Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Jesus is the Only Way to Salvation / Politics / Religion
By: BATR
The meaning of the true Christmas has been obliterated in the secular society that has turned away from religion and scripture. Churches are as much to blame as the popular culture. No sane person can be confident in the future. The country is in decay and disintegrating. Morals, values and ethical mores have been abandoned or been reduced to relativism that personal responsibility is practiced by only a small segment of the population. Christmas is supposed to be the celebration of the birthday of the baby Jesus. Mournfully, you would need to take a pilgrim's journey to find any evidence that this lesson of purpose exists.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
John Kerry’s Moscow Lovefest / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: Mike_Whitney
If John Kerry doesn’t win an Oscar for his performance in Moscow on Tuesday, then there’s something very wrong with the system.
From the time he touched down at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, to the time he left some 26 hours later, the Secretary of State was as cordial and conciliatory as anytime in recent memory. There was no hectoring, no lecturing, no threats of additional sanctions and no finger-wagging condescension, just pleasant give-and-take on the main issues followed by friendly chit-chat, multiple handshakes, and plenty of smiley photo ops. To say his hosts were surprised by Kerry’s behavior is a probably an understatement. After nearly three years of nonstop belligerence and confrontation, the last thing Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin expected was an ingratiating Kerry oozing brotherly love and carrying on like an old buddy from college.
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Saturday, December 19, 2015
Today’s Mainstream Media Often Pandering to Bias and Ignorance / Politics / Mainstream Media
By: Walter_Brasch
The Texas board of education didn’t find anything wrong with a world geography textbook that said slaves from Africa were workers, but that immigrants from northern Europe were indentured servants.
This is the same school board that five years ago demanded that textbooks emphasize that slavery was only a side issue to the cause of the civil war, and that Republican achievements be emphasized in political science and civics textbooks.
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Saturday, December 19, 2015
Operation Northwoods, CIA Terrorism False Flags and Media Propaganda / Politics / Conspiracy Theory
By: James_Quinn
Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
“In many nations, rational people end up believing crazy things, including (false) conspiracy theories. Those crazy thoughts can lead to violence, including terrorism. Many terrorist acts have been fueled by false conspiracy theories, and there is a good argument that some such acts would not have occurred in the absence of such theories. The key point—and, in a way, the most puzzling and disturbing one—is that the crazy thoughts are often held by people who are not crazy at all.”
Cass Sunstein- White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
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Friday, December 18, 2015
Spread of Islamophobia and the Upsurge of Ultra-Fascism to Contain and Counter Arabization and Islamization of the West / Politics / Social Issues
By: Dr_R_M_Mathew
The World, especially the West is under the grip of Islamophobia consequent on the onslaught of the western culture, democratic values, open society and women empowerment by the new brand of Radicle Islam and above all Islamic Terror Attacks. Radical Islam or Islamism ultimately aims at Arabization, more specifically Primitive Arab Tribalization of the West and the Rest of the World.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Sham Paris Climate Agreement / Politics / Climate Change
By: Stephen_Lendman
So-called COP21 discussions from November 30 - December 11 among hundreds of representatives from 196 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) countries were dead on arrival.
They fell short of a whimper, let alone a bang environmental and other civil society groups hoped for - in vain.
Meaningful results were entirely absent - impossible to achieve with America and its key allies unwilling to address a potentially catastrophic future problem without taking constructive action now.
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Monday, December 14, 2015
Marine Le Pen Will Reap What The EU Has Sown / Politics / European Union
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Many people are cheering now that yesterday Marine Le Pen and her Front National (FN) party didn’t get to take over government in any regions in the France regional elections. They should think again. FN did get a lot more votes than the last time around, and, though she will be a little disappointed after last weekend’s results, it’s exactly as Le Pen herself said: “Nothing can stop us”.
And instead of bemoaning this, or even not believing it, it might be much better to try and understand why she’s right. And that has little to do with any comparisons to Donald Trump. Or perhaps it does, in that in the same way that Trump profits from -people’s perception of- the systemic failures of Washington, Le Pen is being helped into the saddle by Brussels.
