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Turkey, Russia, and the Fallacy of ‘Collective Security’

Tuesday December 1, 2015

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Today we are only a few miscalculations and missteps away from a nuclear world war: fewer than ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Last week Turkey shot down a Russian military plane over Syria. Turkish-backed fighters on the ground then executed one of the parachuting crew members. The militants also shot down a responding Russian rescue helicopter with a US-supplied anti-tank missile, killing a Russian marine.

Turkey justified the shoot-down with allegations about airspace violations (lasting mere seconds), which Russia denies. The Turkish prime minister boasted that he personally authorized the attack.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the incident a “stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists.” Russia retaliated by imposing sanctions on Turkey and by allegedly “wiping out” the militants in the area of the shoot-down with heavy bombing. Russia has also built up defenses for its planes operating over Syria near Turkey: fighter-plane escorts for bombers, as well as cover by sea-to-air and ground-to-air missile launchers.
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COP21: Climate Action Or Pushing A Hoax?

Tuesday December 1, 2015

More than 100 heads of state join almost 40,000 other elites in Paris for two weeks to discuss how to approve a legally binding global agreement to fight climate change. When polls in the US showed that Americans view climate change as a very low priority, political leaders backed up by the loyal media began pushing the idea that climate change is driving global terrorism. So if you are not motivated to take action to fight global climate change you must be soft on terrorism. That is how propaganda works. And it is working. What will be the implications for US sovereignty and economic and personal liberty of empowering a global body to regulate US economic activity? Join the Ron Paul Liberty Report today for our take...
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Life in the Electronic Concentration Camp: The Surveillance State Is Alive and Well

Monday November 30, 2015

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Bottle up the champagne, pack away the noisemakers, and toss out the party hats.

There is no cause for celebration.

We have secured no major victories against tyranny.

We have achieved no great feat in pushing back against government overreach.

For all intents and purposes, the National Security Agency has supposedly ceased its bulk collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls, but read the fine print: nothing is going to change.

The USA Freedom Act, which claimed to put an end to the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls, was just a placebo pill intended to make us feel better and let the politicians take credit for reforming mass surveillance.

In other words, it was a sham, a sleight-of-hand political gag pulled on a gullible public desperate to believe that we still live in a constitutional republic rather than a down-and-out, out-of-control, corporate-controlled, economically impoverished, corrupt, warring, militarized banana republic.

You cannot restrain the NSA. The beast has outgrown its chains.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham In Iraq - Wants US Troops To Come Back!

Monday November 30, 2015

Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain have returned to the scene of the crime -- Iraq -- where the war they demanded has left the country shattered into a million bits with ISIS there to take care of the rebuilding. These two "experts" are forever wrong in their every utterance and policy position -- remember how angry McCain became when it was pointed out that he was meeting with terrorists in Syria and telling us they were moderates? -- yet the slavish US mainstream media continues to defer to their rotten judgement. Back in Iraq over the weekend, the Senators again pushed the only policy they know -- war -- demanding a fresh supply of young American meat to be ground up in Iraq and Syria. Troops on the ground, they scream. Give us 20,000 to start! Today's Liberty Report looks at the logical fallacy that doing more of what caused terrorism can defeat terrorism...
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Russia Bans Soros Foundation as a ‘Threat To National Security And Constitutional Order’

Monday November 30, 2015

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Following Russia's official retaliation to the Turkish downing of its jet a week ago, in which Putin issued an executive order limiting employment for Turkish workers, restricting Turkish organizations, and reducing the amount of bilateral trade with Ankara, perhaps a far more notable development took place earlier today when the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office issued a statement in which it recognized George Soros’s Open Society Institute and another affiliated organization as "undesirable groups", banning Russian citizens and organizations from participation in any of their projects.

In a statement released on Monday, prosecutors said the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia’s Constitutional order and national security. They added that the Justice Ministry would be duly informed about these conclusions and would add the two groups to Russia’s list of undesirable foreign organizations.

Are the "globalization gloves" finally coming off?
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The War on Terror is Creating More Terror

Monday November 30, 2015

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The interventionists will do anything to prevent Americans from seeing that their foreign policies are perpetuating terrorism and inspiring others to seek to harm us. The neocons know that when it is understood that blowback is real – that people seek to attack us not because we are good and free but because we bomb and occupy their countries – their stranglehold over foreign policy will begin to slip.

