This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

According to the new book Double Down, in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he's "really good at killing people" while discussing drone strikes.

Peter Hamby of The Washington Post noted the moment in his review of the book.

The reported claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.

Obama oversaw the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, 145 Predator drone strikes in NATO's 2011 Libya operations, the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes that killed the Pakistani Taliban leader and a senior member of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.

His administration also expanded the drone war: There have been 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and several in Somalia under Obama, compared to a total of 52 under George Bush.

In 2011 two of those strikes killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his American-born, 16-year-old son within two weeks.

I am a Student Loan Deadbeat. This is a story of how I accumulated nearly $200,000 of student loan debt, escaped the illusion of debtor's prison, and manage to get by in spite of crushing debt. I hope this serves as a guide for others who are struggling with overwhelming student loan debt, and helps them see that there is life after default.

I expect to be mocked and ridiculed by libertarians, those sanctimonious Randian cheerleaders who pepper their rants with the phrase personal responsibility while bragging about working 20 hours a day at 5 different jobs to pay their student loan debt and validate a rigged system.

And I expect to get death threats from tea party plebians who will grunt, in a nonsensical manner, something about me being a taker and mumble the afterthought, "if ya couldn't afford schoolin', maybe ya shoudda got yerself a job, ya damn libbrul."

I know I'll hear from right wing conservatives who believe that I got myself into this mess and, because other people in my situation paid their extortionists for freedom, I must do so as well, or starve and sleep on the street as punishment.

And I'll get the certain condemnation from Christians who will judge me for not obeying my masters; those brilliant Cruzian elitists who think Jesus preached capitalism and died for the sins of the wealthy.

But I write my story anyway, in spite of the risk of ridicule and death threats and judgment. I write my story because today, in America, lives are being ruined by a rigged student loan system. [i] Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens just like me are struggling with student loan debt they cannot pay. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens just like me are in default. This is America's shameful little secret, and it must be exposed.

But the law he broke actually prevents NOM, the victim, from learning more.

A House committee investigating the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of right-leaning groups has identified the IRS agent who leaked the confidential donor list of the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization that opposes gay marriage. NOM's donor list, contained in a Form 990 Schedule B, which it is required by law to file with the IRS, was obtained in March 2012 by its chief political opponent, the Human Rights Campaign, and subsequently became the subject of several national news stories that centered on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's donation to the group.

Though the House Ways and Means Committee, which began investigating the scandal in the wake of revelations that the IRS had inappropriately singled out conservative groups, has identified the individual who divulged the information as an employee in the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, it can't divulge his name to the public or to NOM. It can't even confirm when the leak took place, whether the perpetrator was disciplined, or even whether he is still employed by the IRS or the U.S. government.

That's because of a peculiarity of the Internal Revenue Code's section 6103, which is intended to protect the confidentiality of taxpayer information. The law makes it a felony to disclose tax returns or related information to the public, but in an odd twist, the results of investigations conducted by congressional committees or by inspectors general are considered the confidential tax information of the alleged perpetrator.

Anatoly Kucherena, a lawyer for former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, says his client has found a technical support job at a Russian website.

Kucherena told the RIA Novosti news agency Thursday that Snowden starts his new job on Friday. Kucherena declined to name the company that has hired Snowden but says it's a major Russian website.

Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in August after being stuck at a Moscow airport for more than a month after flying there from Hong Kong. His whereabouts in Russia remain secret.

The electric grid, as government and private experts describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.

They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

"This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days," said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. "We really want to go beyond that."

Travelers are now being subjected to even more invasive screening procedures by the infamous Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Before "allowing" people to travel, the TSA is performing unwarranted checks of a wide variety of personal documents, going further than ever before into the lives of innocent passengers. As expected, Americans will roll over for the new intrusions and accept that they are necessary to protect the Homeland.

The new pre-screening procedure is more exhaustive than a federal background check. The TSA will now be dramatically expanding their reach into the lives of every passenger, and scouring all of the following documents, according to the New York Times:

• private employment information
• vehicle registrations
• travel history
• property ownership records
• physical characteristics
• tax identification numbers
• past travel itineraries
• law enforcement information
• "intelligence" information
• passport numbers
• frequent flier information
• other "identifiers" linked to DHS databases

"I think the best way to look at it is as a pre-crime assessment every time you fly," said Edward Hasbrouck to the New York Times. Hasbrouck is a consultant to the Identity Project, one of the groups that oppose the prescreening initiatives. "The default will be the highest, most intrusive level of search, and anything less will be conditioned on providing some additional information in some fashion."

The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed - from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century "potato famine" that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland's food exports, while at least one million Irish died from starvation and related diseases, and another million or more emigrated.

Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika - the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.

