UK Should Revisit 5G Ban Now Trump is Defeated, Says Huawei (theguardian.com) 151
AmiMoJo writes: The UK should revisit its decision to ban the Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei from its 5G network in the post-Trump era and recognise that it will worsen England's north-south divide, the vice-president of Huawei has told the Guardian. Victor Zhang's intervention comes as Boris Johnson prepared on Monday to meet the Northern Research Group, the lobby group of Conservative MPs determined to turn the prime minister's levelling up agenda into a reality. Zhang urged the UK to stay true to its roots as the birthplace of the first Industrial Revolution, saying the government could not afford to fall behind in the 5G revolution. In July the UK government, after pressure from the Trump administration, reversed a plan to let Huawei be a controlled 5G supplier, and instead ordered Huawei equipment be stripped out of the country's 5G networks by 2027. Ministers at the time said the reversal was not caused by a new security services analysis of the security threat posed by Huawei, but by the Trump administration's decision to block US conductors being used by Huawei. Zhang said: "The decision is going to have a huge economic impact on the UK. The UK wants to see a balance of investment between London, the south-east, the Midlands and the north of England. World-class connectivity is crucial to this objective, and without that it is very difficult to close the gap in the economic imbalance in the UK."
Leave it to the CCP (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave it to the CCP to not waste any time.
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They are right though. The US hasn't provided any real evidence, certainly none that suggests US gear is any better. And now we are about to crash out of the EU with at best an extremely bad trade deal we can't be choosy. We need to keep investment and development up, pushing back 5G by years and wasting money ripping out working equipment is just daft.
Re:Leave it to the CCP (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that, neither do you. Frankly I don't care because I find that most of what China does in terms of high tech involves theft; I've seen it first hand but that's another discussion.
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Leave it to the CCP to not waste any time.
Well only a complete moron would waste time. When there are literally billons of dollars on the line you jump in quick regardless of whether you're the CCP or a lovely capitalist home grown American company. Except since this is China there's probably the incentive not to be suddenly disappeared also to help shape your priorities.
What about Cisco? (Score:2)
The ban did seem more like something we would imagine coming out of Beijing, rather than Washington, and likely is not a good precedent. At the same time, given China's history with industrial espionage there may well be good cause, but why stop with Chinese base corporations?
One thing we should not is that Cisco equipment [reuters.com] had become a target for the CIA, to install espionage code, without the apparent knowledge of Cisco. In this scenario, we could make the assumption that Cisco was in on the game, but chos
And China Joe says... (Score:3, Insightful)
"...yes sir, how high sir?"
I expect existing trade deals will be renegotiated within the next 12-24 months to eliminate the national security exceptions that allowed Trump to impose tariffs. Interfering with the establishment like that is intolerable.
Re:And China Joe says... (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt it. It was Obama's administration that ZTE got in hot water over and got charged the largest fine. I do give the Trump administration kudos for following up a year later with more severe penalties for not adhering to the prior terms. But also pooh-pooh it for mixing the topic into the trade negotiations which basically nicked the legitimacy of the investigation.
I don't see Bidens administration being any less leniant on China. The only diff I see between the two camps is Trump's is willing to go at it alone and take the hit on the effectiveness of the confrontation. While Biden will gather international partners to go at it together & effectively at the potential cost of not doing it alone if no consensus is reached.
I lean toward Bidens policy because Trumps' leads to isolationism and gradual abandonment of allies... like Korea and Japan here. That loss of soft power does damage in other areas & topics. Also, when did Free Trade become a Democrat thing? Free Trade, Trade Deals, International Collalitions, etc... was always a Republican thing w/ Dems seeking more domestic protectionist measures and barries to international competition. If free trade is a Dem thing now, that sucks, because I don't want to switch to them...
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One thing a long term decline of US power may do is force countries like Japan and South Korea to heavily arm themselves. Watch pacifist clauses in the Japanese constitution either be removed or interpreted out of existence. A similar process may start to occur in Europe as well. And let's not forget that by the end of the Second World War, the US Navy had replaced the Royal Navy as the chief protector of Marine Law, but if the US is truly bound and determined to walk away from that role, we might as well k
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Yes. As I've noted for 5 years now, Trump really is not a conservative or traditional Republican. To which I've been told that all past Republicans before 2016 were merely RINOs. Trump rode a wave of populism, not conservatism. The policies are shallow, no need to have comprehensive planning or explaining foreign trade to his base, because he had them at "lock her up!"
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Totally agree. I think Trump was a pure Democrate till a black man took office and he couldn't stand being on that side. I would say the greatest achievement of Trump is taking on and destroying the Republican party. Keep in mind that there were 16 candidates running against him with the backing of the RNC. They mocked him and he mocked them back.
In the end he didn't just beat them, but completely wiped the floor with them. Facing oblivion, the Republicans clearly decided to join the Trump party and Do
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There is a new trade deal in Asia already completed, with the US not a participant. I don't think the new administration is going to easily shoehorn themselves into it. The US will be left as an outsider.
Boy, it really is a great thing that we had such an amazing deal maker in office, winning so many deals that we'd be tired of winning. Too bad for the farmers who lost their big China markets, but they'll surely be thanking Trump as they sign their foreclosure papers.
This was never about Trump (Score:5, Interesting)
I would expect Biden to uphold the US ban and the official US recommendations for other countries as well.
Australia had also chosen to disallow Huawei in their networks before speaking to the US about it.
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I wouldn't expect Biden to just drop the ban, but I could see him maybe walking back on it some with a lot of caveats. Doing something like the EU: demanding additional security mea
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he is left of Biden
No. There might be a few issues to which this could maybe apply, but it's very hard to believe that Biden would back Brexit.
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Yeah but Denis Skinner backed Brexit and it is hard to be any further left that him without about being Lenin or Karl Marx.
I watched and interview and the reason he gave was because under EU competition/level playing field you cannot nationalise industries any more and he wanted a Labour government to do just that. Trains is special you can renationalize by not renewing any of the franchises. However they all went bust anyway with COVID-19 LOL.
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before speaking to the US
Citation needed. Our friends down in the 51st State of America are not known for being that forward thinking on intelligence, especially considering their previously cozy relationship with the regime.
And in somewhat comical but non related news, in that 51st State of America Trump managed to screw up the postal system so bad that my mail in ballot arrived 2 weeks after the election for QLD government was over. :-)
This is why you make friends (Score:3, Insightful)
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There's a helluva lot of Conservative judges in the Federal courts, right up to the Supreme Court itself, because of Trump. His executive legacy may be undone, to some extent, but unless the Dems flip the Senate, Republicans will still be in a position to hold off any significant legislative changes. And the Republicans still have a sizable Trump base that they will have to please for years to come. Biden's presidency, at least on some files, is going to be a whole lot of gridlock. But maybe just not having
The ban makes sense, despite Trump being in favor (Score:2)
Though I can imagine stupid decisions being made by reactionaries, this ban should continue. This is a serious legitimate threat from China and needs to be thwarted. An entire extra computer can be squeezed onto the chip to do anything it wants with all the signals being passed through, and there is almost no way to stop or detect this other than just not buying the chips at all, and making sure that all chips are manufactured under complete supply-chain control from plans and code that are open sourced.
It
Huawei have "Delusions of Google"... (Score:3)
Reverse this and think about the reaction that there would be: what if a British company turned around and told the Chinese government that they had to reverse a previous decision made, just because of a change in leadership in a third nation...
I have a feeling that the Chinese Government would tell that hypothetical British company to fsck off, which is exactly what the British government should tell Huawei. Especially givern the Chinese government's tendency to sanction widespread intellectual property theft from the west. [theguardian.com]
The Guardian is stupid (Score:2)
If Britain needs a specific Chinese company to diminish the North-South divide, maybe it's a wake-up call that her sources are not diversified; that it relies on an adversary to fill its domestic need; that it lost its high tech industry. The solution is not the attempt to reconsider the ban—it is to learn a lesson and go from there. The Guardian is stupid and and they'd sell Britain to China in a heartbeat
Don't worry they'll revisit it (Score:3)
so...suddenly China is... (Score:2)
a free and open society? With free elections and human rights and no longer stealing the intellectual property of other nations while planning global domination?
Wow. I had no idea that Trump being in office CAUSED China to persecute anybody with the wrong political views. I did not understand that it was apparently Trump that made China into a mono-racial supremacist expansionist nation which claims to be Communist but actually is Fascist and is armed with nuclear weapons (unlike the previous racist fascist
Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering China's social credit score and their move to cashless, they certainly are making strong moves towards being a surveillance state.
