For several months Democrats were in denial, writes John Avlon. But now they're waking up to the fact that this presidential campaign isn't going to be a cakewalk at all.

There are storm clouds on the horizon for Barack Obama's re-election.

Democrats indulged in over-confidence during the Republican primaries. It was an understandable reaction to the chaos that came with all the pandering to the far-Right and the rise of frankly laughable candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain in the search for an alternative to Mitt Romney.

The United States Defence Department announced that a serviceman had died from "complications associated with a medical condition," becoming the 3,000th casualty according to a tally compiled by the broadcaster CNN.

The death comes as Nato armies hastened preparations for a pullout after more than a decade of fighting.

Most of those who have lost their lives during the more than 10 years of Operation Enduring Freedom have been American – 1,974 to date. British troops have suffered the second highest level of deaths among coalition of 28 nations, with 414 deaths.

Sandy Dahl, 52, became one of the faces of the grieving 9/11 families, founding a scholarship in the name of her husband, Jason, and giving public speeches to ensure the memories of those lost were not forgotten.

Officials at the Captain Jason M Dahl Scholarship Fund said she died in her sleep from natural causes at her home near Denver, Colorado, on Friday night.

The State Department is expected to finally name a lead negotiator next month for high level international talks with the U.N. in December that would decide the fate of the Internet, a senior U.S. official told Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio last week.

The nomination would come nearly a year after then-Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin announced in June 2011 that he and his allies sought to establish international control over the Internet. At the time, Putin had “reaffirmed” Russia’s support of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — a little-known U.N. agency responsible for the international regulation of long-distance calls and satellite orbits — as his preferred instrument to bring about international cooperation on cybersecurity and Internet issues. Russia is a co-founder of the ITU, dating back to 1866.

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere.

The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy.

Psychopaths have somehow convinced parents that electroshock torture banned by international law is helping their autistic children.

When a society condones the use of torture first on its enemies and then on its own citizens we should only expect that our children will soon be indoctrinated into accepting such practices by having it applied to them.

The dollar’s death by a thousand cuts just sustained a major blow courtesy the samurai as Kyodo News announced Saturday that Yen-Yuan direct trading will begin in June. Coincidence that Jim Sinclair predicted 6 months ago that the US dollar would suffer a major set-back in June 2012?

Summary.

"The United States' tarnished human rights record has left it in no state -- whether on a moral, political or legal basis -- to act as the world's 'human rights justice,'" China said in an annual report on U.S. human rights.

The report cited the arrests of protesters participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Many protesters, it said, accused police of brutality.

Imagine walking into your local pawn shop and the store is selling Compact Discs for $5.00 dollars and buying them for $10.00!

A report released today shows Wall Street traders used high-speed computers to create just that situation during the Facebook IPO.

The latest incarnation of the completely nonsensical American support of Israel is the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, which has already passed Congress.

H.R. 4133, or the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012, sponsored by Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) along with 304 others, passed the house on May 9, 2012 with a disturbingly large margin.

Indeed, only two of our so-called representatives actually voted against the legislation, further proving that the vast majority of politicians couldn’t care less about America or the people of the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security has flagged hundreds of words as “suspect” – and while many make sense, like “Al Qaeda,” some are just plain odd. For example, the DHS may dig through your cyber life if you write something about snow. Or pork.

So, you’ve just come back from a beach holiday in Mexico and posted about it on your blog. Or maybe you’ve tweeted about skiing lessons? Updated your status, saying you’re stuck home with food poisoning?

All those things will tweak the DHS antennae, according to a manual published by the agency. The Analyst’s Desktop Binder, used by agency employees at their National Operations Center to identify “media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities,” includes hundreds of words that set off Big Brother’s silent alarms.

Original post.

The problem is that numbers were compared without being converted -- some of the measurements were in I-131 equivalence (and yes, this is the first I have heard of it, and no, I do not undrstand why everyone does not use the same scale)...

Maybe if we correct our mistakes in the same voice with which we made them we even gain ground with the people we most need to gain ground with.

Hyperlinks at source

By Li Xiaokun and Zhao Shengnan China Daily/Asia News Network Saturday, May 26, 2012

Beijing on Friday swiftly hit back at Washington's annual report on China's human rights, saying in a report that the US government's crackdown on protesters in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration is the real illustration of American democracy.

In the report, Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011, the State Council Information Office demanded the US stop its double standards.

Beijing issued the report less than 24 hours after the release of the Washington report, which Chinese experts said used harsher wording than previous editions and reflected US double standards that meet political needs in an election year.

