The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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You Should Care About Apple, Your iPhone, and the FBI

Tuesday March 8, 2016

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Yep, you should care. Very much. Hang up the phone and listen.

What This is All About

The FBI wants Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by one of the attackers who killed 14 people in the December San Bernardino shooting. Specifically, the Bureau wants Apple to create new software that would override a security system on the phone designed to erase its contents after ten unsuccessful password tries. The new software would also eliminate the built-in pause required between tries.

The software on the San Bernardino shooter’s phone, after ten tries, will automatically destroy any data on it as a security measure. The FBI needs that ten try limit, plus the required pauses between tries, taken away so that they can run a “brute force” attack against the password. A brute force attack runs an unlimited number of passwords (a1, a2, a3… aa1, aa2, aa3…) at high speed against the system until one works.


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Neocon Games: Warhawks Looking For New War Party?

Tuesday March 8, 2016

Neocons like Robert Kagan are having panic attacks over the possibility that their preferred presidential candidate may not end up the nominee. They are writing strong letters and threatening to take their toys and leave the Republican Party if Trump, who they don't trust, is selected by the American voters. Who are the neocons and why do they continue to have a stranglehold on US foreign policy? Today's Liberty Report is joined by Philip Giraldi to deconstruct the neocon crack-up...
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Hungarian Revolution: Orban Says 'No!' to Brussels Migration Plan

Monday March 7, 2016

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has emerged as the leader of the pro-sovereignty opposition to the dictates of the EU's Brussels bureaucrats. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel swung open Germany's doors to hundreds of thousands of migrants (mostly from places "liberated" by Germany's ally, Washington), Orban quickly saw the disaster that was coming and rushed to defy Brussels and build a border fence at lightning speed. 

When Brussels told Budapest that it had to take in its "fair share" of migrants flooding Europe thanks to Germany's promises of asylum and lots of free things, Orban told the Euro-crats to take a hike, that he would solve the problem democratically by holding a referendum to see what Hungarian citizens wanted.

That cloud over Brussels was in fact steam from the ears of the EU's ruling elites, who are not accustomed to being defied. 

And then things began going very badly indeed for the Eurocrats, who had miscalculated in spectacular fashion.
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Just Shut Up and Vote: The Futility of Representative Government in an Age of Robber Barons

Monday March 7, 2016

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Despite the fact that we’ve been burned before, most Americans continue to allow themselves to be bamboozled into casting their votes for one candidate or another, believing that this time they mean what they say, this time they really care about the citizenry, this time will be different.

Of course, it never turns out differently.

We are as easily discarded the day after the elections as we were wantonly wooed in the months leading up to the big day. Those same politicians who were once so eager to pose for our pictures, smile at our jokes, and glad-hand us for our votes will, upon being elected, retreat behind a massive, impenetrable wall that ensures we are not seen or heard from again—at least, until the next election.

The joke is on us.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all of the caucuses, primaries, nominating conventions, town hall meetings, rallies, meet and greets, delegates and super-delegates are sophisticated schemes aimed at advancing the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting.

It’s not about Red Republicans or Blue Democrats. It’s about Green Donors—i.e, those with money who can afford to pay for access.
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Hillary's Libya: Arab Spring Or Dark Winter?

Monday March 7, 2016

According to a recent New York Times series of articles, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the key Obama Administration figure arguing for a US attack on Libya back in 2011. She promised it would be a triumph of "smart power," but with billions wasted, tens of thousands killed, and a country in ruins, it looks more like "dumb power." Now the US and its allies are readying a new military force to go back into Libya to fight an ISIS that was not present before the US "liberation." Score another defeat for interventionism. The full story today in the Liberty Report...
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Do We Need To 'Rebuild The Military'?

Sunday March 6, 2016

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The Republican presidential debates have become so heated and filled with insults, it almost seems we are watching a pro wrestling match. There is no civility, and I wonder whether the candidates are about to come to blows. But despite what appears to be total disagreement among them, there is one area where they all agree. They all promise that if elected they will “rebuild the military.”

