January 12, 2014 – The Burning Platform

RANDROIDS TAKE NOTE

Was Rand Paul a spineless, corrupt douchebag before he was elected to the US Senate or has the republican party done their magic with him. Maybe it was his trip to the wailing wall… One thing is sure, Rand Paul will never be president and will never accomplish jack shit in the US Senate. What he has attained, at the price of flushing down the toilet every decent thing he was ever exposed to by his father, is a national platform for six years to be an attention whore. I’m sure it was worth it.

Rand Paul: I Never Said Snowden Is a Hero; He Should Be Tried

What are Rand’s fanboys going to say about this? It doesn’t get much clearer.In a letter to WSJ, Rand wrote:

Edward Snowden broke the law. There are penalties for breaking the law, and I believe he should be prosecuted. I do not overlook or believe our country should condone people who have access to military secrets to reveal those secrets.

Rand does go on in the remainder of the letter to muddy his view above, but this is typical Rand, trying to take both sides of an issue:

You claim “in essence” I’ve asked for a plea bargain for Mr. Snowden. I’ve made no specific legal judgment other than to say that I do support laws against national security leaks. I have not argued, as you allege, that Mr. Snowden is a hero. I have stated that history will decide.

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Further, his leaks that had nothing to do with unconstitutional domestic surveillance may have caused real damage to our national security and relations with other countries.

There are advantages to having Mr. Snowden face trial: We could determine how he breached our security and to what extent and how much information was shared with foreign countries. Ruling out the harsher end of the sentencing spectrum might encourage him to return for trial.

Standing trial would allow a judge to determine whether Mr. Snowden’s law-breaking served a higher purpose and thus sentence him accordingly and also whether some of his actions went too far in endangering our security and aiding our enemies, and also sentence him for that accordingly.

But legally and morally, the actions of the individual lawbreaker must be weighed against the government law-breaking that he went to great lengths to reveal. I do not believe we must give up this much of our liberty for security, nor do I apologize for standing up for the Fourth Amendment, which restricts such frighteningly unlimited power.

Note: The purpose of a trial is not to find out how someone was able to accomplish certain things, it is to determine guilt or innocence. Rand’s statement:

There are advantages to having Mr. Snowden face trial: We could determine how he breached our security and to what extent and how much information was shared with foreign countries.

is idiotic.

Thanks to Bob Wenzel, economicpolicyjournal.com

NAME THAT TERRORIST

It truly is amazing how Al Qaeda seems to be everywhere, even though we’ve spent $1.3 trillion, killed bin Laden, “won” the Iraqi war, “won” the Libyan war, and “won” the Afghan war. I thought we accomplished our mission. How can Al-Qaeda be in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and Egypt? They aren’t. The ruling class and their mainstream media mouthpieces call anyone who does not fall into line with what our Empire desires, an Al-Qaeda terrorist. The dumbed down American populace hears Al-Qaeda and quivers. They are manipulated into thinking droning wedding parties and children across the Middle East is the right thing to do. If not, our freedom will be in jeopardy from some ragheads living in caves 12,000 miles from our border. I don’t know whether I’m more disgusted by our neo-con fascist government or the non-thinking, iGadget gazing, hapless excuse for citizens that inhabit this decaying excuse for a society.

Al-Qaeda is Everywhere!

Written by Eric Margolis

Saturday January 11, 2014

How did al-Qaeda, a tiny anti-Communist group in Afghanistan that had no more than 200 active members in 2001 become a supposed worldwide threat?

How can al-Qaeda be all over the Mideast, North Africa, and now much of black Africa? This after the US spent over $1 trillion trying to stamp out al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The answer is simple. As an organization and threat, al-Qaeda barely exists. But as a name, al-Qaeda and “terrorism” have become the west’s handy universal term for armed groups fighting western influence, corruption or repression in Asia and Africa. Al-Qaeda is nowhere — but everywhere.

