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Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Gary Edwards

MAULDIN: It's All About The Jobs -- And Gold - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/s-all-the-jobs-and-gold-2011-9

John-Mauldin financial-collapse JOBS Unemployment-U6 gold

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 11
     
    But as I live in the real world, I buy gold, even though I am optimistic we'll get through this rough patch; because I simply don't trust the bas*%*ds who are driving this ship with 100% of my money in dollars, or any fiat currency, for that matter. Gold to me is a neutral currency. While the metal looks good over the last ten years (and I became bullish on it in 2002 in this letter), over the last 32 years it has not had all that much luster. Bonds have been much better as an investment. It is all about timing. If I wanted to buy gold for investment or trading, I would simply buy GLD. (It is an excellent vehicle for traders; however, GLD is not what I think of as insurance.) And if I were buying gold as a trade, I would buy it in terms of the euro or yen, which I think are both going down against the US dollar. For those who want to buy larger sums of gold, there is a program that I like backed/sponsored by the state government of Western Australia, called the Perth Mint. You can buy gold certificates that represent actual bullion in vaults in Perth at reasonable prices. While your gold is stored in Perth, you can take delivery if you want and leave the country with no taxes owed. Or you can sell the gold and get cash. You diversify your country risk, have excellent and safe storage facilities, diversify your currency risk (if, like me, you think of gold as a currency), and have a different asset class than traditional portfolios. You can learn more about the Perth Mint at www.perthmint.com. And one of their dealers is an old friend of mine, Mike Checkan of Asset Strategies International. I have known Mike for about 30 years, and he does what he says and shoots straight. He is well-known in the investment information world, with lots of endorsements. You can learn more about his outfit at www.assetstrategies.com or call them toll-free at (800) 831-0007 in the U.S. and Canada, or direct at (301) 881-8600. You can also email them from their web site. Where to buy
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...wden-exile-exclusive-interview

surveillance state Snowden-interview

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Snowden: That’s the key—to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn’t matter what we say or think we have. It’s not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend. So when we think in the context of the last decade’s infringements upon personal liberty and the last year’s revelations, it’s not about surveillance. It’s about liberty. When people say, “I have nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.
  • From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there’s the political and the technical. I don’t believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives. And we do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power. We have a system of education that is really a sort of euphemism for indoctrination. It’s not designed to create critical thinkers. We have a media that goes along with the government by parroting phrases intended to provoke a certain emotional response—for example, “national security.” Everyone says “national security” to the point that we now must use the term “national security.” But it is not national security that they’re concerned with; it is state security. And that’s a key distinction. We don’t like to use the phrase “state security” in the United States because it reminds us of all the bad regimes. But it’s a key concept, because when these officials are out on TV, they’re not talking about what’s good for you. They’re not talking about what’s good for business. They’re not talking about what’s good for society. They’re talking about the protection and perpetuation of a national state system. I’m not an anarchist. I’m not saying, “Burn it to the ground.” But I’m saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest. And that cannot happen if we do not question the premises on which they’re founded. And that’s why I don’t think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators] Udall and Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.
  • The Nation: Explain the technical reform you mentioned. Snowden: We already see this happening. The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general. It’s OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he’s planning—obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don’t care if it’s a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge—an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge—and make a showing that there’s probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that’s how it should be done. The problem is when they monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there’s a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Nation: Every president—and this seems to be confirmed by history—will seek to maximize his or her power, and will see modern-day surveillance as part of that power. Who is going to restrain presidential power in this regard? Snowden: That’s why we have separate and co-equal branches. Maybe it will be Congress, maybe not. Might be the courts, might not. But the idea is that, over time, one of these will get the courage to do so. One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the Bush administration is the increased assertion of the “state secrets” privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU—which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention—from getting their day in court. The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen—in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case—that they have become markedly more skeptical. People at civil-liberties organizations say it’s a sea change, and that it’s very clear judges have begun to question more critically assertions made by the executive. Even though it seems so obvious now, it is extraordinary in the context of the last decade, because courts had simply said they were not the best branch to adjudicate these claims—which is completely wrong, because they are the only nonpolitical branch. They are the branch that is specifically charged with deciding issues that cannot be impartially decided by politicians. The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative. Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.
  • Since the revelations, we have seen a massive sea change in the technological basis and makeup of the Internet. One story revealed that the NSA was unlawfully collecting data from the data centers of Google and Yahoo. They were intercepting the transactions of data centers of American companies, which should not be allowed in the first place because American companies are considered US persons, sort of, under our surveillance authorities. They say, “Well, we were doing it overseas,” but that falls under a different Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn’t even authorized by law. It’s just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan’s signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers—sending hundreds of millions of people’s communications back and forth every day—were completely unprotected, electronically naked. GCHQ, the British spy agency, was listening in, and the NSA was getting the data and everything like that, because they could dodge the encryption that was typically used. Basically, the way it worked technically, you go from your phone to Facebook.com, let’s say—that link is encrypted. So if the NSA is trying to watch it here, they can’t understand it. But what these agencies discovered was, the Facebook site that your phone is connected to is just the front end of a larger corporate network—that’s not actually where the data comes from. When you ask for your Facebook page, you hit this part and it’s protected, but it has to go on this long bounce around the world to actually get what you’re asking for and go back. So what they did was just get out of the protected part and they went onto the back network. They went into the private network of these companies.
  • The Nation: The companies knew this? Snowden: Companies did not know it. They said, “Well, we gave the NSA the front door; we gave you the PRISM program. You could get anything you wanted from our companies anyway—all you had to do was ask us and we’re gonna give it to you.” So the companies couldn’t have imagined that the intelligence communities would break in the back door, too—but they did, because they didn’t have to deal with the same legal process as when they went through the front door. When this was published by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post and the companies were exposed, Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers “exploded in profanity.” Another example—one document I revealed was the classified inspector general’s report on a Bush surveillance operation, Stellar Wind, which basically showed that the authorities knew it was unlawful at the time. There was no statutory basis; it was happening basically on the president’s say-so and a secret authorization that no one was allowed to see. When the DOJ said, “We’re not gonna reauthorize this because it is not lawful,” Cheney—or one of Cheney’s advisers—went to Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, and said, “There is no lawful basis for this program. DOJ is not going to reauthorize it, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Will you continue it anyway on the president’s say-so?” Hayden said yes, even though he knew it was unlawful and the DOJ was against it. Nobody has read this document because it’s like twenty-eight pages long, even though it’s incredibly important.
  • The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses. They thought, “No one trusts our products anymore.” So they decided to fix these security flaws to secure their phones. The new iPhone has encryption that protects the contents of the phone. This means if someone steals your phone—if a hacker or something images your phone—they can’t read what’s on the phone itself, they can’t look at your pictures, they can’t see the text messages you send, and so forth. But it does not stop law enforcement from tracking your movements via geolocation on the phone if they think you are involved in a kidnapping case, for example. It does not stop law enforcement from requesting copies of your texts from the providers via warrant. It does not stop them from accessing copies of your pictures or whatever that are uploaded to, for example, Apple’s cloud service, which are still legally accessible because those are not encrypted. It only protects what’s physically on the phone. This is purely a security feature that protects against the kind of abuse that can happen with all these things being out there undetected. In response, the attorney general and the FBI director jumped on a soap box and said, “You are putting our children at risk.”
  • The Nation: Is there a potential conflict between massive encryption and the lawful investigation of crimes? Snowden: This is the controversy that the attorney general and the FBI director were trying to create. They were suggesting, “We have to be able to have lawful access to these devices with a warrant, but that is technically not possible on a secure device. The only way that is possible is if you compromise the security of the device by leaving a back door.” We’ve known that these back doors are not secure. I talk to cryptographers, some of the leading technologists in the world, all the time about how we can deal with these issues. It is not possible to create a back door that is only accessible, for example, to the FBI. And even if it were, you run into the same problem with international commerce: if you create a device that is famous for compromised security and it has an American back door, nobody is gonna buy it. Anyway, it’s not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.
  • The Nation: You really think that if you could go home tomorrow with complete immunity, there wouldn’t be irresistible pressure on you to become a spokesperson, even an activist, on behalf of our rights and liberties? Indeed, wouldn’t that now be your duty? Snowden: But the idea for me now—because I’m not a politician, and I do not think I am as effective in this way as people who actually prepare for it—is to focus on technical reform, because I speak the language of technology. I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States. But we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.
  • The Nation: Creating a new system may be your transition, but it’s also a political act. Snowden: In case you haven’t noticed, I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change. I don’t want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement. But as inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying—as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.
  • The Nation: Some years ago, The Nation did a special issue on patriotism. We asked about a hundred people how they define it. How do you define patriotism? And related to that, you’re probably the world’s most famous whistleblower, though you don’t like that term. What characterization of your role do you prefer? Snowden: What defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one rises to act on behalf of one’s country. As I said before, that’s distinct from acting to benefit the government—a distinction that’s increasingly lost today. You’re not patriotic just because you back whoever’s in power today or their policies. You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country, your community and your family. Sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that go against your personal interest. People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy—one of the early charges leveled against me. But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution—to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies—at least, that’s where I took the oath.
  • As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes” us. Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes—even though what they have done is heroic—is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
  • The Nation: Considering your personal experience—the risks you took, and now your fate here in Moscow—do you think other young men or women will be inspired or discouraged from doing what you did? Snowden: Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I’m still free. I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I’m able to participate in the debate and to campaign for reform. I’m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed. When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense. The charges they brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me—and that’s known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.
  • The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized. Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage. At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by the massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government’s embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, or they would substantiate what harms were done. We’re now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation. Some months after he made that statement, the new director of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said that, in fact, he doesn’t see the sky falling. It’s not so serious after all.
  • The Nation: We have a sense, or certainly the hope, we’ll be seeing you in America soon—perhaps sometime after this Ukrainian crisis ends. Snowden: I would love to think that, but we’ve gone all the way up the chain at all the levels, and things like that. A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they’re really sore—the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment—they’re the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don’t like that at all. The Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts—you know, leaks and things like that.
  • The Nation: You also remind us of [Manhattan Project physicist] Robert Oppenheimer—what he created and then worried about. Snowden: Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people. It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused. When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, “Well, how are we going to deal with this data?” And I was like, “I didn’t even know it existed.” Later, when I found out that we were collecting more information on American communications than we were on Russian communications, for example, I was like, “Holy shit.” Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.
  • The Nation: You’ve given us a lot of time, and we are very grateful, as will be The Nation’s and other readers. But before we end, any more thoughts about your future? Snowden: If I had to guess what the future’s going to look like for me—assuming it’s not an orange jumpsuit in a hole—I think I’m going to alternate between tech and policy. I think we need that. I think that’s actually what’s missing from government, for the most part. We’ve got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It’s just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven’t engaged with Washington until recently. They’re still playing catch-up. As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I’m some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative. But when it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue. As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production—year after year after year—some of that needs to be reinvested in society. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be 
addressed.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14
     
