Do NFL players have the “right” to protest against the national anthem on the playing field? Should Trump’s demand that anyone who does not stand should be fired? What about the owners? And what about the millions the Defense Department sent the NFL to militarize the sporting events? Our take in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
This Thursday evening, September 28, join KPFK Radio’s Alan Minsky, and Scott Horton, managing director of the Libertarian Institute and opinion editor of Antiwar.com, for a discussion about the deadly and disastrous war in Afghanistan you won’t hear anywhere else!
Approaching sixteen years of continuous war, Horton’s new book: Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan is the single best source in your arsenal of reasons to advocate an end to America’s longest conflict.
Whether left, right, center, or wherever you fall on the political spectrum, the choice is clear: it’s time to end the war in Afghanistan.
This event is free and open to the public!
7:30 pm Thursday Sept 28
The Peace Center
3916 Sepulveda Blvd
Culver City, CA 90230
For more information, press inquiries, or other questions, please contact Jared Labell, executive director of the Libertarian Institute at 773-766-4947 or jared@libertarianinstitute.org
A limited number of autographed copies of Fool’s Errand will be available at the event, but you can purchase your own digital or physical copy by visiting https://foolserrand.us.
Journalist Seymour Hersh, whose career includes exposing U.S. intelligence abuses, received an award for integrity from an organization of former US and Western intelligence officials who share Hersh’s ethical concerns about such abuses.
The trademark “Oscar” for Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) was presented to longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at a dinner in Washington on Sept. 22. The symbolic award is a candle sitting atop the traditional corner-brightener candlestick holder.
SAAII confers its annual award on a member of the intelligence profession or related field who exemplifies the courage, persistence and devotion to truth of Sam Adams, a CIA analyst on Vietnam who exposed lies of the generals in Saigon and was then silenced.
Adams, a descendant of the famed Adams family of the American Revolution, died prematurely at age 55 in 1988, regretting that he had not gone public with his information earlier to stop the slaughter in Vietnam. [To learn more about the organization and previous honorees, go to samadamsaward.ch.]
Hersh, now 80, first came to national prominence in 1969 when he helped expose the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai. More recently, Hersh revealed the US military’s torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 and, in 2014, debunked Western propaganda that sought to justify a major US military attack on Syria by pinning a sarin-gas attack on the government.
Continue reading “Seymour Hersh Receives Adams Award for Integrity”
The state crackdown on the Catalan drive to vote on their future on October 1st, coincides with what is perhaps Barcelona’s most important festival, that of the Mercé (the Feast of our Lady of Mercy), which signals the traditional end of the summer season.
It is celebrated with the parading of papier maché giants (gegants) through the streets and a breathtaking exhibition of human towers (castellers) in the rather small Saint James Plaza (La Plaça Sant Jaume) in the heart of the old city, where both Barcelona City Hall and the Palace of the Generalitat (The seat of Catalan Government) are located.
If you have never seen an exhibition of castellers (human tower making) you should really go on YouTube and take a look.
Catalans see this practice as being deeply emblematic of who they are as people in that it places enormous emphasis on what they often refer to as their exaggerated bent toward associacionisme, which could be roughly translated as their compulsive need to join together in voluntary civic organizations of a decidedly multi-generational configure to celebrate their culture, and more simply, the art of living together in joy and solidarity.
There are casteller clubs or collas, located all around the country, where people practice all year round to perfect this physically grueling, technically demanding, patience-challenging, and at times, dangerous, form of collective art.
At last reports, all was going smoothly with the Mercé in the face of the enormous pressures being unleashed upon the city by the central government. Indeed, like the stoic and patient castellers they are gathering to watch, the people appear to be reveling in their ability to hold out with grace and smiles on their faces upon their faces in the face of this unwanted outside force from the centralist authoritarians.
As reported yesterday, the Spanish government sent representatives to Barcelona to convince the head of the Catalan police force (Els mossos d’Esquadra) to cede his command to the dictates of the central government. He has refused to do so.
Continue reading “The Catalan Coup Chronicles 24 September 2017: The Catalans Keep On Keepin’ On”
Providing still more graphic proof of its pathetic and truly cringeworthy descent from the status of a great liberal paper to that of a shameless corporatist rag dominated by baseless Atlanticist talking points, Madrid’s El País has recently suggested that behind the current drive for a vote on independence in Catalonia there there can be found the diabolical hand of Putin’s Russia. In a story that appeared yesterday on the El Pais website, David Alandete wrote:
“The same apparatus for the spreading of fake news that Russia has used to weaken the United States and the European Union, has been deployed in full force in Catalonia, according to a detailed analysis of Pro-Russian websites and Facebook profiles carried out by this newspaper with tools of digital analysis. In the wake of the covert campaigns in favor of Brexit, Marine Le Pen and the German Ultra-right, the Kremlin has come to see the Catalan independentist movement as yet another way to deepen European divisions and consolidate its international influence. They use webpages that publish rumors, activists like Julian Assange, a legion of bots, and millions of automatized pages on social media to insure that lies are shared millions of times on the web.”
But the brilliant journalist at Spain’s leading newspaper was not content to stop with this morsel of infantile thinking.
Casting his eyes across the Atlantic toward the libertarian website, Antiwar.com. One of the very few media outlets in the United States which has covered the Spanish government’s ongoing coup in Catalonia, Alandete suggested that the site and its most important writer, Justin Raimondo, were integral parts of Putin’s efforts to undermine the West’s hallowed democracies.
Jason Ditz is an integral part of Antiwar.com. As news editor, he writes up to 50 articles a week on the most important news stories.
Please join me in wishing him the best birthday possible.
