The Environmental Protection Agency is a federal agency that is charged with the responsibility of writing and enforcing legislation to protect human health and the environment. Established under Nixon in 1970, the EPA is another one of those agencies that sounds like a good idea, until you peel off the shiny friendly top layer to discover the stench of corruption underneath. Up until now, they at least pretended to be there to serve as watchdogs, but it seems like they've decided to give up on that silly illusion.

Since they are looking after all things environmental, they need unbiased specialists to advise them on policies and issues.

Silly me, I always thought that sounded sort of...I dunno...science-y.

Our estimable House of Representatives disagrees.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has warned it would be a "grave mistake" for the French parliament to follow the suit of several other European nations in recognizing a Palestinian state in a vote scheduled early December.

"Recognition of a Palestinian state by France would be a grave mistake," Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem. "Do they have nothing better to do at a time of beheadings across the Middle East, including that of a French citizen?" apparently referring to Herve Gourdel executed by Algerian jihadists in September.

"The State of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, the only state that we have, and the Palestinians demanding a state do not want to recognize the right to have a state for the Jewish people," Netanyahu added.

Just hours before the statement, the Israeli government approved a controversial 'Jewish state bill', which the critics already called anti-democratic. If approved by the parliament on Wednesday, it will redefine Israel as the "national homeland of the Jewish people" instead of a "Jewish and Democratic State."

In the TASS special project Top Officials, Vladimir Putin talks about healthy lifestyle, the "fifth column" and oil prices "plot" and argues with Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev.

On health, wrong statement and the other side of the coin

- What's your health status now, Vladimir Vladimirovich?

- All worries are in foes' dreams!

- The foes are making hints...

- Really? It's the first time I hear about it. What are they saying? Just fantasying?

- I won't retell it to you. As a matter of fact, I've come to the firsthand source.

- Let them think this way. It'll make them relaxed and will bring us benefits, too.

Gold has been in the news a lot in the last week. Most interesting was the fact that the Dutch government secretly got 122.5 tons of gold back from Uncle Sam.

DNB states it has changed allocation policy from 11 % in Amsterdam, 51 % at the FRBNY, 20 % in Canada and 18 % at the Bank Of England (BOE); to 31 % in Amsterdam, 31 % at the FRBNY, 20 % in Canada and 18 % at the BOE. According to the World Gold Council's latest data DNB has 612.5 tonnes in official gold reserves.

Even if much of it is still owed to the Netherlands, this is a nice chunk of gold being repatriated. In contrast, consider that Germany's attempts to have its gold repatriated, which amounted to just 5 tons in 2013, have been stalled, allegedly thanks to the resumption of its suicidal confidence in Uncle Sam as 'lender of last resort'. A more realistic view is that Germany was told that there is no gold, so they can forget all about it.

So why did the Dutch National Bank (DNB) bring back some of its gold?

"It is no longer wise to keep half of our gold in one part of the world," a DNB spokesman told Telegraaf. "Maybe it was desirable during the Cold War, but not now."

Interesting. THEN was a Cold War; not now. That's not going to go down too well in the US State Department. The Dutch didn't bother having a referendum in order to bring it back, like the Swiss. They just went ahead and did it.

De Telegraaf reports that for years there have been doubts at the DNB if the Dutch gold was still in New York. After a very secret and almost military operation DNB has shipped gold from Manhattan to Amsterdam, to bring about a more balanced allocation of its gold reserves and give the Dutch citizens more confidence by storing the gold on own soil to guide the country, if necessary, through a following major crisis. In the previous weeks many armored trucks were seen at the DNB in Amsterdam.

Other news this week included official admission from Ukraine that their gold is gone. This was first noticed back in March, just after the coup, but never verified and only mentioned on alternative news sites... which figures because only they can be relied on to tell you the news:

Tasnim News Agency asked me about a possible Iran - P5+1 nuclear deal as we approach crunch time. Article is in Farsi. This is what I said, in English:

In these final crucial days there's a lot of Western spin about an extension of negotiations; as in an understanding reached on Monday, followed by renewed talks up to March 2015. That's NOT a good idea - in fact dangerous. All those powerful forces against a deal will work on overtime to sabotage it.

Following heated debate, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet has voted in favor of anchoring in law the status of Israel as "the national homeland of the Jewish people," which critics fear would discriminate the Arab population.

According to the draft law, Israel's Basic Laws would no longer define it as "Jewish and democratic" country, but as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

15 Israeli ministers in the cabinet supported the 'Jewish state bill,' with only six, including Israeli Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, saying 'no' to the initiative on Sunday.

The bill now has to be approved by the country's parliament, Knesset, which is scheduled to vote on it on Wednesday.

Netanyahu said that it's high time to amend the legislation as the idea of Israel being the national homeland of the Jewish people is challenged by many inside and outside the country.

"The Palestinians refuse to recognize this, and there is also opposition from within - there are those who want to establish autonomy in the Galilee and the Negev, and who deny our national rights," the Prime Minister is cited by Jerusalem Post newspaper.

He assured that the bill won't give Judaism precedence over democracy, with all Israeli citizens - no mater of their culture and faith - to have equal rights.

