Puppet MastersS


Card - MC

What will you do when you can no longer buy or sell without submitting to biometric identification?

Biometric Identification?
© The Truth Wins

In some areas of the world, payment systems that require palm scanning or face scanning are already being tested. We have entered an era where biometric security is being hailed as the "solution" to the antiquated security methods of the past. We are being promised that the constant problems that hackers are causing with our credit cards, bank accounts, ATM machines and Internet passwords will all go away once we switch over to biometric identification.

And without a doubt, we have some massive security problems that need to be addressed. But do you really want a machine to read your face or your hand before you are able to buy anything, sell anything or log on to the Internet? Do you really want "the system" to be able to know where you are, what you are buying and what you are doing at virtually all times?

Biometric security systems are being promoted as "cool" and "cutting edge", but there is also potentially a very dark side to them that should not be ignored.

In this day and age, identity theft has become a giant problem. Being able to confirm that you are who you say that you are is a very big deal. To many, biometric security presents a very attractive solution to this problem. For example, the following is a brief excerpt from a recent Fox News article entitled "Biometric security can't come soon enough for some people"...
In a world where nearly every ATM now uses an operating system without any technical support, where a bug can force every user of the Internet to change the password to every account they've ever owned overnight, where cyber-attacks and identity theft grow more menacing every day, the ability to use your voice, your finger, your face or some combination of the three to log into your e-mail, your social media feed or your checking account allows you to ensure it's very difficult for someone else to pretend they're you.
Almost everyone would like to make their identities more secure. Nobody actually wants their bank accounts compromised or their Internet passwords stolen. But there is a price to be paid for adopting biometric identification. Your face or your hand will be used to continually monitor and track everything that you do and everywhere that you go.

Footprints

The CIA, pay-offs, lap dancers and BP's Deepwater Horizon

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From his investigation for Channel 4 Television in the newly released film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools.
The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British Petroleum engineered a coup d'état, overthrowing an elected president of a nation who was "not favorable to BP." The corporation's former Vice-President, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured here, holding an AK-47 in front of BP headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan. Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that while he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.

The conversation was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon.

Chess

Putin says oil wars with Russia will make West bleed

oil russia
© Reuters / Henry Romero
Opportunities for the West to hurt the Russian economy are limited, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday. Europe cannot stop buying Russian gas without inflicting pain on itself, and if the US tries to lower oil prices, the dollar will suffer.

If the West tries to damage Russia's influence in the world energy market, efforts will likely backfire, the Russian President said during his twelfth annual televised question and answer session.

To really influence the world oil market a country would need to increase production and cut prices, which currently only Saudi Arabia could afford, Putin said.

The president added he didn't expect Saudi Arabia, which has "very kind relations" with Russia, will choose to cut prices, that could also damage its own economy.

If world oil production increases, the price could go down to about $85 per barrel. "For us the price fall from $90 to $85 per barrel isn't critical," Putin said, adding that for Saudi Arabia it would be more sensitive.

Also the President said that being an OPEC member, Saudi Arabia would need to coordinate its action with the organization, which "is very complicated."

Meanwhile, Russia supplies about a third of Europe's energy needs, said Putin. Finland, for example, is close to Russia economically, as it receives 70 percent of its gas from Russia.

"Can Europe stop buying Russian gas? I think it's impossible...Will they make themselves bleed? That's hard to imagine," the Russian president said.

Light Sabers

Why more Bundy standoffs are coming - revolution brewing

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© New American
The federal government's over-the-top police action against the Bundy family ranch is an ominous portent of more to come, as rogue agencies and their corporate/NGO partners attempt to "cleanse" the West of ranchers, farmers, miners, loggers, and other determined property owners.

On Saturday, April 12, the federal bureaucrats backed down. Faced with hundreds of men and women on horseback and on foot who were armed with firearms and video cameras - as well as local television broadcast stations and independent media streaming live video and radio feeds across America - the Obama administration called off the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) operation to confiscate hundreds of cattle belonging to Cliven Bundy, the current patriarch of a respected pioneer family that has been ranching in Nevada's Clark County since the 1800s.

Document

IRS emails show Lois Lerner contacted DOJ about prosecuting tax exempt groups

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© AP/J. Scott Applewhite
According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for "lying" about political activity.

"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.

Hardhat

Reagan's fear of energy dependence on Russia

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© NCSL.org
Destroy the Evil Empire

As a Hollywood B-movie actor Ronald Reagan never made it, but as a New Age politician preaching New Age economics he was so popular that in 1984 Reagan was triumphantly re-elected to a second and last term as US president. From at latest 1982, his first administration beat the drum on Europe's dangerous energy dependence on the Evil Empire (which was also known as the USSR).

