Ron Paul’s New Mission: Internet Freedom

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For months we’ve been speculating about how Ron Paul might spend the political capital he’s amassed accumulating all those delegate votes through the primary season. Now it looks like we have our answer.

A new document from Ron Paul and his son Rand called “The Technology Revolution” lays out the Pauls’ roadmap for where they’ll focus their agenda moving forward: Internet freedom.

The document makes a case against the largely GOP-motivated legislation to regulate the internet that’s been proposed over the last year—acts like SOPA, PIPA, etc. It also makes a case against the dominant voices resisting internet regulation—the tech companies and political progressives who protested SOPA and who last week released their own manifesto called the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The Pauls argue that both approaches from the left and the right seek to impose harmful controls on an internet that should be left totally unregulated. In the Pauls’ view, the left’s anti-trust concerns and advocacy for “Net Neutrality,” which would prevent telecoms from divvying up their bandwidth and charging sites for quick load times, are as misguided and anti-free-market as the right’s push for tighter copyright controls with SOPA. Government regulation in the interest of openness and consumer fairness is neither open nor fair, they say.

Instead, the Pauls want to see the internet totally unregulated, with corporations and individuals behaving in the ecosystem however the market will motivate them to.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  everett taasevigen

China’s controversial Three Gorges dam now online, world’s largest hydro project

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The final turbine of China’s massive Three Gorges dam has been connected to the power grid, marking the completion of a controversial hydropower project that cost the country more than £38bn and displaced at least 1.3 million people.

The installation of the project’s 32nd 700-megawatt unit on Wednesday brought total capacity up to 22.5 gigawatts (GW), accounting for 11% of the country’s total hydroelectric capacity. Britain’s largest power station, Drax, produces 4GW.

“The complete operation of all the generators makes the Three Gorges dam the world’s largest hydropower project, and the largest base for clean energy,” Zhang Cheng, general manager of the project’s operator, China Yangtze Power, told a ceremony.

The construction of the world’s biggest hydropower plant began in 1994 and its first generating unit was connected to the grid in July 2003.

The official state news agency Xinhua said the dam had already generated a total of 564.8bn kilowatt-hours, saving nearly 200m tonnes of coal a year.

Read more from this story HERE.

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The Worst Ruling Since Dred Scott

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Last week Chief Justice John Roberts blatantly ignored the Constitution and the law and purposefully rewrote Obamacare in order to rule it legal. He called Obamacare a “tax” instead of an individual mandate; he then proceeded to blithely expand the government’s power to tax to encompass a tax on breathing, which is what Obamacare is.

Now I had warned conservatives years ago that Roberts was a rotten pick for the Supreme Court. “Roberts is not an originalist,” I wrote in 2005. “There is nothing in his very short jurisprudential record to indicate that his judicial philosophy involves strict fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution.”

Nonetheless, Roberts’ decision was stunning.

It was stunning because the Obamacare decision represented the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings. Dred Scott is the judicial benchmark for evil decisions, and far surpasses the Obamacare decision in its legal flaws and moral emptiness. And there are many other evil and disgusting Supreme Court decisions that threatened American liberty: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), allowing states to segregate by race; Buck v. Bell (1927), allowing states to forcibly sterilize the mentally retarded; Korematsu v. United States (1944), allowing the federal government to order Japanese Americans into internment camps based on the need to prevent espionage.

All of these decisions were wrong, both legally and morally. But Obamacare surpasses all but Dred Scott in its violation of profound foundational American principles.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: RasMarley

Video: Living in a surveillance state; NSA collects daily “billions of phone calls, emails”

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Many Americans are unaware of that our government is collecting and storing billions of emails and phone calls on a daily basis. “Zero question we live in a surveillance state.”

Photo credit: SwissDave

Calif. Lawmakers Want to Radically Change Legal Definition of “Parents”

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California lawmakers are considering an unusual bill that would legalize, in certain cases, more than two parents for a child.

The bill – SB 1476 – proposed by state Sen. Mark Leno, San Francisco Democrat, has passed the Senate but has not come up for a vote in the Assembly.

The bill would allow judges to recognize more than two individuals as parents when separation and custody battles arise in court.

Mr. Leno hopes to override a California appellate court ruling that limited parenthood to two individuals.

