There are 180,000 contractors in Iraq (more than soldiers). Here is your surge. We have forsaken our standard of not using mercenaries. America will never need a draft. So long as we keep paying taxes, our government can hire mercenaries. Money buys blood.

America, who are we?

Until I started listening to Ron Paul, I considered monetary policy to be another language. His criticism makes a lot of sense (video here). We need to pay attention to our monetary supply. Bernanke seems to respond with disinformation technique #13, Alice in Wonderland.

Also, while on the topic of Ron Paul:

One Voter’s opinion.

WAR!! WAR!! WAR!!
-Kurds Launch Clandestine war in northern Iran. (Mossad?)
-Cheney orders media to increase anti-Iran propaganda. And our “free” press obeys (again).
-Fox “News” analyst: Germany won’t sanction, so we must invade.
-Media and politicians continue to lie and lie and lie and lie.
-Administration continues to exaggerate role of Iranians in Iraq. (We are fighting Iraqis.)
-Britain’s Telegraph reports the escalation has begun.
-Jerusalem Post: US to attack in 8-10 months.
-The vote-for-me-I’m-against-the-war-Democrats give Bush everything he wants. “Last spring, Nancy Pelosi herself, after a call from the Israeli lobby, pulled an amendment that would have forced Bush to come to Congress for specific authorization before attacking Iran. Before the August recess, the Senate voted 97 to zero for a resolution sponsored by Joe Lieberman to censure Iran for complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.”
-Chickenhawk Lieberman suggests to Petraeus he invade Iran.
-New Gingrich gives a ridiculous, sensational, fear-mongering speech about Iran.
-Pentagon plans base on Iranian border.
-France’s new president talks about bombing Iran. Watch France quietly vanish from the media’s hit list.

Peace:
-US Iran report branded “outrageous and dishonest” by UN.
-Jimmy Carter says Iran not a threat to Israel.
-Wesley Clark joins military veterans in lobbying to prevent a war with Iran.
-Former Cent Com Commander General Abizaid says world can live with nuclear Iran.
-IAEA director ElBaradei speaks out against war.
-French president distances himself from earlier remarks.
-Iran cooperates with IAEA, and the chicken hawks go back to the drawing board.
-The indy media remains vigilant. (The only free press we have.)
-Iran’s 30,000 Jews continue to live peacefully, and continue to be ignored by the fear mongers crying “Holocaust.”

I have many friends who are cops. I trust them and respect them for the dangers they face. This is different. I don’t generally see the police as the enemy, but I’m deeply troubled by the increased militancy toward peace protests. I can imagine even my friends getting so focussed on their jobs, they lose sight of what they’re defending.

1) Canadian police caught red handed infiltrating stone-throwing provocateurs into a peaceful protest. This is a great video.

2) Austrailian police remove their name tags to avoid liability, resort to draconian tactics to quash protests.

3) Protest organizers arrested in D.C. Judge for yourself.

4) A new law, quietly passed for Bush by the Democrats, turns the internet and phone system into a permanent spying architecture.

5) A University of Florida student was tasered after asking John Kerry three questions: Why did he concede the 2004 election so quickly when there was evidence of wide-spread voter fraud? Why don’t they impeach Bush to stop a war with Iran? Was he a member of the secretive Skull and Bones Society, along with President Bush? He was rude and a little obnoxious, and demanded to know why he was being arrested after the questions. The media coverage I’ve seen doesn’t repeat his questions. One CNN report said he wouldn’t let go of the mic, which isn’t true. At least two networks have been reporting other tasering incidents, which probably falls under #23 in the 25 rules for disinformation.

Various levels of disbelief in the official account of 9/11, overt lies about Iraq, continued warmongering toward Iran, and the impotence and complicity of the mainstream media have spawned a community of bloggers and independent media. There is palpable fear in parts of the community that a terrorist attack will either occur, be allowed to occur, or be made to occur, and turned into an excuse for a much broader war in the Middle East. (see USS Maine, Gulf of Tonkin, Zimmerman Telegram, Lusitania, and possibly Pearl Harbor)

It’s hard to know what to believe, but I love the task of trying to understand the world — and honestly, I feel better knowing that so many Americans are watching closely and blogging their concerns. Vigilance and criticism makes democracies stronger.

There’s a lot of buzz about an apparent $4.5 billion investment betting on a stock market crash before September 21st.