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Monday, December 14, 2015
Ron Paul - If You Want Security, Pursue Liberty / Politics / US Politics
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
Judging by his prime-time speech last week, the final year of Barack Obama's presidency will be marked by increased militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home. The centerpiece of the president's speech was his demand for a new law forbidding anyone on the federal government's terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm. There has never been a mass shooter who was on the terrorist watch list, so this proposal will not increase security. However, it will decrease liberty.
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Saturday, December 12, 2015
CON21 - Paris Climate Change Conference Show / Politics / Climate Change
By: Raul_I_Meijer
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius just announced, in Paris, a “legally binding agreement” that no-one has agreed the financing for. We can hear a couple thousand lawyers across the globe snicker. But it’s all the COP21 ‘oh-so-important’ climate conference managed to come up with. No surprises there. They couldn’t make the 2ºC former goal stick, so they go for 1.5ºC this time. All on red, double or nothing. Because who really cares among the leadership, just as long as the ‘targets’ are far enough away that they can’t be held accountable.
Friday, December 11, 2015
America Living a Lie / Politics / US Debt
By: James_Quinn
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. We've lost respect for ourselves and others, transforming from citizens with obligations to consumers with desires. The love of mammon has left our country a hollowed out, debt ridden shell of what it once was. When I see the data from surveys about the amount of debt being carried by people in this country and match it up with the totals reported by the Federal Reserve, I'm honestly flabbergasted that so many people choose to live a lie. By falling for the false materialistic narrative of having it all today, millions of Americans have enslaved themselves in trillions of debt. The totals are breathtaking to behold:
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Friday, December 11, 2015
How Far Can The Syria Conflict Spiral Out Of Control - Interview With Pelicourt / Politics / Syria
By: OilPrice_Com
Business is business, so why not buy oil from ISIS. The Russians claim the Turks are doing it, and in all likelihood even Assad is buying it. No one can fight a war without oil, according to Robert Bensh, partner and managing director of Pelicourt LLC oil and gas company. But while the politically unhinged are coming out the woodwork, the more important aspects of this story remain elusive to the public. Is the dangerously unspoken theory that ISIS is a bulwark against Iran what's keeping the West from tackling the Islamic State wholeheartedly on its territory? With no nation that can control it, the threat is now out of control and a war of ambiguous targets is emerging.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Misleading The American Public: Social Security & The National Debt / Politics / US Debt
By: Dan_Amerman
We are told that many economics experts don't worry about the total national debt because $5 trillion of that debt doesn't really exist; it is rather just a theoretical bookkeeping transaction for money that the federal government owes to itself. Netting out this bookkeeping entry then allows some authorities assert that while the debt is a bit on the high side relative to the size of the economy, it is far from historically unprecedented, and certainly no cause for despair or rash talk about insolvency.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Downsizing the News Staff; Downsizing Quality and Credibility - Part 2 / Politics / Mainstream Media
By: Walter_Brasch
For more than a decade, advertising, circulation, and news quality in both print and electronic media have been in a downward spiral. That spiral has twin intertwining roots.
The first root is the rise of social media. The complacent and stodgy print media were slow to catch onto the concept and rise of social media and its influence upon a generation that conducts its life by a fusion of smart phones to ears. When owners figured out they needed to have a digital presence, they first gave away content in a desperate bid to keep readers, and then began to charge for it to those who didn’t have subscriptions.
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Monday, December 07, 2015
Downsizing the News Staff; Downsizing Quality and Credibility / Politics / Mainstream Media
By: Walter_Brasch
On Monday, Nov. 2, every National Geographic staffer was told to report to the magazine’s Washington, D.C., headquarters the next day to await a phone call or e-mail from Human Resources.
Ever since Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox corporation bought the magazine in September, there were rumors the new owner would maximize profits by terminating employees. Those predictions came through when Management fired 180 people, and told dozens of others they were being offered “voluntary buy-outs.”