"But there are national rights only for the Jewish people: a flag, anthem, the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel, and other national symbols," Netanyahu added.

However, the critics have called the proposal "anti-democratic," expressing concerns that it would legalize discrimination against 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel.

Israel and the Third Intifada?

Timothy Alexander Guzman, Silent Crow News - The Israeli government knows how to provoke a response from the Palestinians. They are repressing the Palestinians by controlling their right to enter the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque located in the Old City of Jerusalem. This action, I believe is intentional. It is to provoke a response from the Palestinians so that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would respond militarily. Why would the Israeli government allow right-wing Israeli extremists to continue their violent actions against Palestinian worshippers? The Israeli government knows that it would only inflame a religious hatred among Palestinians against the Jewish population. Perhaps, that is what Israel wants, a decisive war with the Palestinians to finally get their wish to have absolute control over all of East Jerusalem including Al-Aqsa and the Ibrahimi mosques. The U.S. main stream media usually blames the Palestinians for attacking Jewish worshippers as they conveniently ignore the facts that there is a collaboration of the Israeli government (IDF soldiers and police) and extremist Jewish settlers who has committed numerous attacks on Palestinian worshippers in East Jerusalem for the last 50 years. Palestinian scholar, journalist and author Ramzy Baroud points out Israel's coordinated efforts with various political parties, the military and Jewish settlers in an article he wrote in early 2014 titled 'Al-Aqsa vs. Israel: The lurking danger beneath' and declared the following:

Most alarming about these attacks is their political context, which indicates that a great degree of coordination is underway between politicians, security forces and Jewish settlers. In anticipation of a Palestinian backlash, on March 2004, an Israeli court sentenced Islamic leader Sheikh Rade Saleh to eight months in prison for 'incitement.' The Sheikh is the most outspoken Palestinian leader regarding the danger facing Al-Aqsa. Why silence Sheik Saleh now when the attacks against al-Aqsa are at an all times high?

It was on Feb. 25, 1994, that U.S.-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein stormed into the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and opened fire. The aim was to kill as many Arabs as he could. At that moment, nearly 800 Muslim worshipers were kneeling down during the dawn prayer in the holiest month of the Muslim Calendar; Ramadan. He killed up to 30 people and wounded over 120. Exactly 20 years later, the Israeli army stormed al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest Muslim site, and opened fire. The timing was no accident

When Gaza was attacked during the summer, Angela Merkel promised to "stand by the side of Israel." The German chancellor has done much more than offer verbal support for Israel's crimes. Under her leadership, the Berlin government has been equipping Israel with submarines that reportedly carry nuclear weapons. Some German politicians have tried to muzzle debate about Israel by denouncing its critics as "anti-Semites." The American journalist Max Blumenthal - author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel - faced such a smear on a recent speaking tour in Germany.

A number of elected politicians alleged that a scheduled talk by Blumenthal and his colleague David Sheen in a Berlin theater would serve "to promote anti-Semitic prejudice." This was deeply ironic: both Blumenthal and Sheen are themselves Jewish. The politicians denouncing them failed to produce any evidence that they are hostile towards fellow Jews.


Blumenthal spoke to Emran Feroz in Stuttgart.

Emran Feroz: You recently witnessed the destruction caused by Israel in Gaza. What scenes had the most effect on you?

Max Blumenthal: Emergency operations had to be performed in dentist chairs, while the bodies of dead children had to be laid in ice boxes, which were originally designed for ice cream. Those were probably the most shocking testimonies I heard.

EF: Not long after your trip to Gaza, you started using the hashtag #JSIL (Jewish State of Israel in the Levant) on Twitter. Making this kind of comparison between the group Islamic State and Israel is taboo in Germany. Why did you dare to do this?

MB: It is strange that you equate, in Germany, IS with Hamas or describe the entire Palestinian national movement as "heirs of the Nazis," while there is such an outrage regarding my comparison. It was not a direct one-to-one comparison, but I wanted to point out the hypocrisy behind supporting one religiously exclusive state that forces minorities out of its territory while attacking another.

I've long written about how the percentage of sociopaths within a group of humans becomes increasingly concentrated the higher you climb within the positions of power in a society, with it being most chronic amongst those who crave political power (see: Humanity is Rising).

The reason for this is obvious. Those with the sickest minds, and who wish to act upon their destructive fantasies, understand that they can most easily get away with their deeds if they are protected by an aura of power and ostensible respectability.

They believe that as a result of their status, no one would dare accuse them of horrific activities, and if it ever came to that, they could quash any investigation. Unfortunately for us all, this is typically the case. I previously covered the issue of powerful pedophiles in the UK in the piece: Former BBC Host "Sir" Jimmy Savile Exposed as Major Player in Massive Pedophile Ring.

Now we have evidence of yet another case.

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was "useful idiots" and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That's you and me, folks, and it's how the masters of the digital universe see us.

And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.

John Naughton, The Guardian

"Who needs direct repression," asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, "when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?"

In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, "we the people" have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.

Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government overseers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

For instance, we disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal. We disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military. We chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind. We object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.