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.

The United States opened its banking market to China's biggest bank ICBC, for the first time clearing a takeover of a US bank by a Chinese state-controlled company.

Just days after high-level US-China economic talks in Beijing, the Federal Reserve approved an application from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to buy a majority stake in the US subsidiary of Bank of East Asia.

The transaction will make ICBC the first Chinese state-controlled bank to acquire retail bank branches in the United States.

ICBC has been the most aggressive of China's "big four" banks in expanding abroad.

Outside China, it operates subsidiary banks in Asian countries and has branches in a number of countries including Germany, Japan and Singapore.

We just passed the one-year anniversary of the (alleged) execution of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But, did he really live until 2011? Ten years earlier, in 2001, his kidneys were failing, and he was on dialysis. Do you know what the life expectancy is for dialysis patients in the United States? Unless you get a kidney transplant (and Osama did not) the average life expectancy is 5 years. And that presumes that top-notch medical care is provided, which may be hard to come by in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. And being on the run and living in hiding can't possibly help the situation.

However, Osama bin laden had a lot of other health problems besides kidney disease. They included insulin-dependent diabetes, hepatitis, osteoporosis, an enlarged heart, anemia, abnormally low blood pressure, and Marfan's syndrome. [See Nicholas Kollerstrom, "Osama bin Laden: 1957-2001" which can be found on jamesfetzer.blogspot.com, and David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (2009).]

The picture below is of Osama bin Laden from 2001, and below it is an image of him from 2011 which was released by the Pentagon immediately after the raid. I think you'll agree that in the first picture, he looks rather pale and ashen and quite sickly, and in the second picture he looks quite robust.

The first rifts in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's expanded coalition emerged just a day after the Israeli leader brought the main opposition party into his government, with religious and secular parties exchanging threats Wednesday over draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Israel's Supreme Court has ordered the government to halt the exemptions, which have allowed tens of thousands of ultra-religious men to skip compulsory military service and instead spend their days in subsidized religious studies.

The exemptions have infuriated secular Israelis, who say it is unfair that they have to risk their lives in the military while the religious study.

The dispute was a key factor in Netanyahu's surprising decision Tuesday to shore up his coalition by bringing in the Kadima Party.

Speaking to the Army Radio station, lawmaker Yitzhak Cohen of the religious Shas Party said Wednesday that "it's an illusion" to expect a court decision would force seminary students to serve in the military. Moshe Gafni, a leader in the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, warned of a brewing "cultural civil war."