The official unemployment rate is 13.5% - up from 5% in 2006 - and this figure does not take into account the mass emigration of Ireland's young people in search of better opportunities abroad. Job loss and a flood of foreclosures are leading to suicides. A raft of new taxes and charges has been sold as necessary to reduce the deficit, but they are simply a backdoor bailout of the banks.

At first, the Irish accepted the media explanation: these draconian measures were necessary to "balance the budget" and were in their best interests. But after five years of belt-tightening in which unemployment and living conditions have not improved, the people are slowly waking up. They are realizing that their assets are being grabbed simply to pay for the mistakes of the financial sector.

Israeli officials are apoplectic after the Obama administration confirmed that the IDF struck a Syrian military base this week. Israel, which had refused to comment on the strike, is fuming behind the scenes and accusing the U.S. - which gives Israel $3 billion in funding annually - of not behaving like a proper ally:

Israel's Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as "scandalous." For Israel's ally to be acting in this way was "unthinkable," the officials were quoted as saying.

This 'leaked' anger from officials within Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government is quite rich. After all, the Netanyahu government - which receives more U.S. aid than any other government in the world - routinely embarrasses the United States, despite all the financial and military support it receives from their American allies.

It was Netanyahu, after all, who had the chutzpah to criticize and lecture President Obama during a speech he delivered to Congress in 2011.

And it is Israel which, in defiance of repeated U.S. entreaties, continues to expand its settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories, despite U.S. efforts to reignite peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

In fact, just this week, Israel announced further settlement expansions just as the U.S. announced Secretary of State John Kerry would arrive for further peace talks. It's behavior Israel has engaged in repeatedly. Netanyahu officials recently embarrassed Vice President Joe Biden by officially announcing a large settlement expansion just as Biden stepped foot in Israel for talks on the peace process.

So much for behaving like an ally.

Scandalous, indeed.

What is the common element between Liborgate, the Fed manipulating capital markets, China hoarding gold, and the recent ubiquotous NSA spying revelations? At one point, before they became fact, they were all "conspiracy theories" as were the Freemasons, the Illuminati, McCarthy's witch hunts, 9/11, and so many more.

The same theories, which - don't laugh - are now part of a Cambridge University study titled Conspiracy and Democracy, which looks at the prevalence of conspiracy theories and what they tell us about trust in democratic societies, about the differences between cultures and societies, and why conspiracy theories (ostensibly before they become fact) appear at particular moments in history. But, at its core, whether conspiracy theories will, as the BBC summarizes it, eventually destroy democracy.

Because, supposedly, it is not the corruption at the top echelons of government, the ultimate usurpation of power by assorted globalist money groups "never letting a crisis go to waste", that plunder wealth from what is left of the middle class and hands it over, via latent inflation, asset bubbles and capital appreciation to the 1% peak of society's wealth pyramid (in the US), or kleptofascist, unelected bureaucratic groups seeking the "greater good" despite the complete tear of the social fabric (in Europe) that is a threat to democracy.

No - you see it is evil conspiracy theories and the theorists that spin them that are the biggest threat to the "democratic" way of life.

The German, French, Spanish and Swedish intelligence services have all developed methods of mass surveillance of internet and phone traffic over the past five years in close partnership with Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency.

The bulk monitoring is carried out through direct taps into fibre optic cables and the development of covert relationships with telecommunications companies. A loose but growing eavesdropping alliance has allowed intelligence agencies from one country to cultivate ties with corporations from another to facilitate the trawling of the web, according to GCHQ documents leaked by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The files also make clear that GCHQ played a leading role in advising its European counterparts how to work around national laws intended to restrict the surveillance power of intelligence agencies.

The German, French and Spanish governments have reacted angrily to reports based on National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Snowden since June, revealing the interception of communications by tens of millions of their citizens each month. US intelligence officials have insisted the mass monitoring was carried out by the security agencies in the countries involved and shared with the US.

The US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, suggested to Congress on Tuesday that European governments' professed outrage at the reports was at least partly hypocritical. "Some of this reminds me of the classic movie Casablanca: 'My God, there's gambling going on here,' " he said.

Sweden, which passed a law in 2008 allowing its intelligence agency to monitor cross-border email and phone communications without a court order, has been relatively muted in its response.

The German government, however, has expressed disbelief and fury at the revelations from the Snowden documents, including the fact that the NSA monitored Angela Merkel's mobile phone calls.

After the Guardian revealed the existence of GCHQ's Tempora programme, in which the electronic intelligence agency tapped directly into the transatlantic fibre optic cables to carry out bulk surveillance, the German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said it sounded "like a Hollywood nightmare", and warned the UK government that free and democratic societies could not flourish when states shielded their actions in "a veil of secrecy".