Afghanistan

The intentional erosion of public privacy is no accident. It’s not merely a simplistically stupid overreaction to the dangerous world we live in either. It is a very deliberate and nefarious plan being intentionally implemented by the American oligarchy; i.e., the super rich and the super powerful. This is precisely why the establishment freaked out about the Edward Snowden revelations, and it is why every single minor event is immediately manipulated into an excuse to give the government and intelligence agencies more power. While we already know a lot about the NSA’s unconstitutional and fascist policies when it comes to the web, the decimation of the 4th Amendment is also being eagerly practiced at a more local level by police departments across the country.

UPDATE: Full SOTU Speech released - "THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS PASSED"

By now it is well known that The State of The Union tonight will be about President Obama's Robin-Hood Agenda. Furthermore, it is entirely clear that his proposals have no chance of becoming law. As WaPo's Marc Thiessen notes, Obama is not delusional, his move is completely and transparently political... And just as Eric Cantor suggests will merely serve to inflame the GOP. From taxes to cyber security and from community college to housing... in 50-65 minutes, all will be clear...

The fix for low oil prices is... low oil prices. Past some point high-priced producers will naturally stop producing, the excess inventory will get burned up, and the price will recover. Not only will it recover, but it will probably spike, because a country littered with the corpses of bankrupt oil companies is not one that is likely to jump right back into producing lots of oil while, on the other hand, beyond a few uses of fossil fuels that are discretionary, demand is quite inelastic. And an oil price spike will cause another round of demand destruction, because the consumers, devastated by the bankruptcies and the job losses from the collapse of the oil patch, will soon be bankrupted by the higher price. And that will cause the price of oil to collapse again. And so on until the last industrialist dies...

It seems like an eternity ago when Obama delivered the following extensively choreographed "Statement by the President on ISIL", in which he praised US anti-terrorist tactics, giving Yemen and its "partners" as an example of "successful" US foreign intervention.  To wit: "This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground.  This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years." He may want to scrub that statement because just 4 months after reading that from the Teleprompter, America's "partners on the Yemen front lines" have officially fled quietly into that good night, abandoning the control of the nation to local Shiite militiamen.

Terrorists, Counter-Terror “Experts”, and Governments Are All Motivated to Cover Up the Facts

Update: The United States Central Command's (CENTCOM) Twitter and YouTube accounts, attributed to pro-Islamic State (IS) hacking group "CyberCaliphate," has been celebrated as a massive achievement among IS fighters and supporters on Twitter.

Another day, another escalation in the conflict between supporters of the Islamic State and western powers, in this case the Twitter account of the US Central Command (@Centcom), which appears to have been hacked, and where compromising tweets revealing details about military members and potential conflict scenarios involving China and North Korea, are being sent out in real time.

Foreign policy actions have consequences. The aggressive foreign policies of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have radicalized thousands and have made us less safe. Blowback is real whether some want to recognize it or not. There are no guarantees of security, but only a policy of non-intervention can reduce the risk of another attack.

If We Want to Stop Terrorism, Maybe We Should Stop Supporting @&!%#! Terrorists?

If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state. If we do not recognize and resist this development, freedom and prosperity for all Americans will continue to deteriorate. All liberties in America today are under siege. Reality is now setting in for America and for that matter for most of the world. We should not be discouraged. Enlightenment is not nearly as difficult to achieve as it was before the breakthrough with Internet communications occurred. I smell progress.

Be afraid, be very afraid. While French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Friday "The nation is relieved tonight," after the two standoffs concluded, as CNN reports, the French government's work is not over. French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country, according to a French police source. Investigations continue into which terrorist group was ultimately responsible and, not be outdone in the fearmongery, The US State Department has issued a Worldwide Caution warning travelers, of the "continuing threat of terrorist actions and violence against U.S. citizens and interests throughout the world." Thank goodness we have the governments to protect us.

Why not take 24hrs to strategically think through the surrounded man-hunt operation.  Slowly mechanically rolling up a shop's street level security gate?  You can't be serious!  

After seeking doctors, lawyers, and engineers, The Islamic State - expanding on its desire to launch a gold-backed currency - is reported to have opened its first bank in the Iraqi city of Mosul and delivered a budget for its 'territory'. All this is being done, according to Al Jazeera, in an effort to move beyond its image of a terrorist organisation and consolidate its aim of becoming a legitimate state (perhaps stop beheading western media?) "A strategy to make concrete decisions and actions to create a nation state is in place," notes one professor, but as another analyst explains, "ISIS is financing itself partly through a pyramid scheme, and this has begun to falter.”

Some are thinking that 2015 will be a repeat of 2014 with a few incremental changes, However, the interesting question to ask is, how has the ground shifted in 2014, if indeed it has? To our mind, the really interesting development of 2014 is that the world as a whole (with a few minor exceptions) has become quite lucid on the topic of what the United States, as a global empire, is and stands for. Another major shift we have observed is that a significant percentage of the thinking people in the US no longer trusts their national media. In case somebody out there in the media realm is tired of playing it safe and printing stuff that's only fit for wiping your Kardashian with, here are a some points for you to try to refute...

Will truth be stranger than fiction...

“Don’t look back - something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.