Abby Martin Breaks the Set on the End of the World', ínterviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick about their documentary series, the Untold History of the United States, and looks at the Top 5 Surveillance Toys of Big Brother in 2012.

Some ancient cultures referred to them as "the Menace of the Universe" and "the Harbinger of Doom." Comets have almost universally been viewed by the ancients as messengers or omens carrying bad news from the gods.

In the midst of our busy lives it's difficult to keep in mind that we reside on a ball that's corkscrewing through space around a ball of gas called our sun, which is also sweeping through our galaxy.

The ancients didn't have distractions like TVs and the Internet. They looked to the sky for clues and guidance for life on Earth, and comets brought mythology of angry gods and instilled fear in them.

Strangely, in more modern times, comets have been associated with actual dark events.

According to NASA:

Comets' influence on cultures is not limited simply to tales of myth and legend, though. Comets throughout history have been blamed for some of history's darkest times. In Switzerland, Halley's Comet was blamed for earthquakes, illnesses, red rain, and even the births of two-headed animals.

The Romans recorded that a fiery comet marked the assassination of Julius Caesar, and another was blamed for the extreme bloodshed during the battle between Pompey and Caesar. In England, Halley's Comet was blamed for bringing the Black Death. The Incas, in South America, even record a comet having foreshadowed Francisco Pizarro's arrival just days before he brutally conquered them.

Comets and disaster became so intertwined that Pope Calixtus III even excommunicated Halley's Comet as an instrument of the devil, and a meteorite, from a comet, became enshrined as one of the most venerated objects in all of Islam.

Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights - ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution - will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed through the Senate an amendment to the 2013 version of the NDAA. The amendment, although deeply flawed, at least made a symbolic attempt to restore the right to due process and trial by jury. A House-Senate conference committee led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., however, removed the amendment from the bill last week.

"I was saddened and disappointed that we could not take a step forward to ensure at the very least American citizens and legal residents could not be held in detention without charge or trial," Feinstein said in a statement issued by her office. "To me that was a no-brainer."

You've got to be careful when Syria's rebels are perpetually "closing in"

Remember the days when we thought Egypt's path to democracy was a done deal? Western-trained Mohamed Morsi had invited the people to come and meet him in Hosni Mubarak's former presidential palace, the old military toffs in the "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces" had been pensioned off and the International Monetary Fund was waiting to bestow some of those cruel deprivations upon Egypt that would ready it for our financial benevolence. How happy the Middle East optimists were by mid-2012.

Next door, Libya produced a victory for nice, pro-Western secularist Mahmoud Jibril, promising freedom, stability, a new home for the West in one of the Arab world's most fecund oil producers. It was a place where even US diplomats could wander around virtually unprotected.

Tunisia may have an Islamist party running its government, but it was a "moderate" administration - in other words, we thought it would do what we wanted - while the Saudis and the Bahraini autocracy, with the purse-lipped support of Messrs Obama and Cameron, quietly suppressed what was left of the Shia uprising which threatened to remind us all that democracy was not really welcome among the wealthiest Arab states. Democracy was for the poor.

As many of you know, this entire event at Sandy Hook, CT leaves a lot more questions than answers, and with each passing day the story seems to get more convoluted and irrational. I decided to do some of my own digging into Adam Lanza's background, and so far I have been unable to even confirm that this person actually even exists.

I did two separate searches on Intelius and Spokeo and each of them resulted in the same baffling results. Both Nancy and Peter Lanza are listed in Sandy Brook, CT and their family tree shows Nancy and Peter Lanza with only one child....Ryan Lanza. Adam Lanza does not show up in the family tree at either website and searches for Adam Lanza from CT, yield only two results, which are clearly not him.

The search results are posted below. If you scroll down you will see that on each of Nancy, Peter's and Ryan's searches a family tree is given of all known members:

A vicious cold snap across Russia and eastern Europe has claimed nearly 200 lives, officials figures showed Friday, as forecasters warned it would last until Christmas Eve.

In Russia, the cold has killed two people in the past 24 hours, the Ria-Novosti agency reported, citing medical sources, bringing the total number of deaths over the past week to 56.

The freeze had also left 371 people in hospital.

Thermometers have been stuck below minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) in Moscow -- and below minus 50 degrees (minus 58 F) in some parts of Siberia -- for a week.

Russian weather forecasters said temperature in the Khabarovsk region in eastern Russia had dropped to minus 43 Celsius, while Krasnoyarsk in Siberia reported minus 47.

This "abnormal" frost would last till Monday because of a persistent anticyclone, they added.

In Russia's European region, meanwhile, the mercury is expected to fall to minus 31 degrees Celsius on Christmas Eve before rising rapidly afterwards.

Other European countries hit hard by the extreme temperatures were counting the toll as temperatures gradually started to return to normal.