    Remarkable interview. Snowden finally gets asked some questions about politics. 
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Catherine Austin Fitts on Moral Investing and the Coming Equity 'Crash... - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...and-the-Coming-Equity-Crash-Up

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Catherine-Austin-Fitts

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • If you talk about legacy systems and then a breakaway civilization, the legacy systems were financed with debt and if the resources have basically been shifted out and over into "NewCo" then that's going to be an equity model. We're literally coming into what I consider to be a planetary debt for equity swap. So the question for all of us is how do we navigate the turn? When do you leave the bond market and when does the equity increase occur? We've seen North America equity markets rising and the emerging markets falling this year.
  • We're seeing a tremendous divergence in the economy in North America between those portions of the economy that are adapting new technology and growing and the rest of the economy.
  • The other thing I watch is what the divergence means to bond credits and to equity valuations. If you look at the indices you don't really see it. If you look inside the indices you see some enormous splits in quality and value going on.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • The slow burn is a world in which for most people income is flat or falling and expenses are steadily rising. It's a debasement scenario. And the reality is the central banks have been able to have a quite liberal monetary policy because we've been able to offset that with labor deflation. So by globalizing labor and instituting technology you have tremendous deflationary pressures, which offset very generous monetary policy.
  • Starting in the '90s a decision was made to move significant amounts of capital out of existing systems in  the developed world and literally trillions of dollars of financial fraud was engineered to do that. As a financial phenomenon it was quite clever and trillions have literally been moved out between the fraud and the bailouts. I think what the Fed has been doing with quantitative easing is running a shredding operation where they buy up the fraudulent mortgage securities paper and are shredding it.
  • If you look at the Treasury, they've run a very tight regulatory process where that money doesn't seep out on Main Street. It's quite phenomenal the way they've managed to control it. I think one of the big questions is where is that money going to go now? It certainly looks to me like a great effort is being made to make sure it goes into equities, sort of keeps the bond market afloat and goes into equities. So I look it as a very political move.
  • You can balance the budget with fiscal measures or you can balance the budget by the Fed just buying bonds and if you look at the Fed's balance sheet, I think they have a much greater capacity to buy bonds. If you look at all the money that was stolen, the breakaway civilization has plenty of money to buy bonds.
  • I would say so far the Fed's policies have worked for what they're intended to do. We've moved a tremendous amount of money out of the economy. We've now basically run through the statute of limitations or done whatever management needed to cut the cords so that what I call the legacy systems can't get the money back. So the financial coup d'état has been successful and now the cover-up is pretty much over and successful.
  • So now you have big decisions. You have two economies. Before this started what I call the legacy systems had $100 trillion of liabilities and $100 trillion of assets – now, I'm just pulling those numbers out of the air – and
  • the coup moved $40 trillion of assets over into NewCo
  • if you will. Now we've got the legacy systems trying to reconcile $60 trillion of assets to $100 trillion of liabilities and there is a long, drawn-out, grinding process by which some people will get 50 cents on the dollar, some people will get zero cents on the dollar, some people will get 100 cents on the dollar. It's just a very difficult, complex and tangled political scene as to how that's going to all happen. Meantime, NewCo, with $40 trillion dollars, is investing and going gangbusters. NewCo is enjoying an unprecedented boom, investing in lots of new technology and new frontiers, including space. So I think the next step is to manage the lowering of expectations in the legacy systems. That's basically what the administration and the Fed are going to be doing for the next couple years, is just gutting their way through retirees' disappointment.
  • There are three things
  • Number one, Obamacare was created to create a framework that would allow significant reduction of costs and benefits under Medicare over time and healthcare over time;
  • Well, the goal of Obamacare is to control.
  • number two, Obamacare was to provide much more control over both the medical establishment and the population at large;
  • and then, three, to do it in a way that will protect corporate profits.
  • in a relatively short period of time US Medicare expenses would be several multiplicities of the GNP.
  • It's clearly a system that makes no economic sense. It's not just that people are aging. If we eat food that has little nutrition and provide healthcare in which pharmaceutical companies are allowed to charge many multiples of what they charge in other countries you're going to get a financial train wreck, which is where we're headed.
  • So I think the goal was to reconcile that and do it in a way that favors corporations and control.
  • If you go around the entire financial ecosystem, they're getting hit within every line by the same pro-centralization policies that ultimately go up to the same people.
  • Do I think it will snuff out the recovery? No. I think it will simply destroy the economics for a whole world of people who were productive.
  • I don't think the banks are fragile. What happened was they were asked to do a job, they did it and now they've taken all the fraudulent paper and sold it to the Fed or torn it up because they had so much in federal credit arbitrage earnings during this period. So I don't think they're fragile.
  • So it certainly puts us in a position where the creditworthiness of a lot of sovereign debt depends on government military might and the ability to debase a variety of players.
  • There's been a lot of regulation to make it easy for Wall Street to control and make it difficult for small businesses to raise and circulate liquid equity. It's one of the areas in the economy where there really has been a very serious conspiracy.
  • if you want to go really fast and prototype and build out infrastructure, the best way to do it is to make capital available to early venture and start-ups.
  • we, as a society, have stopped the markets from working in the start-up and the small business space.
  • If you look at it across all the different tools, from fabrication technology to new composite materials to robotics to lasers, we're reaching a critical mass of the economic costs dropping and the speed of learning accelerating.
  • If you look back at the history of the US stock market you'll see two huge spikes, one in the '20s, one in the '90s, both when very profound new communication and information technology came out.
  • I think we're in danger of another tech bubble. If you look at who's interested in putting money in this and getting lots of prototypes, the last time they did this was in the '90s. They made a fortune on fraud and they used it not only to serve some fundamental economic purposes but they used it to drain out the pension funds and the retail investors.
  • securities convertible into store credits
  • Wall Street doesn't understand about crowdfunding, are the new alignments that are going to be created in terms of circulating knowledge and purchases and money between consumers and entrepreneurs and companies. It's going to create a whole new level of intimacy.
  • I recommend the documentary, "The Naked Brand." It gives a good sense of the worth of that intimacy and the change from a mass media model to much more intimate relationships
  • awakening of global consciousness.
  • in North America there is almost an astonishing lack of transparency about how government money works within the jurisdiction for which we vote for political representation.
  • So if you were going to have proper transparency in America you would have annual financial statements for your congressional district as well as for the whole country.
  • Now, the government has refused since 1995, as required by law, to produce annual financial statements let alone for the places in which you're voting for jurisdiction. And if you're going to have any kind of citizenry accountability or legislator accountability you have to have that kind of transparency and the government has gone to enormous lengths to prevent that kind of transparency while pretending that we're very transparent. So the Internet is going to make it more and more difficult for that absence of transparency to continue or be justified, and that's good.
  • if you have all your assets in the legacy economy and none in the growing economy you're going to suffer.
  • That's number one.
  • Number two, a lot of households have assets which represent liabilities of the legacy economy, whether Social Security, Medicare or others, and one of the things you have to understand is the politics – you need to not get trapped in the politics of stringing people out for those benefits. Do the best you can but don't get lost in the treadmill of trying to get promised benefits that may or may not come true. And to the extent that you can not get financially dependent on those benefits it would be very good.
  • The final thing is, of course, and readers know this if they're reading The Daily Bell, you're dealing in a system that includes a significant amount of corruption and fraud so you just need to be extremely careful about the quality of the people or the enterprises in which you invest or do business with and keep your assets fairly diversified in terms of both areas of the economy, or sectors, and places.
  • Take a look at different predictions that gold is going to increase significantly in value. All those predictions assume that the monetary inflation is going to spill into commodities. And what you're watching instead is the G-7 have been essentially building a corral that forces the horses to run out through the stock market. That's why I call it a crash-up.
  • I think one scenario we're looking at is the possibility of a crash-up scenario where that monetary increase is funneled into the equity markets. One of the most important questions there is, can you get the global population interested in investing in equities? Because the long bond market bull is coming to a close.
  • We have two choices. We can basically write down the debt and go through a huge crunch period or we can have a crash-up in the equity markets.
  • Right after 9/11 – and General Wesley Clark has said this and I experienced it in my tiny little community in Tennessee – we were basically given what the battle plan was going to be – the US military taking over Eurasia. First we were going to go to Afghanistan, then we were going to go to Iraq, then we were going to go to Libya, then we were going to go to Syria and then we're going to Iran. It was all laid out for us and we seem to be following that battle plan, albeit slower than predicted at that time.
  • If we're going to create a global financial system and a one-world currency, you need everybody in the central banking model. You have outliers. We seem to be bringing in all the outliers. As we do, we are trying to checkmate Russia and China within Eurasia, because I think control of Eurasia is essential for maintaining global empire.
  • what we're watching is an effort to bring everybody into a centrally controlled central banking model.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13
     
