Wall Street probably is wishing it never heard of the "Dimon Principle."

Major banks hoping to thwart calls for tighter banking restrictions were dealt a blow by news that JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion in a trading blunder that proponents of new rules say more stringent regulation would curtail.

The spectacular trading meltdown came despite assurances from bankers that existing layers of regulations, internal safeguards and proper oversight are adequate to prevent such disasters. Those critical mechanisms failed to surface a sprawling series of bad bets that reverberated through the global financial markets.

JPMorgan's shares were slammed Friday after Jamie Dimon, CEO of the largest bank in the U.S., said in a conference call late Thursday that his bank's trading losses resulted from a 'flawed' hedging strategy that was "poorly constructed, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored."

Dimon has been a vocal opponent of a regulation that would restrict certain types of risk-taking by banks, aka the Volcker rule, proposed in the aftermath of the financial crisis by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an "invisible bomb" that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A "senior law enforcement source" told the New York Times that "the scary part" is that "if they buil[t] one, they probably built more."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that "the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people." Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as "a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others."

Why has the Obama administration so aggressively protected the financial industry from legal accountability?

Of all the ignominious actions of the Obama administration, the steadfast, systematic shielding of Wall Street from criminal liability is probably the most corrupt in the traditional sense of that word. In Newsweek this week, Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer have an excellent examination of what happened and why, tying together crucial threads. First they lay out the basic facts, including the core deceit of the President's campaigning for re-election like he's some sort of populist crusader:

With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent - a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, "a guy who had a Swiss bank account." Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president's claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.

Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. . . . Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." . . .

Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street - around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting - his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama's supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.

"It's perplexing at best," says Phil Angelides, the Democratic former California treasurer who chaired the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. "It's deeply troubling at worst."

You are not going to believe how much money is being spent on our former presidents. At a time when U.S. government spending is wildly out of control, a total of 3.6 million dollars is being used to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 2012. For 2013, the plan is to increase that amount to 3.7 million dollars. But do any of them really need this kind of welfare? The truth is that all of them are very wealthy. So what justification is there for giving them so much money? You can see the GSA budget proposal for former presidents for 2013 right here. The 3.7 million dollars for 2013 does not even include the cost of Secret Service protection.

Rather, it only covers expenses such as office rentals, travel, phone bills, postage, printing and pension benefits. Certainly it is not unreasonable to grant former presidents a small pension, but should we be showering them with millions of dollars each year? At a time when the federal government is drowning in so much debt, the fact that these former presidents are willing to take such huge amounts of taxpayer money really does make them look like parasites.

So why are these former presidents getting this money?

Congress passed The Former Presidents Act of 1958 because they didn't want other presidents to end up as poor as Harry Truman did.

Well, these days former presidents are definitely not in danger of ending up poor. But this law does enable former presidents to stick the U.S. taxpayer with some absolutely outrageous bills.

For example, George W. Bush is scheduled to get $1,356,000 from U.S. taxpayers in 2013.

$85,000 of that will be for phone expenses.

He must have a really, really bad calling plan.

Bill Clinton is scheduled to get $1,019,000 from U.S. taxpayers in 2013.

A whopping $442,000 of that will be for office space.

That breaks down to more than $36,000 a month.

I hope that office space is nice.

Perhaps he needs a lot of office space to hide from Hillary.

"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." - Inception (2010). Director/Writer: Christopher Nolan.

"We believe the hypnotist - the "official culture" - and we are able, with preternatural cunning, to deny what is often right in front of our faces." - Laura Knight-Jadczyk, "Mass Mind Control."

"Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you." - David Foster Wallace.

"Hypnos is the God of Sleep, which he induces with purest opium smoked through a horn. He could also be the God of Dangerous Addictions, as he works for Hades with his brother Thanatos, the God of Death." - Godchecker.

"Hypnos enters the sleep of mortals and, at the bidding of the Olympians, gives them dreams of foolishness or inspiration, depending on the individual and their divine protectors or enemies.