That is why each time there is an event like the killings in Paris earlier this month, they rush to the television stations to terrify Americans into agreeing to even more bombing, more occupation, more surveillance at home, and more curtailment of our civil liberties. They tell us we have to do it in order to fight terrorism, but their policies actually increase terrorism.
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‘Deadliest Terror Group in the World’: The West’s Latest Gift to Africa

Saturday November 28, 2015

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Nigeria’s Boko Haram is now officially the deadliest terror group in the world. That they have reached this position is a direct consequence of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Co’s war on Libya – and one that was perhaps not entirely unintended.

According to a report just released by Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram were responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, compared to 6,073 attributed to ISIS, representing a quadrupling of their total killings in 2013. In the past week alone, bombings conducted by the group have killed eight people on a bus in Maiduguri; a family of five in Fotokol, Cameroon; fifteen people in a crowded marketplace in Kano; and thirty-two people outside a mosque in Yola.

In 2009, the year they took up arms, Boko Haram had nothing like the capacity to mount such operations, and their equipment remained primitive; but by 2011, that had begun to change. As Peter Weber noted in The Week, their weapons “shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/ anti-tank guns.” This dramatic turnaround in the group’s access to materiel was the direct result of NATO’s war on Libya.
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Two Reasons The 'War on Terror' Will Always Fail

Saturday November 28, 2015

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If we want to get to a world where terrorism isn’t such a regular tragedy, governments need to start recognizing the fact that the so-called “War on Terror” is a self-fulfilling prophecy destined to foment one thing and one thing only: more terrorism. 

The Big Picture: The problem arising in the wake of the recent mass-murder event in Paris and the subsequent French bombing of the Islamic State (also a mass-murder event) is that the two acts (and hundreds like them) serve as justification for more of the same from the other side. They provide fuel for each other’s fire and the situation, not surprisingly, continues to metastasize. 

The great paradox at play is that as the West continues to attack the Islamic State, the organization’s appeal continues to grow among those who view the West as an adversary. Nobody knows exactly what causes radicalization but my best guess is that its appeal will continue to increase as the West continues to respond to violent events with exponentially more violence in turn. Such has been the trend thus far. 

Why Terrorism? Terrorism is likely to spawn from a number of things, such as a bankrupt ideology, a sense of injustice, and disenfranchisement with the status quo. Regardless of the exact origins in any particular case, there are two primary reasons that the “war on terror” will continue to fail (assuming the goal is to reduce the number of terrorist attacks and the rampant increase in radicalization). Reason #1: Western violence (the principal prescription for fighting terrorism) is also the primary motivation behind successful terrorist recruiting efforts. Reason #2: Western attempts to overthrow heads of state under the guise of fighting terrorism provide an incredible opportunity for terrorist organizations to take root in a more institutional fashion. Let’s discuss these two phenomena in more depth.
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The Most Dangerous Time in Our History?

Thursday November 26, 2015

Washington wants the rest of us to believe we are living in the most dangerous time in history. It is how they can cower us into accepting their "protection." But they are wrong. They are hyping threats. In fact we have a great many things to be thankful for as Americans this Thanksgiving. Those of use working for peace and the prosperity it brings have more tools at our disposal than ever in history. We are empowered. Tune in to a special Thanksgiving Day edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report...
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Massachusetts Cheerleader Tweets Criticism Of Illegal Immigration, School Bans Her From Team

Thursday November 26, 2015

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We have been discussing the rapid erosion of free speech on our campuses. That trend started a long time ago in our high schools where officials have steadily attacked the exercise of free speech by teenagers. Few however have reached the level of censorship and content-based punishment as Revere High School in Massachusetts.Cheerleader Caley Godino has been banned from her team because she tweeted political comments that her teachers did not like about illegal immigration.

The day after the municipal elections Godino was on a field trip outside of the school when her Civics teacher sent out a tweet about low voter turnout in the elections that noted that only ten percent of the population voted. Godson dashed off a response saying “10 percent of Revere voted because the others are not legal.”

The school Administration promptly put her on probation. Superintendent Dianne Kelly insisted that she is supportive of free speech but only up to a point: “If you’re going to stand up and say something that other people will find offensive or hateful, then you need to be prepared to deal with the ramifications of that.” Well, yes, but the “ramifications” are usually more speech — part of a healthy dialogue in a free society. Godino received an overwhelming response from critics. However, Kelly and her staff wanted to silence her voice and punish her exercise of free speech. This seems quite afield from the standard under Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. Sch. Distr. (1969) of punishing those acts that “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.”
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