If you’re a rebel group seeking publicity, the fastest way is by pledging allegiance to the shadowy, nowhere al-Qaeda.

Take Iraq, where fighting currently rages between the Shia government and Sunni militias in Anbar Province. Interestingly, the Sunni uprising is centered on Fallujah, which was almost flattened by US Marines and blasted apart by depleted uranium shells and illegal white phosphorus as a dire warning to Iraqis who resisted.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, over a dozen Iraqi resistance groups rose to fight the Americans and their new-found Shia allies. Chief among them were Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and Iraqi military veterans. As I kept saying at the time on major US TV networks, there was no al-Qaeda and no nuclear weapons in Iraq. Thank George W. Bush for Iraq’s so-called al-Qaeda.

Thanks to the magic of mass media manipulation, Washington was able to divert attention from all of the Sunni resistance groups — or “terrorists” as they were branded — to a single group of cutthroats led by a mysterious, renegade Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The rest of the resistance groups simply vanished from our view.

A few have now resurfaced in western Iraq, notably the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Syria), or ISIS. It is always branded “al-Qaeda linked” by western media, though no evidence is offered. Iraq’s increasingly brutal regime has also claimed it is fighting al-Qaeda in Anbar Province.

Mention of the al-Qaeda buzz-word has sent America’s conservative Republicans and neoconservatives into a frenzy. They are demanding that the Obama administration do something. Maybe re-invade Iraq? There are some 10,000 US combat troops just down the road in Kuwait.

US special forces, drone and manned aircraft, and CIA mercenaries are already in action around Fallujah and Ramadi. As in past years, CIA is paying millions to Sunni tribesmen to fight anti-government forces.

Crazy as it sounds, the US is considering buying attack helicopters from Russia to give to the Baghdad regime, as it is now doing in Afghanistan with the Kabul regime.

Speaking of Afghanistan, former Pentagon chief Leon Panetta admitted that there were no more than 25 to 50 al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. But now, al-Qaeda has popped up in Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, across North Africa, Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, and so on. Somalia’s anti-western resistance group, Shebab, is also branded “al-Qaeda linked.”

Back in the Cold War, almost all groups opposing western domination were called communists. Today, al-Qaeda has replaced communism as a hot button name. The widespread — but probably mistaken — belief that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks has made anything “linked” to al-Qaeda fair game for liquidation.

Branding your foes “terrorists” is a fine way of de-legitimizing them and denying them any political or humanitarian rights. Israel did this very effectively with the hapless Palestinians, who foolishly cooperated by bombing civilians.

However, the obvious problem here is that doing so creates an endless supply of “terrorists” and pressure to take action against them. That and oil are the reason US special forces are now beating the bush all over black Africa. It’s the never-ending “long war” that America’s militarist and neocon circles want, and against which President Dwight Eisenhower so presciently warned back in the 1950’s.

Egypt offers another grim example of propaganda becoming fact. The majority of its people who voted for a democratic government in a fair election and its leaders are now condemned as “terrorists” by the thuggish generals who overthrew the legitimate government in Cairo. Anyone daring to oppose the US and Saudi-backed military junta is a “terrorist.” They must drive terrorist cars, eat terrorist food, and have terrorist babies.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/january/11/al-qaeda-is-everywhere!.aspx

Blood in the Water

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on January 13, 2013

Discuss this article at the Doom Psychology Table inside the Diner

Chatting on the Internet has been a main source of entertainment for me going on I think about a Quarter Century now. Not precisely sure the year I first hosted an AOL Chat Room. I do have Yahoo Groups still up on the net from the mid-late 90s though, so it is at least 15-20 years. I long ago closed most of them to new posting, they are just archives, a history of my years as an Internet Board Moderator/Discussion Host.

Whatever the topic it is that your Blog/Forum is concerned with, many of the same types of Personalities always show up, and the debates and arguments that ensue also all have similar and Topic Independent forms.

