People tend to think of Amazon as a big store on the internet. It is more than that. For example, in August of 2013, soon after Amazon founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, I wrote about Amazon’s Amazon Web Services having as customers hundreds of government agencies. Included among them is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with which Amazon had a 10 years, 600 billion dollars contract to build private cloud servers inside CIA data centers. read on...
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud. read on...
Included in a Thursday foreign policy report by Rick Sanchez at RT, are portions of an interview with peace advocate and former United States House of Representatives Member Ron Paul (R-TX) in which Paul explains that a big barrier to moving toward nonintervention overseas is that “warmongering” has become a bipartisan fixation. “It used to be the Democrats were considered less likely to be involved in war, but they’re every bit as aggressive as the Republicans,” said Paul. read on...
In 2011, when then-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he spoke passionately from the debate stage against the US government having a fence at the US-Mexico border. “I think this fence business,” said Paul at a debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, “is designed, and may well be used, against us and keep us in.” “In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital and there’s capital controls and there’s people control,” continued Paul, “so, every time you think of a fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us.” read on...
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have not just been targeted by the United States government in response to their publishing of US government secrets. They have also been subjected to false reporting in the media. read on...
A year into legal recreational marijuana sales in California, the volume of sales is far less than many people, and the state government, expected. The reason for low sales numbers is not that people stopped liking marijuana. The missing expected sales are still being made, but in the black market. Because “California is regulating and taxing the hell out of cannabis” in the legal market, it is hard “for legal suppliers to compete with the state's longstanding, extensive, and highly developed black market,” writes Jacob Sullum in a Friday Reason article. read on...
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud. read on...
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who will be sworn in as a United States Senate member from Utah on Thursday, wrote a Tuesday Washington Post editorial very critical of President Donald Trump. Romney warns in his anti-Trump torrent, “The alternative to US world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal." read on...
President Donald Trump would do well to listen to Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s Russiagate investigation lawyers, concerning the propriety of prosecuting Julian Assange of WikiLeaks who has lived in the Ecuador embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition to the United States. Interviewed Sunday at the Fox News show Fox & Friends, Giuliani made it clear that he believes Assange should not be prosecuted for the publishing of US government information. Assange took part in First Amendment-protected activity, Giuliani explains, as did the New York Times and the Washington Post decades earlier when they published the US government’s Pentagon Papers containing many revelations about US activities related to the Vietnam War. read on...
Donald Trump’s presidency is a “mixed bag.” That is the assessment of libertarian communicator and former presidential candidate Ron Paul in a recent interview with Larry King at King’s Ora TV show Politicking. read on...
