Today
as I do every day I went to my website’s
many RSS feeds and read reports and commentaries that have become painfully
familiar.Here are some items I found:
*
David Stockman’s hard-hitting article
that urges Donald Trump to slam the Fed in the upcoming presidential debate
for its crucifixion of what Stockman calls Flyover America.“The Fed’s core
policies of 2% inflation and 0% interest rates . . . are based on the
specious academic theory that financial gambling fuels economic growth and
that all economic classes prosper from inflation and march in lockstep
together as prices and wages ascend on the Fed’s appointed path.”
Stockman
adds: “Putting the wood to the Fed is the right answer for what ails
the American economy. Monday night would be a good place for the Donald
to line-up with the 90% who have been left behind.”
Unfortunately,
putting the wood to the Fed doesn’t mean eliminating it, in Stockman’s view.
*
Ron Paul’s Liberty Report that featured former state department
official Peter Van Buren as a guest discussing
the Snowden movie and the nightmare surveillance state in which we have
been caged in the name of protecting us.You better not become a “person of
interest” if you’ve ever so much as given the appearance of venturing from
morally approved paths.If Big Brother takes an interest in you,
no part of your life, past or present, will be hidden from its all-seeing
eyes.
But
wait — you say you’re a good guy, have done nothing wrong, have nothing to
hide, and therefore don’t care that BB is watching your every move?
Who
says you’ve done nothing wrong?As security
expert Bruce Schneier wrote in 2006, “the government gets to
define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition."Quis custodiet custodes
ipsos? ("Who watches
the watchers?”)
And
you have nothing to hide?Words can be taken out of context.Intended
humor can be misconstrued.Someone may have it in for you.The
issue is not security versus privacy.It’s privacy versus control.Schneier,
quoting Cardinal Richelieu: ”If one would give me six lines written by the
hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him
hanged.”
*
The frightening but unsurprising trend of tech companies amplifying
the war-making powers of government through ever more powerful
autonomous
killer robots.“When it comes to lethal autonomous
systems, proponents argue that they could one day save lives, precisely
targeting only opposing soldiers and machines while leaving civilians safe
from harm.”Right.And who determines what those soldiers
will look like?US enemies have a nasty habit of dressing
like civilians.Safer to wipe out everyone than risk not
killing a “terrorist.”
*
Lew Rockwell’s speech
on War and the State, and the many ways it has distorted our lives
and the lives of others.“War and [war propaganda] encourages us
to think of other peoples as dispensable or simply beneath us. A wedding
party is blown to smithereens in Afghanistan, and Americans yawn. But we’d
certainly pay attention if the federal government blew away a wedding party
in Providence, Rhode Island.”
* Robert Wenzel’s report on former Speaker
John Boehner
joining the law and lobby firm Squire Patton Boggs.
“With
Speaker Boehner joining our team, we're better positioned than ever to grow
our brand throughout the world and to fully capitalize on our integrated
global platform,” said Squire Patton Boggs CEO Mark Ruehlmann in a statement.Boehner’s
“former deputy chief of staff, Dave Schnittger, and former policy adviser,
Natasha Hammond, already work at Squire Patton Boggs.”Nothing
like a revolving door to capitalize on an
“integrated global platform.”
*
The Guardian reports on Donald Trump’s
plan
to take the oil from all the states controlled by ISIS, particularly Iraq.Starve
the savages.Quoting Trump: “We go in, we spend $3tn,
we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then … what happens is we get
nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils.”And:
“You’re not stealing anything,” Trump said. “We’re reimbursing ourselves … at
a minimum, and I say more. We’re taking back $1.5tn to reimburse ourselves.”
Just
one year after the invasion, at the Radio and Television Correspondents’
Association annual dinner in Washington, D.C., President Bush joked to the
hundreds of journalists at the gathering, “Those weapons of mass destruction
have got to be here somewhere.” Slides of Bush crouched on the floor of the
Oval Office, looking for WMDs under the furniture, accompanied his comedy
routine. As dead U.S. service members were brought back to Dover Air Force
Base, where photographing the body bags was banned, and while Iraqi corpses
piled up in streets and morgues, Bush’s behavior was unfathomable.
After
the government’s killing, maiming, and rendering homeless tens of thousands
of Iraqis and destroying their infrastructure, a Trump administration would
find a way to steal the country’s oil. Is that not like murdering a man then
cleaning out his bank account?
Might
as well strip the US government from all moral pretenses. Make the
Iraqis pay for the US government’s mendacity, death and destruction.
That will certainly cast a healing pall over the devastated Middle East.
*
Jacob Hornberger comments on the recent
blowback
in New York City and New Jersey. “U.S. foreign interventionism in the
Middle East has been the motivating factor for every act of anti-American
terrorism since 1993, when terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center,”
he writes.
The
US government has killed people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, yet
Americans are shocked and puzzled over why some of them retaliate. In
Hornberger’s words:
Under
no circumstances can the U.S. killing of people in the Middle East be
permitted to stop.
The
reason is simple: The national-security branch knows that if the troops were
to be brought home today, anti-American terrorism would evaporate.
What
would that mean? It would mean no more “war on terrorism.” After all, if
there is no more anti-American terrorism, then why do we need a “war on
terrorism”? Why do we need a PATRIOT Act, an assassination program, Gitmo,
secret surveillance schemes, indefinite detention, and perpetual state of
emergency?
And
so on.
This
is the US
deep state at work. It’s been doing this for as long as it could
get away with it, which goes back no later than the Spanish American War
in 1898. And on Monday night, September 26, there will be a debate
between the latest candidates to serve this rogue institution.
A record
number of viewers is predicted by some experts, even though it will be
competing with another major entertainment event, Monday Night Football.
Paraphrasing
Russell Crowe as fighter James J. Braddock in Cinderella Man, at least
football players can see who’s hitting them. American voters
cannot.
If
by chance you find the news and candidates appalling and want some assurance
that dawn might be approaching instead of an oncoming freight train, consider
this inspirational
video: “Surgeons in Oxford have used a robot to operate inside the eye -
in a world first. A team at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital used the device,
controlled via a joystick, to remove a membrane one hundredth of a millimetre
thick. Patient Bill Beaver, 70, said it was "a fairytale”.” Mr.
Beaver was going blind in his right eye, which the surgery corrected.
Better
a “fairy tale” surgery than a nightmare presidential campaign.
