market went on, the more harm for the company piled up. X had massive fines imposed on it, millions and millions of dollars. The censorship judge froze the assets of a completely separate company, Space X, and took its money out of the Space X Bank to pay for X's fines, X lost huge ad revenue it desperately needed, given how much it's in debt to its various creditors, and millions of X users in Brazil migrated to competitors such as Blue Sky and Threads. The longer the ban went on, the more likely that migration was to be permanent.
So, two weeks ago, X began stating to these Brazilian courts that it would reverse itself and comply with all demands in Brazil, not just from now on, but retrospectively as well. To prove that it meant it, it started banning all of the accounts this judge had censored, including the accounts on X of all elected officials. It paid all the fines imposed on X, millions of dollars and a jump through every other hoop that had been set up for it, in part to humiliate X as a condition for getting back to Brazil. All of this was done last week. X had complied with every demand by the Brazilian courts on purpose and created some excuse as to why X couldn't come back online last week, namely that they paid their fines to the round judicial account and waited until this week, in fact, today, to restore X. One might suggest that the delay was due to the fact that there was a huge midterm election held last Sunday in all of Brazil and X was unavailable for it as a result of that delay.
Some are depicting X's return to Brazil as some sort of ringing victory for free speech that must triumphed over the authoritarian centers in Brazil, and that it was Brazil that capitulated but the exact opposite is actually true. Brazil forced X into complete submission and therefore this is one more victory for the growing state censorship regime and the consequences of that victory in Brazil, just like the one in France when they arrested Pavel Durov of Telegram, are already spreading. We're going to show you all about that ban.
When the Nord Stream II pipeline, connecting Russia and Germany, was exploded under the ocean in late 2022, in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, that was not only one of the worst incidents of industrial terrorism in history, but it was also one of the worst environmental disasters in decades, as massive amounts of gas leaked out from the destroyed pipeline at the bottom of the sea into the ocean for months at a time.
Parts of the U.S. government and its media allies, in the face of the obvious question of who did that, hilariously tried to suggest that it was Russia, which for some reason decided to blow up its own pipeline, a pipeline that it built and that is central to its plans for economic growth by selling cheap natural gas to Western Europe. Yet, a new report out of Northern Europe this week bolsters what Seymour Hersh and others had reported for a long time and which was, in any event, quite self-evident, namely that the United States, not Russia, the United States and its key allies in Ukraine, played the significant role, if not the leading role, in this act of industrial sabotage. And we'll tell you about this new evidence and remind you of just how extreme the propaganda was that they actually tried to convince people that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
