Dr. Miller writes:
Bill Buckler, Captain of the financial newsletter The Privateer, published in Australia, has this to say about Ron Paul:
"Dr. Paul's great and merited attractiveness to a growing number of admirers has a very simple source. He is that rarest of creatures – a FREE man. He is beholden to nobody. He has developed his ideas and his convictions over a long and fruitful life of independent thinking. He does not compromise. He hones in on the fundamental issue and principle of any political issue and serves it up without salt or other 'seasoning.' He says what he means and he means what he says. He is the living embodiment of the 'dream' that most Americans have long since given up on as they saw it slip further and further beyond their grasp. He is the only prominent person who is doing everything he can to turn the non-debate which masquerades as the 'mainstream' in the US and global political economy into something of substance. That, far more than presidency, is his goal."
Mike Rozeff on an important component of the war lobby.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is an anti-Iran influence on U.S. foreign policy that cannot be ignored.
In its words, AIPAC wants to "prevent Iranian nuclear weapons capability". Yet Israel has that capability and far beyond. Israel has actual nuclear weapons.
Note the following four contrasts between Israel and Iran:(1) Israel has not entered into the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Iran has been a signatory to the NPT since 1968.(2) The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does not inspect Israel for nuclear-related activities. It regularly inspects Iran.(3) Israel is thought, not only to have the capability of building nuclear weapons, but to have anarsenal of nuclear bombs. Iran has no nuclear weapons. Israel has nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Iran does not.(4) Israel threatens to attack Iran preemptively. Iran does not threaten to initiate an attack on Israel. It threatens to respond with force only if it is first attacked by Israel.
AIPAC’s "prevention" position does not respect Iran’s rights. AIPAC does not contest Israel’s nuclear weapons of mass destruction, but it wants to violate Iran’s right even to have the knowledge that it takes to build a nuclear weapon.
Has Iran given up rights by some sort of recognizable aggressive behavior with respect to Israel, such that Israel may attack Iran and claim self-defense? Not at all. Iran has not attacked Israel in any of the wars that Israel has fought since it became a state.
From marketwatch.com, the author writes...
Many people will think of the gold standard as a relic of a bygone era,
something as old-fashioned as bow-ties and stuffed animals. (My caveat:
To me, that's not an insult.) Grant, when we met, argued the reverse. He
says paper currencies and our current monetary system are the ones that
are out of date.
"The anachronism is today's system," he says. We have a "command and
control, top down" system whereby the Federal Reserve imposes an
interest rate on society. The Fed, in other words, tells us what the
price of money should be. It is, Grant says, oddly at odds with the
modern age. "We live in a world of collaborative social networks" of the
Internet and Facebook, of Wikipedia instead of the old World Book, and
so on. And yet when it comes to the price of money, we wait for a
committee that sits in private to tell us what it should be.
This, he argues, is the cause of so many of our ills. The Fed has moved
from "central banking" to "central planning," fueling bubbles,
encouraging risks, and generally upsetting the equilibrium of the economy.
It's a good critique.
From the website ArtOfManliness.com, BRETT & KATE MCKAY ask...
So what should the more serious-minded citizen be looking for in the next leader of the free world? What criteria beyond hair and quips might a man use to evaluate and judge candidates for office, or those already in office?
Opinions will certainly differ on such a significant and pressing question. But while I was in college, I was introduced to an excellent yardstick for measuring our leaders, one that has stuck with me ever since.
A bedrock of principlesA politician and a statesman are not the same thing. A statesman... is not a tyrant; he is the free leader of a free people and he must possess four critical qualities:
- A moral compass
- A vision
- The ability to build a consensus to achieve that vision
The "Judge" writes...
The problem with most wars is that they are more strategic and adventurist than they are just. We now know that Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the U.S. Regrettably, it took 5,000 American lives, more than a half-million Iraqi lives, nearly a trillion borrowed dollars and two presidential election campaigns for voters to realize that. What was the grave, profound, enduring public evil from Iraq that directly threatened the freedom or safety of Americans? There wasn't one.
The same may be said for Afghanistan, about which, shortly before he was fired, Gen. James Jones, Obama's first national security adviser and a former Marine commandant, stated that the U.S. had 100,000 troops wasting their time chasing fewer than 100 al-Qaida there. Did we assure that no more innocents – or even combatants – died than was necessary to end that war? No.
And my guess is that you don't know anyone in America whose freedom and safety were threatened by the Libyan government last April.