Federal spending was up $30.5 billion in the first five months of fiscal 2013 compared to the first five months of fiscal 2012, according to newly released data from the U.S. Treasury.

The federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and runs through Sept. 30. In the first five months of fiscal 2012 (October through February), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, total federal spending was approximately $1,473,999,000,000.00. In the first five months of fiscal 2013, total federal spending was $1,504,547,000,000.00.

Thus, federal spending was $30,548,000,000.00 more in the first five months of fiscal 2013 than it was during the first five months of fiscal 2012.

The federal government is also spending at a much faster pace this year than it did before President Barack Obama took office.

The amount of debt worldwide is more than all of the bank accounts in the world, and the current financial situation in Cyprus is the inevitable next phase: Confiscation.

All pretense is now gone that central or global bankers can 'securitize' growth by packaging and repackaging debt; by hypothicating and rehypothicating debt; by regulating and rergulating debt. Since the bond market rally began in the early 1980s (yes, it's that old) each crisis has been met by central and global bankers - the IMF, EU and ECB, to name a few - and their Wall St. and City of London brethren with an increase in debt, and an extension of the debt's maturity.

The result has been - as of 2007 - the biggest mountain of on-balance sheet and off-balance sheet debt in history: A staggering $220 trillion in debt in America's $14-trillion economy alone (when you include all public, private and contingent liabilities of unfunded entitlement programs). Deals in the global debt derivatives market now stand in excess of $1 quadrillion, riding above a global GDP of approximately $60 trillion.

A controversial article published in Philadelphia Magazine this month has the attention of the Nutter Administration.

The article, titled "Being White in Philly," features a series of interviews with anonymous white residents from different areas of the city who share stories about their interaction with black residents.

Mayor Nutter calls the article's tone "disgusting," and he's asked the Human Relations Commission to investigate some of the sensitive racial issues explored in the piece.

Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald says this is all about fact finding.

"I think he feels that there are enough problems in this article that it warrants a closer look," McDonald explains.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, called President Barack Obama a liar and urged her party to stand by conservative values, rousing the crowd at a conservative conference on Saturday.

"Barack Obama promised the most transparent administration ever. Barack Obama, you lie," the former Alaska governor said in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington.

She was echoing a line from a Republican member of the House of Representatives who shouted at Obama during a speech to Congress in 2009 and accused him of lying about healthcare for illegal immigrants.

"Stop The Cyborgs" is a new site that attempts to bring a balanced trepidation to the unbalanced idea that we'll all be walking round with Google's outer brain strapped to our faces.

The opposition will congregate in dark corners.

They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles.

The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass?

It won't be easy. Once you've been cybernated, there's no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web.

One site is called "Stop The Cyborgs." It claims to be "fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time."

The former Bush speechwriter confirms what has long been the most ridiculed claim about a key reason the US attacked Iraq

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, author of the infamous "Axis of Evil" claim in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, has a Newsweek column this morning announcing that "all of us who advocated for the [Iraq] war have had to do some reckoning". His column is an attempt to provide such a reckoning, and contains numerous revealing assertions.

He begins with this melodramatic decree, designed to make you sympathetic of the stressful and scary environment in which Bush officials were operating: "My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby." To justify this characterization, he says that "when my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she'd hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies," and that "a few weeks before, a sniper had terrorized the Washington suburbs. Anthrax attacks had killed five people and infected 17 others. What would come next?" (In actuality, the anthrax attacks came from a US Army lab; the Washington sniper attacks were in 2002, not 2001, and were perpetrated by two Americans; and hearing some F-16s patrolling the sky is hardly the stuff of extreme war trauma, particularly when compared to what people in actual war zones regularly experience). Frum is right that the fear levels were extremely high in this time period, but that was due to a deliberate campaign orchestrated by the administration in which he served.

Frum's most interesting revelation comes from his discussion of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whom many neocons intended to install as leader of that country after the US took over. Frum says that "the first time [he] met Ahmed Chalabi was a year or two before the war, in Christopher Hitchens's apartment". He then details the specific goals Chalabi and Dick Cheney discussed when planning the war:

"I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those 'others' was Vice President Cheney, it didn't matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to US dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia."

It's not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world's natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they've also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world's smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they're not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.

Buenos Aires - Allegations that Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, collaborated with Argentina's brutal military dictatorship have been circulating for decades. The Pope, and the Vatican he now heads, have vehemently denied these allegations. The Vatican has dismissed the allegations against the new Pope as a "left-wing anti-clerical attack on the church." Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi insisted there has never been a "concrete or credible accusation" against Bergoglio.

On Sunday, an Argentinian newspaper published a government memo that seems to definitively prove that Bergoglio did indeed provide information to the murderous dictatorship, informing authorities about allegations against two Jesuit priests who were kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned for five months for allegedly contacting anti-regime leftist guerrillas. Furthermore, Gregoglio is alleged to have sold the priests out even while he personally promised them his protection.

On March 13, Digital Journal published a lengthy article detailing Jorge Bergoglio's-- and the Argentine Catholic church's-- alleged role in collaborating with that country's brutal, US-backed military dictatorship, a regime characterized by kidnapping, torture, murder and disappearance.

As many as 30,000 people, from students, trade unionists, journalists and leftists and their sympathizers to children and even pregnant women (whose babies were stolen), were killed or disappeared during the 1976-1983 'Dirty War,' which was fully supported by the Carter and Reagan administrations. Many of the most brutal regime figures, including the dictator Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, were trained by the US military in kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression.

Russians are preparing to withdraw billions of euros from Cyprus and the island will plunge into a recession lasting for decades due to the onerous terms of a EU bailout, economists warned on Monday.

"The Russians are already indicating they want to withdraw their money. Why should they stay? They will go somewhere where they can be protected; we can't protect them," economist Simeon Matsi told AFP.

"We have indications that billions (of euros) will be withdrawn, we already know of about three billion that is ready to move. They are already asking lawyers to draw up documents to withdraw money."

As a condition for a desperately-needed 10-billion-euro ($13 billion) bailout for Cyprus, fellow eurozone countries and international creditors Saturday imposed a levy on all deposits in the island's banks.

Deposits of more than 100,000 euros will be hit with a 9.9 percent charge, while under that threshold the levy drops to 6.75 percent.

The controversial tax is seen hitting Russian pockets hard, with experts estimating that Russian deposits in Cypriot banks amount to at least 15.4 billion euros ($20 billion) of the estimated 67 billion euros of deposits held by Cyprus banks.

Pictures of long lines of angry Cypriots trying to pull money out of empty ATMs made the rounds on Monday, as the world woke up to a decision by the Troika and President Anastasiades to impose haircuts on the nation's depositors. While Cypriot savers and opposition politicians protested the one-time levy, the unprecedented move appears focused on Cyprus' large foreign depositor base, particularly Russian citizens and banks, which account for approximately 22% of total deposits, which are nearly four times larger than the island-nation's yearly GDP.

Global markets were shaken out of complacency on Monday as a new episode in the European sovereign debt crisis took a hit at confidence and the reigning positive risk-sentiment of the past few weeks. News broke over the weekend that the Troika (European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF) told Cyprus to raise €5.8 billion ($7.5 billion) of the total €10 billion ($13 billion) bailout that will be used to recapitalize their embattled banks from depositors. Cypriot citizens, who hurried to ATMs only to see them fully drawn out as the expected bank run materialized, were enraged. So was Vladimir Putin.