Puppet MastersS


Beaker

Gulf troops were used as 'guinea pigs' say war veterans

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© unkCHANGED MAN: Dave Sephton with the cocktail of drugs he has to take every day since the Gulf War in 1991.
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.

Handcuffs

Police State: Plainclothes NYPD detain woman in Union Square for demonstrating


Dollar

Is the JP Morgan bombshell the financial world's worst nightmare?

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

Comment: Tip of the iceberg?


Bizarro Earth

Deliberate government and EU policy to keep the UK short of water and increase prices

cracked
© PACracked: the country’s water problems are derived from the failure to fix leaks and increase reservoir capacity
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.

Comment: When essential utilities are under the control of private interests then methods of increasing prices become inevitable.


Stormtrooper

Anti-Islam Teachings 'Widespread' in U.S. Law Enforcement

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© ShutterstockMuslims are waiting for the call to prayer at the Umayyad Mosque on October 12, 2007 in Aleppo,Syria. homeros
A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for "total war" with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.

The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that "Hiroshima"-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.

"It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn't academically sound," said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is "no longer in a teaching status". Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. "It's part of a much larger problem," Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.

Heart - Black

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

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© Ted Parker
There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are "clinical psychopaths," exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an "unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation." (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted nearly as much three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called The Fable of the Bees.

Private Vices, Publick Benefits read the book's subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm - a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are - Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By "pride" Mandeville meant vanity; by "luxury" he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we'd say, was fraud: "All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit."

Yoda

911 Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds: US government needs to keep the fear factor alive

The Obama administration has the worst track record when it comes to prosecuting whistleblowers. Obama once claimed he'd work hard to have a transparent government, but many have faced retaliation for revealing controversial government information. Sibel Edmonds, who is a whistleblower, waited 340 days for FBI clearance of her memoir but finally released it on her own. Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, joins us for more.


Star of David

Iran sentences 13 for spying for Israeli spy agency

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An Iranian court has sentenced 13 people after finding them guilty of involvement in espionage activities for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

Branch 15 of Tehran's Revolution Court made the decision on Sunday, stating that they had been lured into spying for the Mossad by overseas-based satellite television networks and clever advertisement campaigns.

The defendants reportedly accepted large sums of money from Mossad and CIA agents.

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry announced on April 17 that it had arrested over a dozen Israeli-linked spies and terrorists.

The ministry said the detainees were of Iranian and non-Iranian nationalities.

Bomb

Syrian Rebels Admit Terrorist Bombing Campaign (Then Deny Actual Bombings)

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Perhaps in an attempt to soften coming revelations that Syria's opposition will be increasingly armed and backed by the West for a final military push to divide and destroy a sovereign Syria, Reuters released a report titled, "Outgunned Syria Rebels Make Shift to Bombs." The report admits that the Syrian rebels, depicted so-far as hapless pro-democracy protesters, are now turning to bombing tactics.

Reuters quotes one rebel fighter as saying, "we are starting to get smarter about tactics and use bombs because people are just too poor and we don't have enough rifles." The unnamed rebel continued, "it is just no match for the army, so we are trying to focus on the ways we can fight." Reuters attempts to allay the fears of its readers by claiming rebels they interviewed insisted that, "unlike al Qaeda, their bombs were aimed at military, and never civilian, targets."

Paradoxically, however, the Reuters story reveals that the rebel bombing campaign is being carried out by Sunni "hardliners" who learned their bombing skills from fighting (and killing) US troops in neighboring Iraq - or in other words, the very "al Qaeda" the rebels claim they are not like. A "Syrian Liberation Army" spokesman also admitted that his fighters were operating "manufacturing facilities" for bombs - like the one in Hama that recently exploded, killing 70 and leveled the greater part of a city block.

Bomb

Various Spin on the Terrorist Bombings in Syria as the Destabilization Campaign Rolls On

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The recent bombings in Syria and their deadly civilian toll has brought a great deal of attention to the U.S./NATO destabilization campaign in that country. Some news agencies like Press TV have now taken to referring to the situation in Syria as a "destabilization campaign" and that's a good start though I wouldn't expect Fox and CNN to follow suit anytime soon. And don't expect "dissidents" on the left like Amy Goodman or Chris Hedges to point this out either. Maybe in 25 years when the files are declassified the American public will get the truth but by then there will be none of us conspiracy theorists left to report on it.

The bombings are taking an unusually brutal toll. The Western-backed NATO terrorists are desperate to derail any political solution to the problem especially now that the parliamentary elections have been held (the NATO-backed opposition refused to take part) and the new Syria constitution has been approved by the population (89% approved of the new constitution) which again, the NATO-backed opposition refuses to recognize because the White House wants to write their own neo-liberal constitution for the Syrian people just like they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

The PR blow-back from the recent bombings has the globalist Clinton run State Department doing back-flips trying to spin the story one way then the other.first they say it's al Qaeda, then they say it's Assad himself, now we're back to the al Qaeda story.