And so it begins... with news of the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with the help of a Predator spy drone. The unmanned Predator B drone was called from an Air Force base in North Dakota (along with Highway Patrol, a SWAT team, a bomb squad and deputy sheriffs) to locate three men accused of pinching some cows. Yes, that's right, cows.

To some it may sound like a neat way to track criminals, but I'm not sure they fully understand the implications that the forthcoming rapid deployment of drone technology in 'civilian' skies will have.

Drones have been developed and designed not to track American cow thieves but primarily for military applications on the battlefields of imperialistic aggression. The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases and it has already built 60 bases around the world for its unmanned, remotely controlled killer drone warplanes. With more bases under construction, defence contractor behemoths like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are competing for slices of the big fat unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) pie. These companies can look forward to the profit windfall that the increasingly likely and long-planned military incursions into Syria and Iran will bring. They are now also exploiting new local markets that over-hyped illusory threats of domestic terrorism will bring to their balance sheets.

It's almost as if the contractors are colluding with Government and media to ensure they have a lucrative future for their shareholders...

"In a regular sequence, new 'emergency decrees' appeared every six months, each yet again reducing salaries, pensions, social benefits, and finally even private wages and rates of interest. Each was the logical consequence of the last one, and each time Bruning [German Chancellor 1930-1932], clenching his teeth, imposed the painful logic." From: Defying Hitler: a memoir, by Sebastian Haffner, written in 1939, discovered by his son after his death, published in 2000

The above haunting words were written by Sebastian Haffner in his 1930s memoirs as a young lawyer in Berlin who experienced first-hand the Nazi takeover.

The economic circumstances that Germans were subjected to seem an eerily relevant description of what we are experiencing today. History seems to be repeating itself as we encounter the current repetitive fiscal emergencies and imposition of 'austerity measures' ad-nauseum. If you listen carefully to the emotional, fatalistic language of 'desperate' politicians, you'll hear a not-so-faint echo of the vitriol of the Third Reich's infamous chancellor.

Through Government media agents, we're told "we need to make sacrifices" or the world and everything in it, will implode and die a painful, agonising death. The new 'emergency decrees' of our times all sound necessary in the 'life-raft' manner they are announced. New legislation or amendments are touted as the saviours of global security, fiscal responsibility or financial stability, but the true, freedom-crushing impact of a few carefully chosen, ambiguous words on a legislative manuscript is only fully understood when it is far too late as Haffner carefully explicates.

President Obama meets European Union leaders, shakes hands, puts on some smiles for the press, pretends he doesn't already know what the plan is and shakes his head thoughtfully. Obama says the US is willing to use its magic wand to help put smiles on European faces in time for Christmas. Markets climb despite a warning from several three or four letter acronyms lurking in the shadows and pulling the strings that Europe will slide into a 10 mile deep sink-hole - and Britain will follow - unless each Eurozone country delivers 13.4% of its peasants minced, lightly seasoned, vacuum packed and oven-ready to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in under 45 minutes.

This page will automatically invent apocalyptic scenarios of catastrophic proportions every 90 seconds - OFF

- Obama says even though he is married he will spend the night with Mrs Merkel if he has to
- Fitch says US downgrade possible if anyone from the Rothschild family sends an SMS
- IMF's Lagarde says their new technocrats in Italy and Greece are behaving themselves
- Despite having bad dreams, world markets go up a bit and down a little, pretty much like they normally do
- Europe 'in sink-hole' - and could take global economy with it
- JP Morgan says it's tired of waiting for downtrodden European peasants and import its own from China

21.35 It's been a long day of satirical expose of Debt Crisis Live and other such live-blogging. They don't half like creating a drama out of a crisis and it can only mean one thing...

21:25 We're currently in YAMC - Yet Another Manufactured Crisis

"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

The United States is transitioning to the days of the Great Depression. The Great Depression of the 1930s was defined as "Great" because it affected so many places in the world. Considering the state of world economics today, this description is not far from what is happening now, especially in EU and North America. I'm going to be speaking mostly about what's happening to the US economy rather than worldwide. I will assume that if you're reading this, you by now realize that the state of the economy in the US is dire. But if you haven't yet, let's review some key issues:

• The US national debt is over $15 trillion and rising.
• Unemployment is at an all-time high.
• By March this year, nine million Americans had lost their health insurance since 2009, due to job loss.
• Americans are losing their homes in foreclosures and the housing market is not improving.
• Americans have been steadily losing their pensions since 2008.
• Even veterans have been hit hard by the economy.