At the time, one of the Reagan administration's major concerns was the rapid construction of east-west gas pipelines, mainly through Ukraine, bringing cheap Russian gas to Europe - after serving the Soviet dependent Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe, including Ukraine, which from 1975 essentially abandoned the development of its own, very large domestic reserves of gas. Also at that time, Soviet oil production was growing at a rate almost as fast as gas production, as oilfield E&P activity pushed eastward in Russia, from the Urals to Siberia, to the Arctic and the Pacific Far East. In large part due to oil transport and refining infrastructures being concentrated in western USSR, oil export to Europe was the prime market destination for rising Soviet oil output.

Snakes in Suits

Obama White House: 'A new level of secrecy and control'

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© Consciouslifenews.com
In 2007, the Frontline documentary "News War" featured a series of interviews with Bill Keller, then the executive editor of Takeaway partner The New York Times. Frontline host Lowell Bergman asked Keller about freedom of the press under the Bush Administration.

"We have an administration that is more secretive and more hostile to the operations of the press probably than any since the Nixon administration," Keller replied.

As Bergman noted in the documentary, many prominent journalists and news organizations agreed with Keller. They may have even looked forward to the Obama years, hoping the new administration would have a change of heart.

Jill Abramson succeeded Keller as executive editor in July 2011, in the midst of the Obama era. She tells Takeaway host John Hockenberry that the White House's relationship with the press has only deteriorated.

Info

Best of the Web: 10 most compelling quotes from Putin's annual Q&A marathon

putin q&a
© RIA Novosti / Aleksey NikolskyiVladimir Putin, during his 4-hour Q&A session.
Ukraine's crisis was, predictably, at the center of Vladimir Putin's annual televised interview. He said the situation can only be solved through a compromise between internal players. Below are the president's ten most significant quotes.
"[Yanukovich] didn't have the heart to sign an act that would see force used against his citizens."
Answering a question from an ex-Berkut - Ukrainian special forces - commander as to whether the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has always been such a "weakling and traitor," Putin said that Yanukovich did his duty as he thought was right, proper and necessary.

"I spoke with him, certainly, many times, during the crisis, and after he arrived in the Russian Federation; we talked about using force... The gist of his answer was that he thought about using force many times, but he didn't have the heart to sign an act that would see force used against his citizens," Putin said.

Comment: Once again, Putin proves to have more class, insight, decency and humor than any of his counterparts on the world stage. How many other leaders would be willing to sit down for four hours straight and actually answer peoples' questions?


Clock

Obama begins to say good-bye - good riddance!

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© En.paperblog.com
Because you can find anything on the Web, you can easily search and pull up a running clock that tells you just how long, to the second, Barack Obama has been president. It moves in real time. It only feels like it's speeding up.

Constrained by crises over which he has little power to impact events, hemmed in by a divided Congress more interested in scoring points with voters than in legislating, and watching as his potential successor assumes more and more of the political spotlight, Obama may be receding into history more quickly than either he or his aides ever anticipated.

It was impossible to listen to the president's speech Thursday at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Texas without hearing the trace of the valedictory. Certainly, it was not intended to be so - and Obama didn't deliver it as such. (Bill Clinton does wistful; Obama may not have that gear.) But his remarks were less a clarion call to action than a stern statement of principle, his mouth fixed flat for most of the address, his face betraying the weariness of almost six years of incessant conflict.

Comment: Obama is a human parasite who has murdered millions in the Middle East and deprived millions more of basic human rights. Another political psychopath (like him) will come along and pick up where he left off. Until human beings realize who and what psychopaths are, how they operate and manipulate the rest of humanity, the cycle will repeat itself over and over and over.


Snakes in Suits

Former Time editor rewarded for being media whore: Sworn in at State Department

Rick Stengel  state department
© PatrickMcMullan.comRick Stengel
Rick Stengel finally has a new job - with benefits.

Stengel stepped down as the top editor of Time magazine last summer because he was under consideration for a job in President Obama's State Department. But the government shutdown last fall delayed the process for months.

Stengel actually started work as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in February, but the official swearing-in ceremony did not take place until Tuesday afternoon in the State Department's Benjamin Franklin Room.

There, Secretary of State John Kerry joked that Stengel was back sharing an apartment with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, another former top editor of Time - and CNN - who now runs the Washington, DC-based think tank, the Aspen Institute.

In their salad days at Time Inc., Stengel and Isaacson shared a summer home in Sag Harbor with Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

A number of top Time magazine people, including Michael Crowley, Mark Halperin, Michael Scherer and Bobby Ghosh, were on hand for the ceremony as were NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Ali Zelenko, a former senior VP of Communications at Time, now at NBC News.