Justin Raimondo

"[The] central point of all the pro-FBI, pro-government, anti-"extremist" propaganda blaring from MSNBC and other news outlets is to convince us that speech leads to violence."

Every government lives in fear of its own citizens. The fear waxes and wanes, as the tides of public opinion and economic ups and downs crest and wash over the political landscape. In good times, the fear is somewhat contained: discontent, albeit ever-present, is masked by prosperity and contained; in bad times, the fear overflows into the everyday life of the citizenry, which is viewed with the utmost suspicion by the ruling elite. In Washington, they’re wondering: how long will they put up with it?

Today, the answer to that question is: not much longer – and the fear is manifest in the latest campaign against "extremism," which is being touted by the "mainstream" media, the authorities, and the professional "extremist"-hunters who work in tandem with both. To give you the flavor of the witch-hunting atmosphere being whipped up by the media-FBI complex, get a load of Rachel Maddow, the "liberal" MSNBC commentator, last Thursday night.

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Jeff Gates

[The Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Sons of Japhet (pink areas), the people who lived around the Caspian and Black Seas. As they are not descendants of Shem or Abraham, they cannot be called Semitic.]

The history of Israel as a geopolitical fraud will fill entire libraries as those defrauded marvel at how so few deceived so many for so long. Those duped include many naive Jews who—even now—identify their interests with this extremist enclave.

Israeli leaders are wrong to worry about “de-legitimization.” They are right to fear that a long-deceived public is fast realizing that Israel’s founding was key to an ongoing deception.

The Invention of the Jewish People did not begin with Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller by that title. There was no Exile says this Jewish scholar. Nor was there an Exodus. So how could there be a Return, the core premise of Israeli statehood?

If this patch of Palestinian land never rightly belonged to a mythical Jewish People, what then for the legitimacy of the “Jewish homeland.” And for that depiction by British Foreign Secretary Alfred Balfour in his November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild?

Were Christians likewise seduced by Sunday school teachings reliant on the phony findings of Biblical archeologist William Albright? Shlomo Sand chronicles how in the 1920s Albright interpreted every excavation in Palestine to “reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New.”

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John Cornwell

The worldwide scandal of Catholic paedophile priests threatens to become the gravest crisis in the modern history of the Catholic Church. As Pope Benedict XVI prepares to visit Britain to beatify Cardinal Newman, we look at the life of this humane Catholic convert.

One summer afternoon in the late 1990s, my wife and I were by an Italian poolside in the Alban Hills, south of Rome. We watched a group of touring British choirboys, aged ten to 13, relaxing in the water after performing a sung Mass at St Peter's Basilica. Frolicking with them was Joe Jordan, a seminarian who had accompanied them, uninvited, from Rome. After watching his behaviour, involving boisterous tickling and handy-horseplay, my wife, who was a teacher in London schools for 14 years, said: "That young man has a problem: I wouldn't let him near a child unsupervised."

The following year Jordan was ordained a priest and appointed to a parish in Wales. In 2000 he was sentenced at Cardiff Crown Court to eight years' imprisonment for sexual abuse of minors in Doncaster and Barry, near Cardiff. When I asked Jordan's seminary rector why it had taken my wife a few minutes to identify what he and his colleagues failed to recognise over a period of five years, he said: "Oh, Joe was a devout man. There was no indication of any kind of problem." Jordan's hidden problem was not only his own, and that of the boys he abused, but a problem with recruitment, screening and formation of Catholic priests the world over. Now it is a problem of the Pope's.

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Ellen Brown

“We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. . . . Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson . . . and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.”

~ William Jennings Bryan, Democratic Convention, 1896

William Jennings Bryan would have been pleased. The government is now officially in the banking business. On March 30, 2010, President Obama signed the reconciliation “fix” to the health care reform bill passed by Congress last week. Slipped into it was student loan legislation the President calls “one of the most significant investments in higher education since the G.I. Bill.” Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), the federal government will lend directly to students, ending billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to firms providing student loans. The bill will save an estimated $68 billion over 11 years.

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Des Moore

A snapshot of the NetLogo Global Climate Change model.

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.” ~Vaclav Klaus

What State of Climate do we really have?

Over the past six months or so there has been a remarkable change at both official agencies and research institutions in attitudes of the believers in the dangerous warming thesis. Reflecting the Copenhagen flop and the Climategate exposure of uncertainties within research bodies, the previous out of hand dismissals of sceptical views have moved to an acknowledgement that those views should not be ignored and that uncertainty does exist. It has now become almost respectable to be a sceptic. Mind you the warmists are still quick to assure us either that the “basic” science remains valid or that we are now in an era of supposed Post-Normal science where the uncertainties are so great and the issues so important that conventional methods of first obtaining all relevant information before taking preventative action cannot wait but must rely on assessments by “knowledgeable” experts.

