Israel has said it's shutting the only two operating Gaza border crossings indefinitely. This comes a day after a projectile hit Israel from the strip, but caused no damage. Border closures threaten to isolate already devastated Gaza completely.

The move will affect both the Kerem Shalom and Erez border crossings, Haartez reported, quoting Israel's defense establishment. The authorities have notified the Palestinians of the decision.

Meanwhile, the three other crossings into Gaza are still not operational and the passage from the area into Egypt - the Rafah crossing - remains closed.

From now on and until further notice, only critical humanitarian aid going into Gaza will be allowed via the Erez crossing.

The US is considering bombing pipelines in Syria, which it claims is in an attempt to cut off the huge profits being made by ISIS from captured oilfields.


The Independent quotes Julieta Valls Noyes, the deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs during a visit to London, that ISIS was making $2 million a day off oil sales and that the US would consider airstrikes as well as "kinetic strikes against some pipelines" and "actual physical action to stop the flow".


The trouble with this justification for destroying Syria's oil pipelines, is that ISIS does not have the capability to use the pipelines to transfer oil. ISIS transports the stolen oil on the back of trucks, and sells it on the black market in Turkey.

We often hear government officials and mainstream financial pundits throwing around numbers like a billion or trillion. To most Americans these numbers are indiscernible.

They are so incredibly enormous that we can't even imagine what one billion dollars actually looks like, let alone what it takes to generate such capital.

And a trillion, or better yet, the $17.9 Trillion that is our national debt? Forget about it! That's so much money that we're talking piles of cash the size of skyscrapers.
But even a visualization like this makes it difficult to understand how much money this actually is.

Ann Barnhardt, who in 2011 shut the doors to her investment firm and urged her clients to withdraw their money from all markets because she says the entire system has been utterly destroyed, will blow your mind in her most recent blog post.

It turns out money the way we were taught to understand it in school isn't really how we should be valuing economies or debt. Instead, we need to be looking at what that money represents.

How do we define the sizes of economies? In dollars? Nope. These systems should be measured in terms of a transcendent, invariant unit. Currencies are, by definition, variant, because they are constantly changing relative to one another. This includes the dollar, which is itself measured against a BASKET of other currencies. I propose that GDP should be measured in the unit of MAN HOURS or MAN YEARS. $20 per hour average wage. 2000 hour average work year. Because the buying power of an average man hour or man year shouldn't change much at all. Think about it.

So, if we take the latest bee-ess GDP for the former US of $16.8 trillion, and if we use an average wage of $20 per hour, or $40,000 per year, we get an economy of 840 billion man hours, or 420 million man years.u really want your mind blown? Do that same calculation with the debt (now $18 trillion). Now do it with the unfunded liabilities of the FEDGOV (conservatively $250 trillion).

450 million man years, and 6.25 billion man years respectively.

Source: Notes for Apres la Guerre Part 2: Banking and Financial Market Theory

So, when we talk about trillions of tax dollars being spent on banks or infused into shadow investment houses around the globe, we're actually not just talking about money being stolen from one group of people that's being distributed to another. What we're talking about is the literal theft of our lives - our time and energy.


The unfunded liabilities are estimated at $250 trillion, or as Barnhardt noted, 6.25 Billion man years.

A representative of the populist LDPR nationalist party claims in an official letter that the US President should be blamed for thousands of innocent people's deaths and therefore cannot keep his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

"More and more international experts are calling Obama's presidency dark times. The reason for that is the brutal policy that he is conducting all over the world, like Napoleon or Hitler had done before. But I want to warn Obama so that he pays more attention to history and understands that he can end up like Hitler," MP Roman Khudyakov said in an interview with Izvestia daily.

The politician added that under Obama the United States participated in the "dirty war" in the Middle East, financed the armed conflict in Ukraine and violated international law by torturing suspected terrorists. All this makes the US President complicit in the violent deaths of several thousand innocent civilians and such a person cannot remain the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Khudyakov said.

In addition, the lawmaker suggested to pass the Peace Prize taken from Obama to Russian President Vladimir Putin. "He stopped the war in Iran, in Syria and he is still saving a lot of people from major bloodshed. He is a vivid example of a politician who preserves peace and love in the world."

