Southern Avenger: A Decade Of Empire

Southern Avenger: The Scam Of Social Conservatism

U.S. Soldiers Are Waking Up

Quote - Hippocrates

There are, in effect, two things: to know and to believe one knows. To know is science. To believe one knows is ignorance.

Hippocrates

The Last Check Has Failed: The US Government Is A Rogue State

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

From here.

Peter Schiff Is A True Patriot

Christmas Weekend

Gary Johnson: The Next Ron Paul?

Southern Avenger: Person of the Year: Ron Paul

Bullion Is A Girl's Best Friend

How Government Competes

Corporatism

Lord Monckton Interviews Global Warming Activist Who Relies on FAITH

These people are just as dangerous as any other religious extremist.

Blair Publicly Displays Honest Disdain The Ruling Elite Has On The Poor

I often thought it funny, the left-wing complains about the right-wing capitalist policies big business push through government and the right-wing complains about the left-wing socialist policies liberal-elites push through government. The right-wing will fire back that those big business policies do not represent capitalism and are more in light with fascism or even socialism (not real capitalism); the left-wing will fire back that those liberal-elite policies are centrist and capitalist (not real socialism). Mean while, the ruling elites gain more control and we sit here watching, fighting back and forth about definitions. Well, that actually doesn't seem funny.

This paradox has led me to two conclusions: 1. The left/right paradigm is false and distracts the masses and even politically intelligent from the real issues. 2. The ruling elite might have disagreements and factions, but they do not reflect the left/right paradigm. Its more of a disagreement on how to properly control the people and direct them to their own interests, whether via the military industrial complex and war, or via climate change and taxes on CO2.

Despite the apparent disagreements, what I think both sides of the ruling elite do agree on is much more comprehensive. One perspective I'm sure they all share is a complete disdain for poor people as they share no regret for the harm and death their policies give to them.

As Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright did before him, Tony Blair blurted out a completely insensitive comment over the weekend making very clear the disregard the elite have for the people harmed by their policies while making it very clear this man should be put on trial for war crimes. From theRawStory.com:

In the absence of explicit UN approval, Blair justified the war on the basis of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and long-range missiles and its non-compliance with UN weapons inspections, in defiance of numerous UN resolutions.

The alleged chemical and biological weapons were never found, but Blair said he would have gone to war even if he had known they were not there.

"I would still have thought it right to remove him (Saddam Hussein). Obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat," he said.

He added: "It was the notion of him as a threat to the region, of which the development of WMD was obviously one, and because you'd had 12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject, he used chemical weapons on his own people -- so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind."

Lord Christopher Monckton Tears Apart Man-Made Climate Change Activists and Copenhagen

Lord Christopher Monckton gave a very thorough interview on King World News over the weekend that completely tears apart the activists in Copenhagen; the activists negotiating and the activists on the streets. Listen to it here.

Monckton also announced over the weekend he is joining the UKIP with Nigel Farage in an effort to bring governance back to the people of the United Kingdom away from the European Union. He discusses the problems with the European Union in the second half of the interview linked above. An issue he ran into with free-range eggs is rather interesting.

Here's a clip of a speech he gave in the United States a couple of months ago:



Here's the full speech that he gave:

John Stossel Argues Against Global Warming

Our Christmas Tree

Ron Paul Was Right

MEP Nigel Farage on what is wrong with the EU

Letting Be

Peter Schiff debates David Epstein of Columbia University

This is certainly a debate worth watching. There are those in the audience that support either side of the discussion and both individuals are given great amounts of time to make their case and argue over the underlying merits.

Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout

I don't necessarily agree with solutions Matt Taibbi often promotes to resolve the issues he diagnosis, but his diagnoses are typically spot-on. Here's the intro to his latest diatribe on Obama and the Bankers...you can read the full article here:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

One aspect I didn't like about this piece: toward the end Taibbi goes on a mini-rant about the tea-baggers, which, even though deserved (as rants against ignorance is always deserved), it is misplaced. He accuses them as being the problem voter that allows Obama to get away with his misdeeds, but he's wrong. Its the apologetic liberal, the person that looks to Obama and thinks he'll eventually bring peace, help the poor, support the unions, and legalize pot, if only we just let him do his job. They are the problem. At least the teabaggers are protesting SOMETHING. Where are the left-wing peace activists when Obama sends 30,000 troops into Afghanistan? Where are the left-wing socialist activists when Obama is bailing out wall-street and leaving main street to fend for themselves? Some write about it, but noone is putting their feet on the street. They are the problem for the same reason the Christian right were the problem when Bush was president: they excuse all of the major fuck ups, rip-offs, and infringing on individuals because they've been fed enough propaganda to make them think that their president views life the same way they do, and that's all they need to have that warm and fuzzy feeling when they sit down at night and watch American Idol.

