At 6’6″, William “Big Willie” Andrew Robinson III — a bowler hat perched atop his head, his voice booming — cut an imposing figure among the youth of South Central Los Angeles during the 1970s. That figure both belied and contributed to his mission, which was to end gang violence and racial unrest through drag racing. Robinson died this past Saturday after a short illness. He was 70.

For a life lived in the furtherance of “peace through racing,” as was his mantra, Big Willie should get the Jalopnik Peace Prize. If there were such a thing.

His seemed an impossible task in a city whose racial entrenchment began decades before. Post-war racial violence in Los Angeles traced its roots to the 1920s, when blacks began to exit a claustrophobic ghetto, seeking elbow room in traditionally white areas, and were met with fists, blackjacks, knives, and gasoline bombs.

CONTINUED at Jalopnik.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Yesterday was a pretty emotional day for Paul supporters everywhere. The Paul campaign announced that they would no longer compete in the states that have not yet voted as it would cost too much money moving forward. In fact, here is what Ron Paul said himself:

Moving forward, however, we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have.

This is completely understandable and really just goes to show how fiscally responsible Dr. Paul truly is, especially when comparing him to his conservative counterparts who spent themselves into oblivion and racked up some serious campaign debt. With that being said, this is only more reason to vote for the man as he knows where to draw the line and also knows what all of Paul supporters know, which is that we will all continue to vote for the man regardless of the campaign’s inability to compete with the Wall Street funded Mitt Romney. When those Occupy kids are looking for a leader it should probably be the guy whose campaign is funded by the downtrodden 99 percent as opposed to the 1 percent big bank bank funded candidates like Romney and Obama.

This doesn’t mean that Paul is completely out of this race. As was just mentioned, his supporters are loyal and will vote for him despite this seemingly tragic pitfall. The hunt for delegates will continue and ultimately, Ron Paul will continue to surprise the doubters and make a serious impact on this race. This isn’t blind faith or overly-loyal Paulbot idiocy, this is facts. I doubted the campaign’s strategy but have since learned that in the realm of acquiring delegates, they are doing a hell of a job. The media doesn’t accurately report on what’s going on in the delegate hunt and honestly, you can go to various mainstream media sites and look at their delegate counts and the numbers don’t match – corporate media is clueless. Romney may have been announced the winner in Maine but Paul walked away with the most delegates. Santorum and Gingrich have lost theirs and with 11 states left to vote, Paul could continue to be a thorn in the side of the establishment beast. As I’ve said many times, this isn’t about winning, this is about the message and gaining enough support to stamp it on the leviathan’s forehead before it is once again let loose on the masses. In other words, Paul might not win the fight but he is going to break a motherfucker’s nose.

Even though the mainstream media has been quick to gleefully write Paul off as a quitter, his forces are moving forward – just more covertly in a way that is unique and foreign to these political experts spewing regurgitated pre-written bullshit through our television and radio speakers. In order to dispel the mainstream hogwash, Paul’s chief strategist Jesse Benton sent out an official statement. Here is some of what that memo states:

Let me be very clear. Dr. Paul is NOT ending his campaign. As Dr. Paul has previously stated, he is in this race all the way to the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August. Looking ahead, our campaign must honor that trust by maximizing our resources to ensure the greatest possible impact at the National Convention. So while our campaign is no longer investing in the remaining primary states, we will continue to run strong programs at District and State Conventions to win more delegates and alternate delegates to the National Convention.

To this end, our campaign has several positive and realistic goals: 1) Having recently WON Maine, we believe we can win several more states. 2) We will win party leadership positions at both the state and national level. 3) We will continue to grow our already substantial total of delegates.

We will head to Tampa with a solid group of delegates. Several hundred will be bound to Dr. Paul, and several hundred more, although bound to Governor Romney or other candidates, will be Ron Paul supporters.

Unfortunately, barring something very unforeseen, our delegate total will not be strong enough to win the nomination. Governor Romney is now within 200 delegates of securing the party’s nod. However, our delegates can still make a major impact at the National Convention and beyond. All delegates will be able to vote on party rules and allow us to shape the process for future liberty candidates.

We are in an excellent position to make sure the Republican Party adds solid liberty issues to the GOP Platform, which our delegates will be directly positioned to approve. Our campaign is presently working to get several items up for consideration, including monetary policy reform, prohibitions on indefinite detention, and Internet freedom.

Finally, by sending a large, respectful, and professional delegation to Tampa, we will show the Party and the country that not only is our movement growing and here to stay, but that the future belongs to us…

Considering that two of the biggest states, California and Paul’s home state Texas, haven’t yet voted, there are a shitload of delegates that could easily go Paul’s way, especially since he has performed well in both of those states. The race is still as interesting as it has been all along, even though the media is ignoring Paul and pretending he isn’t even a part of this race anymore. Their “out of sight, out of mind” strategy hasn’t worked in the past and it won’t work this time. Paul supporters aren’t going anywhere and their numbers will continue to expand.

