Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

How to stick it to the poor: A congressional strategy

Why choose between under-educating children and taking the food out of their tiny mouths?
snake in suit
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Congress is stickin' it to us all this Christmas, but especially, to the poor.
The 113th Congress has stuck it to the poor at pretty much every opportunity. In fact, if you take all their past and future plans into account, it looks like they have accomplished that rare feat: To close in on enacting an overarching, radical agenda without control of the Senate or the presidency.

How did they do it? Probably by escaping scrutiny through a piecemeal approach to legislation, a president who is willing to meet them halfway, and one diabolic word: Sequester.

Comment: It becomes more and more evident as the days pass that members of the U.S. Congress lack conscience and empathy. Is this the kind of legislative 'leadership' Americans really want to support?

Do they really 'serve' in the best interests of the majority of Americans?


Gear

CIA's anti-terrorism effort called 'colossal flop'

Image
CIA officers given 'non-official cover,' often posing as business executives, tried to collect intelligence on terrorists. The NOC program reportedly has had few successes.

Several years ago, a senior officer in the CIA clandestine service attended a closed-door conference for overseas operatives. Speakers included case officers who were working in the manner Hollywood usually portrays spies - out on their own.

Most CIA officers abroad pose as U.S. diplomats. But those given what's called non-official cover are known as NOCs, pronounced "knocks," and they typically pose as business executives. At the forum, the NOCs spoke of their cover jobs, their false identities and measures taken to protect them. Few said much about gathering intelligence.

A colleague passed a caustic note to the senior officer. "Lots of business," it read. "Little espionage."

Twelve years after the CIA began a major push to get its operatives out of embassy cubicles and into foreign universities, businesses and other local perches to collect intelligence on terrorists and rogue nations, the effort has been a disappointment, current and former U.S. officials say. Along with other parts of the CIA, the budget of the so-called Global Deployment Initiative, which covers the NOC program, is now being cut.

Comment: Oh but we beg to differ.

It's been an extraordinary success.

Americans in particular have fallen into line behind the War on Terror, and have been herded into ever finer orders of control.

The purpose of these programs is never their stated purpose. They know Iran isn't what they say it is. They know they have to create and maintain the phony 'Muslim terror threat' - even if that means torturing innocent people just to get their 'confessions' on record.

The true purpose lies behind the ideology and the outward structure.

The true purpose is to keep people believing in the myth that authorities have any control over reality, even as it comes apart at the seams.


Pistol

Sandy Hook: The Gun Range Myth and other media-created fantasies

Everything we were told is wrong

The Gun Range Myth


We've screened and edited over 100 hours of commentary on the Sandy Hook (Newtown) shooting. Our written commentary appears below after the videos. The key issues in this story are best covered in the videos that appear on these pages.

Comment:
Sandy Hook cover-up continues: Connecticut State Investigation ends with records sealed, crime scene destroyed, motive 'unknown'
SOTT Talk Radio: The Sandy Hook Massacre, What Really Happened?


HAL9000

Every text you make.... Snowden documents show NSA gathering 5bn cell phone records daily

nsa spying
© Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/CorbisThe data can also be used to study patterns of behaviour to reveal personal information
The National Security Agency is reportedly collecting almost 5 billion cell phone records a day under a program that monitors and analyses highly personal data about the precise whereabouts of individuals, wherever they travel in the world.

Details of the giant database of location-tracking information, and the sophisticated ways in which the NSA uses the data to establish relationships between people, have been revealed by the Washington Post, which cited documents supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden and intelligence officials.

Comment: There's no question that the American public should be outraged that their rights to privacy are being violated, but the question stands whether the NSA program has the capabilities to perform all that is alleged above. After all, if people are convinced that they are being monitored all the time, they will be more willing to accept the lines that the PTB have drawn against their freedoms.


Padlock

Muzzling the voice of people: Japan enacts strict state secrets law despite protests

state secret law
© Yuya Shino/ReutersNakagawa, chairman of the Upper House Special Committee on National Security, is surrounded by lawmakers during a vote on a state secrets act at the parliament in Tokyo
Japan enacted a state-secrets law toughening penalties for leaks on Friday, despite public protests and criticism that it will muzzle the media and help cover up official misdeeds.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, keen to beef up Japan's security amid rising concerns about China's military assertiveness, has said the law is needed to the smooth operation of a new National Securities Council and to persuade foreign countries such as close ally the United States to share intelligence.

Gold Coins

One BIG problem with Bitcoin...

bitcoin
At this point, you'd pretty much have to be living under a rock to have not heard of Bitcoin.

I actually asked this question ('have you been living under a rock?) to someone recently who proudly proclaimed that he had never heard of Bitcoin, almost expressing gratification in his ignorance of a game-changing model.

Bitcoin is on fire. Mainstream media coverage is everywhere.

Comment: SOTT Talk Radio - Bitcoin, Gold and the Cashless Society


Gear

Japan's Abe secures passage of secrecy law as opposition revolts

Shinzo Abe
© Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty ImagesShinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe secured final passage of a bill granting Japan's government sweeping powers to declare state secrets, a measure aimed at shoring up defense ties with the U.S. that prompted a public backlash and revolt by the opposition.

The upper house of the Diet gave final approval of the measures in Tokyo late yesterday after opposition parties first forced a no-confidence vote in Abe's government in the lower house. The wrangling over the bill forced the government to extend the parliamentary session, due to end yesterday, for two more days.

The bill, which forms part of Abe's broader push to strengthen Japan's defense policy in the face of China's military assertiveness, stiffens penalties for bureaucrats who leak secrets and journalists who publish them. It gives government officials the power to define what constitutes a state secret under categories from defense to diplomacy, terrorism and safety threats.

"There is rationale in the secrecy bill, but the government has been too hasty and has lacked efforts to provide a framework for information disclosure which is the flip side of secrecy," said Hidenori Suezawa, a financial market and fiscal analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc.

Better Earth

Nelson Mandela: Timeline of his life

Mandela
© Unknown
A look at the key dates in the life of the revered statesman, who led the fight against apartheid and united his troubled nation.

July 18, 1918: Born Rolihlahla Mandela in a small village in the eastern Cape of South Africa.

1944: Joins the African National Congress (ANC).

1944: Marries first wife Evelyn Mase.

1948: South African government introduces the racial segregation policy of apartheid.

December 1952: Sentenced to nine months hard labour, suspended for two years, for civil disobedience campaign. Opens first black law firm with Oliver Tambo.

1956: Charged with high treason as part of a round-up of 156 activists.

Vader

US Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "We're turning into a country that knows only one way to achieve its purpose and that is to kill people"

US Army colonel, former War College instructor and former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell Lawrence Wilkerson tells Real News: "I don't know if our grandchildren will live in a democratic republic."


Eye 2

Best of the Web: Hersh: Obama administration lied about gas attack in Syria

hersh
Prominent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says US President Barack Obama did not tell the whole story about a chemical weapons attack near the Syrian capital of Damascus in August.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in a new report published in the London Review of Books, wrote that the administration of President Obama was aware of the fact that the militants fighting against the Syrian government had the ability to make chemical weapons but did not inform the public about it.

"Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts," he wrote in the article.

Comment: Syria, Chemical Weapons and the Britam Defence emails
BBC and doctors in Syria: shilling for Western Psychopaths in Power?
Top 45 lies in Obama's speech at UN