Glenn Greenwald: The Strange Consensus on Obama's Nobel Address

Reactions to Obama's Nobel speech yesterday were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum, and there were two points on which virtually everyone seemed to agree: (1) it was the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; and (2) it was the most comprehensive expression of Obama's foreign policy principles since he became President. I don't think he can be blamed for the first fact; when the Nobel Committee chose him despite his waging two wars and escalating one, it essentially forced on him the bizarre circumstance of using his acceptance speech to defend the wars he's fighting. What else could he do? Ignore the wars? Repent?

I'm more interested in the fact that the set of principles Obama articulated yesterday was such a clear and comprehensive expression of his foreign policy that it's now being referred to as the "Obama Doctrine." About that matter, there are two arguably confounding facts to note: (1) the vast majority of leading conservatives -- from Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich to Peggy Noonan, Sarah Palin, various Kagans and other assorted neocons -- have heaped enthusiastic praise on what Obama said yesterday, i.e., on the Obama Doctrine; and (2) numerous liberals have done exactly the same. That convergence gives rise to a couple of questions:

Why are the Bush-following conservatives who ran the country for the last eight years and whose foreign policy ideas are supposedly so discredited -- including some of the nation's hardest-core neocons -- finding so much to cheer in the so-called Obama Doctrine?

How could liberals and conservatives -- who have long claimed to possess such vehemently divergent and irreconcilable worldviews on foreign policy -- both simultaneously adore the same comprehensive expression of foreign policy?

Read the rest here.

Canadian Science-Fiction Writer Beaten and Arrested at US Border

Read about it here.

Not letting a journalist into your country certainly conveys an ugly smell (as we did with that left-wing activist lady...Amy Goodman I think?), but at least we did it politely and without harm; beating a man, throwing him wet and cold into a cell for three hours, arraigned and charged for a crime not committed without legal representation, and then released on foot, without a jacket, personal belongings withheld, into Ontario's first winter storm, is this not the markings of a fascist government?

Lew Rockwell: The Left Fell into the Climate Morass

It might take a while to sink in, but the global warming cause is on the skids. Two issues are taking the whole project down: it is getting cooler not warmer (and hence the change of the rhetoric to a vague concern over "climate change"), and the email scandal of a few weeks back proved that this really is an opinion cartel with preset views not driven by science.

Oh sure, people are saying that climategate is not really very serious and is only being exploited by Fox News and the like. And it's true that not all measures of global temperature show cooling and that the science can be complex.

On that basis, the New York Times urges us to ignore the outpouring. "It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen."

Yes, a clear case. Come on. The whole political agenda of these people is now being seriously questioned. It is no longer a slam-dunk case that we are going to have world central planning in order to control the climate and protect the holy earth from the effects of industrialization. Oh, and tax us good and hard in the process.

But you know what is most tragic to me about this? This whole hysteria led to a fantastic diversion of energy on the left side of the political spectrum. Instead of working against war and the police state, issues on which the left tends to be pretty good, instincts were diverted to the preposterous cause of creating a statist system for global thermometer management.

Read the rest here.

Rand's Tea Party

Neil Reynolds @ TheGlobeandMail: Operation Audit: Fed up with a rogue central bank

For Congressman Ron Paul, the lonely libertarian from Texas who first championed an audit of the Fed, the committee vote was, in itself, a revolutionary declaration. First elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives in 1976, Mr. Paul has since drafted innumerable bills to audit the Fed - all of which his colleagues greeted either with indifference or disdain. This time round, it was different. In the 435-seat House, Mr. Paul signed on 320 co-sponsors, a remarkably bipartisan alliance with enough pledged votes to approve the proposed Federal Reserve Transparency Act.

Not often is Dr. Paul mentioned in the Canadian media. You can read the full article here.

Kucinich: Afghan War A Racket

Lieutenant Allen West: Congressional Candidate

I'm sure this guy is no Ron Paul, but its a pretty good speech.

Ron Paul: Imagine

Justin Raimondo: The Antiwar Right: Our Time Is Near

The political rationale for Democratic hawkishness is always that the Republicans will supposedly beat up on Obama and the Democrats in Congress if they show "weakness." With a strong anti-interventionist tendency in the GOP, the Democratic Leadership Council and its "centrist" allies will have to come up with a different excuse.

Yes, it’s true that politics in Washington is all about partisanship, and to be against this president and his programs is to at least call into question the conduct and motivating principles of his foreign policy – and anti-interventionists shouldn’t hesitate for one moment to take full advantage of this. During the run up to the second world war, Republican opposition to FDR"s strenuous (albeit largely covert) attempts to drag us into the European side of the conflict provoked antiwar sentiment on the Republican right. The group that came together to oppose the Rooseveltian program of war abroad and a highly-centralized, semi-socialist state at home – those we call, in retrospect, the Old Right – came from very disparate points on the political spectrum: the Hooverites, Liberty Leaguers, and Taft Republicans on the right, and on the left disillusioned old-fashioned liberals like the journalist John T. Flynn, and anti-war, anti-Washington Midwestern progressives, such as Senator Burton K. Wheeler, of Montana. Together, they built the biggest antiwar movement in American history, the America First Committee, which, at its height, had 800,000 dues-paying members, and a large activist contingent.

