Houston, Texas: No Freedom of Speech For Pastors

Thomas Jefferson rightly noted that big cities are the “bane” of freedom. And in a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe.” Modern America is a living testament to Jefferson’s sagacity. Unlike early America, the vast majority of the U.S. population now lives in large metropolitan areas. And it is the big-government machinations of big-city politicians that are leading the charge for America’s surrender... Read article

Stocks Plunge 460 Points On QE Exit

“Financial markets are faced with uncertainty that isn’t going away. The slowdown in Europe is probably in the early innings, the Fed hasn’t begun to raise interest rates, and geopolitical crises seem to pop up by the day.” Jeff Cox, Finance editor, CNBC Six years of zero rates and trillions of dollars of asset purchases couldn’t stop stocks from falling sharply on Wednesday. All three major indices moved deep into the red, with the Dow Jones leading the pack, dropping an eye-watering 460 points before rebounding... Read article

A Frivolous, Open-Ended War

There has never been a war in American history so strategically ill-conceived as the one currently developing against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. The Mexican war of 1846-47 was essentially an aggressive operation to take Alta California and New Mexico, and to cement the status of Texas. It was limited in its objectives, and it was conducted in a strategically sound manner. The goals – their legality apart – were achieved, and the balance between costs and benefits was never in doubt. Vae victis! The Civil... Read article

The Power Barons: Humanism’s Deities

A recent study by Harvard Business School found that United States corporate executives make over 300 times as much as the average worker.  Based on a $30,000 annual worker income and a 40 hour week the CEO gets $4326.00 an hour while the worker gets $14.42. In the mid-thirties during the depth of a serious depression executives at General Motors were making 200 times as much as their workers. It was this disparity that helped set the stage for a power shift from the corporate moguls to John L .Lewis  and his CIO (Congress... Read article

The Rise of the Professional Slut

“There was a time when you knew who the bad girls were,” someone close to me once said. “Now you know who the good girls are.” And I hear that all three of them are beside themselves over today’s state of affairs. “Lena Dunham: I Was Raped By a ‘Campus Republican,’” the headline reads, introducing the “Girls” star’s story about an alleged sexual assault at the hands of a “mustachioed” conservative undergrad while a student at Ohio’s Oberlin College nearly a decade ago. It’s perhaps a fanciful... Read article

Financial Regulators Bend Rules For Banksters

The cozy relationship between financial institutions and their respective regulators has long been known. Concern from reformers and activists comes from all stripes of ideological perspectives. With the attention that Carmen Segarra, the whistleblower of Wall Street, has gained, the noise from the banking establishment pushes back. Here comes the expected spin from the Fed, The New York Fed Slams Tape-Recording Whistleblower, Says She Was Fired After Just 7 Months Over Performance. Read their Statement Regarding New York... Read article

Has Obama Changed His Mind About Syria?

The ISIS siege of Kobane continued overnight while cities across Turkey were set ablaze by Kurdish protestors. At least 19 civilians were killed by Turkish riot police who were trying to disperse angry crowds that had gathered to protest the government’s unwillingness to defend the predominantly Kurdish city.  According to Hurriyet, “The worst violence was seen in Diyarbakır during a reported gunfight between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) supporters and Hizbullah, a radical Islamist group whose members are mostly... Read article

Question For ISIS: Where’d You Get All Those Swords?

Okay, so what?  So what if you’ve just joined ISIS, been given a sword and been sent off to Syria and Iraq.  So what if you now have a huge bloody sword in your hand and you’ve just cut off somebody’s head?  Big freaking deal.  You’re the one that will be going to Hell, not me.  But what I want to know is this:  Where, exactly, did you get that huge bloody sword in the first place?  “Swords R Us”? From your local “Samurai of the Desert” katana convenience store? To... Read article

America’s “Terrorist Academy” In Iraq Produced ISIS Leaders

The University of Al-Qaeda? “Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.” Nafeez... Read article

State Sponsored Assassination Culture

The ongoing failures of the Secret Service to provide proper protection for the President have political careerists in a tizzy. Scares that harm could come to the commander-in-chief, also worries the press. Ordinary citizens on principle, accept that the White House should be secure grounds. Rotating blame usually means that the buck does not stop on the oval office desk. Indeed, who could expect any President to be responsible for their own safety? Surely, policy decisions made as a government could not possibly have... Read article

How Stable Is The Bond Market?

Seldom does the enormous bond market turn on the fate of a single trader. Well, the news that Bill Gross was leaving Pimco under suspicious circumstances did not go unnoticed. The WSJ writes: “The yield on the 10-year benchmark Treasury note was hovering around 2.506% immediately before the disclosure that Mr. Gross was leaving the hundreds-of-billions of dollars in Treasurys and other debt he oversaw at Pimco to go to rival firm Janus Capital Group Inc. Within a half-hour, the yield jumped to 2.546%. While a move of... Read article

Nigeria: Rebels Without A Paycheck?

Author’s note: Who among our founding fathers way back in 1776 would ever have guessed that, just two hundred and thirty eight years later, America’s main driving force, highest ideal, most efficient function and top-priority goal would be to sell weapons and hoard oil. I recently dared to ask a Nigerian-American friend of mine the same dreaded question that I had asked him the last time we had talked. “How are things going over in Nigeria right now?“. “Bad. Really bad,”... Read article

Equal Work? Government Has No Idea What That Is

“Equal pay for equal work!” the mantra goes. “Women get only 73 cents on a man’s dollar!” These are oft-heard slogans, and we may well hear them again during the fall campaign with the War on Women afoot. Now, going beyond the rhetoric, it’s not widely known but nonetheless true that the intersex pay gap is attributable to different career choices men and women make: women tend to choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences instead of hard ones), work shorter hours even when “full time,” are more... Read article

2014 Election Business As Usual

Thus far this election cycle has been a dud. Hardly a sweat is broken in the rarified air of partisan politics punditry. The only consistent factor that can always be counted upon to amuse is the reams of paper wasted on the false promises and prevarication made by the esteemed party regulars. It is easy to simply blame the entrenched incumbents or the current crop of insurgents, but it goes much deeper when an entire nation remains mute in the face of the worse run and most condemnable conduct, coming out of the District... Read article

Justice Is Immutable: Tyranny Is Elastic

As our society bounces down ward, flowing this way now and that way a little later, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is happening until it has already overwhelmed us. Almost everyone now knows that football stars Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson are guilty of violence within their families; a video shows Rice knocking his wife unconscious and dragging her out of an elevator.  Pictures of Adrian Peterson’s ten year of son with red switch welts on his back and legs have been widely circulated.  Both are being disciplined... Read article

Silicon Valley Corporatists

Remember the days when an entrepreneur would perfect their whiz kid ideas in a garage and bring them to market? Did Steve Wozniak ever envision the behemoth that Apple would become and the cult camp that worships every new product that flows from their robotic coolie assembly lines? Riots Over Rotten Apple Mania describes an example of the forbidding underbelly of corporatist business model that Apple exemplifies so dramatically. Notwithstanding this record of 21th century sweat factories, do the venture vulture capitalists... Read article

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