Two news reports by major wire services this weekend demonstrate just how pervasive misinformation and propaganda are in the mainstream media when it comes to the Iranian nuclear issue.

The first:

Reuters reported this week that Catherine Ashton, the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and chief nuclear negotiator for the P5+1, has high hopes for the new round of talks with Iran resuming May 23rd in Baghdad and will approach the meeting as a "serious set of discussions that can lead to concrete results."

Sounds positive enough, especially when coupled with the statement Ashton made at the end of last month's meeting in Istanbul. "We have agreed that the Non-Proliferation Treaty forms a key basis for what must be serious engagement, to ensure all the obligations under the NPT are met by Iran while fully respecting Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

However, another comment made by Ashton on Friday is cause for considerable concern. She told reporters in Brussels, "My ambition is that we come away with the beginning of the end of the nuclear weapons programme in Iran. I hope we'll see the beginnings of success."

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.

"A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."

Half a million Britons could lose their disability benefit under plans for radical welfare reform, local media reported.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said that he is determined to introduce radical reforms to disability benefits which will see more than two million claimants reassessed in the next four years.

Iain Duncan Smith said that the number of claimants has risen by 30 percent in recent years "rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability".

"Losing a limb should not automatically entitle people to a pay-out", he suggested.

The cost of disability living allowance, which is intended to help people meet the extra costs of mobility and care associated with their conditions, now outstrips unemployment benefit and will soon be £13 billion annually.

Faced with a power shortage for Israelis, the environment minister offers to cut the life-saving power Israel is selling to Gaza strip.

Israel's minister of environmental protection, Gilad Erdan (Likud), has demanded that the government stop supplying power to the Gaza Strip in order to prevent power failure in Israeli cities this summer. In an official letter addressed to all government ministers (below), Erdan notes that 4.5 percent of Israel's power supply is sold to Gaza.

Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents. Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the Americans as "terrorists" for the bounty paid.

If Rodriguez's identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He has been on CBS 60 Minutes taking credit for torturing Muslims and using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA claim, Rodriguez's name would be a struck through item on the terrorists' hit list. He would be in his grave.

So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice (sic).

Notice that Rodriguez, "The Torturer of the Muslims," doesn't have to hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.

In Robert E. Gamer's book The Developing Nations is a chapter called "Why Men Do Not Revolt". In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the "patron-client" networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. "The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups," he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth," including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability - keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits - ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

Gulf War veterans claim they were used as human guinea pigs on the battlefield - and now they believe they have the classified documents to prove it.

Dave Sephton, of Bradeley, was one of thousands of soldiers who claim they returned from the 1991 conflict a changed man.

The 50-year-old, who served as a lance corporal with the Queen's Royal Lancers for a decade, now suffers from a range of different medical complaints including post traumatic stress, extreme fatigue, gut pain and hormone deficiencies.

The conditions all fall under the umbrella term 'Gulf War Syndrome'.

For years the father-of-two, who takes 20 to 40 different drugs every day, has believed his illnesses were partly caused by vaccinations he and other troops were given in combat.

"We're getting to the heart of why you own gold" - long time friend and colleague, Wistar Holt (Holt & Shapard Capital Mgmt)

I think every useful blog under the sun has re-hashed the JP Morgan/Jamie Dimon bombshell dropped on the market last night, so I'm going to try to be brief, to the point and hopefully add some "color" and information that is new.

First, Jamie Dimon did a superb job of throwing very expensive, opaque lipstick on the world's ugliest pig and catering the to the Wall Street analysts and media who take what he says and spin it to the public in the best possible light. In fact, I just saw one headline on Marketwatch that said "JPM stock is lower due to a a bad trade." A "bad trade?"

What we just saw last night was the result of Wall Street's equivalent of unsupervised special ed. children playing with financial nuclear triggers. How do I know this? I used to be one of those unsupervised kids back in the 1990's, when the magnitude of the capital being played with was a small fraction of what it is now.

This is not a "bad trade." This is a massive proprietary (i.e. bank trading/speculation portfolio) position that has blown up. Dimon fraudulently refers to it as "an economic hedge" that didn't work as well as they expected.

Jamie Dimon is either completely ignorant of what is going on in JPM's speculation-ridden proprietary trading operation or he's lying. Or a lot of both. If he's clueless, then he should be terminated by the board immediately. If he's lying, he should be investigated by the Obama Justice Department. But we know the latter has no chance of happening, as Eric Holder's Justice Dept has taken financial fraud prosecutions to a 20 year low. Not surprising since JP Morgan and other Wall Street banks are the heart of the client list of Eric Holder's pre-Justice Dept law firm.

Failure to fix leaks and increase reservoir capacity are behind our water problems.

When I returned last week to a grey, cold, rainswept Heathrow, after a brief visit to Australia on rather sad family business, I naturally wanted to know what had been going on while I was away. It hardly said much for our democracy that Boris Johnson should have owed his "triumphant" re-election as Mayor to the support of just 16.8 per cent of those Londoners eligible to vote - while Labour owed its "victory" in council elections to just 12 per cent of the potential voters. The Greek and French election results heralded another sharp downward lurch in the slow-motion collapse of the euro. The prospect of Britain's lights going out moved nearer with the pulling out of France's state-owned EDF as the last company that might have provided us with new nuclear power stations, while the Environment Agency's Chris Smith announced that Britain may be hoping for a glut of cheap gas from "fracking" shale, but that this could be allowed to generate electricity only on condition that all the resulting CO₂ is buried in holes in the ground, by a wishful-thinking technology that would double its price and is unlikely ever to work anyway.

As big a story as any, however, was the ongoing drama of our "wettest-ever drought" as, despite record recent rainfall, we are told that hosepipe bans are still unlikely to be lifted because we don't have enough water to go round. And here, it turns out, there is a startling twist to the tale.