Puppet MastersS


Heart - Black

Throw Out the Money Changers

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© N/A
These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.

The two most destructive forces of human nature - greed and envy - drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death.

Comment: To learn more about the "Raskolnikovs of the world" read Political Ponerology: The Scientific Study of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes


Arrow Up

ElBaradei urges ICC trial of Bush

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© UnknownFormer US President George W. Bush (R) and his Vice President Dick Cheney
Former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says former US President George W. Bush and his administration's officials should be put on trial in the "International Criminal Court" (ICC) for waging war on Iraq.

ElBaradei in a new memoir, The Age of Deception says that the Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.

He accused then-President George Bush and his administration officials of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq with an excuse to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The so-called hunt for WMD in Iraq, however, yielded no results.

Family

Airport passenger screener charged in distributing child pornography

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© Government Employees union websiteTSA officer Thomas Gordon Jr. is being held.
A passenger screener at Philadelphia International Airport is facing charges that he distributed more than 100 images of child pornography via Facebook, records show.

Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.

Homeland Security agents arrested the TSA officer March 24, and he is being held without bail.

Although the case was unsealed Thursday, neither the indictment nor the news release mentioned Gordon's job searching airline passengers for TSA.

Bomb

First Responder - "We Were Nuked on 9-11"

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© unknown
In November, the heat from the underground fires were melting fireman's boots. My feet were hot as I walked across the rubble.

I laugh when all these firemen and cops are portrayed as heroes for responding to 9/11.

Consider me the anti-hero. I arrived at the WTC on the second week and I worked at the WTC and landfill until November. I made the best of it and did what I had to do.

As an Italian American cop from Brooklyn I did my job-nothing more. I was out for me. Throughout my career I made arrests and I was never in trouble yet I knew in the back of my mind that the job would screw me. It did.

I am now sick like thousands of other first responders. The difference is that I'm not bellyaching about what an injustice was dealt to me. Perhaps it is karma.

It is funny how the powers-that-be hide the truth right under your nose, in plain sight. In the early 40s the "Manhattan Project" was started. Years later we all knew about the devastation of the first A-bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It turns out that no one could fathom that the government would build an Atom bomb right in downtown Manhattan.

Vader

USDA moves to let Monsanto perform its own environmental impact studies on GMOs

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© Grist"Everything looks A-OK. What a surprise!"
Last August, Federal Judge Jeffrey White issued a stinging rebuke to the USDA for its process on approving new genetically modified seeds. He ruled that the agency's practice of "deregulating" novel seed varieties without first performing an environmental impact study violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

The target of Judge White's ire was the USDA's 2005 approval of Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beets, engineered to withstand doses of the company's own herbicide. White's ruling effectively revoked the approval of Monsanto's novel beet seeds pending an environmental impact study, and cast doubt upon the USDA's notoriously industry-friendly way of regulating GM seeds.

Pistol

120 dead after 2 days of unrest in Syria

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© AFP/YoutubeImage grab taken from a YouTube video on April 19, 2011 - which AFP cannot independently verify - claims to show Syrian anti-regime protesters during a demonstration in Homs on April 18, 2011.
Beirut - Syrian security forces fired at tens of thousands of people joining funeral processions Saturday after the bloodiest day of the monthlong uprising against President Bashar Assad, bringing the death toll from two days of violence to more than 120 and prompting two lawmakers and a local religious leader to resign in disgust over the killings.

The resignations were a possible sign of cracks developing in the regime's base in a nation where nearly all opposition figures have been either jailed or exiled during the 40-year dynasty of the Assad family.

"I cannot tolerate the blood of our innocent sons and children being shed," Sheikh Rizq Abdul-Rahim Abazeid told The Associated Press after stepping down from his post as the mufti of the Daraa region in southern Syria.

The lawmakers, Nasser Hariri and Khalil Rifai, also are from Daraa, which has become the epicenter of the protest movement after a group of teenagers were arrested there for scrawling anti-regime graffiti on a wall in mid-March.

Since then, the relentless crackdown on demonstrations has only served to invigorate protesters whose rage over the bloodshed has all but eclipsed their earlier demands for modest reforms. Now, many are seeking Assad's downfall.

Bad Guys

US: 9/11 Responders To Be Warned They Will Be Screened By FBI's Terrorism Watch List

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© GETTY
Washington -- A provision in the new 9/11 health bill may be adding insult to injury for people who fell sick after their service in the aftermath of the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, The Huffington Post has learned.

The tens of thousands of cops, firefighters, construction workers and others who survived the worst terrorist assault in U.S. history and risked their lives in its wake will soon be informed that their names must be run through the FBI's terrorism watch list, according to a letter obtained by HuffPost.

Any of the responders who are not compared to the database of suspected terrorists would be barred from getting treatment for the numerous, worsening ailments that the James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Law was passed to address.

Megaphone

The Libya story is total BS

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© Pentagon Press Office

Nuke

Fukushima = 2,000 Atomic Bombs

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France detonated this nuke in the South Pacific 7-3-70 Scientific American Sygma
Killer Contamination Spreads Worldwide Without Opposition

San Francisco - Radioactive contamination equivalent to the Fukushima, Japan disaster in terms of the hated "Mushroom Cloud" Atomic Bombs is two thousand (2,000) 500 Kiloton Atomic Bombs.* Each 500kt Atomic Bomb is 33 times bigger than the American Bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

President G. Bush often referred to the well known "mushroom cloud" as a terrorist signature. Nope, just standard operating procedure (SOP) in the stationary nuclear weapons biz-ness, otherwise known worldwide as "Nuclear Power Reactors." Except, in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Weapons, the biggest ever, the "mushroom" portion is invisible and has engulfed the whole world with 70 Billion Radioactive Lethal Doses* - so far. There's more on the way.

Truly, it is as if the entire world is At War! The dreaded all-out nuclear war that would happen if Russia or the United Stated accidentally "Pressed The Button" is going on right now; it is a done deal. Imagine that! The same thing as detonating 2,000 big Atomic Bombs and not even one "BOOM!" Not a shot fired, yet we could all die!

Bad Guys

Libya and hindsight: Book review of War is a Lie by David Swanson

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Hindsight can be a troublesome thing. I distinctly remember ranting on this very blog about Gaddafi's barbaric treatment of his own people. I never went so far as to suggest that we should send in the gunboats, so to speak, but rest assured, I thought it. When I read David Cameron's words to the Kuwaiti Parliament and then again in the UK Parliament, I felt reasurred that we should back the uprising on humanitarian grounds. A popular uprising against four decades of Gaddafi rule being violently quashed by a bloke who, to be frank, I never really liked.

Now, regime change is looking ever more likely in Libya as we try to get more involved but become more evasive about being involved. We've sent in 'advisers' to assist in organisational matters. Not ground troops. OK? Peter Brookes' cartoon in The Times today was a good one. Soldiers marching on their hands, their legs facing the sky: "No boots on the ground..." Yes, very good Peter, I've definitely heard that somewhere before.

This is all relative to Biteback, we're publishing War is a Lie by David Swanson. But on re-reading it last night in preparation for writing a blog to let you all know it was available, I read this: