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Showing posts from December, 2010

State Lawlessness on the Rampage

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy. 2011 is shaping up as a brutal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America’s rightful hegemony over the world. If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Am

Rapidly declining inventories setting up massive price inflation?

Above: The price increases for both silver and gold in terms of Marks during hyperinflation in Weimar Germany Source: Here

Was Jesus Christ, Libertarian?

“Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?" They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She replied, "No one, sir." Then Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go, (and) from now on do not sin a

NSC Study Shows You are More Likely to Killed By a Cop Than a Terrorist

See this video as an example After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears. While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations? The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used. -- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack -- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack -- You are 11,00

Awaiting the Storm by Fred Reed

Flags. These are always a bad sign. Hardly a politician appears on television who doesn’t stand in front of an American flag, sometimes three American flags. A venomous nationalism now poisons the air, and grows. We are off and rolling. The trappings of fascism spread. General David Petraeus, commander of the Eastern Front, poses with the President in the White House in combat fatigues. The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolization beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian. We may get one. The times ripen for a man on a horse. (Or perhaps a woman: Twitler of Alaska looms.) An ignorant population, unread, unfamiliar with the outside world, focuses its anxieties on troubling dark things lurking abroad, the brown hordes from the south, the rising Chinese, inexplicable Moslems who want to kill all C

Opinion: You Might Be Committing a Federal Crime

(Dec. 17) -- Here's one proposition not up for partisan debate: America is woefully overcriminalized, and the criminal law is woefully overfederalized. Today there are nearly 4,500 federal criminal laws on the books, and most of them have been added in just the last few decades. A groundbreaking, nonpartisan study conducted this year by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Heritage Foundation revealed that many of these laws lack even the most basic protection: an adequate criminal intent requirement. That means Americans can be convicted and thrown in prison for doing something -- actually, one of thousands of seemingly innocuous things -- they had no idea was against the law. This overcriminalization has real-world consequences. Throwing in prison people who didn't intend to break the law, or who violated laws that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, imposes an unnecessary burden on taxpayers to pay for their senseless incarceration. This

Ron Paul: America Is The Biggest Counterfeit Machine In The History Of The World

Ron Paul told Morning Joe this morning that he is "heartened" to see that the Debt Commission embraced his and Barney Frank's call to at least look into spending cuts in the military but even that does not totally reassure him because you "need to change the policy, you can't quit one weapons system and think that's a solution if you still want to be policemen of the world." Said Joe Scarborough: "Republicans who claim to be small deficit hawks want to stay in Afghanistan for another decade, want to continue everyone of these weapons systems. We can't balance this budget. We can't sustain ourselves fiscally if we keep spending money on these two wars." Meanwhile, Paul thinks you could take $10 billion from building embassies and bases and but $5 billion of it into medical or unemployment benefits "to tide us over" and "put $5 billion against the deficit." Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ron-paul-on-

Obama White House pressured Spain to drop Bush torture prosecution

By Daniel Tencer Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 -- 10:42 pm Obama White House pressured Spain to drop Bush torture prosecution, leaked cable shows. The Obama administration went to the mat to defend its predecessors from a torture prosecution in Spain last year, a leaked State Department cable shows. The cable, released by WikiLeaks this week, shows that senior US diplomats teamed with Republican lawmakers -- including a former Republican Party chairman -- to put pressure on Spanish officials to drop a criminal investigation into the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." In the spring of 2009, Spanish Judge Balthasar Garzon launched an inquiry into six Bush officials linked to the torture policy. They were then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Cheney adviser David Addington; Pentagon lawyer William Haynes; Pentagon official Douglas Feith; and Jay Bybee and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel. Read More: Here