In retrospect, was this even about winning the presidency or was this about turning the Republican Party on its head and making a real difference? Is this really about shattering one half of the two-party mold in an effort to fix the system from within? If so, will it work? Either way, this game has been well-played by the Paul camp and ultimately it’s up to us everyday people to see that the message is sent and clearly understood. From here on out, this game is going to get pretty fucking filthy. Put on your gloves because we aren’t done swingin’!

Rick Santorum is running out of time and opportunities to stop front-runner Mitt Romney’s slow, grinding march to the Republican presidential nomination.

Romney’s convincing rout of Santorum in Illinois on Tuesday, along with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s endorsement of Romney on Wednesday, were a one-two punch that intensified questions about how long Santorum can keep his conservative campaign alive.

Romney’s Illinois win widened an already daunting lead in delegates, and Bush’s endorsement could signal that those party leaders who have been sitting out the nominating battle might be ready to begin coalescing around Romney.

Santorum needs a win in conservative Louisiana on Saturday and a breakthrough victory in the Midwestern battleground of Wisconsin on April 3 to have a chance at changing the race’s course and casting doubt on Romney’s inevitability.

Otherwise, pressure will mount for him to pull the plug on his White House bid and help the party rally around Romney as the challenger to President Barack Obama in the November 6 general election.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.

And, just like that, the seemingly endless series of Republican presidential debates may finally be grinding to a halt.

On Thursday, Mitt Romney‘s campaign announced that they had no plans to participate in a March 1 debate in Atlanta, sponsored by CNN and the Georgia Republican Party. The news was first reported by CBS News/National Journal.

In an e-mail, the Romney campaign said that they were unable to make the debate because of scheduling demands before the series of primaries and caucuses on March 6, known as Super Tuesday.

“Governor Romney will be spending a lot of time campaigning in Georgia and Ohio ahead of Super Tuesday,” wrote Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman. “With eight other states voting on March 6, we will be campaigning in other parts of the country and unable to schedule the CNN Georgia debate. We have participated in 20 debates, including eight from CNN.”

Mr. Romney does, however, still intend to participate in next Wednesday night’s CNN debate in Arizona.

Mr. Romney is not the only candidate sitting out the March 1 debate. A spokesman for Rick Santorum told a CBS News/National Journal reporter that he had “no plans of doing it right now.” And CNN said that Representative Ron Paul of Texas told the network on Thursday that he also did not plan to attend.

Upon being told that Mr. Romney would skip the March 1 debate, Newt Gingrich, campaigning in Los Angeles, said he expected to participate, then offered a reason why Mr. Romney would want to avoid confrontation.

“The Romney model is to go to Wall Street and raise huge amounts of money to run negative ads,” Mr. Gingrich said, “and you can understand why having to defend that strategy is probably not something he’s very happy with.”

CNN, in a statement, said that “without full participation of all four candidates,” it would not hold a Super Tuesday debate.

That means next Wednesday’s debate in Mesa, Ariz., will be the 21st of the race so far, and the candidates and their staff members — particularly Mr. Romney’s — have grumbled about their frequency. But now, the primary season of debates may finally be coming to an end.

Source: the NY Times.

The absurdity of America today never ceases to amaze.  In fact, it has become so elaborate that one might even suggest it has reached a kind of poetic symmetry.  When a protest group is willing to stick their necks out to expose the horror of the National Defense Authorization Act and its open door strategy for unconstitutional arrest and indefinite detainment of American citizens, I have to stand up and applaud.  This is the kind of protest we need to see all over the country.  Of course, any establishment system which is willing to dissolve the inherent liberties of its citizens certainly isn’t going to stand by quietly while they blatantly point out the injustice.  The Grand Central Terminal action featured in the video below is a perfect example of the swift and immediate stifling of peaceful dissent by an increasingly totalitarian government:

Responses to the event vary.  Most people who have actually been exposed to the facts on the NDAA have expressed utter disgust and fury.  Rightly so.  Some, however, have taken the old elitist mantra, perpetuated effectively by the Neo-Cons in their heyday, that if you are not for the system, then you are a danger to society.  Not surprisingly, there are still plenty of useful idiots out there buzzing about like parasites in search of blood.

For those who would applaud these arrests, and suggest that they are well deserved, I would have to ask very pointedly; why?

Is it right to crush free speech as long as the message is offensive to you personally?  Do peaceful protestors really present a legitimate threat to our national stability?  Are they truly more dangerous than a corrupt government hellbent on assassinating the legal protections of our natural rights which have existed for centuries?  Would any supporter of the jackboot methodology like to explain to me in a coherent manner why they believe their skewed world view should be shielded from sincere questions?  Please, I can’t wait to witness the kind of ridiculous mental gymnastics required to make such arguments palatable.  If this kind of ignorance wasn’t so destructive, it might actually be entertaining.

The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter if these activists were in Grand Central Terminal, on the streets, or busting through the doors of the Oval Office.  While New York authorities will attempt to argue property loopholes in free speech protections for Grand Central, or national security because of the vulnerability of the terminal, really, this has nothing to do with either.  This is about the removal of American voices from a room, and nothing more.   If the message is going to be suppressed by the mainstream media, and shrugged off by representatives, then protesters must go to where the people are, and make the truth heard by whatever means necessary.