Here is an article relating the investigation of these trades to the recent fatal fall taken by Congressman Paul Gillmore. It speculates he was murdered for finding out too much, and also relates the nukes which recently went temporarily missing from the Air Force’s arsenal.

Several blogs point to tomorrow, September 14th, because of Air Combat Command’s safety stand-down. They see this as an echo of the Air Force’s peculiar behavior on 9/11.

And here is an interesting article, chiding others for being irresponsible in their criticism, and providing easy fodder for those seeking to discredit the 9/11 truth movement.

My advice: Read as broadly as you can. Be skeptical. Use your brain. Read original sources. Reach your own conclusions. Do not be afraid. And make yourself heard.

Hillary calls for an undivided Jerusalem.

Okay, I’m still learning here, but my sense of history is this: Jerusalem/Al Quds was an undivided, multi-ethnic city under Arab administration in what was, until 1967, a part of Jordan. During the 1967 war, Israel captured Jerusalem. Since then, Israel has quietly deported Palestinian residents, demolished their homes, petitioned the international community to recognize Jerusalem as its capital, physically cordoned off Palestinian residents from the rest of the city, and developed bureaucratic systems to discourage Arabs residents from staying (see my essay), all under the cry “security! security! security!” and with enthusiastic diplomatic and financial support from America’s politicians.

Ask yourself: what does an undivided Jerusalem mean? how would it be attained?

Did CentCom Commander Fallon call General Petraeus an “ass-kissing little chickensh*t?”

I planned to write a comprehensive post summarizing the 9/11 truth movement after finishing the book 9/11 and American Empire, Intellectuals Speak Out, but there are already so many great organizations and websites dedicated to this cause (here’s one), my doing so seemed redundant. I will say this: if you’re looking for something immediately damning, study building 7, or study the presence of molten steel at the wreckage site.

Here is an example of the mainstream media ignoring and ridiculing the truth movement. Rather than exploring the most significant single political event of our time and the woefully inadequate investigation that followed, they talk about cookies and scantily dressed women. A sign of the times. Their determination to ignore the shouting masses is comical. They can’t win. The truth has a certain ring to it.

Oops! Weren’t they supposed to wait until after the terrorist attack? (Read More)

This story has gotten very strange, very fast. N Korea. Practice run for Iran. American Pilots. Air Defense. Who Knew. Who didn’t.

I started paying attention to our monetary system since watching the very disturbing America: Freedom to Fascism.

Two Ron-Paul clips about how inflation happens:
-Speech in Iowa — inflation is often a transfer of wealth from the working masses to the bankers and government institutions that spend newly-printed (and not yet inflated) money.
-On the floor of Congress discussing the integrity of the dollar.

The occasion for this post is this: The Federal Reserve (which is about as federal as Federal Express) has just injected $31.25 BILLION into the economy. I think the key to understanding this is picking apart the process behind the word “injected.” It results in the transfer of wealth described by Ron Paul in the clip above. That’s not to say money should never be printed, but it ought to be done by Congress, as specified in the Constitution. In 1913, they abrogated their responsibility by creating the private and very secretive Federal Reserve.

Well, they finally got him. It doesn’t matter that Norman Finelstein is the son of a Holocaust survivor. If you are off-message, you will be censored.

There will be no criticism of Israel, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

300,000,000 Americans � 100,000 people on the gov’t watch list
= 1 out of every 3,000 Americans. Does this make you feel safer?

If we’re supposed to be so scared of terrorists, doesn’t regulating our borders make more sense than blacklisting 100,000 of us and spying on the rest?

Sometimes with blogs, it’s hard to know what to believe. Wouldn’t it be great if America had a functional, dedicated mass media that served the public with rigorous, unbiased, investigative journalism?

For your consideration:

Christopher Bollyn, American journalist, beaten and imprisoned for reporting the wrong things.

Did twenty-two British SDI researchers commit suicide? Very strange. Very scary. For all the steps we’ve taken toward fascism in the US, at least we don’t have an Official Secrets Act, as the British do. I first became skeptical of Britain’s seemingly progressive government after reading Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country.

article here

The jist of it is that many child-sex or other prostitution rings get traced to very powerful people, and investigations are subsequently quashed. Here is a documentary made in the mid-90′s implicating Larry King and many of Washington’s political elite. It appeared in TV Guides across the nation, but was yanked just before airing on the Discovery Channel.