Qohaito is a mysterious, ancient, pre-Aksumite settlement in the Eritrean highlands, with several impressive monolithic columns rising towards the sky. It is said that right there, under the surface, exists another entire lost city. As you walk, the earth shakes, and somewhere deep below; you can hear the echo of your footsteps.
Ben Swann takes a look at the root of police militarization and why even if military equipment is removed from police departments across the nation, militarization will not come to an end.
A good deal has been said about ISIS being a grotesque travesty of Islam and a defiant rejection of all that is commonly held to be moral and humane. Islamic scholars from a variety of denominations have come forward with a single voice to condemn it as a grave wrong, and this is of course vital and timely. However, condemnation alone misses a vital point; it flatly rests on the surface of a much deeper phenomenon.
Ron Paul wrote an eye opening article recently about some legislation that was just signed in Congress, namely H. Res. 758. In the article Dr. Paul explains the purpose of the resolution. It’s not a new law but provides a basis of facts that will be relied on for future action. So essentially the resolution purports that Russia behaved badly in various ways and by way of signing H. Res.
Somewhere out there in space there are little green men who have labelled our planet a no-go zone by virtue of the sheer weight of evidence indicating the existence here on Planet Earth of a pathological condition known to them as ‘Warfare’. Historians among the little green people from somewhere, must have pondered throughout millennia, why humans have been so inhumane to their own kind.
The US House of Representatives might have though it through a bit more, but House Resolution 758, the handiwork of Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill), passed with 98 percent of the vote. The text lasts a dreary 16 pages, but that is the least of it.
The principle Nazi ideological prop that secured massive financial and political support from Germany’s leading industrialists was the Communist and Soviet threat. The main Nazi military drive, absorbing two-thirds of its best troops, was directed eastward at conquering and destroying Russia. The ‘Russian Threat’ justified Nazi Germany’s conquest and occupation of the Ukraine, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, with the aid of a substantial proportion of local Nazi collaborators.
Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)
The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers… A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
— Thomas Jefferson
The American people tend to view the Republican and Democratic parties as near polar opposites, but this is far from true. Indeed, they are clearly more united on the fundamentals underpinning U.S. society than they are at odds.
The heated legislative and political battles that characterize both parties, which are fought bitterly every two and four years in national elections and throughout the 50 states, are taking place within a much larger context of agreement between the right/far right Republicans and the center right Democrats.