Remember, in China, there is no real difference between corporations and government. Having equipment for such vital communications be crafted and unauditable by China is stupid.
You know basically all our electronics (Score:5, Insightful)
It just seems silly to me. The ship of "China's an oppressive regime and we should be afraid of them making all our stuff" has sailed, circumnavigated the globe and come back ladened with exotic spices. We want cheap stuff more than we want human rights.
Heck, every time you fill up your tank for $2.13 cents (current average, and equivalent to $1.32/gallon in 1998) you can thank children in Afghanistan and their fear of skies. [reliefweb.int]. Oh and don't forget your wife's diamond engagement ring.
I'm not trying to rag on you, but I do wonder what the real reason is we're going after Huawei. My guess is this is just trade negotiations.
What it is not is a concern for our safety and security. The 43 aircraft carriers we have does that. We're literally the only country on earth with a modern navy.
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That's exactly what we're doing though (Score:2)
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We shouldn't turn a blind eye to all that's going on unless we want our entire way of life so completely undermined that it just falls apart from the inside..
That better?
Recognizing the past is Step 1; Step 2 is 'don't do it anymore'.
Do not stare into aperture with remaining good eye
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> What it is not is a concern for our safety and security. The 43 aircraft carriers we have does that. We're literally the only country on earth with a modern navy
the CCP sought to destroy its enemies from within with soft power. your 43 aircraft carriers is not going to do you any good if the operators are corrupted by a foreign power.
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And the US can give every neighbour china is trying to steal land and ocean from, weapon systems which can trivially sink their navies as well ... and china is building a lot of ships.
Don't confuse restraint for weakness ... as Trump showed, the US was never weak, it just showed a ridiculous and often self damaging amount of restraint.
China isn't building Aircraft carriers (Score:2)
Look up the Belt & Road Initiative. China's taking over Africa with loans. They're doing the shit we thought Japan was going to do in Cyberpunk novels from the 80s.
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When it comes to surveillance this is true of America too, or have we all forgotten prism?
How about using some neutral place you can trust like switzerland? Oh wait...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
if its not open hardware and software, its spying for someone
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Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
The same can be said of America.
American corporations own much of the government. The NSA 0wns the corporations. Facebook provides your social credit score, along with Equifax which provides your financial credit score. Americans gleefully install surveillance devices in their homes like "Alexa" and "Windows 10".
Fortunately we don't have to actually trust equipment that much. Just assume it's all backdoored and build your network accordingly. Even if it isn't chances are there are bugs in the firmware that the NSA knows about and you don't.
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Oh I don't think we should just let them do it. But banning Huawei is not how we gain any influence, or avoid screwing ourselves.
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Well to be clear then I'm saying we can apply the same standards to Huawei as we do other companies. For example no products made with forced labour. Then there is a financial incentive to not use forced labour and to be open and transparent about where products are manufactured.
VW recently had this when investigations found that some of its car parts were possibly made with forced labour in China. Their response was less than stellar and I think we should do more to both investigate and enforce the rules.
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Okay, but in that case whose network hardware can we trust? Cisco is a front for the NSA, as are all American companies. Maybe Japanese gear, they make some decent stuff.
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Considering China's social credit score and their move to cashless, they certainly are making strong moves towards being a surveillance state.
Not saying "trust China", but they do have some good reasons for wanting to monitor transactions. Only 2% of Chinese pay income tax according to The Economist, when it should be 15%. Tax evasion is rampant - they are worse than the Greeks!
https://www.economist.com/chin... [economist.com]
Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason to believe that China plans to use its dominance[...]
Well, only if you are willing to dismiss all other signals. Like a totalitarian regime. Human rights. The Hong Kong situation. The difficulties running foreign businesses in China. The great firewall.
And while huawei gets so much attention that they are unlikely to incorporate spy hard- and software now, its anything but unlikely they would do that in the future. Having the world full of phone-home 5G networking equipment sounds like a fine goal to Chinese authorities to me. And they proven they can take on a lot of engineering challenges. Custom obfuscated silicon is only a minor challenge in that context and maybe not even needed seeing how we deal with management software and network connectivity in 2020.
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You forgot Tibet and Inner Mongolia. But Western media doesn't like to talk about those.
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Well, only if you are willing to dismiss all other signals. Like a totalitarian regime. Human rights. The Hong Kong situation. The difficulties running foreign businesses in China. The great firewall.