    Catherine is a frequent guest on CoastToCoastAM.com, so I've come to know her well.  Although this interview doesn't discuss her ability to see into the future, I know from experience that she is a real visionary hitting the mark at an astounding clip.  Chalk this interview up as a must read.
Paul Merrell

Transcript: Comey Says Authors of Encryption Letter Are Uninformed or Not Fair-Minded |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...-letter-uninformed-fair-minded

surveillance state FBI Comey encryption backdoors

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 May 15 - No Cached
  • Earlier today, FBI Director James Comey implied that a broad coalition of technology companies, trade associations, civil society groups, and security experts were either uninformed or were not “fair-minded” in a letter they sent to the President yesterday urging him to reject any legislative proposals that would undermine the adoption of strong encryption by US companies. The letter was signed by dozens of organizations and companies in the latest part of the debate over whether the government should be given built-in access to encrypted data (see, for example, here, here, here, and here for previous iterations). The comments were made at the Third Annual Cybersecurity Law Institute held at Georgetown University Law Center. The transcript of his encryption-related discussion is below (emphasis added).
  • Increasingly, communications at rest sitting on a device or in motion are encrypted. The device is encrypted or the communication is encrypted and therefore unavailable to us even with a court order. So I make a showing of probable cause to a judge in a criminal case or in an intelligence case to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that the content of a particular defense or a particular communication stream should be collected to our statutory authority, and the judge approves, increasingly we are finding ourselves unable to read what we find or we’re unable to open a device. And that is a serious concern. I am actually — I think encryption is a good thing. I think there are tremendous societal benefits to encryption. That’s one of the reasons the FBI tells people not only lock your cars, but you should encrypt things that are important to you to make it harder for thieves to take them.
  • A group of tech companies and some prominent folks wrote a letter to the President yesterday that I frankly found depressing. Because their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption. Look, I recognize the challenges facing our tech companies. Competitive challenges, regulatory challenges overseas, all kinds of challenges. I recognize the benefits of encryption, but I think fair-minded people also have to recognize the costs associated with that. And I read this letter and I think, “Either these folks don’t see what I see or they’re not fair-minded.” And either one of those things is depressing to me. So I’ve just got to continue to have the conversation. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think a democracy should drift to a place where suddenly law enforcement people say, “Well, actually we — the Fourth Amendment is an awesome thing, but we actually can’t access any information.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But we have a collision going on in this country that’s getting closer and closer to an actual head-on, which is our important interest in privacy — which I am passionate about — and our important interest in public safety. The logic of universal encryption is inexorable that our authority under the Fourth Amendment — an amendment that I think is critical to ordered liberty — with the right predication and the right oversight to obtain information is going to become increasingly irrelevant. As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is that all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, therefore all of our lives — I know there are no criminals here, but including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies — will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning. I think we need to have a conversation about it. Again, how do we strike the right balance? Privacy matters tremendously. Public safety, I think, matters tremendously to everybody. I think fair-minded people have to recognize that there are tremendous benefits to a society from encryption. There are tremendous costs to a society from universal strong encryption. And how do we think about that?
  • We’ve got to have a conversation long before the logic of strong encryption takes us to that place. And smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily. Technical people will say it’s too hard. My reaction to that is: Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people we have in this country to figure something out? I’m not that pessimistic. I think we ought to have a conversation.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 May 15
     
    Considering that I'm over 10 times as likely to die from a police shoooting as I am from a terrorist attack, how about we begin this conversation, Mr. Comey, by you providing formal notice to everyone who's had the telephone metadata gathered or searched all dates on which such gatherings and searches were conducted so citizens can file suit for violation of their privacy rights? Note that the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held last week that the FBI exceeded statutory authority in gathering and searching that information. Because the gathering and searching was not authorized, that would bring the gathering and searching under the protections of the Privacy Act, including the FBI duty to account for the disclosures  and to pay at least the statutory minimum $1,500 in damges per incident.  Then I would like to have an itemization of all of the commercial software and hardware products that your agency and or your buddies at NSA built backdoors into.  Then your resignation for millions of violations of the Privacy Act would be deeply appreciated. Please feel free to delegate the above mentioned tasks to your successor. 
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ns-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy

