Puppet MastersS


Books

We have been transformed into a pathocracy: Political Ponerology, a must read

Political Ponerology
© © Red Pill Press Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
I lived through WWII. I remember hearing FDR's "I don't like war, Eleanor doesn't like war" speech on the old Philco console radio with my parents and sister gathered round. We lived in Grand Island, NE then. I recall our victory garden, churning milk to make butter, and the black-outs with Army Air Force war planes flying overhead. I remember driving by the prisoners-of-war prison at Fort Chaffee, Fort Smith, AR and seeing the Germans standing at the fence smoking American cigarettes. I recall the end of the war when I was 7 in Bartlesville, OK.

I also remember the Nuremberg trials and recall wondering how such an evil bunch ever got control over the German people. I never found an answer to that riddle. I wondered if it could happen again, maybe even here.

I recall Goering's shocking statements, "Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." and "...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

USA

Arizona man with leukemia dropped from health insurance because of new Obamacare regulations

Image
A Fountain Hills man says he may soon have to get another job just to pay for healthcare insurance under the new Affordable Care Act.

Michael Cerpok, is a high school drop-out, one of six kids born to a school teacher, and doesn't come from a wealthy family. He has run two businesses for more than 25 years and says he may have to do more to literally stay alive.

"I've worked hard because I've had to, and I've had to, because cancer runs in my family," says Cerpok, who picked his current health insurance based on that family history. His monthly premium is just about half of his monthly take-home pay.

Vader

New York Times reporter: Obama admin 'most closed, control-freak administration I've ever covered'

obama control freak
Remember when the media rushed to talk about transparency in the Barack Obama "Hope and Change" era? Good times, good times. Leonard Downie, who once worked as the executive editor of the Washington Post and wrote a novel about Washington corruption and the Iraq War, finds a bigger and non-fictional problem in the successor to George W. Bush. Downie gives the Post a preview of his report from the Committee to Protect Journalists which outlines the Obama war on reporters and their sources:
"A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me," Sanger said. As a result, longtime sources no longer talk to him. "They tell me: 'David, I love you, but don't e-mail me. Let's don't chat until this blows over.' "

Sanger, who has worked for the Times in Washington for two decades, said, "This is most closed, control-freak administration I've ever covered." Many leak investigations include lie-detector tests for government officials with access to the information at issue. "Reporters are interviewing sources through intermediaries now," Barr told me, "so the sources can truthfully answer on polygraphs that they didn't talk to reporters."

The investigations have been "a kind of slap in the face" for reporters and their sources, said Smith of the Center for Public Integrity. "It means you have to use extraordinary measures for contacts with officials speaking without authorization."

Bullseye

Jesuit Father General Asks: Who gave the United States or France the right to act against the Syrian people?

Father Adolfo Nicolas
© voltairenet.orgFather Adolfo Nicolas
According to the Superior General of the Jesuits, by intending to bomb Syria to enforce international law, the United States and France arrogate to themselves a responsibility they don't have, violating precisely that same law. Washington and Paris are planning to lead humanity towards barbarism.

Q. The Holy Father has gone out of the way to speak for peace in Syria, which is now under threat of a new attack by the United States and France. What do you think in this regard?

Father Adolfo Nicolas: It is not customary for me to make comments on situations that have to do with international or political situations. But in the present case we are dealing with a humanitarian situation that exceeds all the limits that would ordinarily keep me silent. I have to confess that I cannot understand who gave the United States or France the right to act against a country in a way that will certainly increase the suffering of the citizens of that country, who, by the way, have already suffered beyond measure. Violence and violent action, like what is being planned, have to always be the last resort and administered in such a way that only the guilty are affected. In the case of a country this is evidently impossible to control and, thus, it seems to me totally unjustified. We, Jesuits, support 100% the Holy Father and wish with all our hearts that the threatened attack on Syria does not take place.

Wall Street

The financial "Hyper-meritocracy" - an oxymoron led by criminal morons

This column was prompted by William Galston's review of Tyler Cowen's new book Average is Over. Galston's column worries about the huge, permanent underclass that Cowen envisions will grow in the United States. I write to challenge Cowen's assumption that winners will prevail through a process of "hyper-meritocracy." Cowen's embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from "merit" - which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the "winners." The people who grew wealthiest were often the people must responsible for the largest destruction of wealth in history. In this first column I show that it is the most anti-meritocratic system. We do not live in a "winner-take-all" Nation. We increasingly live in a "cheater-take-all" system.

liar loans mortgages
© The Register
What Cowen has missed is the famous (but nearly famous enough) warning sounded by George Akerlof and Paul Romer in 1993 in their classic article "Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit."
"[M]any economists still [do] not understand that a combination of circumstances in the 1980s made it very easy to loot a [bank] with little risk of prosecution. Once this is clear, it becomes obvious that high-risk strategies that would pay off only in some states of the world were only for the timid. Why abuse the system to pursue a gamble that might pay off when you can exploit a sure thing with little risk of prosecution?" (Akerlof & Romer 1993: 4-5).
The result of these perverse incentives is the epidemics of accounting control fraud that drive our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. In the savings and loan debacle, for example:
"The typical large failure [grew] at an extremely rapid rate, achieving high concentrations of assets in risky ventures.... [E]very accounting trick available was used.... Evidence of fraud was invariably present as was the ability of the operators to 'milk' the organization" (NCFIRRE 1993).
The large Enron-era frauds were all accounting control frauds.