It was the 13th annual report China has published in response to US attacks.

The US report "turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and remained silent about it", China's report said.

*hyperlinks and video live at source*

The 1% mock America’s war dead on every Memorial Day because they continuously damn more US soldiers to kill and die in unlawful wars.

This is an insult to our military past and present, and their families. Because an unlawful war is a literal attack upon US soldiers, it is also treason by the 1% upon American military.

Current US wars are not close to lawful: war law is the legal victory all of our families sacrificed to achieve through two world wars: no nation is allowed to use their military in armed attack unless under attack by another nation’s government.

EYE on RNC - 2012 Republican National Convention
Tampa Bay, Florida Protest watch - police state

Fla. Police Got Lesson in Crowds From Chicago

Republican Convention...Protesters Can Carry Guns

RNC 'event zone' goes to final city vote

One senator from Illinois, though, wants to write off those millions and change who is classified as a Palestinian refugee. Mark Kirk, a hawkish Republican whose political career has been boosted by right-wing Israel advocates, is leading a drive to fundamentally redefine who a Palestinian refugee is in the eyes of the United States.

Critics see the move as just one step in a larger strategy to take the issue of refugee rights for Palestinians off the negotiating table, and to cut funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency that assists Palestinians. One senior Senate aide who helped craft the amendment told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “this will have major implications for future negotiations over final status issues with regard to refugees.”

Western propagandists unanimously defer to "activists" despite hundreds of UN monitors on the ground in Syria.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributor
Activist Post

Reports this week of the Syrian military "slaughtering civilians" near Homs have been reported relentlessly by Western media outlets, citing solely "activists" who have been consistently exposed as manipulating and purposefully distorting the reality on the ground in Syria. After episodes including "Gay Girl in Damascus," who turned out to be in fact a "middle-aged American man in Scotland," and "Syrian Danny" who was caught directing fake gunfire before a staged "casualty report" given to CNN's Anderson Cooper, the word of "activists" in Syria, openly sympathetic to the Free Syrian Army, is clearly less than credible...

Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss the 99% knocking on Timmy Geithner's door looking for 'reform' of criminal behavior. In the second half of the show Max talks to independent video journalist, Luke Rudkowski, about livestreaming to the world from a smartphone and his recent work covering the NATO summit in Chicago.

More bombing in Damascus; Is Syria headed to a civil war in spite of the UN ceasefire. Clashes have erupted between pro and anti Assad groups in northern Lebanon and news of a group of Lebanese pilgrims abducted by anti-government armed groups in Syria. Is Syrian violence spreading into the neighboring country and is the a deliberate attempt to do just that?

Sayer Ji, Contributor
Activist Post

New research published this week in the journal Heart has confirmed the findings of two controversial studies on calcium supplementation and heart attack risk published in the British Medical Journal last year, and which found a 24-27% increased risk of heart attack for those who took 500 mg of elemental calcium a day.[1] [2]

The results of this newest review, involving 24,000 people between the ages of 35 and 64, were even more alarming. Those participants who took a regular calcium supplement increased their risk of having a heart attack by 86% versus those who took no calcium supplements at all...

“When men attempt to amass such stupendous capital as will enable them to suppress competition, control prices, and establish a monopoly, they know the purpose of their acts. Men do not do such things without having it clearly in mind.” -President William Taft, 1911, Message of the President of the United States: communicated to the two houses of Congress at the beginning of the second session, Sixty-second Congress, December 5, 1911, on the anti-trust statute

Independent journalist George Mapp was the first to publicly break the story of alleged weapon dealer Viktor Bout's imminent transfer to Florence Colorado's Super Maximum security prison (dubbed Supermax) to be canceled.

Judge Shira A. Scheindlin — whom also presided over the Viktor Bout trial and sentenced him to 25 years — now sentenced Andrew Smulian who earlier pled guilty to participating in FARC weapon deal to 5 years.

Smulian will be able to deduct that time from his 60 month sentence and will be a free man in about 10 months.

After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old entrepreneur had finally passed out. A few hours of sleep would help with the day ahead.

But unlike most people working at AOL's Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He'd been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company's food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over.

An honor student in Texas was thrown in jail after she missed too many classes at her high school.

A judge issued Diane Tran, 17, a summons Wednesday for her excessive truancy after she missed class. She was arrested in open court.

Last month, Tran was issued a warning by the judge for missing school.

Tran said she works both full-time and part-time jobs, in addition to taking advanced and college level courses.

