Unexpected look for the Rome Temple:

Promises, Promises - by Laurence M. Vance

"Do Republicans think we’re stupid? Do they think we’ve forgotten the eight-year presidency of Republican George W. Bush? Do they think we’ve forgotten that Republicans had an absolute majority in both houses of Congress for over four years of the Bush administration? Do they think we’ve forgotten that the Republican Party controlled the Congress during the last six years of Clinton’s presidency?
The empty promises, grandiose claims, vain assurances, and blatant lies in the Republican "Pledge to America" mean that it’s not worth the paper and toner it would take to print out a copy. Republicans are clearly trying to capitalize on voter discontent with the Democratic Party, garner the support of the Tea Party movement, and sucker Americans into voting them back into power.
Promises, promises."

For the rest of the story Click Here.

A World Made by War, by Tom Engelhardt

"If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that "homeland" – a distinctly un-American word – would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, "enhanced interrogation techniques") would become as American as apple pie and that some of those "techniques" would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally – only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short – that I would spend my time writing incessantly about "the American way of war" and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts."

For the rest, Click Here

The Federal Reserve is Selling Paper Gold and Buying Physical Gold

"Conclusions:
Officialdom will never admit it and it will NEVER be reported in the mainstream financial news but our financial system has NEVER been in a more precarious state. A banking crisis of unparalleled proportions is coming – probably soon – the exact timing is still sketchy.
Got physical precious metal yet?"

For the rest of the article by Ron Kirby, Click Here.

A Conspiracy Against Ourselves by J.T. Gatto

"There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do – forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.

Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his "infinite delight" with Spenser’s Faerie Queen – an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. "Frank had a dog. His name was Spot." That happened."

For the rest Click Here.

Doug Casey on the Tea Party

"The problem with the Tea Party movement is that it has no underlying philosophical basis. Without that sound foundation, it's either going to fail or transform into something really ugly. On average, Tea Party members know something is wrong. They're disgruntled, and they want change. Not the Obama type of change – but what? You just don't know which direction they may go, and there are some very disturbing directions they could end up taking. ... They tend to be thoughtless and reflexive. They conflate some muddled feelings of "tradition" with an actual belief system. They operate on a stimulus-response basis. They're religious in exactly the same way as fundamentalist Muslims. And they're hypernationalistic. ... The Tea Party is a middle-class movement that channels ... fear into the political arena – and politics always caters to the lowest common denominator. Fear is very dangerous, it can have all kinds of very nasty results. Fear causes people to act irrationally."

Great Interview about the Tea Party, Click Here.