The above points are just some of the things going on right now that immediately affect a vast number of Americans, and this is just the beginning: I read something the other day that made me realize that things have gone from bad to worse and there is no more denying it.

It's that time of year again, a time for forgetting all that's bad in the world and instead opening the little doors on an advent calendar and putting some tinsel up around the house. That is, of course, just one of the ways that the PTB use this 'festive season' to the max to keep us distracted as they nonchalantly strip away our civil liberties, living standards and dignity. Those who rely on the mainstream media for their news will be unaware that the US Government will soon be able to declare pretty much anyone a potential 'Terrorist', but they will know why Katherine Heigl hates testicles.

As I write, The top search term on Yahoo is Katherine Heigl. I must confess, I've never heard of her, but I think that is a good thing. According to the New York Daily News, she is an actress who stars in a 'hilarious' Public Service Announcement entitled 'I Hate Balls'. The video is to promote a spay-and-neuter animal campaign, in which she jokes that the real reason she's such an advocate for spaying and neutering animals is because she simply hates "terrible, terrible testicles." She goes on to say:

"Hate balls, fix pets, save lives. It's just that simple,".

I suppose if we just read the MSM then life would be simple. But take a tour around the alternative news media sites and they are reporting on something that might just be a little more important to the average American than dogs' balls: the new legislation in process that will enable the U.S. Government to declare a suspect U.S. Citizen a terrorist, who can then be taken to foreign prisons without a court process. The new signs of terror include those who have food storage for more than 7 days, missing fingers, or own guns and ammo!

Update: We covered a list of prophecies in the first part of this series. The idea of California 'falling into the sea' was mentioned. Just a few days ago, another chunk of it did just that. Specifically, part of the Paseo del Mar road in San Pedro fell into the Pacific Ocean after a landslide on 21 November. We don't think this particular landslide is what the Cs were referring to, just thought the timing was interesting in light of bringing it up here!

Just as new discoveries in science can overturn a previously held 'consensus' in a heartbeat (often to the consternation or willful disbelief of those promoting the consensus), new historical data can turn our ideas of what we think happened in our history on their head. We often take for granted that event X occurred in year Y, forgetting that either or both of those variables may be completely false. The event may turn out to have been a fiction, created by scribes and leaders of the time (or years later) for purposes of political propaganda. Dating methods may be inaccurate or possess possible confounding factors, mucking up the accepted timeline. Or, when new documents or scientific data are discovered, the event may turn out to bear little resemblance to our previous ideas of how it happened. New actors emerge with new motivations, necessitating a revision of the history books and the way we see the events and personages of our near and distant past.

Then there are the problems inherent in the study of prehistory, before the advent of 'history' as we know it. There, we only have scarce clues to rely on, all built on sciences which are themselves built on certain assumptions about the way things work. Archaeology, paleoanthropology, population and molecular genetics, climate science, geology... all of these contribute to a story of the past that historians create for us. When we consider the relatively young age of many of these sciences, the amount of information that we have amassed in that short amount of time is pretty staggering. But it's important to keep in mind that history too is a work in progress; new theories and advancements in science can prompt a radical revision of old ideas.

Prehistory occupies a good portion of the Cs transcripts. While archaeologists and anthropologists can piece together broad outlines of migrations, genetic mixing, human behaviors, population bottlenecks, etc., this was a period from which no written records appear to have survived. As such, it's hard to verify specific historical details and much of what the Cs say about these times remains interesting conjecture. But while much of it is unverifiable, it also provides opportunities to test the material as new discoveries come to light: fossil finds, climate studies, evidence for catastrophes and extinctions, and more.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of those politicians who really makes my flesh crawl. In fact, whenever I hear or see her speak, hairs really do stand up on the back of my neck. She seems to cause a reaction in me similar to the reaction 'fingers scraping a blackboard' brings to sensitive ears.