Khudyakov is not the first Russian politician who has suggested stripping the US President of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In August this year, the head of the LDPR party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, wrote in a public address that Obama was not worthy of the honor.

Deutsche Skatbank, a division of VR-Bank Altenburger Land, which was founded in 1859, is not the biggest bank in Germany, but it's the first bank to confirm what German savers have been dreading for a while: the wrath of Draghi.

Retail and business customers with over €500,000 on deposit as of November 1 will earn a "negative interest rate" of 0.25%. In less euphemistic terms, they have to pay 0.25% per annum to the bank for the privilege of handing the bank their hard-earned money or their business cash.

Inflation has had a similar effect in the zero-interest-rate environment that the ECB and other central banks have inflicted on savers, but this time it's official, it's open, it can't be hidden. Instead of lending your moolah to the bank so that the bank can lend it out to businesses and retail customers for all sorts of economically beneficial purposes, you're financially better off hiding it in the basement. Grudging respect is due the ECB and other central banks: through the perverse regime of ZIRP, they have succeeded in transmogrifying "cash in bank" from an income-producing asset to a costly liability.

"Punishment Interest" is what Germans lovingly call this. It's the latest and most blatant step of the central-bank strategy to confiscate in bits and pieces and over time the wealth that prudent people and businesses have accumulated, and that should have re-entered the economy via the intermediation of the banks.

If you require more evidence that the United States is a dysfunctional society, observe American elections. Election season is slander season. Each party's attack teams focus on misrepresenting, defaming, and ridiculing the opposing party's candidates. Attack ads have replaced debates and any discussion of what the issues are, or should be, and how candidates perceive the public's interest. Each attack team tells lies designed to enrage various voters about the other team's candidate.

Whoever is elected is indebted not to voters but to the special interests that provided the campaign money. Once elected the official serves the private interest groups that put the official in office. In America the government can be bought and sold just like everything else. In its Citizens United ruling, a Republican Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the right of corporations to purchase the US government.

Each state has its own dominant interest groups that win every election. In Florida real estate developers routinely defeat the environment and local communities. Developers have even been known to form organizations that pose as conservation supporters in order to misrepresent and defeat conservation measures.

Yet, despite their long string of losses to special interests, voters still participate in elections. I once read a theory that elections are a form of entertainment. President Clinton's encounter with the young woman on MTV - "boxers or briefs" - is one indication of the lack of seriousness that Americans bring to politics.

Perhaps the lighter moment of a young woman's interest in the president's underwear should be cherished. The Clinton years will be remembered as scandal after scandal with dark events unresolved and covered up. The Clinton years were transformative. For those who don't remember and those too young at the time to be aware, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (1997), will be an eye-opener. Perhaps the Democrats should read the book before nominating Hillary as the party's presidential candidate.

Evans-Pritchard was Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph, one of the main British newspapers. He was stunned by how the American media ceased to function during the Clinton years. The Clinton years gave us such events as the federal government's murder of the Branch Davidians in their Waco compound and subsequent coverup, the Oklahoma City bombing and coverup, and the coverup of the apparent murder of White House counsel Vincent Foster.

Britain's National Archives released a draft plan from the early 1980s in which the UK government considered recruiting mentally ill psychopaths to help maintain order in the country in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack.

According to the Independent, in 1982, Britain's Home Office ran a war games scenario in which the country was struck by 300 megatons of nuclear weapons over a 16-hour period.

Civil servants, police, firefighters, emergency military personnel and other government officials took part in the war game training exercise, named "Operation Regenerate."

We're supposed to know by now that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a really bad guy - so bad that anything that he says is further proof of his screeching hostility to the United States.

The Washington Post reported (10/24/14) on a recent Putin speech with this blistering lead sentence:

Making clear that the Kremlin has no intention of backing down from the worst Russia/Western crisis since the Cold War, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States on Friday of trying to "reshape the whole world" for its benefit, in a fiery speech that was one of the most anti-American of his 15 years as Russia's paramount leader.

Fiery anti-Americanism!

It's not hard to believe that Putin was highly critical of the US foreign policy, but what precisely did he say? The Post called it "a bitter distillation of Putin's anti-American rhetoric." The Post Karoun Demirjian and Michael Birnbaum reported that the address was an

unsmiling, straightforward worldview that blasted the United States as taking advantage of its powerful post-Cold War position to dictate misguided terms to the rest of the world. Putin faulted the United States for a rise in global terrorism, a resumption of a global arms race and a general worsening of global security.