A major difficulty with either of the latter assurances is that whichever science is used is now showing marked problems in public (which many knew about but were not previously heard). The IPCC (which itself undertakes no scientific research) is now under an independent review instituted by the United Nations (for what that may be worth) and increasing numbers of individual scientists and groups of scientists are publicly revealing numerous possible explanations of the increase in temperatures other than increased greenhouse gas emissions. Evidence has also emerged suggesting that official agencies have made inappropriate additions to “raw” temperature data and have omitted to explain that some of the increase in temperatures is obviously due to natural causes. In short, claims of a scientific consensus behind the dangerous warming thesis are even less convincing than they were. Even a major supplier of analysis to the IPCC – Dr Jones, the (now suspended) head of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit - recently acknowledged that the science is not settled.

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Stephen Lendman

NY Police attacking peaceful demonstrators.

On March 11, the US State Department issued its "2009 Human Rights Report: China (includes Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macau)," calling the People's Republic of China (PRC) "an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutionally is the paramount source of power," practicing:

-- "cultural and religious repression;"
-- harassment of human rights activists;
-- harassment and disbarment of lawyers who defend them;
-- control of free expression, the Internet, and access to it;
-- extrajudicial killings;
-- torture and coerced confessions of prisoners;
-- use of forced labor, including prison labor;
-- monitoring, harassing, detaining, arresting, and imprisoning "journalists, writers, dissidents, activists, petitioners, and defense lawyers and their families;"
-- denial of due process;
-- political control of courts and judges;
-- administrative detentions and prolonged illegal ones;
-- "tight restriction (on) freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel;"
-- failure "to protect refugees and asylum-seekers adequately;"
-- forced repatriations of North Koreans;
-- pressure on other countries to repatriate Chinese citizens;
-- monitoring and restricting local and international NGOs;
-- "endemic corruption;
-- trafficking in persons;
-- discrimination against women, minorities, and persons with disabilities;
-- forced abortion(s and) sterilization(s);"
-- no choice of independent union representation or legal right to strike;
-- "arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life;"
-- harsh and degrading treatment in prisons;
-- arbitrary arrests and detentions;
-- "arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence;" and more.

While China is no model human rights champion, America is guilty of far worse crimes as well as all of the above abuses, yet rarely do major media reports reveal them.

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Matt Taibbi

How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

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Noam Chomsky

International Erich Fromm Society in cooperation with the Educational Center Hospital of Stuttgart, Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010, 6 p.m., ”White Hall“ at Stuttgart’s New Castle

The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” 20 years later, he was re-declaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell’s memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm’s work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom – matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.

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Stephen Lendman

Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutional bill of rights, states:

"Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

dom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association."

Article 7 assures

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person and the right not to be deprived thereof in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."

According to Yale Law Professor and constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson (1908 - 1981):

"Maintenance of a system of free expression is necessary (1) as assuring individual self-fulfillment, (2) as a means of attaining the truth, (3) as a method of securing participation by the members of society in social, including political, decision-making, and (4) as maintaining the balance between stability and change in society."

With no free expression right, all others are at risk at a time dissent is called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. Howard Zinn called it "the highest form of patriotism," and according to Voltaire, "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

In a post-9/11 climate, it's more than ever endangered, academic tenure affording no protection; to wit, Professor Denis Rancourt's University of Ottawa (U of O) March 31, 2009 firing, ostensibly for pedagogical reasons, but as he said:

"I was fired under the false pretext of having arbitrarily assigned high grades in one course in the winter 2008 semester. [To do so], the university had to dispense with due process. In the words of the professors' union's lawyer, my dismissal was 'both a denial of substantive and procedural rights....and a contravention of the basic principles of natural justice.' "

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Victor Korgun

The development of the situation in Afghanistan over the last 12 months has been influenced by the new US strategy approved by President Barack Obama in April 2009. As opposed to the strategy of George Bush the strategy of Obama’s government implies not only strengthening US and NATO military presence in the country but also trying to solve the country’s domestic problems: poor economy, corruption, drug traffic, inefficient government, weak local armed forces and police. However drug traffic is not seen as a very important issue because considering that the consumption of Afghan drugs in the US is smaller than in Europe. Also within the new strategy Obama also linked Afghanistan with Pakistan into one knot of problems called “AfPak”.

Until recently we have not seen any significant changes in the Afghan policy of Washington. In January-September of 2009 the US government officials were mainly busy with the problem of presidential elections in Afghanistan, shuffling numerous possible candidates in Kabul. Another couple of months they were thinking about the controversial results of the elections and finally with heavy heart they agreed to recognize Hamid Karzai (who they were sick and tired of) as the reelected president. Than the White House and the Congress began to work on a ruling on bringing more troops to Afghanistan. In December 2009 and January 2010 Washington was preparing for an Afghan conference in London and only in February operation Mushtarak was launched in Helmand province, which was the beginning of practical implementation of the new strategy.