You have your Intellectual Debates between people concerned with a subject; you have Napalm Contests that ensue when posters seriously disagree and can’t keep to topic but rather start attacking each other; you have Religious and Spiritually oriented people who no matter WHAT the topic feel it impacts on their Belief System, you have Ideologues on a particular political or philosphical agenda; you have One Line Comedians and you have Innocents & Clueless people. Categories often overlap of course.

The topics of Collapse and DOOM of course bring out all these types, even more than typically contentious topics like Religion or Politics by themselves. Fairly obviously, if you start talking about Near Term Human Extinction or even just a Population Bottleneck that might knock down Human Population by 90% or more WITHIN THE LIFETIMES of the readers, this is a tad bit upsetting for most people and not something they WANT to believe at all. So initial reaction from the Uninitiated is almost always a Denial response.

It gets a bit worse though when you run into folks who HAVE considered these issues to one extent or another, and have WILLFULLY decided they will argue against the concepts at all cost. They wanna PROVE that everything you and all your Compadres in the Collapse Blogosphere believe is FALSE, you don’t know WTF you are talking about because you are not an EXPERT, and all Doom Blogging amounts to is a bunch of Chicken Littles calling for a Sky Falling event, while the Sky still hangs up above our heads quite nicely, Thank You. Here on the Diner, we have such a Denier who goes by the screen name of MKing, and I often refer to as Socrates because of his tendency to make Socratic style arguments where he never actually answers a direct question, but instead just poses you another one to consider.

Depending on the level of expertiese of the person engaging in such discussion and dependent on how natively smart they are and how PERSISTENT, you can end up in some VERY long and ultimately unsatisfying debates where the same old arguments are recycled all the time. As Host, you end up getting caught up in them almost no matter what, because even if you have been over the particular subject involved 100X or more, you still have to address these “New” concerns brought up by a new and enthusiastic poster who has his head screwed on completely BACKWARDS! LOL

We had such a poster on the Diner recently, a fellow who used the Nom-de-Plume Impermanence, or “Imp” as I took to referring to him after a little while. He had an agenda to place EVIL on top of Groups, and GOOD on the Individual. He was not concerned with the specifics of Collapse as it is playing itself out, and really no matter how questioned or challenged would not address those issues. Rather, every line of questioning simply ran back round to whether anybody can know anything, including Imp who claimed to Know Nothing. Except in Knowing Nothing, he was always claiming to know nothing better than anybody else did. LOL.

Imp ALSO made the claim that anyone can win any argument so long as they know how thinking works. How exactly Imp knew how thinking works when he claimed to KNOW NOTHING is a mystery as yet unsolved of course. LOL.

A couple of important Truths surfaced out of this episode of Days of Our Trolls here on the Diner. I thought I might highlight them.

Truth #1

You Can’t Win a debate on the Internet if you Quit.

Doesn’t matter how smart you are, how well you understand the nature of thinking or any of the points you might have made during the course of the debate. Once you resign, it’s like toppling over your King on the Chessboard. You quit, you’re gone, you’re done and your opponent gets to continue on writing his spin as he sees fit, unobstructed.

Truth #2

The Individual cannot stand up to the Group

If you oppose the Group Think on a website, it takes a lot of fortitude to last any length of time at all. You get hammered on by more people all the time, and unless you gain at least a few allies, the Sharks will smell Blood in the Water and circle in for the Kill. I was only able to last on TBP as long as I did because of years of practice with Internet Napalm before that and Depleted Uranium Body Armor layered over Kevlar BVDs covering Rhinocerous thick skin. Imp thinks he was “attacked” here? hahahahahahahaha. He’s got no idea what a REAL Shark Attack from Jimbos band of Shit Throwing Monkeys was like back in the Good Old Days when Smokey was pitching out the Scatology and Homophobia.