Worse, when cheaters prosper market forces become perverse because of the "Gresham's" dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets and professions. George Akerlof explained this in his most famous article on "Lemons" in 1970.
"[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence."
Akerlof was not the first expert to understand the dynamic.
"The Lilliputians look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft. For, they allege, care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, can protect a man's goods from thieves, but honesty hath no fence against superior cunning. . . where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage" (Swift, J. Gulliver's Travels: 1726).

Attention

Poster boy never actually enrolled in Obamacare but claims 'I have not misled anyone'

Image
© WRCB-TV
TheBlaze updated Friday's story about Chad Henderson - the 21-year-old self-confessed supporter of President Obama whose story about signing up for Obamacare the very first day has been widely publicized - with the shocking news from an interview his father gave saying Henderson, to his knowledge, never actually purchased an Obamacare plan.

Turns out that's absolutely true.

Sarah Kliff, the reporter Henderson spoke to initially at the Washington Post, sounded none too pleased about this newest twist.

"Chad never told me that his dad had signed up, but did say he enrolled in a plan around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning," Kliff writes. "Either somebody is lying, or the Henderson family needs to work on its communication skills."

Bad Guys

Kerry defends military operations in Libya, Somalia

Al-Shabaab fighters
© UnknownAl-Shabab fighters. Useful patsies of the US one day, enemies the next.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has defended Washington's recent military operations in Libya and Somalia for targeting terrorists.

"We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in its effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror," he said on Sunday.

Kerry is in the Indonesian island of Bali to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

He added that the operations showed that "those members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations literally can run, but they can't hide."

He was referring to attacks by US Special Forces on several targets in Somalia and Libya.

Comment: The US wants to choose which terrorists to support and which to go after. They are happy to arm and fund al-qaeda terrorists in Syria while going after other patsy terrorists elsewhere whose usefulness for the empire has expired.

The financial terrorists of Wall Street are of course protected as they line the coffers of the elite, while destroying the lives of billions.


Cult

Illegal Israeli settlers destroy olive trees in West Bank with impunity

Palestinian olive farmer
© UnknownA Palestinian farmer from the village of Qaryut inspects the remains of his olive trees on October 9, 2012, after they were uprooted overnight by Israeli settlers.
A Palestinian farmer says Israeli settlers have destroyed nearly 130 olive trees in the occupied West Bank.

Yasser Fukha said on Saturday that he saw a group of residents from a nearby Israeli settlement of Shavei Shomron driving near the farm in the village of Deir Sharaf and later found trees uprooted and damaged.

It came as the Palestinian farmers are set to start the 40-day harvest of olive, which is regarded as the backbone of the Palestinian economy.

Palestinians also consider the crop as a symbol of their connection to their occupied land.

Israeli settlers, mostly armed, regularly attack Palestinian villages and farms and set fire to their mosques, olive groves and other properties in the West Bank under the so-called "price tag" policy. However, the Tel Aviv regime rarely detains the assailants.

Rocket

Winning hearts and minds: 10 killed in separate US airstrikes in Afghanistan

Afghan funeral
© Unknown
Ten people, including children, have been killed in two separate US airstrikes in eastern and central-eastern Afghanistan, Press TV reports.

A US midnight airstrike on Saturday killed five people and severely injured three civilians in the central-eastern province of Maidan Wardak.

Earlier on Friday, at least five civilians, including three children, were killed in another US airstrike in an area a few kilometers from Jalalabad city, the capital of the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar.
"Last night around 11 p.m., five civilians aged between 12 and 20 carrying air guns wanted to go hunting birds some eight kilometers (five miles) from the center of the city of Jalalabad. They were targeted and killed by a foreign forces airstrike," said provincial police spokesman, Hazrat Hussain Mashreqiwal.
A NATO spokesman has confirmed the airstrike without referring to the casualties.

Arrow Down

What rubbish, Sir Simon! Our intelligence agencies are not outside the law

Real issues arise out of the Snowden affair, but British security laws keep us safe without intruding on citizens' freedoms

Simon Jenkins: Why the silence in Britain?

Image
Edward Snowden in Moscow. 'It is not surprising that there has been more debate about Snowden and Prism in the United States than in the UK.' Photograph: Itar-Tass
I usually am impressed by Simon Jenkins, but his polemic in today's Guardian on the Edward Snowden affair was well below par and full of howlers. If his emails are like that he can relax. No intelligence agency will waste its time trying to read them.

He repeats the original accusation that GCHQ used the Americans' Prism programmeto "circumvent" British law. If he had done his homework he would be aware that the intelligence and security committee, which I chair, has investigated that very claim, seen GCHQ's secret files, and been able to report to parliament that GCHQ had legal warrants from the secretary of state in every case.