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Anait Brutian

On February 2, 2010, the Israeli Knesset held the inaugural meeting of The Lobby for Greater Israel. According to Knesset members Arye Eldad (National Union), "This kind of lobby should have been unnecessary … We could have expected that after disengagement [from Gaza and parts of northern Samaria in 2005] all talk of creating a Palestinian state would have been taken off the table and that no one would try to get rid of settlements … Instead, we are once more hearing about a two-state solution and a [construction] freeze. I am certain that with this unity we can save the Land of Israel"(1). Made up of 39 Knesset members, out of which 12 from Netanyahu's Likud party and others from Shas, Israel Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi, the National Union, United Torah Judaism and Kadima, the lobby aims at acting as a "protective wall against any threat to the settlements"(2). Minister-without-portfolio Bennie Begin (Likud) went further than the official mission of the lobby, suggesting that the creation of a Palestinian state threatened Jewish security and rights to the Land of Israel(3). Yoav Sorek and Moriya Taassan, representing The Israeli Initiative, expressed a similar sentiment during the meeting: "We hope that this important lobby will grow to support Eretz Yisrael and help stop the discrimination against Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria"(4).

The claims of "discrimination against Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria" are unsubstantiated. Of course, there is discrimination, but it is aimed at Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The charge of discrimination clarifies the mindset and the aims of The Israeli Initiative.

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Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

Life has become "awful" for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming. Those days are now gone.

Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the "Climategate" affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.

His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. "We know where you live," his detractors taunt.

Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.

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Terry Eagleton

Acknowledging that wickedness exists doesn’t mean you have to believe in the existence of Satan. And you don’t have to be religious to think that there is such a thing as sin – just think of Jamie Bulger, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

Fifteen years ago, two ten-year-old boys tortured and killed a toddler, James Bulger, in the north of England. There was an outcry of public horror, though why the public found this particular murder especially shocking is not entirely clear. Children, after all, are only semi-socialised creatures who can be expected to behave pretty savagely from time to time. If Freud is to be credited, they have a weaker superego or moral sense than their elders. In this sense, it is surprising that such grisly events do not occur more often. Perhaps children murder each other all the time and are simply keeping quiet about it. William Golding seems to believe, in his novel Lord of the Flies, that a bunch of unsupervised schoolboys on a desert island would slaughter each other before the week was out.

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Chris Hedges

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

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Ángel Guerra Cabrera

La creación de la Comunidad de Estados de América Latina y el Caribe decidida en la cumbre de Cancún es el reflejo institucional de un nivel cualitativamente superior en la lucha de los pueblos de nuestra América por su emancipación, integración y unidad. Expresa también la creación de una correlación de fuerzas más desfavorable al ejercicio de la hegemonía de Estados Unidos que la existente hasta finales de la década de los años 90, que ayudaría a explicar la creciente militarización de la política imperial. Las grandes batallas populares contra el neoliberalismo condujeron al surgimiento de un conjunto de gobiernos con políticas más o menos radicales pero independientes de Washington y estimularon en grados distintos según los países y grupos sociales la elevación de la conciencia latinoamericanista, antimperialista e incluso anticapitalista a todo lo largo y ancho de nuestra región. Llegado este momento la batalla de ideas pasaba a ser un componente decisivo del enfrentamiento al imperialismo.

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Stephen Lendman

In Washington, the more things change, the more they stay the same, or usually get worse. It's true each election cycle, and when Congress enacts "reform," watch out.

Exhibit A:

Obamacare: legislation that rations care and enriches corporate providers.

Exhibit B:

Financial reform, shaping up to be more business as usual, masquerading as change, and leaving what's needed unaddressed and papered over.

What Real Reform Looks Like - Abolish or Nationalize the Fed

For many years, Ron Paul waged a lonely struggle to abolish the Fed, trying and failing in the 106th, 107th, 108th, and 110th Congresses. Numerous times he explained what he said on the House floor on September 10, 2002, namely:

"Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary cycle. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people," a 1913 dollar (when the Fed was created) today worth about a nickel and continues to erode.

Under the Fed, we've also had rising consumer debt; record budget and trade deficits; an unsustainable national debt; a high level of personal and business bankruptcies; millions of lost homes; high unemployment; loss of the nation's manufacturing base; soaring poverty levels; an unprecedented wealth gap between the rich and most others; and a hugely unstable economy lurching from one crisis to another, the current one near-catastrophic with years more pain and suffering ahead for growing millions."

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E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D
The Corwall Alliance

Wanted for Premeditated Murder: How Post-Normal Science Stabbed Real Science in the Back on the Way to the Illusion of "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming

Climate Change and the Death of Science is the most important article we've linked to in quite a long time. If you have time to read nothing else from this issue, read this. It's worth every minute it will take.