Even with a really thick skin though, you can’t last forever battling the Group Think on a website. The Battles Escalate, and eventually the Admin will pull the plug on the Individual, not the Group. It is true even here, since we have the Dungeon. If an Individual keeps causing havoc on the board, he’s going to get sequestered to where he cannot do too much harm. We don’t ban or censor anyone here, but persistent Trolls will get their posting pretty well buried in the depths of the SMF file structure.

The analogues to both Truth #1 and Truth #2 IRL are first that if you expect to survive, you can’t do it as an Individual. Second, you better find or create a Group of like minded people to work together with before TSHTF. I spent a good couple of years collecting up a few individuals with similar mind sets to my own (though of course almost nobody agrees with the Orkin Man thing. lol), and only after that did I set up the Diner with Peter and the other 12 Founders. I NEVER could have made this Blog & Forum what it is on my own, it took a Group to do that.

Imp of course will take this all as validation of his notion that Groups are Evil, squashing out Individual thinking. The thing is here, nothing gets accomplished with Individuals with different mind sets and different goals bickering all the time. You have to settle on some common principles that all agree on before you can start to work in synergy.

Here on the Diner, a few of the Common Principles I can identify quickly are:

1- You can’t have Infinite Growth in a Finite World
2- Per Capita Energy is becoming more scarce and expensive
3- We do have serious Climatic Issues, regardless of what the underlying cause is
4- Human Population is in serious Overshoot and will crash, just on what timeline we don’t know
5- Nuclear Energy is an existential threat to life on the planet, and needs to be eliminated
6- Our Financial system is a sham run by a Greedy and self-serving Plutocracy

If you are an Individual who questions any one of these Core Group Principles, it is likely you will get hammered on by the Group. If you question more than one of them, it’s GUARANTEED you will be hammered. If you further go into obfuscation and ad hom attacks on the other members of the Group, the Sharks will circle in tighter around you and there will be Blood in the Water. It won’t be the Blood of the Sharks either. It will be the Blood of the Web Surfer dumb enough to paddle his Laptop into Shark Waters on the Doomstead Diner. :icon_mrgreen:

Diner Sharks Feeding Frenzy on Cornucopians

Despite the above graphic, I don’t want to dissuade anyone who has a Philosophical or Religious spin on Life and/or on the Collapse we face different from the Diner Group Think from Posting Up with their thoughts. I like hearing from everybody. I also don’t want people with contrary or unpopular ideas to avoid the Diner, because having a wide variety of perspectives makes for more interesting conversations overall.

Nevertheless, the Regular Diners all basically agree on the Core Principles outlined above, so if you disagree with them you are pretty certain to be questioned and expected to provide evidence or at least a decent argument for why your POV is correct. If you ignore the counter arguments which are made and simply keep repeating your beliefs like a Mantra, this is like Chum in the Water for Diner Sharks. The water will start to Boil and limbs will start disappearing.

On the other hand, if you happen to AGREE with the Core Principles, the Diner is a great place to hang out with your Compadres and figure out precisely what you are going to do in response to the sorry shit state of the world we are stuck living in at the moment. You probably can’t change the world, but you do have control over how you respond to the problems that are before us now, and quite certain to get a good deal worse moving into the future.

Bemoaning it all on the Internet is one response which does have a cathartic effect and it isn’t all bad to engage in this activity. For one thing, it raises awareness in more people that we actually HAVE a problem. Far more people are aware of these things now than when I first dropped into the Collapse Blogosphere in 2008. However, this doesn’t really do very much to help resolve issues you face now or may face in the near future with respect to Money, your Food Security, your Living Arrangements or dealing with the rapidly expanding and encroaching Police State. Working out strategies to deal with these problems is what we do now with the SUN Project. Hopefully we can make things slightly less than godawful bad in our own neck of the woods, and help others do the same where they are. We already have Affiliates all over the FSoA and in Oz and Europe too!