"It never ceases to amaze me how our partners have been guilty of making the same mistakes time and again," Putin said, accusing the United States of breeding terrorists by upsetting the established order in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

OK, so fiery anti-Americanism is the belief that the United States desires a unipolar world where it calls the shots. Does anyone doubt US elites think otherwise?

Wading through all the chickensh*t over the last few days Netanyahu's "grassy knoll" comeback somehow missed out on all the action, but what the hoot guys? Where I come from that terminology only means one thing, as far as I know, that applies to the lexicon anywhere in America, if not the world. Hey, even Google agrees with me. And what are the chances Netanyahu and/or his speechwriters don't know this? Nada. Impossible.

Why would Netanyahu make a reference to one of the most alarming chapters in American history, the assassination of a beloved American president? And for many, an assassination still shrouded in mystery and deceit? I just thought it was very weird. Where is our press?

Winding down after scrutinizing, dissecting and eviscerating Goldberg's now infamous Chickensh*t article, Justin Raimondo, in The Chickenshit Lobby Is Mad As Hell - but just how mad are they? makes the argument had a leader of Iran slipped "grassy knoll" into a message to an American president the press would have gone bonkers. I agree.

What's surprising is how Netanyahu, in a speech to the Knesset, took the opportunity to answer his critics in the Obama administration: "Netanyahu angrily insisted he was 'under attack simply for defending Israel,' adding that he 'cherished' Israel's relationship with the US."

The famously combative Israeli Prime Minister went on to say:

"When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede. You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels."

Bibi, who spent many years in the United States, is surely cognizant of what his "grassy knoll" reference connotes. You can argue it was just an infelicitous phrase, or that Bibi was referring to himself, not Obama. Maybe so. But what if, say, an Iranian official, even a low-ranking one, had said such a thing? The uproar would be deafening. And so the question must be asked: was Bibi threatening the President of the United States?

If we take seriously Goldberg's depiction of the poisoned relationship between Bibi and Obama, the possibility can't be completely dismissed.

• Western media says they are legitimizing, stabilizing, and a vote for a turn towards the EU. This is simply not the case
• The country is still badly split, East vs. West
• Turnout was low, especially in the critical East
• The East is dis-enfranchised
• Neo-Nazi street violence still a real political factor
• Popular support for Poroshenko is low
• Support for the war is low
• The government, and popular opinion, are deeply fractured
• Poroshenko failed to consolidate himself as the country's leader

Sunday's Ukrainian parliamentary elections are being misunderstood by the international media and by elements of the Russian press.

There is a misperception that they were between competing parties with differing ideologies, such as those that take place elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world.

This is very far from being the case.

Ukraine this year has experienced a major power struggle between two factions of its political elite. In February 2014, one faction won the power struggle by resorting to a violent coup that gave it control of the levers of power.

Since then, this faction has moved to consolidate its control over the country by eliminating what is left of the defeated faction. Having secured control of the Presidency and the government and purged the Constitutional Court and media, it has now made use of early elections to purge the country's parliament - a fact admitted to by Poroshenko in his election decree.

This is intended to be followed by a thorough purge of the state bureaucracy, the police and the army, as authorised by a draconian albeit unconstitutional new "lustration" law. The intention is that by the end of this process, there will be no remnant of the rival faction that held power before the coup in February represented in any body of the state power.

The banner under which this purge is being carried out is, of course, "anti-corruption" and "democracy".

Neither should be taken too seriously.

That slogan, "the fight against corruption" is a perennial catchphrase that has been repeatedly used since the 1980s; it was used in the former Soviet Union by pro-Western liberal factions who desired to discredit and eliminate their opponents. As the post-Soviet history of both Russia and Ukraine show, pro-Western crusaders against corruption are largely unconcerned when it is committed by those they count amongst themselves.

As for "democracy", pro-Western liberal factions in both Russia and Ukraine have long since reinterpreted this word to mean a political system where they hold power and their opponents don't.

That this was a purge is revealed in the way in which the two parties most closely identified with the defeated faction - the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party - were destroyed before the elections to prevent them from taking part.