surveillance state Snowden operational-security advice must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Micah Lee: What are some operational security practices you think everyone should adopt? Just useful stuff for average people. Edward Snowden: [Opsec] is important even if you’re not worried about the NSA. Because when you think about who the victims of surveillance are, on a day-to-day basis, you’re thinking about people who are in abusive spousal relationships, you’re thinking about people who are concerned about stalkers, you’re thinking about children who are concerned about their parents overhearing things. It’s to reclaim a level of privacy. The first step that anyone could take is to encrypt their phone calls and their text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. It’s free, and you can just download it immediately. And anybody you’re talking to now, their communications, if it’s intercepted, can’t be read by adversaries. [Signal is available for iOS and Android, and, unlike a lot of security tools, is very easy to use.] You should encrypt your hard disk, so that if your computer is stolen the information isn’t obtainable to an adversary — pictures, where you live, where you work, where your kids are, where you go to school. [I’ve written a guide to encrypting your disk on Windows, Mac, and Linux.] Use a password manager. One of the main things that gets people’s private information exposed, not necessarily to the most powerful adversaries, but to the most common ones, are data dumps. Your credentials may be revealed because some service you stopped using in 2007 gets hacked, and your password that you were using for that one site also works for your Gmail account. A password manager allows you to create unique passwords for every site that are unbreakable, but you don’t have the burden of memorizing them. [The password manager KeePassX is free, open source, cross-platform, and never stores anything in the cloud.]
  • The other thing there is two-factor authentication. The value of this is if someone does steal your password, or it’s left or exposed somewhere … [two-factor authentication] allows the provider to send you a secondary means of authentication — a text message or something like that. [If you enable two-factor authentication, an attacker needs both your password as the first factor and a physical device, like your phone, as your second factor, to login to your account. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, GitHub, Battle.net, and tons of other services all support two-factor authentication.]
  • We should armor ourselves using systems we can rely on every day. This doesn’t need to be an extraordinary lifestyle change. It doesn’t have to be something that is disruptive. It should be invisible, it should be atmospheric, it should be something that happens painlessly, effortlessly. This is why I like apps like Signal, because they’re low friction. It doesn’t require you to re-order your life. It doesn’t require you to change your method of communications. You can use it right now to talk to your friends.
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  • Lee: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it’s only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing? Snowden: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today. I use Tor personally all the time. We know it works from at least one anecdotal case that’s fairly familiar to most people at this point. That’s not to say that Tor is bulletproof. What Tor does is it provides a measure of security and allows you to disassociate your physical location. … But the basic idea, the concept of Tor that is so valuable, is that it’s run by volunteers. Anyone can create a new node on the network, whether it’s an entry node, a middle router, or an exit point, on the basis of their willingness to accept some risk. The voluntary nature of this network means that it is survivable, it’s resistant, it’s flexible. [Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you’re on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network.]
  • Lee: So that is all stuff that everybody should be doing. What about people who have exceptional threat models, like future intelligence-community whistleblowers, and other people who have nation-state adversaries? Maybe journalists, in some cases, or activists, or people like that? Snowden: So the first answer is that you can’t learn this from a single article. The needs of every individual in a high-risk environment are different. And the capabilities of the adversary are constantly improving. The tooling changes as well. What really matters is to be conscious of the principles of compromise. How can the adversary, in general, gain access to information that is sensitive to you? What kinds of things do you need to protect? Because of course you don’t need to hide everything from the adversary. You don’t need to live a paranoid life, off the grid, in hiding, in the woods in Montana. What we do need to protect are the facts of our activities, our beliefs, and our lives that could be used against us in manners that are contrary to our interests. So when we think about this for whistleblowers, for example, if you witnessed some kind of wrongdoing and you need to reveal this information, and you believe there are people that want to interfere with that, you need to think about how to compartmentalize that.
  • Tell no one who doesn’t need to know. [Lindsay Mills, Snowden’s girlfriend of several years, didn’t know that he had been collecting documents to leak to journalists until she heard about it on the news, like everyone else.] When we talk about whistleblowers and what to do, you want to think about tools for protecting your identity, protecting the existence of the relationship from any type of conventional communication system. You want to use something like SecureDrop, over the Tor network, so there is no connection between the computer that you are using at the time — preferably with a non-persistent operating system like Tails, so you’ve left no forensic trace on the machine you’re using, which hopefully is a disposable machine that you can get rid of afterward, that can’t be found in a raid, that can’t be analyzed or anything like that — so that the only outcome of your operational activities are the stories reported by the journalists. [SecureDrop is a whistleblower submission system. Here is a guide to using The Intercept’s SecureDrop server as safely as possible.]
  • And this is to be sure that whoever has been engaging in this wrongdoing cannot distract from the controversy by pointing to your physical identity. Instead they have to deal with the facts of the controversy rather than the actors that are involved in it. Lee: What about for people who are, like, in a repressive regime and are trying to … Snowden: Use Tor. Lee: Use Tor? Snowden: If you’re not using Tor you’re doing it wrong. Now, there is a counterpoint here where the use of privacy-enhancing technologies in certain areas can actually single you out for additional surveillance through the exercise of repressive measures. This is why it’s so critical for developers who are working on security-enhancing tools to not make their protocols stand out.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    Lots more in the interview that I didn't highlight. This is a must-read.
Gary Edwards

Tocqueville's Warning to America: The Dangers of Despotism - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...erica-The-Dangers-of-Despotism

Alexis-de-Tocqueville freedom-liberty

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jul 13
     
    "The words of Alexis de Tocqueville in Book Four, Chapter VI of Democracy America are particularly poignant: I had remarked during my stay in the United States, that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism... I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it. I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,--his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;--he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their gate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly la
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 13
     
    "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." - James Madison
Paul Merrell

Remarks by President Obama and President Ghani of Afghanistan in Joint Press Conference... - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/...i-afghanistan-joint-press-conf

war & peace Palestinian-Question Obama Palestinian-statehood U.N. U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • PRESIDENT OBAMA:
  • But I am required to evaluate honestly how we manage Israeli-Palestinian relations over the next several years.  Because up until this point, the premise has been, both under Republican and Democratic administrations, that as different as it was, as challenging as it was, the possibility of two states living side by side in peace and security could marginalize more extreme elements, bring together folks at the center and with some common sense, and we could resolve what has been a vexing issue and one that is ultimately a threat to Israel as well. And that possibility seems very dim.  That may trigger, then, reactions by the Palestinians that, in turn, elicit counter-reactions by the Israelis.  And that could end up leading to a downward spiral of relations that will be dangerous for everybody and bad for everybody. So, bottom line, just to summarize here -- number one, our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel will continue unabated, unaffected, and we are absolutely committed to making sure that the Israeli people are safe, particularly from rocket attacks and terrorist attacks aimed on civilians.
  • I don't think anybody ever envisioned in any peace agreement, certainly not one that Prime Minister Netanyahu would agree to, or that the Israeli people would agree to, that overnight you suddenly have a Palestinian state right next to Jerusalem and that Israel would not have a whole range of security conditions that had to be met, and that it would be phased in over a long period of time. So the issue has never been, do you create a Palestinian state overnight.  The question is, do you create a process and a framework that gives the Palestinians hope, the possibility, that down the road they have a secure state of their own, standing side-by-side with a secure, fully recognized Jewish state of Israel.  And I think -- it's not just my estimation -- I think it’s hard to envision how that happens based on the Prime Minister’s statements.  And so, when I said that we have to now do an evaluation of where we are, it's not in reference to our commitment to Israel’s military edge in the region, Israel’s security, our intelligence cooperation, our military cooperation.  That continues unabated.  And I will continue to do whatever I need to do to make sure that our friends in Israel are safe.  That's what I've done since I've been President, and that's not going to stop.  And so the Israeli people need to know that.
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  • With respect to Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, I think it's important to understand that the issue here is not what I believe, but it’s what the Palestinians and the parties in the negotiations and the Israeli people believe is possible.  That's the most important issue.  I've said before and I'll simply repeat:  Prime Minister Netanyahu, in the election run-up, stated that a Palestinian state would not occur while he was Prime Minister.  And I took him at his word that that's what he meant, and I think that a lot of voters inside of Israel understood him to be saying that fairly unequivocally. Afterwards, he pointed out that he didn’t say “never,” but that there would be a series of conditions in which a Palestinian state could potentially be created.  But, of course, the conditions were such that they would be impossible to meet anytime soon.  So even if you accepted, I think, the corrective of Prime Minister Netanyahu in subsequent days, there still does not appear to be a prospect of a meaningful framework established that would lead to a Palestinian state even if there were a whole range of conditions and security requirements that might be phased in over a long period of time -- which was always the presumption. 
  • Number two, that the evaluation that’s taking place is specific to what happens between the Israelis and Palestinians going forward.  We’ll continue to engage the Israeli government as well as the Palestinians, and ask them where they are interested in going and how do they see this issue being resolved.  But what we can’t do is pretend that there’s a possibility of something that’s not there.  And we can’t continue to premise our public diplomacy based on something that everybody knows is not going to happen at least in the next several years.  That is something that we have to, for the sake of our own credibility, I think we have to be able to be honest about that. And I guess one last point about this, because obviously I’ve heard a lot of the commentary -- there’s a tendency I think in the reporting here to frame this somehow as a personal issue between myself and Prime Minister Netanyahu.  And I understand why that’s done, because when you frame it in those terms, the notion is, well, if we all just get along and everybody cools down, then somehow the problem goes away.  I have a very business-like relationship with the Prime Minister.  I’ve met with him more than any other world leader.  I talk to him all the time.  He is representing his country’s interests the way he thinks he needs to, and I’m doing the same.
  • So the issue is not a matter of relations between leaders; the issue is a very clear, substantive challenge.  We believe that two states is the best path forward for Israel’s security, for Palestinian aspirations, and for regional stability.  That’s our view, and that continues to be our view.  And Prime Minister Netanyahu has a different approach.  And so this can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow let’s all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”  This is a matter of figuring out how do we get through a real knotty policy difference that has great consequences for both countries and for the region. Q    Will you consider supporting Palestinian statehood at the U.N.? PRESIDENT OBAMA:  We’re going to do that evaluation -- we’re going to partly wait for an actual Israeli government to form.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Mar 15
     
