In case you are not yet aware, OfCom, Britain's Office of Communications, decided to take Press TV off air in the UK this week. The significance of this move by the state regulator should not be underestimated. The battle for free speech is definitely on.

With this move, the state apparatus has all but declared war on a foreign network's ability to broadcast a political perspective that differs from the consensus reality line. Note that the state, particularly in the UK, will spend millions per year in order to enforce a rolling agenda of talking points. The US will also spend billions to ensure the same thing.

An attack by a US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has killed at least 78 people and injured 64 others in southern Somalia, Press TV reports.

The Friday attack took place near Qooqani town located in southern Somalia, a Press TV correspondent reported.

In a different incident on Friday, another US drone attack killed 11 civilians and wounded 34 more in Hoosingow district in the south of the country.

Somalia is the sixth country where the US military has conducted drone strikes.

The US has employed drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen to launch aerial bombings.

Washington claims the airstrikes target militants, though most such attacks have resulted in civilian casualties.

Somalia has been without a functioning government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

A non-UN-sanctioned US drone strike has left at least four people dead in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials say.

The US unmanned aircraft targeted a vehicle near Darpa Khel village, which is located about four kilometers (two miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in the district of North Waziristan, AFP quoted local officials as saying on Friday.

This is the third drone attack by US forces near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in 48 hours.

The incident comes as at least 12 people lost their lives in two separate strikes in North Waziristan.

Hundreds of Pakistanis have been killed in illegal US drone strikes in recent years.

FBI Insider (with clearance) finds nothing on plot within FBI channels.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer says that an FBI insider told him the dubious terror plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador which has been blamed on Iran was likely manufactured by the Obama administration, because no information about the plot even exists within FBI channels.

"The FBI's had a record lately and I did talk to one of my inside guys and he is saying he thinks the same thing, you know why, because he can't find any real information and he's got a clearance - so that tells him that there's something going on that's extraordinary by the fact that he's an inside investigator, knows what's going on and yet, I'm gonna quote here, 'There's nothing on this within the DOJ beyond what they've talked about publicly' - which means to him that there's something very wrong with it," said Shaffer.

Imagine that you couldn't drive on major highways without agreeing to put a camera in your car -- one that could film either the occupants or the vehicle's surroundings and transmit the images back to a central office for inspection.

You don't have to read George Orwell to conjure up such an ominous surveillance state. You just have to skim through filings at the U.S. Patent Office.

It's hard to imagine Americans would tolerate such a direct, Big-Brotherish intrusion. But they might not notice if the all-seeing cameras were tucked inside another kind of government tracking technology that millions of Americans have already invited into their cars.

Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that just signed a 10-year contract to provide in-car transponders such as the E-Z Pass to 22 electronic highway toll collection systems around the U.S., recently filed a patent on technology to add multi-function mini-cameras to their toll gadgets. Today, transponders are in about 22 million cars around the U.S. Adding inward and outward facing cameras to the gadgets would create surveillance capabilities far beyond anything government agencies have tried until now.

The stated reason for an inward-pointing camera is to verify the number of occupants in the car for enforcement of HOV and HOT lanes. The outward-pointing camera could be used for the same purpose, helping authorities enforce minimum occupant rules against drivers who aren't carrying transponders.

But it's easy to imagine other uses. The patent says the transponders would have the ability to store and transmit pictures, either at random intervals or on command from a central office. It would be tempting to use them as part of a search for a lost child, for example, and law enforcement officials might find the data treasure trove irresistible. The gadget could also be instructed to take pictures when the acceleration of a car "exceeds a threshold," or when accidents occur, so it could be used like an airplane cockpit flight recorder.

Editor's Note: No doubt to subvert any legal constraints on targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens

Washington - Americans who support or engage in acts of terror against the United States should have their citizenship revoked, said a group of lawmakers who on Thursday introduced legislation to that effect.