I mean no one else in the west gives a shit about that, so why should the UK? Actually at least most of the west (minus the USA) condemn the Hong Kong situation, but a foreign government offing its own citizens ranks quite low compared to money and short term jobs.
Re: The Ban was totally absurd (Score:2)
s/incorporate/activate/
As long as it's not activated, there's very little risk of it being detected, which is the only worry they'd logically have... I'm not saying they have it, not that they don't, but if being scrutinized is a worry, they will still carry on with the design in of spyware.
Re: The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Informative)
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And proceeded to produce better products than both... Ouch. That's the real problem here. Huawei got to where they got through theft and deception but the end result is that they currently dominate the technology field in 5G. That's fundamentally what this is about in the first place, most of the west couldn't compete.
Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there is, it's what dictators typically do. Why should we believe Xi is different from any other dictator? What sets him apart?
Even the US gov't has used US-based private companies to spy (not necessarily with the CEO knowing). Thus, we should expect ANY superpower to do such, and China is becoming a super-power. At least in the US there is a degree of checks and balances and openness that often exposes bad deeds. China lacks that.
The Ban was totally reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
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Really? There's no proof after 50 years worth of Intellectual Property Infringement that the Chinese Government has a significant interest in spying to manipulate markets?
Where have you been?
Re:Laughing MFAO!! (Score:5, Funny)
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The fact that Trump was ever the president
That's enough.
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I mean you jest, but have you seen Boris Johnson? The resemblance to Trump is uncanny, even after you mute both their audios.
Re:Laughing MFAO!! (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't cheat the vote and expect the fraudulent results to be allowed to stand.
In turn, that means, if they vote does indeed stand after all lawsuits are either thrown out or decided on merit, the vote wasn't cheated on.
I guess, we wait and see and let the courts do their work.
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Now that Trump is defeated?
Let's call it a draw. [imgflip.com]
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Re:The Ban was totally absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Also there's at least a couple users here who claim to be from Western countries, but who lived in China for a while (work related, I'd guess) who claim that it's totally different from literally everything you hear; my take on those few is that (1) they were treated totally differently because they weren't Chinese/Chinese citizens, i.e. don't kill the Western geese who lay the golden eggs, or (2) they're just another flavor of Chinese operatives, using a different set of tactics to spread pro-ChiCom propaganda.
May sound outlandish to you, but I'm no rampant conspiracy theorist, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable set of possible assumptions.
That, and there are people who just plain don't trust their own (Western) government, and like a Missouri mule, will stubbornly pull in the opposite direction that their own government and news services are pulling them.
For my part I find the idea that all the nasty stuff I hear and see in the news being fabricated to be what's absurd. The current Chinese regime is expansionist, and has little-to-no regard for freedom of speech/expression, basic civil rights, and even basic human rights, and that's just what we know about.
Trusting the untrustable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yours seemed to be the most substantive of the comments that mentioned "trust". Though I don't fully agree with you, I still think you deserved some sort of favorable moderation.
Rather than be disagreeable, I'll explain why I personally trust Huawei equipment more than most brands. It's precisely because no one trusts China. That means ALL of the security experts are studying Huawei's devices. Any funny business on a wholesale level is going to get detected at some point and would hurt sales. Ergo Huawei actually has strong motivations to produce secure devices and insofar as the Chinese government wants Huawei to earn money from the foreigners, it's also in their interest not to meddle.
Having said that, I think there are two major areas of threat. One is with features that are designed to support post-sale intrusions. For example, extra volatile memory that could be used to hold malware that would vanish whenever a device is powered down (and possibly moved to a site for investigation). The other threat is retail funny business, though the first example that comes to mind involves Cisco. Remember when they intercepted the router shipments to certain customers to replace them with special versions?
But right now I think the real threat from China appears to be their readiness to deal with a zombie apocalypse scenario. Wearing a mask isn't a political problem in China because they actually controlled the disease.
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Largely concurrence, but reading The Perfect Weapon and remembered the source code thing, which is important. It is quite reasonable to believe that the Chinese intelligence agencies have the source code for all of Huawei's devices and probably can detect bugs the Huawei people don't know about. Cuts both ways, however. Ditto every American company and the American intelligence agencies. And of course vice versa, with the Chinese trying to obtain or steal the source code from American companies, etc.
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This is Britain, get it? They have other friends than you.