    "Q    Will you consider supporting Palestinian statehood at the U.N.? "PRESIDENT OBAMA:  We're going to do that evaluation -- we're going to partly wait for an actual Israeli government to form." At best, a threat; no action. 
Paul Merrell

Ron Paul: Syria is a "false flag" - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/...ron_paul_syria_is_a_false_flag

war & peace Syria ron paul false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Former Rep. Ron Paul does not just oppose a potential military intervention in Syria, or think the government is exaggerating the case for war, or think we’re moving too quickly, but thinks the government is outright lying — “I think it’s a false flag,” he says, invoking the favorite phrase of conspiracy theorists everywhere.“[Syrian President Bashar al] Assad, I don’t think is an idiot. I don’t think he would do this on purpose,” Paul told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto of the allegation that Assad used chemical weapons on civilians.“Oh, so you question whether  Assad even used the gas, of if he’s just being set up?” an incredulous Cavuto responded.“Yeah, just look at how many lies were told us about Saddam Hussein prior to that buildup. More propaganda. It happens all the time,” Paul replied. “I think it’s a false flag. I think really, indeed. And nobody knows if indeed he was slaughtering people by the thousands with poison gas. If he was that’s a different story, but that’s not the case.”
Paul Merrell

How Edward Snowden Changed Everything | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...ard-snowden-changed-everything

surveillance state Snowden Wizner state-of-play civil-liberties must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Ben Wizner, who is perhaps best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Wizner, who joined the ACLU in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, has been a force in the legal battles against torture, watch lists, and extraordinary rendition since the beginning of the global “war on terror.” Ad Policy On October 15, we met with Wizner in an upstate New York pub to discuss the state of privacy advocacy today. In sometimes sardonic tones, he talked about the transition from litigating on issues of torture to privacy advocacy, differences between corporate and state-sponsored surveillance, recent developments in state legislatures and the federal government, and some of the obstacles impeding civil liberties litigation. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication.
  • en Wizner, who is perhaps best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Wizner, who joined the ACLU in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, has been a force in the legal battles against torture, watch lists, and extraordinary rendition since the beginning of the global “war on terror.” Ad Policy On October 15, we met with Wizner in an upstate New York pub to discuss the state of privacy advocacy today. In sometimes sardonic tones, he talked about the transition from litigating on issues of torture to privacy advocacy, differences between corporate and state-sponsored surveillance, recent developments in state legislatures and the federal government, and some of the obstacles impeding civil liberties litigation. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication.
  • Many of the technologies, both military technologies and surveillance technologies, that are developed for purposes of policing the empire find their way back home and get repurposed. You saw this in Ferguson, where we had military equipment in the streets to police nonviolent civil unrest, and we’re seeing this with surveillance technologies, where things that are deployed for use in war zones are now commonly in the arsenals of local police departments. For example, a cellphone surveillance tool that we call the StingRay—which mimics a cellphone tower and communicates with all the phones around—was really developed as a military technology to help identify targets. Now, because it’s so inexpensive, and because there is a surplus of these things that are being developed, it ends up getting pushed down into local communities without local democratic consent or control.
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  • SG & TP: How do you see the current state of the right to privacy? BW: I joked when I took this job that I was relieved that I was going to be working on the Fourth Amendment, because finally I’d have a chance to win. That was intended as gallows humor; the Fourth Amendment had been a dishrag for the last several decades, largely because of the war on drugs. The joke in civil liberties circles was, “What amendment?” But I was able to make this joke because I was coming to Fourth Amendment litigation from something even worse, which was trying to sue the CIA for torture, or targeted killings, or various things where the invariable outcome was some kind of non-justiciability ruling. We weren’t even reaching the merits at all. It turns out that my gallows humor joke was prescient.
  • The truth is that over the last few years, we’ve seen some of the most important Fourth Amendment decisions from the Supreme Court in perhaps half a century. Certainly, I think the Jones decision in 2012 [U.S. v. Jones], which held that GPS tracking was a Fourth Amendment search, was the most important Fourth Amendment decision since Katz in 1967 [Katz v. United States], in terms of starting a revolution in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence signifying that changes in technology were not just differences in degree, but they were differences in kind, and require the Court to grapple with it in a different way. Just two years later, you saw the Court holding that police can’t search your phone incident to an arrest without getting a warrant [Riley v. California]. Since 2012, at the level of Supreme Court jurisprudence, we’re seeing a recognition that technology has required a rethinking of the Fourth Amendment at the state and local level. We’re seeing a wave of privacy legislation that’s really passing beneath the radar for people who are not paying close attention. It’s not just happening in liberal states like California; it’s happening in red states like Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. And purple states like Colorado and Maine. You see as many libertarians and conservatives pushing these new rules as you see liberals. It really has cut across at least party lines, if not ideologies. My overall point here is that with respect to constraints on government surveillance—I should be more specific—law-enforcement government surveillance—momentum has been on our side in a way that has surprised even me.
  • Do you think that increased privacy protections will happen on the state level before they happen on the federal level? BW: I think so. For example, look at what occurred with the death penalty and the Supreme Court’s recent Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. The question under the Eighth Amendment is, “Is the practice cruel and unusual?” The Court has looked at what it calls “evolving standards of decency” [Trop v. Dulles, 1958]. It matters to the Court, when it’s deciding whether a juvenile can be executed or if a juvenile can get life without parole, what’s going on in the states. It was important to the litigants in those cases to be able to show that even if most states allowed the bad practice, the momentum was in the other direction. The states that were legislating on this most recently were liberalizing their rules, were making it harder to execute people under 18 or to lock them up without the possibility of parole. I think you’re going to see the same thing with Fourth Amendment and privacy jurisprudence, even though the Court doesn’t have a specific doctrine like “evolving standards of decency.” The Court uses this much-maligned test, “Do individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy?” We’ll advance the argument, I think successfully, that part of what the Court should look at in considering whether an expectation of privacy is reasonable is showing what’s going on in the states. If we can show that a dozen or eighteen state legislatures have enacted a constitutional protection that doesn’t exist in federal constitutional law, I think that that will influence the Supreme Court.
  • The question is will it also influence Congress. I think there the answer is also “yes.” If you’re a member of the House or the Senate from Montana, and you see that your state legislature and your Republican governor have enacted privacy legislation, you’re not going to be worried about voting in that direction. I think this is one of those places where, unlike civil rights, where you saw most of the action at the federal level and then getting forced down to the states, we’re going to see more action at the state level getting funneled up to the federal government.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    A must-read. Ben Wizner discusses the current climate in the courts in government surveillance cases and how Edward Snowden's disclosures have affected that, and much more. Wizner is not only Edward Snowden's lawyer, he is also the coordinator of all ACLU litigation on electronic surveillance matters.
Gary Edwards

REVEALING QUOTES ON THE GOALS OF PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY - 0 views

