Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Categories

OpEdNews » The Government’s Shameful War on Marijuana Users

History is replete with examples of governmental attempts to modify human behavior by imposing prohibitions. All attempts failed, most of them miserably.
In the 16th century, coffee was banned in Egypt and supplies were burned. Coffee consumption increased rapidly.
In the 17th century, the Tsar of Russia executed people caught using tobacco. Among unexecuted Russian citizens, tobacco [...]

Brazil to Propose Dropping Dollar in China Trade, Caijing Says - Bloomberg.com

By Eugene Tang
May 15 (Bloomberg) — Brazil and China should conduct bilateral trade using their own currencies rather than the dollar, the Caijing magazine reported today, citing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in an interview.
The two nations should give greater value to the Chinese and Brazilian currencies, Silva will propose to China’s President [...]

Yonkers Tribune : Gerald Celente Trends Alert - The “Bailout Bubble” - The Bubble to End All Bubbles

Kingston, NY — The biggest financial bubble in history is being inflated in plain sight, said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute. “This is the Mother of All Bubbles, and when it explodes,” Celente warns, “it will signal the end to the boom/bust cycle that has characterized economic activity throughout the developed [...]

OpEdNews » Global Debt Enslavement - From Gold Reserves to Petrodollars; Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part III

Global Debt Enslavement - From Gold Reserves to Petrodollars
“The gold standard (while it lasted) was a necessary step in giving bankers’ ‘fractional reserve’ legitimacy, but the ruse could not be sustained indefinitely” because exiting gold to defray foreign debts results in money backing it to be withdrawn from circulation. The result - contraction, recession, or [...]

Washington’s Blog

Time Magazine assesses Geithner and the stress tests in a reasonably honest article entitled “Stress Tested: Has Geithner’s Bank Confidence Game Worked?”.
A “confidence game” is, of course, just the formal name for a con job.
Washington’s Blog.

The true cost to the BBC of iPlayer… - Mixed Signals - Rupert Goodwins’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community

Friday 8 May 2009, 3:08 PM
The true cost to the BBC of iPlayer…
Posted by Rupert Goodwins

Over on CNet, Nate Lanxon has delivered a stonking piece on the technical background to the BBC’s iPlayer servers.
Which does raise the question, though: is it value for money?
I’m trying to work out how much more - or less - [...]

In the Name of Venality | vanityfair.com

In the Name of Venality
by Graydon Carter June 2009

It can fairly be said that the chain of catastrophic bets made over the past decade by a few hundred bankers may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history. They’ve brought the world’s economy to [...]

OpEdNews » Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part II

Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part II - by Stephen Lendman
This is the second of several articles on Ellen Brown’s remarkable book titled “Web of Debt….the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free.” It’s a multi-part snapshot. Reading the entire book is strongly [...]

Raw Story » Naomi Klein: Poorest, most vulnerable paying for bank bailouts

With the results of stress tests on the major banks about to be released, the Washington Post is reporting that nearly all the banks “now have enough money to weather the recession” and that this is an “outcome more positive than many investors had expected.”
However, political analyst Naomi Klein doesn’t trust the stress tests. “It [...]

Democratizing the US Monetary System: Urgency of the American Monetary Act

On Thursday, April 23, 2009, Stephen Zarlenga, director of the American Monetary Institute (AMI), delivered two briefings on Capitol Hill on the American Monetary Act that AMI drafted and that may be introduced as legislation during the current congressional session. This single measure has the potential of bringing together the tens of millions of people [...]