School is all about teaching children how the real world works. So if there is no such thing as a free lunch in the real world, should the same principle apply in our schools? West Virginia Delegate Ray Canterbury seems to think so.

During a recent debate over West Virginia's Feed to Achieve Act, Canterbury suggested that kids who cannot afford lunch should have to work for it instead.

"I think it would be a good idea if perhaps we had the kids work for their lunches: trash to be taken out, hallways to be swept, lawns to be mowed, make them earn it," Canterbury said. "If they miss a lunch or they miss a meal they might not, in that class that afternoon, learn to add, they may not learn to diagram a sentence, but they'll learn a more important lesson."

'Orwellian' is an apt description of the Obama administration's targeted killing program, says Georgetown law professor

The Obama administration's drone war in Yemen "terrorizes" the local population, kills civilians regularly, and helps al-Qaeda recruit new members by sowing anti-American sentiment, according to testimony from a Yemeni activist in a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

"Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers," Farea Al-Muslimi told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on the legality of the drone war. "The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine."

"What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village," al-Muslimi said, "one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America," adding that he has "seen Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula use US strikes to promote its agenda and try to recruit more terrorists."

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three - and perhaps as many as 16 - of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history - MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

UK citizens can now be stripped of their passports for "actual or suspected" activities declared to be "contrary to the public interest" without a legal procedure, Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May has announced.

May told parliament the move is aimed at "individuals who seek to engage in fighting, extremist activity or terrorist training outside the United Kingdom, for example, and then return to the UK with enhanced capabilities that they then use to conduct an attack on UK soil."

"The need to disrupt people who travel for these purposes has become increasingly apparent with developments in various parts of the world."

In the wake of Thatcher's departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby's daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was "affected by a Trade dispute".

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished.

I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. "I cannot tolerate this," said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher's ban held.

Privacy, not surveillance, is what must be justified now. We must make sure not to draw the wrong lessons from Boston.

Observing the media frenzy that surrounded last week's Boston marathon bombing and the eventual capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one thing became immediately clear: the attack gave media elites an opportunity to fully embrace their generally latent authoritarianism. Finally, they could openly and unapologetically align themselves with law enforcement officials, sham "counter-terrorism experts," and whoever else bravely suggested that total surveillance is good and inevitable. (See Tom Brokaw telling viewers that they must now submit to increasingly invasive searches, or Andrea Mitchell uncritically amplifying Tom Ridge's policies when he was head of the Department of Homeland Security as but two of the countless examples.) They could once again act as spokespeople for the government, uniting the country under the banner of American Exceptionalism.

The country's foremost jingoist, Thomas Friedman - the NYT columnist who once indelicately suggested that the Muslim world suck the United States' collective phallus - wrote in his column on April 17th that "cave dwelling is for terrorists." Americans, he countered, live in freedom. The "cave" line's Islamophobia is as obvious as it is repugnant, and should be a reminder that not-so-subtle bigotry towards Muslims is acceptable and rewarded in polite society in this country. His larger point, that the United States will respond to this apparent terrorist attack by remaining a fully open society is either willfully delusional or a product of his privilege; he won't be profiled because of his name or religion.

Privacy, not surveillance, is what must be justified now, though that was true before Boston. The elites either don't see it or simply pretend not to, but the authoritarianism unleashed by 9/11 has become institutionalized, normalized, and ubiquitous. The surveillance state didn't need Boston to implement its policies, though the bombing will certainly be used to accelerate them and further marginalize dissent.

The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called "Free Syrian Army" fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.

Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a "humanitarian" pretext is usually invented - as it was in Libya. Failing that, as the West has already clearly done in Syria, an even more tenuous narrative has been resurrected from its well-earned grave. CNN has reported in their article, "Hagel: Evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria," that:

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country's civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a "game changer."

The Centers for Disease Control has been quietly rolling out a nationwide program called the Immunization Information Systems (IIS), registering your vaccine information into a database. [1] This effort has been run in parallel with state vaccine registry implementations.

What is the intention of such programs?

My colleague Leslie Manookian, writer and director of the movie The Greater Good, wrote in a recent article, the "CDC has openly stated that vaccine registries are a tool to identify areas of 'undervaccination' so that they can be 'addressed' and brought into 'compliance.'" [2]

I would also add to Leslie's statement that since the government purchases a large bulk of the vaccines (for example, the Vaccines for Children program), it is in their financial interest to make sure vaccines are consumed regularly.

If you exempt your child from being vaccinated, your refusal is also being tracked and put into the database. If you want to know why this is a big deal, read on.

But first, what does tracking every vaccine you or your children have ever been injected with look like?

Big Plans for You

I want to make this very real for you.

The government collects information on who vaccinates their children and who does not. They know how many children have had their vaccines. They also know how many children have opted out of being vaccinated. They have the data.

The government has big plans and the most outrageous part about this entire scheme is you don't have a choice - your data is entered. In order to accomplish this task we have to answer 3 basic questions.

1. What data is being tracked?

2. Who has access to the tracked data?

3. What will be done with this data?

Let's start with the first question of what is being tracked.

As with many "terrorism" related events since 9/11, the Boston bombing official narrative proves to be a web of lies as important facts are revealed. It turns out that the FBI has lied about its knowledge of the alleged suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, already being presented as guilty not only in the mainstream press but by the President himself.

According to the suspects' mother, the FBI had been following them for years:

The FBI originally feigned ignorance over the identity of the two Boston bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as they appealed to an unwitting public to help them "identify" and "find" the suspects. [...]

Russia Today, in an article titled, "'They were set up, FBI followed them for years'- Tsarnaevs' mother to RT," stated of the suspects' mother:

But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.

She would say of the FBI to Russia Today:

They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me...they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites... they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step...and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!

[...] The FBI would then be forced to concede that indeed it had interviewed the suspects, in 2011, two years before the Boston bombings. (Tony Cartalucci Boston Bombing Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev Reported Killed, Was Alive When Detained: Tamerlan's Aunt, Global Research, April 22, 2013.)

Military academies grooming future officers for warfare in cyberspace


In this Feb. 20, 2013 photo, Martin Carlisle, standing, a computer science professor at the Air Force Academy and director of the school's Center for Cyberspace Research, instructs cadets in cyber warfare, at the U.S. Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colo. The U.S. service academies are ramping up efforts to groom a new breed of cyberspace warriors to confront increasing threats to the nation's military and civilian computer networks that control everything from electrical power grids to the banking system. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colorado (AP) - The U.S. service academies are ramping up efforts to groom a new breed of cyberspace warriors to confront increasing threats to the nation's military and civilian computer networks that control everything from electrical power grids to the banking system.

Students at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies are taking more courses and participating in elaborate cyberwarfare exercises as the military educates a generation of future commanders in the theory and practice of computer warfare.

The academies have been training cadets in cyber for more than a decade. But the effort has taken on new urgency amid warnings that hostile nations or organizations might be capable of crippling attacks on critical networks.

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, called cyberattack the top threat to national security when he presented the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment to Congress this month. "Threats are more diverse, interconnected, and viral than at any time in history," his report stated. "Destruction can be invisible, latent, and progressive."