"All governments are run by liars." - Independent journalist I.F. "Izzy" Stone

President Obama has managed, with singular assistance from Congress and the courts, to mangle the Constitution through repeated abuses, attacks and evasions.

This is nothing new, as I've documented in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. However, with his recent speech on the National Security Agency - a heady cocktail of lies, obfuscations, contradictions and Orwellian doublespeak - Obama has also managed to pervert and propagandize our nation's history, starting with Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, likening their efforts to secure our freedoms to NSA phone surveillance.

Frankly, George Orwell's Winston Smith, rewriting news stories for Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth, couldn't have done a better job of revising history to suit the party line.

While it didn't bode well for what was to follow, here's how Obama opened his speech:

"At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the 'The Sons of Liberty' was established in Boston. And the group's members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots. Throughout American history, intelligence has helped secure our country and our freedoms."

Obama's inference is clear: rather than condemning the NSA for encroaching on our privacy rights, we should be commending them for helping to "secure our country and our freedoms." Never mind that the Sons of Liberty were actually working against the British government, to undermine what they perceived as a repressive regime guilty of perpetrating a host of abuses against the colonists.

After such a 1984-esque send-up, it doesn't even really matter what else Obama had to say in his speech about NSA reforms and the like. Rest assured, it was largely a pack of lies. Mind you, Obama said it eloquently enough and interspersed it with all the appropriately glib patriotic remarks about individual freedom and the need to defend the Constitution and securing the life of our nation while preserving our liberties. After all, Obama has proven to be very good at saying one thing and doing another, whether it's insisting that "you can keep your health care plan," that he'll close Guantanamo, or that his administration's controversial drone strikes only target terrorists and not civilians.

Original video produced by BrasscheckTV.com

Narrated by Goodman Green

On Sept. 11 last year, up to 1 million people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan by water "in an emergent network of private and publicly owned watercraft--a previously unplanned activity." It was an American Dunkirk, like the epic rescue of the British army at Dunkirk in 1940 by an armada of similar craft.

Fifty three years ago today, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous speech warning of the military-industrial complex. It's quite a speech, and well worth reading, listening to or watching. But, the famous lines are the ones that still rings true today:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The White House claims that it's a mere coincidence that President Obama has chosen the anniversary of that speech to give his speech, outlining what are expected to be merely cosmetic reforms to the NSA's surveillance efforts, still convinced that even if the programs are incredibly broad and powerful, that it's okay since he won't abuse them.

A man said he was wrongly targeted by Houston police, handcuffed and detained for more than an hour, after he gave a homeless man 75 cents.

Greg Snider said he was driving in downtown Houston around 2 p.m., when he pulled into a parking lot at Commerce and La Branch to take a business call.

"That's when the homeless man came up to me. He said, 'Hey my name is Dave. I'm from Dallas. I'm down on my luck. Do you have any change,'" said Snider.

Snider said he gave the man some change and drove off.

"I had no idea at all what was about to happen," said Snider.

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal - now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan - and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.

"[E]verywhere, "time is winding up," in the words of one of our spirituals, "corruption in the land, people take a stand, time is winding up." - Martin Luther King Jr.

We now live in a two-tiered system of governance. There are two sets of laws: one set for the government and its corporate allies, and another set for you and me.

The laws which apply to the majority of the population allow the government to do things like sending SWAT teams crashing through your door in the middle of the night, rectally probing you during a roadside stop, or listening in on your phone calls and reading all of your email messages, confiscating your property, or indefinitely detaining you in a military holding cell. These are the laws which are executed every single day against a population which has up until now been blissfully ignorant of the radical shift taking place in American government.

Then there are the laws constructed for the elite, which allow bankers who crash the economy to walk free. They're the laws which allow police officers to avoid prosecution when they shoot unarmed citizens, strip search non-violent criminals, or taser pregnant women on the side of the road, or pepper spray peaceful protestors. These are the laws of the new age we are entering, an age of neo-feudalism, in which corporate-state rulers dominate the rest of us, where the elite create the laws which can result in a person being jailed for possessing a small amount of marijuana while bankers that launder money for drug cartels walk free. In other words, we have moved into an age where we are the slaves and they are the rulers.

Unfortunately, this two-tiered system of government has been a long time coming. As I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the march toward an imperial presidency, to congressional intransigence and impotence, to a corporate takeover of the mechanisms of government, and the division of America into haves and have nots has been building for years.

Jazz musician and former Israeli Gilad Atzmon has a message for supporters and critics of banned French comedian Dieudonne:

It looks like a movie, but it's not

This footage is compiled from multiple locations in Chelyabinsk, Russia when it was hit by the shockwave from an enormous overhead meteor explosion on February 15th 2013. The blast caught up with people in their offices, schools, workshops... one moment they were going about their normal day, the next...

Defense Against the Psychopath is a documentary excerpted from chapter one of my book; The Art of Urban Survival. Teaches people how to recognize and defend against our society's most dangerous predators, psychopaths.


Check out the my website here.

Free download of the PDF booklet, Defense Against the Psychopath here.

Amiri Baraka, a poet and playwright of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others, died on Thursday in Newark. He was 79.

His death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, was confirmed by his son Ras Baraka, a member of the Newark Municipal Council. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Baraka had been hospitalized since Dec. 21.

Mr. Baraka was famous as one of the major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and '70s, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena.

Among his best-known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995; the play Dutchman; and Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a highly regarded historical survey.

Mr. Baraka, whose work was widely anthologized and who was heard often on the lecture circuit, was also long famous as a political firebrand. Here, too, critical opinion was divided: He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised, particularly in the racially charged political landscape of Newark, where he lived most of his life, or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s.