Once again, today's news all points to the "road-paving" for what is to come - the road to war and totalitarianism:
U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the nuclear deal with Iran is propelling the Arab world into the arms of Russia. The Egyptian government, formerly a U.S. ally, will buy $2 billion in armsfrom Russia, signaling a strategic realignment in the Middle East that leaves Putin in control.
Egypt’s open embrace of Russia started immediately after the Obama Administration suspended some military aid to the Egyptian government in response to the overthrow of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. While American aid continued unabated after the Islamists took over, it was cut after they were overthrown.
Support for America and President Obama in particular collapsed in Egypt in response. Only a single percent of Egyptians have confidence in the U.S. and three percent have confidence in Obama. The U.S. support for the Brotherhood has made it a casualty of the regional backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Royal Family of Bahrain, a foe of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, feels the same way. Crown Prince al-Khalifa recently said, “America seems to suffer from schizophrenia when it deals with the Arab world.”
He compared the U.S. unfavorably to Russia; a shocking assessment considering Bahrain’s hostility to Putin.
“The Russians have proved that they are reliable friends,” he explained.
This trend didn’t start after the Arab Spring brought the Muslim Brotherhood to the forefront. It started shortly after President Obama took the oath of office. By June 2010, Egyptian and Jordanian officials were privately fretting about American diplomacy, specifically how the administration was reaching out to Syria.
“Only if you’re tough with America and adopt an anti-U.S. stance will the U.S. have a more flexible attitude and pay you,” an Egyptian official anonymously stated.
We warned last week of the rising nationalism and concerns about Abe's intentions and this evening the escalating tensions in the East China Sea are clear once again. In an effort to "normalize" an officially 'pacifist' policy, a hawkish Abe announced that Japan has tonight increased its military budget notably to buy drones, amphibious vehicles, submarines, and vertical take-off aircraft to boost defenses around the remote Senkaku islands. It seems the farce is getting more surreal as Japan also considers obtaining the means to counter ballistic missiles the point of launch. Why go to war and risk it all by printing and deficit spending your country into oblivion for a 'purpose' when you can do it without spilling a drop of blood?
Japan said Tuesday it intends to boost military spending by five percent over the next five years, with a hardware splurge intended to beef up defence of far-flung territories amid a corrosive row with China.
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The government will also consider obtaining the means to counter ballistic missiles at the point of launch, according to new security plans which set a total five-year budget of 24.67 trillion yen ($239 billion), up about 1 trillion yen on the previous five-year plan.
Japan will set up a marines-style force to deal with any island incursions, equipping it with 17 tiltrotor aircraft and 52 amphibious vehicles, as well as three surveillance drones, according to documents given to reporters in advance.
Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked a trove of National Security Agency documents, welcomed a court ruling on Monday that declared the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records to be a likely violation of the US constitution.
Snowden said the ruling, by a US district judge, justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received the documents from Snowden.
"Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many,” said Snowden, whose statement was first reported by the New York Times.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of so-called metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, relating to unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope.
He also expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” wrote Leon, a US district judge in the District of Columbia.
I could not believe my eyes when I saw a photo of hundred law-abiding Americans waiting obediently in line outside of the Arapahoe High School, with their hands up, to be patted down by armed-to-teeth sheriff deputies in the aftermath of the shooting a few days ago.
That picture reminded me how insignificant We the People are in the eyes of the authorities and their enforcement agencies. Deprived of their Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, unarmed and defenseless subjects, the People were treated as if they posed a deadly threat to the sheriff and his deputies armed with assault weapons, many of whom in body armor and Kevlar military-style helmets, that apparently cared much more about their own safety than the safety of people that they were supposed to serve and protect.
I would expect a picture like that to be taken in a Nazi Germany of 1930s and 40s where the authorities did not try to sugarcoat their hostility to the regime’s real and imaginary adversaries. But in America? We have come a long way from the land of the free and the home of the brave to a socialistic-like system in which individual liberties are often referred to as loopholes or outdated reminiscences of the bygone era where the governments were for the people and not the other way around.
Our governments, apparently irritated with our stubborn refusal to give up our Second Amendment rights and to delegate our right to self-defense to the “trained professionals,” become increasingly impatient, if not outright hostile to the majority of Americans.
Cops and sheriff deputies used to be like all other folks, with the same rights and same guns like the rest of us. The only major difference between us and them was that they were authorized to enforce the law while we were only allowed to protect ourselves from the criminal acts in progress. Now, that equality has been broken and for no good Constitutional reason.
Our inalienable right to self-defense with a deadly weapon is being nixed little-by-little, as if it were somehow unworthy of a civilized person to take responsibility for his or her own property, safety, and survival. We are being constantly lectured by our governments how unfit we are to fulfill that responsibility and how our “clinging to our guns” aids criminals and derailed maniacs, and leads to outbursts of deadly violence.