The scene on opening day of the now renown (previously secretive) Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly Virginia on May 31st might actually feel surreal as activists and members of the alternative media converge on the property line of the Westfields Marriott to document the event as over 130 of the worlds most predominant businessmen, financiers, and oligarchs gather behind closed doors to discuss the future of the planet amongst themselves.

In fact, the meeting will be the 60th annual meeting of the Bilderburgers and some of the most predominant alternative members in the world will be on location to try and grab their shot at exposing the elites agenda and gain explicit intel on the attendees, topics, and highlights of the meeting.

Mitch Stoltz
EFF

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet...

Stephen Lendman, Contributor
Activist Post

Destructive neoliberal mandates harm US and European societies. Canada's conservative government force-feeds similar policies.

They include wage and benefit cuts, less social spending, privatization of state resources, mass layoffs, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and super-rich elites, and harsh crackdowns against resisters.

It's also about sharply hiking college tuition fees, student anger, and criminalizing public responses...

Warning to all men who are considering using Propecia to treat their male pattern baldness: it causes sexual dysfunction in nearly all users and this is often PERMANENT!

The alternative, Rogaine, is not much better and carries a risk of causing skin problems, dark circles and accelerated aging. Fortunately, there IS a natural (and much safer) alternative.

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

In an attempt to get more money from the state, a middle school and high school in Texas are implementing a program in which student IDs will be outfitted with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in order to track their movements around school.

As is so often done when it comes to surveillance technology, this is being sold to us as something for our own good and the good of our children. This is identical to how the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is pushing their ludicrously unconstitutional license plate surveillance program...

Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post

Thanks to Posse Comitatus, the US military are forbidden from responding on the streets of America whenever the whim is announced.

The Posse Comitatus Act, Section 1385, states that only under “circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress” can a military presence on American streets be permitted.

Yet, if the Defense Department has their way, a new authorization act will give them the power to order the armed forces to be used against the American public...

In looking at and assessing the economic paradigm of John Maynard Keynes — a man himself fixated on aggregates — we must look at the aggregate of his thought, and the aggregate of his ideology.

Keynes was not just an economist. Between 1937 and 1944 he served as the head of the Eugenics Society and once called eugenics ”the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.” And Keynes, we should add, understood that economics was a branch of sociology. So let’s be clear: Keynes thought eugenics was more important, more significant, and more genuine than economics.

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

Since the violence in Syria first broke out, Syrian President Bashar al Assad stated that the attacks focused on civilians were the work of foreign agents and terrorists, an assertion which the Western media regularly mocked.

I have repeatedly pointed out that large sections of the opposition, such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), are nothing more than terrorists, evidenced by their willingness to brag about carrying out terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, the reality of terrorist activity in Syria has been nothing short of blatant for months now and the Western rhetoric dating back to over a year ago completely glosses over these facts.

Earlier this year we witnessed a massive pro-Assad demonstration in Damascus which focused on protesting the “one-year conspiracy” to overthrow the Assad government, something which the Western media chose to ignore, for obvious reasons...

It didn’t occur to me that the six-foot fence around the perimeter was meant to keep me in. That is, until the day I decided to leave.

Fed up with being kicked around the schoolyard, I decided to do what any intelligent human being would do: go home. I soon learned this wasn’t a viable option for a sixth grader.

Looking back, it’s not real clear who was surprised the most by the situation — the school authorities at my assumption that I would actually leave, or me, at the revelation I had no choice in the matter. Apparently there were laws. Huh, who knew?

The view of the playground fence from the jungle gym was never quite the same.

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere.

The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy.

Hillary Clinton, another in a long line of unqualified Secretaries of State, informed “governments around the world: we are watching, and we are holding you accountable,” only we are not holding ourselves accountable or Washington’s allies like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the NATO puppets.

Paul Watson welcomes Charlie Skelton, reporter for The Guardian to discuss the upcoming Bilderberg Conference in Chantilly, Virginia.
Bilderberg 2012 is set to be the scene of the biggest ever protest against the secretive organization. Listed below are the details and meet-up times for what promises to be a momentous occasion.

While the global elite are still clinging to the hope that the euro single currency can survive a Greek exit that now looks inevitable, some members of the financial aristocracy have already given up on the entire eurozone altogether.

In an article for the Financial Times entitled, We must break up the failing euro, former Bilderberg attendee Sir Martin Jacomb concedes that all efforts to rescue the euro have been in vain, calling for "all 17 members to decide at once to revert to national currencies."

Why are so many members of the U.S. Armed Forces committing suicide. Neither the officers,noncoms or enlisted seem to have a clue!

An Army general has retracted comments he made earlier this week on his official blog after he had attended the memorial service of a soldier who committed suicide in front of his twin 6-year-old daughters.