Hypnos is husband to Aglia, one of the Graces, because he did a very dangerous favor for Hera. During the Trojan War, Hera wanted to distract Zeus from the battle so she could assist the Achaians, who seemed to be losing the war. She wanted Hypnos to cast a spell of sleep on Zeus but he refused. At first Hera offered Hypnos a golden throne crafted by her son Hephaestus but she was forced to raise the ante when Hypnos reminded her of the only time he had dared cast sleep on Zeus. Long before the Trojan War, Hera was angry at Heracles and she had persuaded Hypnos to make Zeus sleep while she tormented the hero. When Zeus awoke, he was in a rage. He searched for Hypnos and finally found him hiding in the arms of his mother, Nyx (Night). Zeus overcame his anger and simply warned Hypnos not to try such a trick again, and Hypnos went unpunished.

In preparation for this new deception, Hypnos made Hera swear oaths of her sincerity. He agreed to help her deceive Zeus for the hand of one of the Graces, Aglia (or Pasithea). He turned himself into a bird and, before Zeus could see him, hid in the tops of the trees on Mount Ida. He stayed hidden until Hera had seduced Zeus. When the father of gods was dulled by pleasure and sleep, Hypnos flew to Poseidon and urged him to increase his efforts in helping the Akhaians because Zeus was asleep and unaware of the Earth Shaker's meddling. Poseidon strode through the ranks of soldiers and urged them on. Finally, his bellowing and screeching roused Zeus from his slumber but, in that short time, the Akhaians had turned the battle back on the Trojans. Hera's trick had worked. Zeus never found out that Hypnos had betrayed him (again)." - Stewart, Michael. "Hypnos", Greek Mythology: From the Iliad to the Fall of the Last Tyrant.

"Oh Zeus Universal, if you hear our song,
Show us again your immortal power
In this darkest hour." - Sophocles: Oedipus the King.

A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the last decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists - not the religion.

"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," the instructor, Army. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are "no longer relevant."

The double agent who infiltrated Al Qaeda and helped foil a plot to blow up a US-bound airliner was a Saudi Arabian national who also holds a British passport, according to US reports.

In a report which it sheeted home to "counterterrorism sources", CNN reported the man was sent by Saudi counterterrorism agents into Yemen as a mole after it was discovered that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was developing an updated model of the underwear bomb that failed to explode in a Christmas Day 2009 attempt.

The man reportedly grew up in Europe and joined militant sympathisers who tried to recruit him for terror attacks.

It said that the Saudi man's British passport enhanced his value to the terror group, because he could travel without a visa to the US.

But when he learned that a concrete terror plot was in the works, the man contacted Saudi counterterrorism officials from Yemen.

The Saudis then informed the Americans of the planned operation and let them know that they had succeeded in infiltrating the group, according to CNN.

The news stories, which quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out. These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants.

They have become a litany in recent years. The terrifying 2003-2004 national news stories that a Detroit "sleeper cell" had sent Muslim terrorists to blow up Disneyland and other landmarks, including in Las Vegas, was later thrown out of court, with accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, to almost no press attention - the same cycle of hype and failed convictions that have characterized many such stories. The evidence had included a home video taken in Disneyland, "doodles", and a guy with a credit card fraud problem, who had been pressured to diminish his own sentence by accusing his buddies.

At least 55 people have been killed and 372 others injured by two powerful blasts in the Syrian capital on Thursday morning. The car bombs detonated near a military intelligence building.

The blasts happened in quick succession during the morning rush hour, just as employees were arriving to work. An initial small explosion was followed by a much larger blast allegedly targeted at paramedics and security forces arriving at the scene, AP reports.

The explosion left two craters - three and six meters wide - in front of the military compound. The two cars were stuffed with more than 1,000 kilograms of explosives, said Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi.

Makdissi also said that in addition to 55 dead - some of them already identified - and 372 injured, there were at least 15 sets of unidentified remains, implying that the death toll was likely to rise. Syrian authorities have urged people to donate blood for the injured.

The real situation in Syria is absolutely different from how the Western media portray it, historian and political analyst Pierre Piccinin told RT. He visited the turbulent state twice and says it was not as bad as he expected.