Nearly all politicians are scheming, lying parasites that wallow in their cosy, smug little club of elite buddies, nodding, shaking hands, signing bits of paper that will result in the deaths of thousands then turn and smile to cameras telling us plebs that 'it's for the greater good' or 'God told them to' and all sorts of tripe. But Hilary ... AARRGGHH - there is just something soo false and contrived about how she delivers her political spin to the masses that gets my goat up.

As U.S. Secretary of State she has been rather busy of late dictating to the media which of the few remaining sovereign nations on the big blue marble are due for some much needed 'intervention' so that they can come to enjoy some beautiful American-style democracy. The kind of democracy that has turned a once great nation into a dwindling empire on its last legs.

Having 'successfully' brought 'humanitarian aid' to Libya - by destroying its infrastructure, murdering countless civilians and injuring thousands, while lining the pockets of military and defence contractors, I wonder how long it will be before we hear Hillary chuckling with psychopathic glee over the murder of YA'E'L (Yet another 'Evil' Leader') - This time in Syria? Iran? Pakistan? Maybe all three at the same time?

I will assume that if you are taking a few minutes to read this article you are, like me, more or less a news addict. Every day you wake up and while fixing breakfast you turn on the radio and a laptop to check what is up with this world. As you eat you protest at the comments that come through the airwaves and correct every attempt at subtle propaganda, although sometimes you just have to laugh. Meanwhile you compare the radio broadcast with what is coming through the net in alternative news websites such as Sott.net. You also check out Facebook or some other social media site where you have a number of friends who are also into hunting interesting news items, so you want to see what they have spotted in the last twelve hours.

A week ago I had a surreal moment while reading headlines on Facebook. It was the clear impression that the world had indeed gone mad - and not in a harmless or amusing mad way, but in a cruel and soul-less way. Among the things that caught my eye:

• 10-Year-Old Survives Life Threatening Complications To Give Birth To Son Prematurely Likely a victim of rape.
• House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable To 'Prevent Overly Burdensome' School Lunch Regulations. They grow on trees, you would think.
• How the Telecom Industry Seeks to Confuse About the Dangers of Cell Phones. "From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use."
• TSA Puts Off Safety Study of X-ray Body Scanners. At least they are backtracking in Europe. But what harms Europeans is OK for Americans?
• Seattle Police pepper-spray 84-year-old woman and pregnant teen. Because they can.

It is these sort of shocking items that make us feel that urge to understand how and why. What is the point of it all? What is the bigger picture? Horror moves us to seek knowledge, which is why I have been thinking lately about the main lines of force in the current state of global affairs. The way I see it, the major interrelated threads are the economic crisis, revolutions, imperialism and climate change. The first three are like standing lines of dominoes about to collapse. The last one can 'rain' down on us at any point - in fact it already has, but how strongly will it be when it does again?

Something Wicked This Way Comes

As Thanksgiving quickly approaches, I feel a sense of doom knowing that Black Friday (BF) looms like a coming storm and wonder who will get hurt or die this time. This time every year, just after dinner, the countdown to shopping madness begins in the US and we are inundated with news of who got trampled in the crazed rush to buy stuff. We shake our heads with pity and cluck our tongues in self-satisfactory hubris that we are somehow better than they are and then return to having our third or fourth helping of leftovers. Yes, I'm guilty of this as well.

It reminds me a bit of the television show Celebrity Deathmatch where, essentially, a few are pitted against each other for the entertainment purposes of the many. We wonder, "Who are these people?" Who indeed. Little do we realize, they are us.

So a 'lone wolf' 'home-grown terrorist' has been apprehended, in the nick of time, by the FBI and NYC cops. Or so the story goes. The problem is, we've heard this one before, many times. Jose Pimentel, like so many others alleged 'jihadis' before him, is undoubtedly the victim of yet another FBI sting operation rather than a dangerous terrorist. FBI sting operation? "What's that?" I hear you ask. Well, in case you've fallen victim to the 10-year-long 'war on terror' government and media mind-job, allow me to explain, or rather, allow me to point you to some fairly reliable sources.