www.psychquotes.com

psychquotes psychiatry psychiatric

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives "In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."
  • Psychiatry's Views on Education "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."
  • The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ..
  • When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
  • "…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."
  • "Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave." 
  • "This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes.
  • "I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion" Sigmund Freud
  • "Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?"
  • "Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • "...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong"
  • "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs.  …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."  
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • Psychiatry's Views on Religion "Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis." Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief
  • "The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."
  • "The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them.
  • "…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith." "
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • We shall not solve the problems of alcoholism and juvenile delinquency by increasing a sense of responsibility. It is the environment which is 'responsible' for the objectionable behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual, which must be changed.
  • Psychiatry's Views on Creating a Slave Society "We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood."
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
  • "It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common wheel." Edward Thorndike, Key Psychology Theorist, member of the "Eugenics Committee of the USA"
  • "We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
  • The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. . . Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. . . . We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain." 
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • "Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found – providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not."
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas..."
  • Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao. Thomas Sowell, writing in Forbes, 1991
  • "The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." Hegel (who influenced Karl Marx)
  • Psychiatry's Views on America "America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless." Sigmund Freud America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. Sigmund Freud
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • Freud on Marxism "The strength of Marxism obviously does not lie in its view of history or in the prophecies about the future which it bases upon that view, but in its clear insight into the determining influence which is exerted by the economic conditions of man upon his intellectual, ethical and artistic reactions." Sigmund Freud
  • Basically, all that is necessary to revoke all the constitutional rights of any citizen is to accuse him of being mentally-ill."
  • John A. Stormer, "None Dare Call it Treason"
  • "Old conventions, customs and values… to be challenged… The aim should be to control not only nature, but human nature." He recommended two slogans for "spreading world-wide the gospel of mental hygiene": "To learn to think internationally" and "The necessity to disarm the mind." Dr. J.R. Lord, psychiatrist
  • "Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity!  If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity… Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’"
  • The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children.
  • These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers.
  • "If all else fails, punishable behavior may be made less likely by changing physiological conditions. Hormones may be used to change sexual behavior, surgery (as in lobotomy) to control violence, tranquilizers to control aggression, and appetite depressants to control overeating." Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"
  • We must learn to recognize them for what they are - possessors of no special knowledge of the human psyche, who have, nonetheless, chosen to earn their living from the dissemination of the myth that they do indeed know how the mind works". Psychiatrist Garth Wood, M.D., in "The Myth of Neurosis", 1986
  • These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior). Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in "The Death of Psychiatry", 1974
  • "The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health."
  • By calling the harmless 'insane', (who statistics prove to be no more violence-prone than the average citizen, unless hopelessly deranged by damaging psychiatric 'treatment'), dangerous and justifying their own existence by the 'need' to deal with that inflated 'danger', the mad-doctors themselves pose the greatest threat to liberty, property and democracy in our times."
  • Citizens for Higher Ethical Standards in Medicine
  • "Mental illness is often used as an ad homonym to discredit the individual. This has been a common use of psychiatric diagnosis in psychiatry in Russia. " ... there are two main groups [of schizophrenia patients] ... 1) people admitted to the mental hospital long before they had been political dissenters ... 2. others who ... have put forward complex social and economic theories as alternatives to orthodox Marxism..."  Wing, cited in "Pseudoscience in Psychology", by Dr. Szasz, p. 126
  • "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.." J. Krishnamurti
  • "...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise."   The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell
  • "A Trojan horse full of dangerous psycho-fantasies has been professionally prepared for us by Christian psychiatrists and psychologists...  At the base, such therapies stand upon dogma, not scientific observations, and the dogma is the odious one of Freud and his followers who were some of the century's most anti-Christ teachers.  No amount of well-intentioned refinement of deadly doctrines will make them clean for Christians." Dr. Hilton P. Terrell, M.D
  • "Contrary to the popular public conception, this happenstance is NOT a form of health care, but the result of a fraudulent system being granted police powers by the State.
  • "Psychotherapy may be known in the future as the greatest hoax of the twentieth century."
  • "Nearly half a century has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness." 
  • "Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true.  There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations.  Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them."
  • "In the 14-year period between 1950 and 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all of the nation's armed conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Persian Gulf War.  Between 1965 and 1990, the total number of mental-hospital inpatient deaths exceeded the number of battle deaths in the same wars by 70 percent.  Inpatient deaths topped out at 1,103,000 during this 25-year period, compared with 650,563 recorded deaths in battles."
  • Kelly Patricia O’Meara: "The Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeth's", Insight Magazine, June 16, 2001
  • "The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal."
  • Neuro-psychiatrist Sydney Walker in "Dose of Sanity"
  • "Clearly this business of treating minds, particularly this big business of treating young minds, has not policed itself, and has no incentive to put a stop to the kinds of fraudulent and unethical practices that are going on."
Paul Merrell

US hegemonic quest in Mideast creates chaos - Global Times - 0 views

www.globaltimes.cn/...902843.shtml

war & peace economic-warfare U.S.-foreign-policy China Iran New-Silk-Road

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Editor's Note:With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the struggle between Iran and the West over nuclear issues, the Middle East remained chaotic in 2014. What about 2015? What kind of role will the US play in the regional political landscape? At a seminar held by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, Global Times (GT) reporter Liu Zhun talked to Flynt Leverett (Flynt), former senior director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), and Hillary Mann Leverett (Hillary), former director of Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the NSC, about these issues. GT: What is your forecast of the situation of the Middle East this year?
  • Flynt: More and more negative consequences of the failed US drive for the hegemony in the Middle East will become increasingly evident. The US is struggling to come to terms with that. Washington should reconsider its basic strategy for this region, but President Barack Obama has a great belief in US' hegemonic agenda. Many analysts in the US argue that Washington should "double-down" on its strategy. But this is the wrong direction.Hillary: There will be more violence throughout the region - violence encouraged by the US. A potential difference rests on the possibility that an alternative mindset will be brought in by China as it rises. Whether Russia, with the support of China and Iran, can put Syria's conflicts on a different trajectory toward resolution is important - whether they can bring in a different paradigm for conflict resolution. I am not sure they can yet, but I am encouraged by China's rise and its focus on sovereignty and conflict resolution. GT: If the US changes its course, will the region be a better place?Flynt: Yes, it will be a better place. The historical record has proven that. For 20 years after China's revolution, the US was doing everything it could to isolate and hurt the People's Republic of China. After it gave up its hostile policies toward China, China, as well as other East Asian countries, embarked on a long and productive period of economic expansion with rising prosperity for hundreds of millions of people. The Middle East will not be perfect after the US changes its policy, but it will be better.
  • GT: But the chaos in the Middle East, much of which is driven by religious issues, is more complicated than the conflicts China encountered with the US, which were basically ideological. What do you think of the role of Islam in the chaos of the Middle East?Hillary: There has been a perception that there is something wrong with Islam and that it is the major contributor to the complications of the problems in the Middle East. But if you look historically, that is not really true. There is no evidence that Muslims are historically terrorists. The head of the IS was in an American prison, where he became more extreme in his own views and forged a network with other extremists.The perennial chaos of the Middle East, to a large extent, is caused by a long history of military penetration by Western countries such as France, the UK and now the US. GT: You suggest the US should shift its Middle East policy and pull back from trying to be a hegemon - for example, by restoring ties with Iran. What do you think of Obama's current strategy to the Middle East?Flynt: People are talking about the Obama doctrine and his being less interventionist. I don't really think that is right. I think the Obama administration is no less committed to so-called global leadership, which is actually hegemony, over strategically important areas like the Middle East. The Obama administration thinks it has a smarter way of promoting that leadership than its immediate predecessor. But that is more a tactical than strategic difference.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • GT: China's "One Belt and One Road" project is believed to have a major influence on the Middle East. Will it be a counterbalance of the US' influence in the region?Flynt: US power in the Persian Gulf is in relative decline. But because it is desperate to cling to its hegemonic ambitions in the region, Washington is trying to put China's interests at risk. China will decide what its interests are in the Middle East. As an analytic point, though, if China really wants to have an independent and balanced foreign policy, China will need to decide how accommodating it wants to be of US preferences and to what extent it wants to pursue its own interests, even when the US is not necessarily happy about that. I think the Middle East's engagement in the Silk Road, especially Iran, is going to be a testing ground for China. Hillary: I think the US will definitely disagree with the project. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has really focused on trying to expand its influence, military or otherwise, on Central Asian states in a bid to put pressure on Russia. This has been a consistent theme through both Democratic and Republican administrations. China's project will unavoidably reach Central Asia, which could lessen interest in those states in aligning with various American projects and make it harder for the US to pressure Russia. Besides, as Iran is central for both Silk Roads, China's good relationship with Iran will be very problematic for the US interests, and also for its hegemonic ambitions across the entire Middle East.
Paul Merrell

Daily Press Briefing - October 6, 2016 - 0 views

www.state.gov/...262877.htm

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Syrian war Russia U.S.-military-threats