Excluding Japan, and maybe New Zealand, name some please.
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I think most reasonable people, whatever their sentiments, know that Biden will be elected President by the majority of Electors. China isn't doing anything that Fox News didn't do within three or four days of the election; after all Fox News called Arizona days before the New York Times did.
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And amazingly, Fox is losing a lot of viewers over that. Not the majority of course, but the true believers in Trump are leaving to the bizarre fantasy news outlets like OANN or newsmax. Fox sticks with it's core bias of conservative views, but Trump really wasn't a conservative. Or at least Fox can read the writing on the wall, if they want to be a news organization instead of being a Trump brand mouthpiece, it needs to keep one finger on the truth in the political game of Twister(tm).
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Don't you find it odd that Republicans are not confident in their own election's processes? You know the ones they designed and controlled? Don't you consider it incompetence that they couldn't even design such processes properly in the first place to contain the "most basic level of election integrity"?
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Republicans aren't the investors in Dominion software.
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Are you sure? Because its used in a lot of red states. Including Georgia and it couldn't edge the Dems out for the two Senate seats? How about all those red states in the middle of the US... a lot of those use Dominion too. I guess the opposition is so sneaky and smart that they just wiggle their way into Republican strongholds but... thankfully are so incompetent that they can't figure out how to bump their side by 1- 2%?
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Just because someone you don't like states a fact does not invalidate the fact. Otherwise you would have to concede that 2+2 can never be 4, as you would find that in a chinese textbook.
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..reelection fund
Don't you mean Trump's legal defense fund? xD
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I thought we were an autonomous collective?
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You're fooling yourself! We're living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes...
Re: China calling it, huh? (Score:2)
There you go, bringing class into it!
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So Trump is running down the field with the ball. He trips and falls. Seconds left in the game. All the tackles pile on him in a big scrum (I know, I'm mixing sports). Clock is ticking, and the game is essentially over except for the referees walking over and pulling people off the pile to see what carnage is below. Maybe there's a chance of one or two points to Trump but the game is lost. And everyone in the stands knows this. Except... in one part of the stands on the Trump side are the cheering peo
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And when the judges have finished pulling people off, they let Trump finish his touchdown because the refs were all paid off by Trump, and it gets declared as valid.
So they give Trump the points. And he still loses 300 to 6
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It won't matter if he loses, because at the end of the day, he will still be the one standing in the winner's spot.
Because who's going to stop him? He'll preemptively fire anyone he thinks might, and replace them with people who will be loyal to him regardless of their qualifications for the position.
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It won't matter if he loses,
He did.
because at the end of the day, he will still be the one standing in the winner's spot.
He wont be
Because who's going to stop him? He'll preemptively fire anyone he thinks might, and replace them with people who will be loyal to him regardless of their qualifications for the position.
I really hope he tries. Will be quite amusing.
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Perhaps you haven't been paying attention. He's already started.
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Perhaps you haven't been paying attention. He's already started.
Perhaps he needs to try harder.
Slight grin so far, and barely even a chuckle. I'm hoping for at least hearty laugh.
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No SPOILERS !
I want to be surprised.
I want it to be like a Royal Rumble with plenty of misdirection and twists. Pence should almost do it and fail for maximum drama. Maybe even Q could make an appearance. They need to yell “You're fired” every time they almost do it. Is Trump strong enough to throw a fake chair?
It's sure to be boring though in reality. Biden will just have the Secret Service remove Trump from the Whitehouse Jan 20 after his inauguration, if he hasn't left of his own accord be
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You seem to be under the assumption that Trump will not have preemptively replaced the highest ranking secret service people with his own yes-men by that time to prevent his removal.
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Even if they have been ordered not to by superiors?
Biden will be their superior. Try to keep up.
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I am suggesting that high ranking people in the secret service and probably the military who might follow through with abt effort to remove him are going to get replaced by yes-men before then, and that they aren't going to listen to Biden.
The law is only as powerful as its ability to be enforced.
Really... is it that hard to imagine that the USA accidentally elected itself a dictator in 2016?
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Sorry if you are hearing this for the first time. It can be quite a shock.
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Just checking, has Trudeau procured better glue for his eyebrows or are they still falling off?
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Re: Trump (Score:2)
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I don't know of any state that is so far behind that their Electors won't be convening by December 8th. There's certainly nothing coming from the states themselves.