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How The Use Of Drones To Secure Borders Threatens Everyone’s Rights

“A critical point raised by that study is how ‘border’ security has now come to mean much more than security around the actual border. Government agencies have sweeping powers to enforce ‘border’ security across the whole nation in terms of tackling border crime, identifying irregular migrants, and imposing security requirements upon travellers and goods crossing borders. Drones are enabling ‘upstream’ surveillance which allows a state to monitor and intervene in developments both inside and outside the country, far from its immediate border, for example by assessing migration patterns, observing events in neighbouring nations, or asserting control over remote seas.  In the US, Predator drones operated by the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection Agency have been used to spy on Black Lives Matter demonstrations many miles from the border itself.”

2021 01 29 08 20

More at Drone Wars

 

Global Day Of Action: World Says No To War On Yemen

Call or write your members of Congress and Senate – Biden ran on ending support for the war on Yemen, he needs to be pressured to keep that promise.

Sign up here

Watch here

Over 300 organisations from 18 countries have signed up for a call to action against the war on Yemen so far, making this the biggest international anti-war co-ordination since the campaign against the Iraq war. This protest is timed to take place just days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, who has promised to end US support for the war. This is our one central aim – to hold him to his word and force fellow governments to follow suit.

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic many of the planned physical protests have had to be postponed but our global movement will not be silenced. For the World Says No to War on Yemen Global Online Rally we have brought together a group of prominent voices from across the world to speak out against this utterly brutal war and call for its immediate end.

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Stephen Wertheim: Delusions Of Dominance, Biden Can’t Restore American Primacy And Shouldn’t Try

By seeking global dominance rather than just its own defense, the United States has acquired a world of antagonists. These antagonists have in turn further increased the costs and dangers of dominance. As a result, U.S. foreign policy has failed in its most essential purpose: it has made the American people less safe where they live.

Stephen Wertheim has a vision for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. One that would be supported by the majority of Americans, but is it a vision shared by the Biden administration?

2021 01 25 07 55

RIP Jeff Riggenbach

My dear old friend Jeff Riggenbach died today.

Jeff was a brilliant writer who penned two pieces on Randolph Bourne, the namesake of Antiwar.com’s parent foundation, The Randolph Bourne Institute.

As a teenager, I was a news junkie. (That never changed.) I listened regularly to KFWB News radio in Los Angeles. One of their anchormen, Jeff Riggenbach, had a distinctive baritone voice. When I was 19, I was doing a bit of selling marijuana. A friend came to tell me of someone who wanted to buy a pound. I told him to bring his friend by. When the friend arrived and started talking, I said “You’re Jeff Riggenbach!” “I’m aware of that,” he replied.

Over the years I met Jeff over and over at events and homes of friends. In 1978 we were working in the same offices, Jeff at Libertarian Review and me at Students for a Libertarian Society. We became fast friends.

The Mises Institute says this about Jeff:

Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. His books include In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and Persuaded by Reason: Joan Kennedy Taylor & the Rebirth of American Individualism (2014). Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available on Mises.org.

Jeff was a brilliant and creative man. He died at 74 after a long illness. He made the world better and his passage is a great loss. I will miss him very much.

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