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • of Press Relations » Daily Press Briefings » 2016 » October » Daily Press Briefing - October 6, 2016John Kirby SpokespersonDaily Press Briefing Washington, DC October 6, 2016
  • MR KIRBY: Well, again, I think – and I think Mark walked you through this – there were three principal topics that they discussed. One was Syria; one was Ukraine; and the other, of course, was DPRK and our work inside the UN to pursue additional sanctions on the regime. The discussion on Syria focused on two things principally. One was the situation in Aleppo and the Secretary’s obvious and deep concern about the continued siege there and also about the potential to continue multilateral efforts to discuss the way ahead. And that’s – and that’s basically it. We certainly, when we said we were suspending U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on the cessation of hostilities and the work to that end in Syria, there was never any expectation that the two foreign ministers wouldn’t speak about Syria again. And certainly, if we’re going to continue multilateral efforts, which we fully intend to do, whether it’s with the ISSG or other partners or through the UN, there’s no way you can do that without including Russia in that discussion. QUESTION: So and just – so are you trying to set up a meeting, for example? I mean, you’re talking about bilateral discussions. Are you trying to set up a meeting with other countries including Russia on this? MR KIRBY: I don’t have anything on the schedule to speak to today, but I certainly wouldn’t rule out the fact that there will be attempts and efforts through multi – through a multilateral fora to meet again and to try to work through this. I certainly wouldn’t rule that out. QUESTION: And just one other one. Given the failure of the previous efforts and given the main thing that you guys argued was that the carrot or the leverage you had was Russia’s eagerness for intelligence-sharing cooperation, et cetera, the JIC, what makes you think they’re going to be any more likely to work to halt or reduce the violence in a multilateral context absent those incentives than they were when they had the incentives on the table? MR KIRBY: We don’t know. We don’t know. That’s a call for them to make if they’re interested or willing in participating in a multilateral discussion or not. But speaking for Secretary Kerry, I can tell you that he fully intends to use multilateral efforts available to him, whether it’s the ISSG or the UN or something separate and distinct. Tom Shannon was in Berlin at the invitation of the German Government just yesterday to – a smaller but still multilateral discussion about Syria. The Secretary has every intent to continue to use those vehicles as best he can. But we don’t know whether Russia will come to those sessions. We don’t know whether they will do so --
  • QUESTION: Yeah, okay. And is there anything that you are doing to try to stop Aleppo from falling to the government, the Russian-backed government offensive, or have you kind of written it off? MR KIRBY: Nobody is writing off Aleppo. I think everybody’s deeply troubled and concerned about what appears to be a very continued, concerted, and if – and increased effort by the regime to conduct a siege and to take Aleppo. But -- QUESTION: Yeah. Are you doing anything to stop it? MR KIRBY: Well, we obviously are continuing – another reason why, as I said, they – Foreign Minister Lavrov and the Secretary spoke yesterday was the Secretary was expressing our concerns about what’s going on in Aleppo. We’re not turning a blind eye to that. And we still want – the short answer to your question is we’re still interested in pursuing a cessation of hostilities that can endure nationwide, and certainly in Aleppo. It’s just that now we’re going to have to pursue that goal through a multilateral effort and not any longer solely through a bilateral effort with Russia.
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  • QUESTION: Let me just follow up on the statement made by Brigadier General Konashenkov, the spokesman for the ministry of defense. He said that they have the 300 and the 400 and it’ll come out surprisingly and so on. Does that give you pause in contemplating a military option? MR KIRBY: Again, Said, I don't want to – I think it’s safe to assume that we’re looking at a full range of options here. And those comments notwithstanding, we still have a responsibility as a government to consider all those options. What we’ve also said is that none of the other options that we’ve talked about to date are any better or can lead – we don’t believe will lead to a better outcome than what we’re trying to pursue through diplomacy. And we’re still trying. Even though we’re suspending bilateral cooperation with Russia, we’re still trying to pursue diplomatic solutions here. And so I just don’t want to – I don’t think it’s useful or helpful for me to speculate one way or the other about these comments and the threats that they might embody. We have a responsibility to the Syrian people, to our allies and partners, and we take that responsibility seriously. And we’re approaching this conversation inside the government with that in mind.
  • QUESTION: In the event that a strike is decided upon and you take out certain, let’s say, runways or military facilities and so on, it would be just a punishment or would it be a la Desert Fox back in 1998 in Iraq? Or would it be something that is sustained to basically – like Libya, to overthrow the regime? MR KIRBY: Said, you’re well ahead of any decisions, at least that have been made to date here, on the U.S. side. I can’t even begin to entertain that question. We still believe a diplomatic approach is the best one. Yes, inside the government, we continue to have conversations about options. Not all of those options, as I’ve said, revolve around diplomacy. It would be irresponsible for us not to think about other tools available to us to change the situation on the ground in Syria. But we’ve also said that military options, whether they’re a no-fly zones, a safe zone, whatever you want to call them, they bear risk. They expend resources. And they’re certainly, just by dint of the fact that they’re military, are going to not de-escalate the tension, not going to bring down the violence necessarily. That doesn’t mean they’re off the table. It just means that, in consideration of them, we have to factor all of that in. But your question gets well, well ahead of where we are right now, and I couldn’t possibly answer it.
  • QUESTION: If we can go back to Syria – and sorry, this is from a little bit earlier in the week, and so I apologize if it’s already been addressed. But I was wondering if you had a response to the Russian Government blaming – putting blame on the U.S. for the shelling of the Russian embassy in Damascus. MR KIRBY: I don’t know if it’s been addressed or not. There’s no truth to it. Okay?
Gary Edwards

I Am a Peaceful AR-15 Assault Rifle Owner | Casey Research - 0 views

www.caseyresearch.com/...eful-ar-15-assault-rifle-owner

second-amendment Guns

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 May 13
     
    ""Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurances and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." George Washington I can't think of any reason I need to own my AR-15 assault[1] rifle. I don't pretend to need it for self defense. I also own several handguns. Any one of my handguns would be adequate to allow me an opportunity to defend myself, or another person, from virtually any act of aggression by another individual. Indeed, I could have easily halted any of the recent gun based rampages, by any of those deranged lunatics, with just one of my handguns. I wish I had been there. I have needlessly and peacefully owned my AR-15 for many years. I keep my AR-15 securely locked in a gun safe in the very same home where my young children live. My children are aware of my AR-15. Like many other things in life, I have taught my children about guns. Recently, some of my kids attended a private gun safety class given by a highly experienced gun expert. I enjoyed watching my kids learn about my AR-15. I admit being a bit nostalgic about my AR-15. I spent lots of time learning about every aspect of the AR-15 when I was in Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. I also carried an AR-15 when I served my country in Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia. I had it with me when I lived in a dirt hole on the border of Kuwait. It is the weapon I know better than any other. I own lots of dangerous things I don't need. I don't need my highly modified 600+ hp Z06 Corvette, or my Harley Davidson motorcycle, or that crazy looking knife I sometimes jokingly say was imported directly from the Klingon Empire.[2] Al
Gary Edwards

Columbine Survivor Pens Bold Open Letter to Obama Rejecting Gun Control: 'Whose Side Ar... - 0 views

www.theblaze.com/...-control-whose-side-are-you-on

Gun-Control second-amendment Evan-Todd

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13
     
    Amazing letter from Columbine survivor, Evan Todd, to Obama, explaining why Obama's gun control proposals are non sense. Evan Todd's open letter to Obama, below. - Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives: Universal Background Checks First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens. Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it. Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time. It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now - but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendmen
Gary Edwards

Amnesty Senators and the Stories They Told | RedState - 0 views

www.redstate.com/...the-stories-they-told

Amnesty Amnesty-Liars Backstabbing-Senators

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Republicans (and red state Democrats) used to tell voters amazing things about their opposition to amnesty. Then they got elected and supported legislation that actually weakens border security and puts people on a path not just to legalization, but to citizenship, before ever securing our borders.
  • 1. Rubio: “I would vote against anything that grants amnesty because I think it destroys your ability to enforce the existing law and I think it’s unfair to the people who are standing in line and waiting to come in legally. I would vote against anything that has amnesty in it.”
  • 2. Corker: “We need a new immigration policy that reflects America’s values. First, secure this border. Allow people to work here but only if they’re legal. No amnesty. Those employed but here illegally must go home and return through legal channels.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • 3. Wicker: “I agree that illegal immigration is a major issue that needs to be addressed. However, I oppose amnesty as the solution.”
  • 7. Heller: “I believe it is an amnesty program, a back-door amnesty program for the 12 to 15 million people who are here illegally.”
  • 5. Flake: “I’ve been down that road, and it is a dead end. The political realities in Washington are such that a comprehensive solution is not possible, or even desirable given the current leadership. Border security must be addressed before other reforms are tackled.”
  • 6. Hatch: “We can no longer grant amnesty. I fought against the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill because they granted amnesty to 3 million people. They should have to get in line like anybody else if they want to come into this country and do it legally.”
  • 4. Ayotte: “For the people who are here illegally, I don’t support amnesty; it’s wrong. It’s wrong to the people who are waiting in line here, who have waited for so long. And we need to stop that because I think that’s where the Administration is heading next.”
  • 8. Alexander: “We cannot restore a system of legal immigration – which is the real American Dream – if we undermine it by granting new benefits to those who are here illegally.”
  • 9. Collins: Before 2008 reelection, voted no on McCain-Kennedy amnesty
  • 10. Hoeven: Hoeven said the U.S. needs to secure its borders and crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.
  • 11. McCain: “Complete the danged fence.”
  • 12. Graham: Amid withering criticism from his constituents, Graham — who is up for reelection next year — began to argue that it was time to approach the immigration problem in stages. On Thursday, he likened the decisive vote to pass his amendment to “having been robbed 12 million times and finally getting around to putting a lock on the door.”
  • 13. Kirk: “The American people believe our borders are broken. It is a fundamental duty of our government to know who is entering the country, making illegal entry nearly impossible. In the coming Congress, we have an overwhelming bipartisan consensus to restore confidence in the security of our borders — before we pursue other immigration proposals.”
  • 14. Murkowski: “With regard to undocumented aliens, I believe that those who illegally entered or remained in the United States should not be granted amnesty. Granting amnesty to illegal aliens sends the wrong message and is not fair to the vast majority of immigrants who abided by U.S. immigration laws. Granting amnesty would only encourage further illegal immigration.”
  • 15. Chisea: Joined most other Republicans, including opponents of the legislation, in supporting a proposal — which was defeated largely along party lines — that would have blocked legalization until the government can prove U.S. borders are secure. Chiesa said he sees border security as a top priority given his law enforcement background, and has yet to decide his stance on citizenship for immigrants without authorization.
  • Red State Democrats
  • 1. Pryor: “I voted against the president’s immigration plan today because the border security and enforcement measures are inadequate and the bill fails to effectively address the individuals who are already here illegally.” Pryor says it’s time for changes, “It’s time for a new approach. I advocate that we strengthen and implement the enforcement measures in this bill and show we can fully enforce immigration laws.”
  • 2. Tester: He wants secure borders and no amnesty for law breakers.
  • 3. Landrieu: “Sen. Landrieu is a leader in the U.S. Senate fighting against illegal immigration,” Schneider said. “She has fought against amnesty for illegal immigrants and to provide more resources for border security. The new NRSC attack is designed simply to mislead voters about Sen. Landrieu’s record.”
  • 4. Donnelly: “Eliminate amnesty because no one should ever be rewarded for breaking the law.”
  • 5. Hagan: Hagan said she supported increased border security and opposed amnesty.
  • 6. McCaskill: Claire does not support amnesty. As a former prosecutor, Claire believes people who break the law should be held accountable, both illegal immigrants and the employers who exploit them for cheap labor. Claire does not believe we need any new guest worker programs undermining American workers.
  • 7. Stabenow: Do you support path to citizenship for illegal immigrants? STABENOW: I voted no, because it went too far and cost us jobs. I do think it’s important to have border security and legal system that is fair and effective. My focus is on our jobs that we’re losing because of failed policies.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13
     