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Sunday, December 06, 2015
Greece Is A Nation Under Occupation / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Perhaps the best way to show what a mess Europe is in is the €3 billion deal they made with Turkey head Erdogan, only to see him being unmasked by EU archenemy Vlad Putin as a major supporter, financial and who knows how else, of the very group everyone’s so eager to bomb the heebees out after Paris. It could hardly have been more fitting. That’s not egg on your face, that’s face on your egg.
But Brussels thinks it’s found a whipping boy for all its failures. Greece. It’s fast increasing its accusations against Athens’ handling of the 100s of 1000s of refugees flooding the country. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of Greece, not Brussels. The EU has so far given Greece €30 million in ‘assistance’ for the refugee crisis, while the country has spent over €1.5 billion in money it desperately needs for its own people. But somehow it’s still not done enough.
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Friday, December 04, 2015
China South Sea Martime Dispute, an Overture to World War III? / Politics / China US Conflict
By: Casey_Research
By Doug Casey
It’s always been true, as Bourne said, that “war is the health of the State.” But it’s especially true when economic times get tough. That’s because governments like to blame their problems on outsiders; even an imagined foreign threat tends to unify opinions around those of the leaders. Since economies around the world are all weakening, and political leaders are all similar in essential mindset, there’s good reason to believe the trend towards World War III is accelerating.
Many politicians and pundits in the U.S. blame “those damn Chinese” for taking “our jobs” by filling Walmart with tons of cheap goods, and the swarthy ragheads for making the price of oil too high (usually, but now too low).
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Friday, December 04, 2015
Why Is The U.S. Reluctant To Bomb ISIS Oil Fields? / Politics / Crude Oil
By: OilPrice_Com
There has been some revealing new information coming out recently regarding the strategy against ISIS. One aspect many find troubling is the apparent failure of U.S. and coalition forces to sufficiently target and destroy oil infrastructure located in ISIS territory, which accounts for a significant portion of the terror group's annual income. The argument goes, if we want to impact their operations, we should target their primary sources of income, and choke off their operational funds. So, why does ISIS oil infrastructure still stand? Is this the result of an intelligence failure? Negligence? Or, is there a more purposeful reason?Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, December 03, 2015
David Cameron Declares Jihad on Islamic State Syria - 'Bombs Away Chaps' / Politics / ISIS Islamic State
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Britain's industrial military complex smarting from having failed to profit form the four year long Syrian civil war will today be toasting after the success of much costly lobbying of MP's, who led by the Prime Minister have followed their instructions to start to empty the munitions dumps of bombs and missiles to be dropped right across Syria, joining US, French, Turkish and Russian militaries as they rain hell fire missiles down onto civilian populations, with the probable resulting carnage of many hundreds of innocents killed for every ISIS gangster killed, akin to flattening Rome to kill members of the mafia, all in the name of defending Britain from the terror threat that the likes of the CIA and MI5 amongst other secret police agencies have been busy creating and fostering so as to support the need for the exponential expansion of the surveillance state.
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
The Economic Costs of Terrorism Hit an All-Time Peak / Politics / War on Terror
By: John_Mauldin
The world can change quickly, and last week it did. The most immediate and heartbreaking impacts of the Paris attacks were suffered by the victims themselves and their families, but from there the ripples of terror spread outward around the world.
The Paris events didn’t happen in isolation. Recent bombings in Lebanon, Iraq, Mali, and Nigeria, plus the Russian airline disaster, showed us how far evil can reach.
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Wednesday, December 02, 2015
It Will Take Trillions of Euros to Save the European Union / Politics / European Union
By: John_Mauldin
The EU’s political leaders and other elites are committed to holding the European Union together. To them, united Europe is an article of faith. They hold the idea with as much ferocity and fervor as any religious belief. But while the European Union is a wonderful political idea, it’s economically terrible. And the EU nations will have to face up to bearing enormous costs to save the Europe we wished for.
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