The bill submitted to both chambers of Congress by hawkish independent Senator Joe Lieberman, Republican Senator Scott Brown and Republican congressmen Charlie Dent and Jason Altmire come fresh on the heels of the killing of US-born radical cleric and Al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaqi in Yemen by a suspected CIA drone.

That killing was authorized by US authorities in a secret document, drawing fire from civil rights advocates who argued it permitted the execution of a US citizen without due legal process.

CEO pay rises 28 percent - in one year

If you happen to be a billionaire or corporate Fat Cat, you may have noticed a mob assembled near your headquarters or home recently. You may not know what they're protesting exactly; you might even joke that perhaps this has something to do with why they are unemployed. But when it comes to their complaint that the rich have been getting richer while things keep getting worse for the poor, downtrodden and unemployed, you gotta admit, they have a point.

While the stagnant economy continues to hurt those at the bottom of the American workforce, there's plenty of money for the .0001 percent at the top. (The compensation totals, compiled by Forbes' stats guru Scott DeCarlo, include salary, bonuses, perks and the value of exercised stock options through Sept. 6. Sources are CompuStat ExecuComp and SEC filings).

Compensation for the chief executives of America's biggest corporations is way up in 2011, 28 percent higher than last year on average, according to GovernanceMetrics International. If you were already in the top quartile of high-paid plutocrats, your comp nearly doubled. Cash bonuses are triple what they were before the recession.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks.... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
- Schopenhauer

The Thing That Couldn't Die

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness. - Nietzsche

They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse the management of an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but for no other reason than a cold heart doesn't dwell upon the cruelty of its bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club. They're the Killer Elite, but don't call them elite. No. Apparently, and with ironic perversity, that's me and my numerous tribe; over-educated beyond utility at the end of the Age of Useless Things.

And I mean that: the end of things. Capital has exhausted its first fuels, and now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round. And naturally, when it's down to your own body, setting it alight before it's taken from you to stoke the engines of the Great Machine becomes the final impudence. Depending upon whether your nation is an appetizer or an entrée on the globalists' menu, and how well the kitchen prepares its living parts, such an act may lead to revolution or a passing LULZ. It can go either way.

9/11 conspiracy theories have been laid to rest many times.

But somehow they seem to keep bouncing back.

A few years ago, the military released a few frames from one of its eighty security videos showing the attack on the Pentagon. As Sean Hannity said, "This will silence the conspiracy theorists." And by all rights it should have. After all, if you enter a state of deep relaxation and watch those frames with your eyes closed and visualize a 757 hitting the Pentagon, you can almost see it - even if O'Reilly himself couldn't.

Not long after that, a British scientist released a very, very scientific paper explaining how the Twin Towers might have defied the laws of physics by exploding into powder from the top down at near free-fall speed without the use of explosives. The author claims to have discovered that chaos theory invalidates the laws of physics - and the laws of meaning as well. You can tell that this paper is incredibly scientific because it is impossible to understand. If you relished Finnegan's Wake, you might be able to get through a couple of sentences of this paper. Conspiracy theorists, however, dismissed it as pretentious nonsense.

Another British scientist has opined that it was magnetic phenomena, not heat or explosives, that caused the Trade Towers to collapse. This theory, however, was not magnetic enough to cause conspiracy theories to collapse.

The Defense Department, which has promised to publish a reliable account of how it spends its money by 2017, has discovered that its financial ledgers are in worse shape than expected and that it will have to spend billions of dollars in the coming years to make its financial accounting credible, the Center for Public Integrity reported Thursday.

The U.S. military has spent more than $6 billion to develop and deploy new financial systems, but the effort has been plagued by significant added overruns and delays, defense officials told the CPI, a nonprofit investigative news organization.

The Government Accountability Office said in a report last month that although the services can now fully track incoming appropriations, they still can't demonstrate that their funds are being spent as they should be.

Despite the difficulties in putting a new audit system in place, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in opening remarks to the House Armed Services Committee, pledged Thursday to cut the implementation timeline in half "so that in 2014 we will have the ability to conduct a full budget audit."