    Good collection of statements and position summaries for Republican and Democrat Senators who yesterday voted for the latest Amnesty Bill.  Each had staked out a election position demanding the border be closed and that American jobs be protected.  Yet, here they are voting for an amnesty plan that will legalize over 46 million new Americans. There is no  doubt in my mind that Big Business supports cheap labor fully subsidized by the great American social safety net.  These corporate welfare queens want to pass the escalating cost of labor onto hapless taxpayers.  The Democrats get to rule a one party nation as these new "Federal" citizens loyalty to the is bought and paid for by the States.   And the middle class gets destroyed.   The last stronghold in the Marxist transformation of America handbook, "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky, is the middle class.  Alinsky had a plan to take it down, and this is the final nail. Still, I don't think any of these Senators are Marxists.  Obama is a Muslim Marxist, same as his father.  A real true believer.  But what were witnessing in America's destruction is not ideological.  It's all about the money.  Ideology is for the handful of idiots needed to put their lives on the line.  The rest can be handled with the one two punch of money and power.  And that's what we see with the amnesty Senators. The money comes from International Banksters and Big Business.  The power comes from having a position, bought with enormous amounts of cash, in the New World Order. Ideology is the facade that hides the enormity of this global power play.
Gary Edwards

The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb | Scott Adams' Blog - 0 views

blog.dilbert.com/...nitive-dissonance-cluster-bomb

Scott-Adams Dilbert Trump

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Nov 16
     
    "Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn't even complete. I've heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing? It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. This is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it. This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on PREDICTING the outcome of the election using the Master Persuader Filter. I told you it would be easy to fit any theory to the facts AFTER the result. And sure enough, we can fit lots of theories to the facts. At least 24 of them by CNN's count. Generally speaking, the greater the persuasion, the more cognitive dissonance you get. Trump is - in my opinion - the greatest persuader of my lifetime. I expected this level of cognitive dissonance. Next time you see a persuader of this magnitude, you can expect the outcome to be cognitive dissonance in that case too. This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here's the setup that triggered them. 1. They believe they are smart and well-informed. 2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad. 3. Half of the voters of the United States - including a lot of smart people - voted Trump into office anyway. Those "facts" can't be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That's where cognitive dissonance comes in. There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn't see Trump as a dangerous monster, pe
Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...-list-33-most-intriguing-cases

Clinton-Body-Count

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17
     
    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Gary Edwards

Newt Gingrich: 15 Things You Don't Know About Him - 1 views

www.thefiscaltimes.com/...s-You-Dont-Know-About-Him.aspx

Newt-Gingrich Libertarians Ron-Paul Reagan-Constitutional-Conservative Banksters Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 11
     
    Good article on Newt; covers the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Personally i don't trust Newt.  As former repubican senator Jim Talent of Missouri says, "He's not a reliable and trusted conservative leader".  Strangely, Talent supports Romney. And there is nothing conservative about Romney.   The one thing i do like about Newt is that he is a bomb thrower extraordinaire.  There isn't a Libertarian (moi), conservative, or Constitutional conservative anywhere that wouldn't love to see Newt in the ring with Obama, hammering his Marxist ass without mercy.  But i'm not so sure that that desire is enough to overcome the serious character flaws and self centered egotistical baggage Newt hauls around.  He proves time and again that he lacks the core values of a true conservative, including dedication to the upholding the Constitution and Rule of Law. Funny though that a valueless establishment repubican "we can manage big government more efficiently and make it work" guy like Romney is attacking Newt as not being a true conservative?  What does that make Romney?  At least Newt can point to the awesome Contract with America repubican take over of Congress - after 40 years in the wilderness. Even though Ron Paul has lost it on foreign policy, i continue to send money.  My switch from Reagan Constitutional Conservative to Libertarian has "nearly" everything to do with the 2008 financial collapse, and the years of research and study that followed.   I say "nearly" because i just couldn't pull the trigger until unexpectedly i found myself in a Bloomberg discussion questioning my support for Herman Cain.  Sadly, Herman supports the Federal Reserve, including full approval of both Greenspan and Bernacke policies that have destroyed the US dollar and enabled the Banksters to run off with over $29 Trillion of our money.  Of course, this is an indefensible and inexcusable position.  The Libertarian's in the discussion pointed out that the problems this country faces cann
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 11
     
    disclosure: I met Cokie and Steve Roberts at an intimate house party in NH. Probably in 1991. Very nice people but they are full blown unionist-socialist-progressives iron bent on the European Socialism model. Not Constitutionalist in any way shape of form. Certainly not Constitutional Capitalist or free market types either.
Gary Edwards

Limbaugh on Obama's 'Chip on His Shoulder,' the Phenomenon of the 'Not-Romney' and the ... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ey-and-gops-fear-conservatives

Rush-Limbaugh Obammunism Greta-Van-Sustern Fox-News

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 11
     
    Awesome!  Once again Rush takes us to school. excerpt: VAN SUSTEREN: I guess I mean a motive to -- an intentional motive to hurt the country, versus his (Obama) ideology is one that the way you achieve ideals is different values. LIMBAUGH: This is the question. We are living under a number of assumptions about Obama that have been presented to us by elites of both parties. One of the illusions is Obama's brilliant, that he's smarter than anybody else in the room, messianic. We have never had a politician like this in our midst, we were told in 2007, 2008. Nobody like Obama has ever trod our soil. He was going to unify us. The world was going to love us again. It's going to lower the sea levels. I mean, ridiculous stuff. So the question is, is he just dumb? Does he really believe this economic stuff? Does he really believe that taking capital, money out of the private sector and transferring it to government and unions is the way you grow the private sector? Is that the way (INAUDIBLE) Does he really believe that? Is he that ill educated? Is he the product of nothing other than the American education system and whoever influenced him at home when he was young? Or is he an ideologue? Is he a Marxist socialist who has an agenda that's oriented toward cutting the country down to size? I mean, that's the question. For me, the answer to the question is irrelevant. I think that whatever he's doing, why he's doing it, it's obvious he is doing it. He is taking steps, these 10 policies that are injurious to the country, injurious to individuals, targeting as the enemy the people who work in this country, targeting as the enemy that people that pay taxes. This business of this Occupy Wall Street crowd, which is his -- it was created I think on the basis that Romney was going to be the Republican nominee. Romney's Wall Street, so you get Obama's band out there, Occupy Wall Street, protesting. It was set up to oppose Romney -- Wall Street blamed for all these ills in the e
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