People tend to think of Amazon as a big store on the internet. It is more than that. For example, in August of 2013, soon after Amazon founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, I wrote about Amazon’s Amazon Web Services having as customers hundreds of government agencies. Included among them is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with which Amazon had a 10 years, 600 billion dollars contract to build private cloud servers inside CIA data centers.
Continue readingA new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
Included in a Thursday foreign policy report by Rick Sanchez at RT, are portions of an interview with peace advocate and former United States House of Representatives Member Ron Paul (R-TX) in which Paul explains that a big barrier to moving toward nonintervention overseas is that “warmongering” has become a bipartisan fixation. “It used to be the Democrats were considered less likely to be involved in war, but they’re every bit as aggressive as the Republicans,” said Paul.
Continue readingIn 2011, when then-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he spoke passionately from the debate stage against the US government having a fence at the US-Mexico border. “I think this fence business,” said Paul at a debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, “is designed, and may well be used, against us and keep us in.” “In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital and there’s capital controls and there’s people control,” continued Paul, “so, every time you think of a fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us.”
Continue readingJulian Assange and WikiLeaks have not just been targeted by the United States government in response to their publishing of US government secrets. They have also been subjected to false reporting in the media.
In an email sent to media organizations on Sunday, WikiLeaks details that, due to “a pervasive climate of inaccurate claims about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, including purposeful fabrications planted in large and otherwise ‘reputable’ media outlets,” Wikileaks is providing in the email a list of false and defamatory claims about WikiLeaks and Assange for journalists and publishers “to ensure they do not spread and have not spread falsehoods about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.” A Reuters report counts a total of 140 items in the email’s “Defamation List.”
A year into legal recreational marijuana sales in California, the volume of sales is far less than many people, and the state government, expected. The reason for low sales numbers is not that people stopped liking marijuana. The missing expected sales are still being made, but in the black market. Because “California is regulating and taxing the hell out of cannabis” in the legal market, it is hard “for legal suppliers to compete with the state’s longstanding, extensive, and highly developed black market,” writes Jacob Sullum in a Friday Reason article.
Continue readingA new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Friday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
Listen to the new episode here:
Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.
Starting in five four three two one.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who will be sworn in as a United States Senate member from Utah on Thursday, wrote a Tuesday Washington Post editorial very critical of President Donald Trump. Romney warns in his anti-Trump torrent, “The alternative to US world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal.”
Continue readingPresident Donald Trump would do well to listen to Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s Russiagate investigation lawyers, concerning the propriety of prosecuting Julian Assange of WikiLeaks who has lived in the Ecuador embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition to the United States. Interviewed Sunday at the Fox News show Fox & Friends, Giuliani made it clear that he believes Assange should not be prosecuted for the publishing of US government information. Assange took part in First Amendment-protected activity, Giuliani explains, as did the New York Times and the Washington Post decades earlier when they published the US government’s Pentagon Papers containing many revelations about US activities related to the Vietnam War.
Continue readingCome the swearing in of members of the new United States Congress on January 3, Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN), who is one of the longest-serving Republican members of the House of Representatives and among the House’s strongest peace advocates, will be beginning his retirement from political office. Duncan spoke on the House floor in a short December 21 speech focused on the importance of ending US military intervention abroad. Quoting the Bible, Duncan concludes his final House floor speech with this advice: “seek peace and pursue it.”
Continue reading