"The Farmers Assurance Provision" is the title of a rider, Section 733, inserted into the House of Representatives 2013 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. Somehow, as a farmer, I don't feel the least bit assured.

The only assurance it provides is that Monsanto and the rest of the agriculture biotech industry will have carte blanche to force the government to allow the planting of their biotech seeds.

In addition, the House Agriculture Committee's 2012 farm bill draft includes three riders - Sections 1011, 10013 and 10014. These amendments would essentially destroy any oversight of new Genetically Engineered (GE) crops by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

When something unbelievably evil happens in one of our schools, like the recent murder of 27 children and teachers at the Newtown School in Connecticut, the media always tells us the same thing: blame the lone nut(s). But history suggests that many if not most schoolyard massacres, like other large-scale acts of domestic terrorism, have a much more sinister agenda.

Sheriff Pat Sullivan, who ran the Columbine investigation, was arrested last year and convicted of coercing sexual favors from a child in exchange for methamphetamine. His ridiculously short sentence, served in the jail that bears his name, amounted to a slap on the wrist. Rumor has it that Sullivan is part of a pedophile network along the lines of the Finders of Lost Children and the perpetrators of the Franklin Scandal child sex ring.

Some Columbine victims' family members suspect that Sheriff Sullivan was involved in a "butt rape" incident involving the alleged Columbine shooters. Were those shooters mind-controlled sex-abuse victims?

Rogue intelligence agents and their psychiatrist colleagues have been brainwashing "lone nuts" to commit murder at least since the CIA's MK-Ultra program achieved its objectives circa 1960.

Why would such "rogue networks" want to send brainwashed Manchurian Candidates into schools to massacre children?

Let's allow one of the terrorists themselves to answer that question.

In my "quickie" article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion - and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most "lone nut" massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

Friday's radio guest Paul Rea responds: "To avoid any appearance of reflexively pour new wine into old cognitive categories, you might consider gathering information, to emerging narratives, and then providing critique of them." I agree that there is a place for this kind of critique - the "judicious study" by the "reality-based community" of the false realities created by "history's actors." But unfortunately, Karl Rove was right: No amount of "judicious study" of false-flag events is ever going to undo the powerful first impressions hammered into the deepest levels of the public mind by media propaganda.

So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to "catapult the counter-narrative" as quickly as possible.

Dreams in Infrared

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

In the wake of the mass murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, information on the shooter, and his family, is slowly being discovered by law enforcement other sources. One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes.

Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked the banking world in June.

The father of Newtown Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza is Peter Lanza who is a VP and Tax Director at GE Financial. The father of Aurora Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes is Robert Holmes, the lead scientist for the credit score company FICO. Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.

Libor scandal grows as the fathers of two mass murderers were to testify

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a motive and a link. This coincidence is impossible to overlook. Two mass shootings connected to LIBOR. - Fabain4Liberty via Before it's News

Tokyo - Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) surged back to power in an election on Sunday just three years after a devastating defeat, giving ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a chance to push his hawkish security agenda and radical economic recipe.

Exit polls by television broadcasters showed the LDP winning nearly 300 seats in parliament's powerful 480-member lower house, while its ally, the small New Komeito party, looked set to win about 30 seats.

That would give the two parties the two-thirds majority needed to over-rule parliament's upper house, where no party has a majority and which can block bills, which should help to break a deadlock that has plagued the world's third biggest economy since 2007.

An LDP win will usher in a government committed to a tough stance in a territorial row with China, a pro-nuclear energy policy despite last year's Fukushima disaster and a potentially risky prescription for hyper-easy monetary policy and big fiscal spending to beat deflation and tame a strong yen.

Syrian rebels attacked al-Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Damascus on Sunday and killed dozens of Palestinians and Syrian civilians.

Some 600 terrorists entered the camp after withdrawal of popular groups from al-Orouba and al-Lobiya streets and opened fire on everyone, which led to the killing and injury of many people, a source in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said on Sunday, adding the conflicts are still underway.

According to eyewitnesses, the terrorists killed tens of Syrian civilians and executed several people in the streets.

Many people have tried to take shelter in safer areas and the al-Basel hospital was closed due to its inability to give service to the large numbers of the people wounded during the terrorists' attack on the refugee camp.

In the last four years, the use of unmanned drones to engage in so-called "targeted killing" has escalated dramatically. In Pakistan alone, US drone strikes have increased five fold during the Obama administration, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks US drone strikes [11]. Drones have become the go-to weapon in the United State's "War on Terror". The drone war's apparent "successes" are celebrated by administration officials on a regular basis, often while avoiding the more disturbing details, such as the under-accounted for civilian death toll, the violation of international and humanitarian laws, the counter-productivity of drone warfare, and the lasting effects of such blatant disregard for human life.

It is a challenge to find an accurate count of civilian casualties, thanks in large part to the effort of the United States government to keep information about the drone program shielded from the public. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times both have filed requests for documents relating to the CIA's drones. The CIA replied that it can "neither confirm or deny the existence of records". This response was challenged by the ACLU in a lawsuit containing nearly 200 statements (both on- and off-the-record) made by current and former members of the CIA itself. Justice Department lawyers argue that revealing the existence of such documents relating to targeted killing or a drone program would unveil "sensitive information about the nature and scope of such a program" [1]. A federal judge in Washington D.C ruled in favor of the CIA in September, which the ACLU appealed.

Adding to the difficulty, the information that is being made made public is opaque, misleading, and contradicting. In one statement made to the public, the United States reported that there have been "no" or "single digit" civilian casualties [4]. In late June of 2011, President Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan stated "in the last year, 'there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop [9]." The Bureau of Investigative Journalism cites civilian casualties as follows: From June 2004 to mid-September 2012, US drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan alone. Out of that total, 474-881 were civilian, and of those 176 were children. Additionally, 1,228-1,362 people were injured [11]. Perhaps the government's estimate of civilian deaths is due, in part, to the fact the US counts "any military-aged male" killed in a drone strike as a "militant", not a civilian [1][10].

When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid "politicizing" the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for "don't talk about reforming our gun control laws."

Let's be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It's just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws.

Since then, there have been more horrible, high-profile shootings. Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, took his girlfriend's life and then his own. In Oregon, Jacob Tyler Roberts entered a mall holding a semi-automatic rifle and yelling "I am the shooter." And, in Connecticut, at least 27 are dead - including 18 children - after a man opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation's security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. "Too soon," howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't "too soon." It's much too late.

What follows here isn't a policy agenda. It's simply a set of facts - many of which complicate a search for easy answers - that should inform the discussion that we desperately need to have.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told BFMTV on Tuesday that although French Marines are onboard the vessel, it does not mean that France is preparing for a military intervention in Syria.

He, however, justified the presence of the French aircraft carrier in waters just outside Syria as part of Paris' policy to maintain military readiness in the face of any threat.

The French minister also said that the vessel is not conducting a military exercise in the region.

USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and at least five British warships, which are also carrying a large marine force, are also in the region.

On 20 March 2011, the Charles de Gaulle was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea to enforce a Western-backed no-fly zone over Libya.

Le Drian also denied reports claiming that the French military has gone into a secret state of alert and that it is ready for intervention in Syria.