Tesla CEO Elon Musk weighed in Monday on Big Tech's recent move to censor President Trump in response to the Capitol riot by pro-Trump supporters last week.

"A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech," Musk replied to a tweet of a satirical article entitled "Evil Fascist Dictator Censored and Voted Out Of Office."

President-elect Joe Biden has finally named a new CIA director, one of the final senior-level appointees for his new administration. Much to the surprise of many of us who follow these things, he named senior diplomat Williams Burns to the position. Burns is one of the most highly-respected senior U.S. diplomats of the past three decades. He has ably served presidents of both parties and is known as both a reformer and as a supporter of human rights.

Burns is currently the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an important Washington-based international affairs think tank. He served as deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama and was ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush and ambassador to Jordan under President Bill Clinton. He was instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal and spent much of his career focused on the Middle East Peace Process. Burns joined the Foreign Service in 1982.

When he made the announcement of Burns' appointment, Biden said,

"Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the word stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure. He shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect. The American people will sleep soundly with him as our next CIA Director."

The message from Biden is clear: The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA's crimes of torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel.

False social media posts swirled late Sunday that President Donald Trump in the wake of the U.S. Capitol riots had invoked the Insurrection Act, a law that allows the president to deploy the military to quell rebellion. Tweets sharing images of military personnel in Washington continued to spread Monday morning and became a trending term on Twitter. However, Trump has not invoked the law.

The law, which has existed in various forms since the time of George Washington and in its current state since the Civil War, allows the president to dispatch the military or federalize the National Guard in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.

It was last invoked in 1992 by George H.W. Bush during the unrest in Los Angeles after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King.

What is the Insurrection Act?

The Insurrection Act gives the president authority to call on military and National Guard forces to suppress an insurrection if a state requests it, if there is an insurrection that makes it impossible to enforce federal law, or if there is an insurrection or domestic violence that deprives others of their Constitutional rights. The Act also requires the president to issue a proclamation demanding those participating in the insurrection disperse.

Vaccine passports, hastily ushered in as a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, are expected to become "widely available" during the first half of 2021. "Rest assured, the nerds are on it," Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation, told CNN Business.¹

The Linux Foundation has partnered with IBM, the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and CommonPass, a digital "health passport," in order to develop vaccine credential apps that will be applicable globally.

If the initiative is successful, you'll likely be required to pull up a vaccine certificate on your phone showing when and where you were vaccinated, along with which type of vaccine, in order to get on a plane or attend an indoor event, such as a concert, for starters.

"If we're successful, you should be able to say: I've got a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole set of its own kind of health management practices ... that I use to get on a plane to an entirely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that concert that was happening indoors for which attendance was limited to those who have demonstrated that they've had the vaccine," Behlendorf said.²

In the dark hours of Sunday, the BigTech-government alliance showed its hand in its massive purge of the public square — which is what social media became in a nation of strip-malls, parking lots, and nonstop propaganda — shutting down all voices countering the constructed narrative-du-jour: that the Democratic Party stands for defending Americans' liberty against a rogue president. There have been many "shots" fired so far to kick off a civil war, but that action was an artillery blast.

Remember, the Left's playbook is to accuse their opposition of doing exactly what they are doing. And so, of course, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has launched a last-minute impeachment on grounds of the president inciting "insurrection." By a strange coincidence, reports on as-yet-still-live web channels say that the president has actually invoked the Insurrection Act against seditionists in our government, including, perhaps, Ms. Pelosi. If it is true — and I can't confirm it — then the nation has blundered into an epic political battle.

Some facts may suggest the truth of the situation: The Washington DC air-space was shut down for hours on Sunday afternoon, and 6000 national guard troops have been moved into the District of Columbia as well as other cities controlled by Democrats with Antifa/BLM mobs at their disposal. What does that signify? The news media couldn't be troubled to find out. Mr. Trump is reported to be in "a safe location." As of last week, that was Dyess Air Force Base outside Abiline, Texas. Maybe he is somewhere else now. The New York Times, WashPo and CNN would like you to think that Mr. Trump has been pounded down a rat-hole. That's one possibility. Another possibility is that the Democratic Party is unnerved and desperate about what's liable to come down on them in the days ahead, which resembles a colossal hammer in the sky.

Whether civil war is coming will depend on the degree of stoicism prevalent among the Deplorable multitudes.

I hear the sons of the city and dispossessed
Get down, get undressed
Get pretty but you and me
We got the kingdom, we got the key
We got the empire, now as then
We don't doubt, we don't take direction
Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me

Sisters of Mercy, Lucretia my Reflection

9/11 was the prelude. 1/6 is the Holy Grail.

9/11 opened the gates to the Global War on Terror (GWOT), later softened by Team Obama to the status of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) even as it was suavely expanded to the bombing, overt or covert, of seven nations.

9/11 opened the gates to the Patriot Act, whose core had already been written way back in 1994 by one Joe Biden.

1/6 opens the gate to the War on Domestic Terror and the Patriot Act from Hell, 2.0, on steroids (here is the 2019 draft ), the full 20,000 pages casually springing up from the sea like Venus, the day after, immediately ready to roll.

What is a police state? It is a state in which individuals are answerable to the police for the most routine acts of daily life. It is a state in which the police and not the law decide what is allowed. It is a state in which people have to hide their doings from their neighbours for fear of the twitching curtain and anonymous call to the police. It is a state in which ministers denounce activities of which they disapprove and the police are their compliant instruments.

These things have happened in every totalitarian state of modern times. It is an unattractive spectacle. We are fortunate to live in a country with a tradition of ministerial reticence, the rule of law and sensitive policing. We are unfortunate to live at a time of national hysteria, when that tradition has been cast aside and every one of these classic symptoms of a police state can be seen all around us.

The lockdown regulations confer powers of enforcement which no policeman should have in a society with even the most basic standards of governance. They authorise the police to give orders to members of the public if they "consider" that they are out of their homes without a "reasonable excuse". If they "consider" that two people are together without a good enough reason, they can separate them by force. They do not have to be right, or even reasonable.

Australia's acting prime minister Michael McCormack called the Capitol attack on Wednesday "unfortunate" and compared it to last year's Black Lives Matter protests, inviting widespread criticism.

Mr McCormack, who has taken over while prime minister Scott Morrison takes a week-long holiday, appeared on ABC's Radio National on Monday morning, where he was questioned about the violence in Washington and Donald Trump's possible second impeachment.

When asked about the Capitol riots, Mr McCormack said it was "similar to those race riots that we saw around the country last year".

YouTube has temporarily banned President Donald Trump's channel from uploading new videos or livestreams after earlier content violated policies for inciting violence, the company said late on Tuesday.

The channel cannot upload for a minimum of seven days - which may be extended, and earlier content had been removed, Youtube said in a statement. It did not give details about the video that prompted the move.

"After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to the Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday ruled out invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Pence said that he did not believe invoking the amendment eight days before the end of Trump's term was "in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with our Constitution."

He urged Congress to focus on President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration and to avoid impeaching Trump.