The Russia/Iran sanctions bill passed earlier this month in the Senate has stalled in the House on a procedural issue: bills dealing with revenue must originate in the House. Is there a chance the bill may be scuttled? Don’t hold your breath! Ron Paul reports:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
That’s the claim, anyway. And, not knowing for sure if the DM was on the plane or not, it looks plausible. ABC News is treating it so.
What does former NSA analyst turned whistleblower Edward Snowden have to tell us about liberty? About trading a little freedom for government promises of security? Does he feel that his historic release of government documents showing how the NSA spies on all of us, constantly, without a warrant, has had a positive effect on freedom? Tune in to this very special episode of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, where we speak to Snowden on these and so many more issues:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
This week, in New York City, representatives from more than 100 countries will begin collaborating on an international treaty, first proposed in 2016, to ban nuclear weapons forever. It makes sense for every country in the world to seek a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. It would make even more sense to immediately deactivate all nuclear weapons. But, by boycotting and disparaging the process now underway, the U.S. and other nuclear armed nations have sent a chilling signal. They have no intention of giving up the power to explode, burn and annihilate planetary life. "The United States is spending $1 trillion USD over the next thirty years to modernize its nuclear weapon arsenals and triple the killing power of these weapons," says Ray Acheson, program director at Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Acheson also notes that the excessive spending for nuclear weapons contrasts with US cuts to vital anti-poverty programs. On June 19th, more than a dozen people blocked the US Mission to the UN entrance to protest Washington’s boycott of the negotiations. They were arrested for disorderly conduct, but I believe it’s incomparably more disorderly to plan for nuclear war.
During the past weekend, to support the negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons, WILPF called for "Women’s March to Ban the Bomb" actions in cities across the US and around the world. Jane Addams, who helped found the League in 1919, was a Chicago woman who understood the crucial need to put an end to war, all war, and instead care for the neediest people. She dedicated herself to assuring that many new immigrants in her city were treated with respect, given assistance to meet basic needs and encouraged to live and work together, peaceably. Addams worked passionately to prevent nations from sleepwalking into the horrors of World War I, and she vigorously campaigned to stop the United States’ entry into it.
Continue reading “‘Would You Like a Drink of Water?’ Please Ask a Yemeni Child”
“It was not immediately clear how close the U.S. military recon jet was flying near Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between NATO allies Poland and Lithuania. This fall, Russia moved nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad, putting some European capitals in strike range.” — Armed Russian jet comes within 5 feet of US recon jet
“At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals — Kennedy was rational, Castro was rational, Khrushchev was rational — came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. The major lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is this: The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” –U.S. Vietnam “War” Defense Sec. Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
So, is it just “Nuclear Chicken” – or is it Russian Roulette? Or maybe both?
And will M.A.D. still work after all these years?
I’ve visited Hiroshima many times.
The thing that always struck me about Hiroshima was simply being there. The train pulled into the station under an announcement that you had arrived in Hiroshima. It was another stop on the bullet train’s long run from Osaka to Fukuoka, so they called out the name as if it was just another stop. I’d get off the train, step out into the sunlight – that sunlight – and I was in Hiroshima. I had the same feeling only once before, taking a bus out of Munich and having the driver announce the next stop as Dachau. Somehow such names feel wrong being said so prosaically.
I guess no matter how many times I went to Hiroshima, I always expected something different to happen, when in fact nothing happened. There were 200,000 souls out there that no matter how much concrete and paving had been laid down could not have been buried deep enough. I couldn’t see them for the crowds of people pushing into the station, and I couldn’t hear them over the traffic noise.
