How many of us does it take to move the US in a direction toward a more peaceful foreign policy and the restoration of civil liberties at home? Not as many as people might think. But what is critical is that we educate ourselves and then do our best to help educate others. Some of the drug decriminalization we are seeing today would be unheard of just a few years ago. People's opinion begins changing until a tipping point is reached, and then policy changes. RPI Senior Fellow Adam Dick joins the Liberty Report to discuss his new book, "A Tipping Point for Liberty," which points us in the right direction... read on...
Wikileaks over the last few days dumped tens of thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server.
The disclosures of dirty tricks directed against Bernie Sanders contained in those emails are startling, and only add to the whirlpool of corruption and sleaze surrounding Hillary Clinton and the wheezing corpse of the democratic process.
There's a lot to unpack here:
-- The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email server, which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months including during trips to China and Russia and which contained Top Secret national security data, was not hacked by the Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians.
-- Many in Camp Clinton and the media labeled Bernie Sanders' supporters are paranoid when they made claims during the primaries that the DNC was working against them. The hacked emails confirm the DNC was working against them, including suggestions that the DNC find ways to suggest Sanders was an atheist to discredit him in religious areas. read on...
The US-led coalition fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq has dropped its 50,000th bomb recently, yet the end of the two-year effort is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile civilians are being killed by the hundreds by US bombs on Syria. Is that not also a form of terrorism and is it not generating blowback against Europe and the US? Both major presidential candidates talk of escalating the bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria, but if that approach is not producing the desired result how will doing more of it result in a different outcome? We need an entirely new approach to the war on ISIS. Tune in to today's Liberty Report for our take... read on...
Ron Paul Institute Senior Fellow Adam Dick’s new book A Tipping Point for Liberty: Exposing and Defeating Leviathan Government was published this week. Dick’s new book frankly explores the battle between overbearing government, both at home and abroad, and individuals’ aspirations for liberty. In A Tipping Point for Liberty, Dick describes in detail the dangers from leviathan government and presents reasons for optimism.
Before joining RPI, Dick worked in the United States House of Representatives office of Rep. Ron Paul for nearly ten years. There, Dick concentrated on matters including the drug war, free speech, and gun rights that are focuses of A Tipping Point for Liberty. Dick’s book, drawn from his hundreds of RPI articles, explores in detail several other aspects of the modern America as well, including militarism, police misconduct, and mass surveillance.
Dick, whose experience includes managing one of the most successful Libertarian Party governor campaigns, also delivers in A Tipping Point for Liberty well-informed insights on libertarianism and Paul’s unique place in the liberty movement. read on...
As terrorism struck again in Nice and Germany and… Donald Trump outlined his policy against Islamic State: as president, he will seek a full declaration of war from Congress, the first such formal invocation since Pearl Harbor.
Trump was short on specifics but very clear he would take the strategies of the post-9/11 era into a presidency. Clinton, for her part, intends on “intensifying the current air campaign [and] stepping up support for local forces on the ground.” Their French counterpart, President Francois Hollande, declared “We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil.”
The problem is that none of that will work. While perhaps necessary at times, military force is far from sufficient in defeating Islamic terrorism.
Post-Germany, Post-Nice, post-Brussels, post-Turkey, post-Paris… it is clear the last 15 years of the war on terror in general, and the last two against Islamic State in particular, have not worked. No society can defend itself fully when any truck can be turned into a weapon. No amount of curating social media will prevent disenfranchised people from becoming radicalized. Ramadi fell, Fallujah fell, Mosul will likely fall, and Nice still happened.
“The effect that’s going to happen now is like stepping on a ball of mercury,” stated one American intelligence analyst. “You step on a ball of mercury, all the pieces break up and spread around the world.” read on...
I recently proposed that the liberty movement capitalize on Brexit with “Fed-exit”: a campaign to “secede" from the Federal Reserve. Fed-exit could be accomplished with a few simple policy changes.
Passing Audit the Fed is a good first step toward Fed-exit. Contrary to the Federal Reserve’s propaganda, auditing the Fed will not reduce the Federal Reserve’s mythical “independence.” It will simply allow Congress and the people to learn the full truth about the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy. read on...
September 1961. Geneva, Switzerland. A Turkish classmate of mine named Turgut burst into my room, crying, "those bastards just hanged my father!"
The bastards’ in question were Turkey’s generals. They had overthrown the civilian government of Adnan Menderes and hanged my friend’s father. Since, then, the mighty Turkish armed forces has tried to overthrow the government about every ten years.
Last weekend’s military coup in Turkey was the fifth coup since the 1960’s. Many had believed the mighty, 610,000-man Turkish armed forces, backed by 379,000 trained reserves, NATO’s second largest forces after the US, had finally been driven back to its barracks by the popular democratic AK party government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
So it seemed until last Friday when tanks seized the two Bosphorus bridges in Istanbul, and attacks were staged against key targets, like TV stations, the intelligence HQ, and government buildings. Five very senior generals and 25 colonels were reportedly at the core of the uprising. read on...
We can make a difference! That is a main theme we are keeping in mind as we put together our "Peace and Prosperity 2016" conference in Washington, D.C. this September 10th. The pursuit of a peaceful foreign policy is a task we can all take up. Demanding transparency from the US government can produce results. This week the spotlight turned to one person who has helped prove this right: founder of 28pages.org, Brian McGlinchey. read on...
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams issued a warning to an undisclosed number of masked protesters outside the Republican National Convention: “If you are a member of a group that causes you to have to hide your face, then you probably need a different cause.”
Police claim they have received at least a dozen calls related to concerns about the small groups of black-clad “anarchists” with masks.
So why is Chief Williams so concerned about the face masks? Too early for Halloween?
Nope, facial recognition.
Law enforcement aggressively employs facial recognition technology at events such as the Republican National Convention to identify “persons of interest” and to catalog new persons of interest. Masked faces don’t play as well with the technology (though newer tech can get around some limitations, and iris scan tech needs only to see your, well, eyes. More below.)
With facial recognition, a computer digitizes an image of someone’s face in a way that makes fooling the system difficult, stuff like measuring the distance between eyes, the angle of one’s nose, ear lobe shape and other tough to alter things. read on...
After some 14 years of classification, the hidden 28 pages of the Senate 9/11 report were released last Friday -- not coincidentally the exact moment you release something when you don't want much press coverage. But the explosive revelations -- and even more explosive implications -- are now finally coming out. In today's Liberty Report we interview the individual who should take much credit for the release of these papers. Brian McGlinchey founded the group 28Pages.org to educate the population and to push for the release of the pages. read on...