What does “rebuild the military” mean? Has the budget been gutted? Have the useless weapons programs like the F-35 finally been shut down? No, the United States still spends more on its military than the next 14 countries combined. And the official military budget is only part of the story. The total spending on the US empire is well over one trillion dollars per year. Under the Obama Administration the military budget is still 41 percent more than it was in 2001, and seven percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War.
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US Sends 'Small Armada' to Confront China as Beijing Accuses Washington of 'Containment'

Saturday March 5, 2016

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Obama's so-called "pivot to Asia" has always meant one thing and one thing only: Provoking China and threatening its sphere of influence.

And luckily for Obama, the US has perfected the art of military provocation. It's now been confirmed that the US Navy has sent a "small armada" consisting of "the carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers and the 7th Fleet flagship" to the South China Sea in order to "confront" China.

Some might wonder why China needs to be "confronted" in the South China Sea. As usual, it has nothing to to with "democracy promotion" and everything to do with economic control of the region:

The arrival of group led by the carrier USS John C. Stennis is seen as the latest signal to China that the US will continue to enforce freedom of navigation in the waters through which about US$5 trillion ($7.4 trillion) of trade is shipped each year.
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Getting Intervention 'Just Right': The West's Goldilocks Strategy in Libya

Saturday March 5, 2016

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A renewed Western military ‘commitment’ to Libya will not be enough to defeat ISIS – but it might be enough to establish the permanent military presence in North Africa the West has been hankering after ever since 1970.

On 19th February, the US launched an airstrike on an ISIS training camp in Sabratha, Libya, killing an estimated 40 people. While the attack was widely reported as a ‘new front’ in the West’s ‘war on terror’, the reality is that the Western military presence inside Libya has been growing for some time.

As an Oxford Research Group paper published last month noted, “US, British and French special operations forces are operating covertly with local allies across northern Libya and their aircraft fly quite openly on reconnaissance missions in Libyan airspace. US F-15E strike aircraft, operating from the UK, have launched ‘targeted killing’ attacks on alleged jihadist leaders and US commandos have abducted at least two others for trial in the US. In February Italy approved the use by US armed drones of its Sigonella air base in eastern Sicily, albeit with tight restrictions”.

The paper added that all of this is in addition to the EU’s “Italian-commanded EUNAVFOR MED naval force with a ludicrous mission and no UN mandate” that was launched last October.
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Murder Is Washington’s Foreign Policy

Friday March 4, 2016

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Washington has a long history of massacring people, for example, the destruction of the Plains Indians by the Union war criminals Sherman and Sheridan and the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilian populations, but Washington has progressed from periodic massacres to fulltime massacring. From the Clinton regime forward, massacre of civilians has become a defining characteristic of the United States of America.

Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen, Ukraine’s attack on its former Russian provinces, and Israel’s destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people.

The American state’s murderous rampage through the Middle East and North Africa was enabled by the Europeans who provided diplomatic and military cover for Washington’s crimes. Today the Europeans are suffering the consequences as they are over-run by millions of refugees from Washington’s wars. The German women who are raped by the refugees can blame their chancellor, a Washington puppet, for enabling the carnage from which refugees flee to Europe.

In a recent article, Mattea Kramer points out that Washington has added to its crimes the mass murder of civilians with drones and missile strikes on weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, medical centers and people’s homes. Nothing can better illustrate the absence of moral integrity and moral conscience of the American state and the population that tolerates it than the cavalier disregard of the thousands of murdered innocents as “collateral damage.”
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Libya: How Hillary Clinton Destroyed a Country

Friday March 4, 2016

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“We came, we saw, he died,” exclaimed an ebullient Hillary Clinton, as she exulted over the horrific death of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, who was sodomized with a bayonet before being brutally murdered by rampaging militiamen. Visiting Tripoli, the Libyan capital, the American Secretary of State was eager to take credit for the “liberation” of yet another Muslim country by Western powers acting in concert. An extensive and quite revealing New York Times investigation (Pt. 1 here, Pt. 2 here) reports on “a ‘ticktock’ that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s ‘leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.’ The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: ‘HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,’ it read.”

These days, however, out on the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is not quite so eager to take ownership of what can only be characterized as an unmitigated disaster, a case history dramatizing the perils of “liberal” interventionism from inception to bloody denouement.

Mrs. Clinton was easily won over by the Libyan rebels who presented a utopian view of what the post-revolutionary era would look like: there would be free elections, a free media, women would be able to “do it all,” and everyone would get a pony. They “’said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,’ said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. ‘They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.’”
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