Better than sitting on your ass texting your buddies in the SUV and waiting to go the way of the Dinosaur anyhow.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EPDNGjGyDyI/Sw-2dCC6nbI/AAAAAAAABW4/_g9CaSjHaRU/s1600/DinosaurExtinction0001a.jpg

Muck’s Minute #3

THE INSANITY OF FEDERAL MONETARY POLICY

I sat down this evening with a perfectly good subject on which to pontificate Muck’s Minute #3.

After several Russian iced teas, The subject changed to what you read about today – assuming you have the patience.

Do you have any idea about how incompetent the Federal Reserve (and all the other “central bankers”) are in administrating our fiscal policy and the fiscal policies of those other countries of the world? Were you aware that our US Federal Reserve no only bailed out numerous banks and insurance companies in this country, they also bailed out central banks in a number of European countries and others as well? They did.

Unfortunately, our central bank(s) – the Federal Reserve and all the regional banks attached thereto, bailed out bankrupt banks in the USA, Europe and a dozen other countries scattered across the globe to attempt to keep the status quo running in place and prevent the collapse of the world banking system.

Did they have that mandate? Of course not. Was it a good idea? Not in my opinion. Was it necessary to prevent another global depression? Probably, except that the result of such intervention and money printing will just put off what is inevitable in the intermediate term and will much worse than the situation would have been if we’d had just allowed a reset after Lehman Brothers folded.

I am not in favor of a world-wide financial collapse by any means. Such violent actions tend to result in wars, destroying even the small possible to grow and prosper, dragging otherwise prudent and productive nations down the tube to bankruptcy and depression. Unfortunately, with todays massive “improvement” in technology, communication, interaction and interdependence it would appear that the world will likely survive or self-destruct all at the same time.

Likely, those in the heartland of human ancestry (i.e. Africa) will have a much lesser fall than the rest of us, simply because they are still mired in societies of hunter-gatherers, dictatorships, military governments and all the rest of the “governing styles” that limit the standard of living and wellbeing of their populations.

We, however; America, Europe, Australia, some South American and recently liberated Eastern European states – not to mention Asian countries – a mixed batch if there ever was one –
will catch it in the neck.

The Federal Reserve and Central Banks of countries in the list above have absolutely no clue what to do – thrashing around, wallowing in a mud wrestling contest – with Japan already using a snorkel to breath while under the surface of the mud – all trying to depreciate their currency more than the next guy to enhance devaluation so their products will be more marketable to the rest of the world.

In a word: insanity.

Not only is everyone trying to depreciate their own individual currency relative to other countries currencies to which they they export, they are trying to increase inflation of prices within their country (lowering its’ external value) so as to gain the benefit of screwing any middle class,internal savers and investors they have left AND depreciate the awful debts that are accruing on their national balance sheets. This includes the poor ex- USA. We are doing it too. In spades. The USA’s true inflation rate is running slightly below 8% and unemployment is at 24% (using data from Shadow Stats.com). If you happen to have $100.000 in a broker’s account and have no where to invest it that will earn more than 1.5%, you are loosing 6.5% of the purchasing power of that money A YEAR…… that $6,500.00 down the shitter.

I have concluded that either the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve keep two sets of book – one showing the mark-to-fantasy figures that are published and the other showing the true figures — Or our goose is cooked – big time. No one can formulate accurate data or plan constructive action or manage anything without accurate and true data. It’s impossible. If the Fed and Treasury are using Federal Reserve data – believing it to be true, we are well and truly doomed as every decision an action is based on false data which is GUARANTEED to fail.

Just like it has in the past.

Do we never learn from history? Not much. Mr Bernanke is bailing out to his bomb shelter at Princton University at exactly the right time. Too bad he couldn’t time anything else right.

The end game grows ever closer. Be aware..

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Rand Paul: I Never Said Snowden Is a Hero; He Should Be Tried

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Al-Qaeda is Everywhere!

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