This is the model we should emulate when building a contemporary movement against our policy of perpetual warfare. It will take a broad-based coalition, one that spans the political spectrum and allows for a high degree of variety, to stand against the Empire. But if we’re going to have our old Republic back, it will be a battle worth fighting.

Read the entire article here.

Glenn Greenwald: My Friend The President

Over the past couple of days, Andrew Sullivan has linked to and published protests from various individuals who are quite angry that people "on the left" are being so mean to President Obama, and several of them are so upset that they have decided they are "leaving the left," whatever that might mean. What's most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics. Just marvel at some of this:

"Thank goodness people are starting to leave the left. Their abandonment of Obama is as unconscionable as the right's refusal to work with him. . . . This is about decency and working together to solve problems. . . . Obama is almost solitary in his desire and ability to tackle problems of epic proportion while realizing that we live in a very heterogeneous society. . . . The loud-mouths on the Left are becoming nearly as hysterical and vicious as those on the right. . . . I marvel (unhappily) on a daily basis on how myopic and stubborn many of those on the left have become in regards to President Obama. I wonder if any of these people have ever truly had to make hard decisions in their lives. Have they not ever had to weigh all consequences?. . . . These are real choices people, not a schoolyard fantasy, in which our guy, king of the geeks, is finally captain of the kickball team, and now he can pick us fellow geeks and play us all in sweet revenge against the jocks. He is not playing. He is leading. Not even one year in, I am willing to continue to trust his instinct, his grace, his patience and his measured hand. . . .These are the reasons I voted for him. Hope for a leader, not hope for "everything to be completely different from the previous guy regardless of the consequences", which is what I think many immature democrats are upset about. What a bunch of selfish babies. . . . The stuff coming out of "progressive" mouths is all too often on a par with Glenn Beck's abusive rants--both sides (right and left wingers) playing thousand-pound national football with the President as the ball--meaning, kick kick kick, until you bust his dick. This truly makes me sick."

These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters: are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid? Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign? Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against -- from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions? Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes? Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN? Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to "surge" in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam? Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama's detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House"?

Read the rest here.

Southern Avenger: Weather of Mass Destruction

Where's the outrage?

I open up theGlobeandMail.com and read the headline: "Greenhouse gases a threat to human health, U.S. agency rules". I think to myself, isn't heart disease and the over consumption of meat the greatest threat to our health? Cardiovascular diseases are the leading causes of death in the West. Where is the outrage toward that?

For those lemings who believe in man-made global warming, get upset about meat. The damage done to the environment at the hands of our consumption of meat is monstrous and we don't even need it. You'd kill two birds with one stone if this get-together in Copenhagen was directed toward decreasing the consumption of meat.

Anyway, who trusts any "U.S. Agency"?

Greek Government Acts to Repress Anarchists

The Greek government has arrested 101 individuals for no apparent crime prior to the violent protests today. Apparently this is just the first of many other planned crack-downs by the socialist Greek government on groups of anarchists:

The bourgeois media report that this is a first leg of an operation involving storming many anarchist havens around the city.

Well, thankfully Hayek was wrong in that socialism obviously does not lead to fascism. One of the linked articles also mentions:

10.000 cops are reported to be in operation in Athens for the prevention of riots.

Doesn't sound like a police state to me.

20,000 Lemings March Through London

Read about it here.

We really should stop man from polluting Mars and causing its northern polar ice cap from melting too...

Difference between bush and obama...

From here.

Southern Avenger: Obama Adopts The Bush Doctrine

Barack Obama: More Of The Same

From www.dailypaul.com.

The War On Kids

The New War President

Justin Raimondo's Obama’s War Speech: An Unconvincing Flop

Michael Moore's letter to Obama here.

Cindy Sheehan's 30,000 Wrongs Won't Make It Right

From MichaelMoore.com:

Obama: "We Did Not Ask for This Fight"
Bush: "We Did Not Seek This Conflict"

Obama: "New Attacks are Being Plotted as I Speak"
Bush: "At This Moment ... Terrorists are Planning New Attacks"

Obama: "Our Cause is Just, Our Resolve Unwavering"
Bush: "Our Cause is Just, Our Coalition [is] Determined"

Obama: "This Is No Idle Danger, No Hypothetical Threat"
Bush: "The Enemies of Freedom Are Not Idle"

Obama: "We Have No Interest in Occupying Your Country"
Bush: "I Wouldn't Be Happy if I Were Occupied Either"