As Climategate and other transgressions of fundamental scientific procedure by global warming alarmists continue to unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a great deal of what's been called "climate science" isn't science at all. It's ideological propaganda, often religious (but certainly not Biblical), masquerading as science.

In Climate Change and the Death of Science, Christian blogger Jerry Bouey nails practitioners of post-normal science fair and square, in their own words, demonstrating that even they know and admit they're no longer doing science but politics. To put it bluntly, they stabbed real science in the back. This article strikes at the very root of many environmentalists' routine practices.

Bouey explains brilliantly how science got hijacked by post-normal science along the hurried way to the "overwhelming scientific consensus" on manmade global warming. Bouey points out that one of the world's leading global warming alarmists is himself a devotee of post-normal science and therefore a traitor to real science.

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Richard North

The sooner Canada gets its troops out of Afghanistan the better because the mission is a waste of lives and money in a doomed cause, one of Canada's most eminent diplomats told a Montreal conference Sunday.

That is Robert Fowler, who has told the Liberal party's Canada 150 conference: "The bottom line is that we will not prevail in Afghanistan." He adds: "Once we understand and accept that reality it is time to leave, not a moment, not a life and not a dollar later."

Fowler is not a man to be dismissed easily. He has been a foreign policy adviser to three Canadian prime ministers, deputy minister of national defence and Canada's longest-serving ambassador to the United Nations. More recently, as special UN envoy to Niger he was kidnapped by al Qaeda in December 2008 and held captive in the Sahara for 130 days.

On Afghanistan, he said that it is difficult to rationalise or understand what the Canadian mission can accomplish, what with the Taleban gaining in strength and reach day by day.

"They say look at the number of little girls we have put in school – at a cost of 146 Canadian lives and an incremental cost of $11.3 billion. My, think of the number of little girls we could put in school throughout the Third World – particularly in Africa – with that kind of money. And without having to kill and be killed to get that worthy job done."

He said it appears that our goal in Afghanistan is to colonize the country and replace its culture with ours, a mission impossible for which the Taliban know Canada lacks the resources and dedication to accomplish.

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MondoWeiss

Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf sent out the following note to friends yesterday after her release from detention:

I was arrested on Friday at around noon as I tried to get the Israeli soldiers to stop shooting at people in Nabi Saleh (a small village of about 400 people), especially after International Solidarity Movement volunteer Ellen Stark was shot in the arm. We were in Nabi Saleh for a weekly demonstration by the villagers against the theft of their land. Simultaneous demonstrations were taking place in Jerusalem and in a number of villages throughout the West Bank.

In Nabi Saleh, the demonstration took the form of people walking down a hill towards the confiscated land. "Stop shooting…a woman has been injured and needs medical attention" I yelled at the soldiers, making my way back up the hill to the road they stood on (shooting down at us knowing the rugged terrain we were on made it very difficult to move quickly to avoid their barrage of tear gas and bullets). When I got on the road the soldiers turned their guns on me but I just get talking and walking towards them. "We have a woman that has been shot; she needs help. Stop shooting. There is no reason to be shooting at people like this. You are in THEIR village."

For this I was handcuffed and thrown in a jeep, later accused of: (1) attacking a police officer; (2) cursing at the military and police; (3) obstructing the operations of the military; and (4) being in a closed military zone.

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Stephen Lendman

On February 3, 2010, after a sham trial, the Department of Justice announced Siddiqui's conviction for "attempting to murder US nationals in Afghanistan and six additional charges." When sentenced on May 6, she faces up to 20 years for each attempted murder charge, possible life in prison on the firearms charge, and eight years on each assault charge.

In March 2003, after visiting her family in Karachi, Pakistan, government Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents, in collaboration with Washington, abducted Siddiqui and her three children en route to the airport for a flight to Rawalpindi, handed them over to US authorities who took them secretly to Bagram prison, Afghanistan for more than five years of brutal torture and unspeakable abuse, including vicious beatings and repeated raping.

Bogusly charged and convicted, Siddiqui was guilty only of being Muslim in America at the wrong time. A Pakistani national, she was deeply religious, very small, thoughtful, studious, quiet, polite, shy, soft-spoken, barely noticeable in a gathering, not extremist or fundamentalist, and, of course, no terrorist.

She attended MIT and Brandeis University where she earned a doctorate in neurocognitive science. She did volunteer charity work, taught Muslim children on Sundays, distributed Korans to area prison inmates, dedicated herself to helping oppressed Muslims worldwide, yet lived a quiet, unassuming nonviolent life.

Nonetheless, she was accused of being a "high security risk" for alleged Al-Qaeda connections linked to planned terrorist attacks against New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building, accusations so preposterous they never appeared in her indictment.

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