Ultimately, activism is about disturbing people’s normal mundane routines and shocking them out of their pop-culture stupor, even if for a moment.  If we aren’t allowed to do that without constant police intervention, then the First Amendment is not being served, and then, my friends, we have a problem, a problem which should be forced down the throat of government with even more public action.

Source: Alt Market.

The conservative and liberal blogospheres are unifying behind opposition to Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, with right-leaning bloggers arguing their very existence could be wiped out if the anti-piracy bill passes.

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist,” wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group.

Some have asserted that the controversial measures would criminalize pages and blogs that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. In particular, this has concerned search engines like Google, which could face massive liability if some form of the bill passes, some say.

“Of course, restrictions of results provided by Internet search engines amount to just that: prior restraint of their free expression of future results. Google and others, under SOPA, are told what they can or can’t publish before they publish it. Kill. The. Bill,” conservative blogger Neil Stevens argued at RedState.

Liberals had their own spin on it, cheering on the fact that corporate support for SOPA was starting to subside.

CONTINUED at Politico.

If you are worried the world will end next year based on the Mayan calendar, relax: the end of time is still far off.

So say Mayan experts who want to dispel any belief that the ancient Mayans predicted a world apocalypse next year.

The Mayan calendar marks the end of a 5,126 year old cycle around December 21, 2012 which should bring the return of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with war and creation.

Author Jose Arguelles called the date “the ending of time as we know it” in a 1987 book that spawned an army of Mayan theorists, whose speculations on a cataclysmic end abound online. But specialists meeting at this ancient Mayan city in southern Mexico say it merely marks the termination of one period of creation and the beginning of another.

“We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012,” said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It’s a marketing fallacy.”

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been trying to quell the barrage of forecasters predicting the apocalypse. “The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans,” the institute said in a statement.

In the Mayan calendar, the long calendar count begins in 3,114 BC and is divided into roughly 394-year periods called Baktuns. Mayans held the number 13 sacred and the 13th Baktun ends next year.

Sven Gronemeyer, a researcher of Mayan codes from La Trobe University in Australia, who has been trying to decode the calendar, said the so-called end day reflects a transition from one era to the next in which Bolon Yokte returns.

“Because Bolon Yokte was already present at the day of creation … it just seemed natural for the Mayan that Bolon Yokte will again be present,” he said.

Of the approximately 15,000 registered glyphic texts found in different parts of what was then the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012, the Institute said.

“The Maya did not think about humanity, global warming or predict the poles would fuse together,” said Alfonso Ladena, a professor from the Complutense University of Madrid. “We project our worries on them.”

(Reporting by Pepe Cortes; editing by Anthony Boadle)

Source: The Huffington Post via Reuters. Videos at link.

He was young, good looking, and photogenic. He swept to power against heavy odds on the back of a heart-warming, hopey-changey message, completing a rags-to-riches journey that might have come straight out of a blockbuster movie. It isn’t hard to see why Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was the toast of Hollywood.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Art Carden.

Somewhere, there are two graduate students in the social sciences who need dissertation topics. Those students should be watching the Occupy Wall Street movement with keen eyes, because, as it evolves, it’s going to provide us with an interesting set of applications, illustrations, and tests of different principles in the social sciences. One student should study the on-the-ground evolution of the occupation camps themselves. Another should look at the evolution of perceptions of the occupations and how they have changed as data on the occupiers’ views have emerged.

Former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen has done a valuable service by assembling a poll — which he discusses in the Wall Street Journal — that “probably represent(s) the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.” According to Schoen, the occupiers are united by “a deep commitment to left-wing policies.”

I agree with the occupiers when we both answer “no” to a question like “should we bail out large financial institutions that have made a lot of bad investments?” The more radical occupiers lose me with demands that we “smash capitalism” and “abolish private property.” It isn’t at all clear to me that they have thought through exactly what this would entail.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from the Economic Collapse.

The future of the euro is hanging by a thread at the moment.  The massive debt problems of nations such as Greece, Italy and Portugal are dragging down the rest of the Europe, and the political will in northern Europe to continue to bail out these debt-ridden countries is rapidly failing.  Could the end of the euro actually be in sight?  The euro was really a very interesting experiment.  Never before had we seen a situation where monetary union was tried without political and fiscal union along with it on such a large scale.  The euro worked fairly well for a while as long as everyone was paying their debts.  But now Greece has collapsed financially, and several other countries in the eurozone (including Italy) are on the way.  Right now the only thing holding back a complete financial disaster in Europe are the massive bailouts that the wealthier nations such as Germany have been financing.  But now a wave of anti-bailout sentiment is sweeping Germany and the future of any European bailouts is in doubt.  So what does that mean for the euro?  It appears that there are two choices.  Either we will see much deeper fiscal and political integration in Europe (which does not seem likely at this point), or we will see the end of the euro.

That status quo cannot last much longer.  The citizens of wealthy nations such as Germany are becoming very resentful that gigantic piles of their money are being poured into financial black holes such as Greece.  In fact, it is rapidly getting to the point where we could actually see rioting in the streets of German cities over all of this.

CONTINUED..