Our inalienable right to self-defense with a deadly weapon is being nixed little-by-little, as if it were somehow unworthy of a civilized person to take responsibility for his or her own property, safety, and survival. We are being constantly lectured by our governments how unfit we are to fulfill that responsibility and how our “clinging to our guns” aids criminals and derailed maniacs, and leads to outbursts of deadly violence.
At the same time, police and sheriff deputies are being armed with military weaponry, including armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets, bulletproof glass, and other necessities that their labor unions deemed minimum workplace safety standards that their members are entitled to. All these are in addition to their generous salaries (often in excess of 100,000 dollars a year, including overtime), retirement benefits (standard retirement age that makes them eligible to 100 percent of their salaries is 55), and other privileges (e.g., to concealed carry) that many of us can only dream of.
And the result? The photo at the beginning of this article says it all. They are our rulers, we are their subjects, with hands in the air waiting in line until they “clear” us, with no one even asking who is going to get killed, the defenseless civilians of the armed and armored deputies, if a gunmen is still at large. Ostensibly, this travesty of freedom and security has been put in place for our own safety. (Horse feathers!)
And the result? The photo at the beginning of this article says it all. They are our rulers, we are their subjects, with hands in the air waiting in line until they “clear” us, with no one even asking who is going to get killed, the defenseless civilians of the armed and armored deputies, if a gunmen is still at large. Ostensibly, this travesty of freedom and security has been put in place for our own safety. (Horse feathers!)
What you see here is not a coincidence or an isolated phenomenon. It is a result of the well-orchestrated political process that began sometime after the World War II. The goal of that process is to submit the majority of once free individuals to the will of the collective, or rather its ruling clique, and the social engineers that promise to eliminate social injustice and economic inequality. Not surprisingly, the individual right to keep and bear arms is the first liberty that had to go in order for that process to accomplish its goal.
Human political establishments quickly turn into cults, protected from reality. Under our left-controlled mass media, the United States and Europe look like a brain-locked cult, unable to see rising dangers that are obvious to everybody else.
Our liberal foreign policy elites are deaf, dumb and blind -- which happens often to brain-locked elites before they crumble. Before the disaster of World War I, the British, French, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires were filled with arrogance and self-glorification. Then they fell apart in the industrialized trench warfare that destroyed a whole generation in Europe, bringing the United States to world preeminence for the first time.
One of the architects of liberal foreign policy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who distinguished himself again last week by advising Obama that the US Air Force should shoot down Israeli planes trying to set back Iran's nuclear weapons. We are now protecting the suicide cult of the mullahs instead of trying to defeat it. It was Zbig Brzezinski who was in charge when Jimmy Carter's betrayed modernizing Muslim ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1978. It was ZB who has been rationalizing and defending that massive act of betrayal against a strong ally who helped to bring peace and modernity to the Middle East -- just like Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak did until Obama pushed over the strongest pillar of Western defense in that region. Muslims and Israelis alike are learning to treat the United States as a potential enemy, at least under Democratic presidents.
Under the sway of leftist delusions, a sane and decent American foreign policy which worked since 1917 has now collapsed.
Nobody in the US foreign policy power structure today seems to have thought through to the inevitable consequences. They are living in Lala land, just as surely as ObamaCare's architects were. Our chattering left lives in a cult of self-congratulatory fantasy. They are as well-armed against reality as the Last Empress of China, living in her palatial compound in Beijing while growing her blackened fingernails to the size of curly hoops and pretending that China wasn't breaking down into terminal weakness, only to be awakened by a sadistic Imperial Japan and the vengeance of Mao Zedong.
History will see Obama, not as the Messiah of the Age of Aquarius, but as the last doomed Empress of the West, performing her ritual dance to the warm applause of the Imperial court while outside the walls grinning legions of barbarians are preparing to strike down the whole Empire.
During 2013, America continued to steadily march down a self-destructive path toward oblivion. As a society, our debt levels are completely and totally out of control. Our financial system has been transformed into the largest casino on the entire planet and our big banks are behaving even more recklessly than they did just before the last financial crisis. We continue to see thousands of businesses and millions of jobs get shipped out of the United States, and the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated. Due to the lack of decent jobs, poverty is absolutely exploding. Government dependence is at an all-time high and crime is rising. Evidence of social and moral decay is seemingly everywhere, and our government appears to be going insane. If we are going to have any hope of solving these problems, the American people need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and finally admit how bad things have actually become. If we all just blindly have faith that “everything is going to be okay”, the consequences of decades of incredibly foolish decisions are going to absolutely blindside us and we will be absolutely devastated by the great crisis that is rapidly approaching. The United States is in a massive amount of trouble, and it is time that we all started facing the truth. The following are 83 numbers from 2013 that are almost too crazy to believe…
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Stocks just refuse to go down.
ReplyDeletethey were down 9 pts.
HA HA HA
that is basically unchanged.
I guess we go back to records,
that would not surprise me.
Stephen >>>>>>>>>>>