From the perspective of being the manager at a spiritual bookstore witnessing the New Age 2012 craze at ground zero in West Los Angeles, I feel it incumbent to take the opportunity to lay out some observations regarding this period in time because all too often, I meet people like this:


Hello and Namasté dear New Agers,

Well... Here we are.
Dec 21st, 2012 has come and gone.

Are you "enlightened" yet?
Was there a "global awakening"?
Are you still in a human suit, marooned in Monkey Land, where governments kill, steal, and oppress? Where cultures distract and ensnare you with lies and myths to coerce your obedience through empty promises, convolution, illusory Left/Right paradigms, and fear?

Yep.

So, do you realize what it means?
It means these MANY YEARS of flashy "You Create Your Own Reality" and New Age marketing leading up to the "Awakening/ Ascension of 2012″ was a MANUFACTURED LIE. The planets were never going to "align" and there was never going to be a worldwide global enlightenment on Dec 21, 2012.

"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."

~ Adyashanti

A fascinating new ruling unwittingly illustrates the separate system of 'justice' invented for Muslims in the US after 9/11

Valuable revelations are often found in unlikely places. Such is the case with a fascinating ruling released last week by the New York Court of Appeals, that state's highest court, in the criminal case of People v. Edgar Morales. The facts of the case are quite simple, but the implications of the ruling are profound.

The defendant, Morales, was a member of a Bronx street gang known as the "St. James Boys" (SJB). In August, 2002, Morales and fellow gang members went to a party, saw someone from a rival gang which they believed responsible for a friend's death, and told him to leave. When he refused, they planned to attack him after the party. When the party ended, Morales shot at the rival gang member and his cohorts, severely wounding one of them but also accidentally shooting and killing a 10-year-old girl who was a bystander.

Prosecutors were not content to charge Morales with murder and related crimes. Instead, they charged him with crimes of "terrorism" under an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. When enacting the law, the legislature stated that it is designed to ensure that terrorists "are prosecuted and punished in state courts with appropriate severity". Under the law, this newly created "terrorism" crime is committed whenever one acts with the "intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population", but the law contains no definition of that term.

At trial, Morales vehemently argued that what he was accused of doing could not possibly be "terrorism", but the prosecutors insisted - and the trial court agreed - that his violence "furthered the [gang]'s objective to intimidate or coerce other Mexican-American gangs in the Bronx and, as a result of those activities, the [gang] intended to intimidate and coerce the entire Mexican-American community." The jury found him guilty on all counts, including the "terrorism" charges, and the Court of Appeals set out to determine whether the terrorism charges were validly applied to this violence.

This story connects far-flung places. Kenya, Malaya, Northern Ireland and now Syria. The one over-arching theme is British counter-insurgency strategy, or more plainly, the use of state terrorism by British forces to achieve political objectives.

The story came alive again this week with two seemingly unrelated news developments. First, we learn of deeper involvement of Britain's military in the violence raging across Syria. British military officers and Special Forces are reportedly training - in Jordanian territory - foreign-backed militants to step up their campaign of terrorism across Syria.

These terror gangs, whom the Western mainstream media call "freedom fighters", have been plunging Syria into bloody chaos for the past 22 months, with car bombs ripping through civilian neighbourhoods and death squads massacring whole villages, the latest being Aqrab in Hama Province where over 125 people where murdered this week. Ample evidence shows that the mercenaries, recruited from various countries including Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, are covertly supplied with weapons and training from the US, Britain and France via the conduits of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

As the news of the Connecticut school massacre sinks in, it would take a hard-hearted person not to feel for the parents, families and friends of the victims. It is the sort of event which most of us will not experience first-hand, but some of us may know someone who has gone through a similar tragedy.

In fact, a good friend of mine lost one nephew in a bomb attack in 2008 and last month another nephew was seriously wounded in almost identical circumstances. On the second occasion, President Barack Obama gave the people who wounded the young man - one leg was blown off, as was half of an arm - the green light to continue with their maiming and slaughter of innocents "in self-defence". My friend, as you might have guessed, is a Palestinian from Gaza; his nephews' attackers were Israelis. There was no sign of any grief from Obama, the newly-elected US president on either occasion. No wiping of a tear, nor heartfelt words to try to comfort those left behind to cope with their grief and efforts to re-establish a normal life of the kind we all take for granted.

Like all of his predecessors since World War Two, Obama gives Israel carte blanche to do whatever it wants to the Palestinians. Indeed, he even makes sure that it has the most up-to-date arsenal with which to do its dirty work. Just last week, it was announced that America will replace the munitions used by Israel in its massive bombardment of civilians in the Gaza Strip for eight days and nights in November. Has he suggested that arms and ammunition should be made easier for US citizens to obtain in the wake of Connecticut? No way; he's already, less than 24 hours later, talking of re-opening the debate about gun control. The President of the United States is, however, more than willing to pump the most lethal munitions the military-industrial complex can produce to a state which breaks international laws and conventions at will, and with impunity thanks to his country's unflinching support.