That case involved a lesbian couple and their child’s biological father. With one mother hospitalized and the other incarcerated, the biological father wished to gain custody to remove the child from California’s foster care system.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama is going to impose gun control by treaty . . . on July 27?

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Without any national debate — and after secret negotiations — Obama is going to sign the Arms Trade Treaty which will lead to UN imposed gun control.

Iran Threatens to Destroy US Bases Across Middle East, Israel if Attacked

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Iran has threatened to destroy U.S. military bases across the Middle East and target Israel within minutes of being attacked, Iranian media reported on Wednesday, as Revolutionary Guards extended test-firing of ballistic missiles into a third day.

Israel has hinted it may attack Iran if diplomacy fails to secure a halt to its disputed nuclear energy program. The United States also has mooted military action as a last-resort option but has frequently nudged the Israelis to give time for intensified economic sanctions to work against Iran.

“These bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands (Israel) are also good targets for us,” Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, was quoted by Fars news agency as saying.

Haji Zadeh said 35 U.S. bases were within reach of Iran’s ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 km (1,300 miles) away.

“We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  Futureatlas.com

Allen West: The Balkanized States of America

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The 56 rebels knew they very well might be hanged for what they were about to do. As lawyers, merchants, farmers and landowners, they had plenty to lose. Fighting against an imperial ruler, they had everything to gain.

They were embarking on an adventure – not only because they were revolting against their own government and fighting outmanned and outgunned against a superior military – but because they were creating a radical approach to self-governance.

The 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, knew the only way they ever would be successful in their audacious plan was if they stood together. As Benjamin Franklin said at the signing, “if we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”

Our founders shared a unified vision for our nation. They understood that unity of the many was necessary to uphold the sovereignty of the individual and the fundamental, unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To ensure the sovereignty of each individual American, our Founding Fathers knew the country would have to be unified on certain principles and values: a limited constitutional government, a free market, a respect for “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and a strong national defense.

Read more HERE.

Photo credit: Richard Loyal French

Does the Declaration of Independence Still Matter?

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The Declaration of Independence was partly intended as a list of grievances against a distant monarch. And both George III and the colonists who disagreed with his rule are long dead. But so are many of those who’ve argued that the Declaration is obsolete. In fact, this is exactly what those who called themselves “progressives” were saying a century ago.

Woodrow Wilson, one of the most famous early progressives, argued during the 1912 presidential campaign that “all that Progressives ask or desire is permission…to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle,” meaning that it should promote an ever-expanding set of powers for an ever-expanding government. The problem, he declared, was that pesky Declaration of Independence: “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence,” he remarked. “The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.”

But in fact the Declaration is more than a litany of complaints. Its greater meaning is as a statement of the conditions of legitimate political authority and the proper ends of government. It proclaimed that political rule would, from then on, reside in the sovereignty of the people. “If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence,” wrote the great historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, “it would have been worthwhile.”

The ringing phrases of the document’s famous second paragraph are a powerful synthesis of American constitutional and republican government theories. All men have a right to liberty as they are by nature equal, which is to say none are inherently superior and deserve to rule or inferior and deserve to be ruled.

Because all are endowed with these rights, the rights are unalienable, which means that they cannot be given up or taken away. And because individuals equally possess these rights, governments derive their just powers from the consent of those governed. Government’s purpose is to secure these fundamental rights and, although prudence tells us that governments should not be changed for trivial reasons, the people retain the right to alter or abolish government when it becomes destructive of these ends.

Read more HERE.

DHS Study: People “Reverent of Individual Liberty” may be “Extreme Right-Wing” Terrorists

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Are you “reverent of individual liberty?“ Are you ”suspicious of centralized federal authority?“ Do you think there is a ”grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty?”

Well, then you fall into the category of “extreme right-wing” terrorist, according to a new study out of the University of Maryland, which was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security.

The study, titled “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008,” was conducted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the university. The organization has received roughly $12 million from DHS and is set to get another $3.6 million in future funding. It is also listed as one of DHS’s “Centers for Excellence” on the agency’s website.

The study says right-wing extremists are “groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent.”

Further, right-wing extremist groups “believe in the need to be prepared” by taking part in “paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism.“ Groups may also be ”fiercely nationalistic“ and ”suspicious of centralized federal authority.”

Read more HERE.