At the week’s start, Pittard wrote on his “Thoughts while working out in the gym” blog on the post’s official site: “I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.”

The entry has since been scrubbed.

This is the Appendix to Ron Paul’s book, Liberty Defined.

1. Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government.

2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.

Ontario students have pledged to take to the streets in solidarity with their protesting fellows in Montreal and other cities of Quebec. The students are defying emergency laws the authorities are imposing to curb down the wave of dissent.

Students in Quebec have been protesting for more than 100 days now, with violent clashes between police and protesters reported on several occasions. The latest demo on Wednesday night resulted in a police crackdown on demonstrators.

About 700 people were detained throughout the province, which pushed the total number of detentions over the months over 2,500. That is at least five times more than during the 1970 crisis, when martial law was declared in Quebec in response to the actions of radical nationalists.

The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Santayana’s famous dictum about those who forget history being condemned to relieve it is nowhere better observed than in the mountains of Afghanistan.
One of my favorite artists was the superb Victorian painter Lady Jane Butler who captured in oil the military triumphs and tragedies of the British Empire.

Her haunting painting, "The Retreat from Kabul, (also known as "Remnants of an Army,") shows the sole survivor of a British army of 16,500 during the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842, Dr. William Brydon, struggling out of Afghanistan. All the rest of the British occupation force were killed by Afghan tribesmen after a futile attempt to garrison Kabul.

This gripping painting should have hung over the NATO summit meeting last week in Chicago to remind the US and its allies that Afghanistan remains "the graveyard of empires."

The new G8 scheme to help African farmers does nothing to address the problems that are at the core of hunger and malnutrition. More likely, it will serve only to further poverty and inequality across the continent. The elites of the first world work together with the elites of the third world in the name of helping peasant farmers, but it nobody consults the peasant farmers themselves. Perhaps Obama could spend a week or two living with his Kenyan family members to find out what they actually want and need before he suggests another program to “help” the people of Africa.

The Treasury Department released its semi-annual FX Report, which they say shows that no country in the world is at present manipulating currency and that is including China. This would be laughable if the American taxpayer had not paid for the report. The one thing that is confirmed is that the Chinese have established significant control over the US Treasury Department.

I hope we can all remember last week when the traitor Timothy Geithner cleared the way for the Chinese government to buy US Treasury Bonds directly from the US Treasury, which no other country in the history of our nation has been allowed to do. These are not acts of incompetence, but rather blatant acts of treason against the people of the United States.

Obama, now has formed an agency to directly Bail out the Comex and London exchange for all the derivative bets of Wall Street. It is a back door bail out of the banks and makes sure the manipulation of metals continue, as I see it.

Ted Butler directly accuses the CFTC of lying and being complicit in the manipulation of silver. He says it is easy to prove. He is calling for the resignation of the whole CFTC board.

Cannes 2012: 'The Anti-Semite' Is Banned From Cannes Marketplace

Early Friday, marketplace organizers cancelled screenings of "The Anti-Semite," which reportedly includes scenes in which Dieudonne dresses as a Nazi, and others that mock the Auschwitz concentration camp. Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson also reportedly appears in the film as himself.

"Anti-Semitism has no place at Cannes, and we welcome the clear statement to that effect from the organizers of the film festival," said Abraham H. Foxman

Breathe by Pink Floyd and then Time. Live from London
Run Rabbit run, some psychedelics, and the clock ticking.
Was there a better Pink Floyd song? Not for me. Time is awesome.
"Breathe,Breathe in the Air, don't be afraid to care."
"And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to Run, you missed the starting Gun."
"Home, Home again. I like to be here when I can."
"Calls the faithful to their knees, to hear the Softly spoken magic spells"
Oh, those Words. Then Just before the Ladies make you cry.
"I am not frightened of Dying. Anytime will do, I don't mind.
Why should I be frightened of Dying? There's' no reason for it.
You've got to go Sometime." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vMoMXNbfz0
Dark Side of the Moon is still Fresh 40 years later.
Music like this opened a young man's mind as he was growing up.
I nominate Dark Side of the Moon for the best album of all Time.

55 year old Maurice Johnston lives in Boston, by way of Cleveland. He has a Masters Degree in Plasma Physics from Dartmouth College, and a masters in Electrical Engineering and acoustics from Purdue University. He's worked over 10 years at Lockheed Aerospace & Aerodyne Research Corp. Maurice has taught in Science and physics, and took care of both his parents in their time of need. Maurice is very well spoken, (he sounds like Obama) and is very kind, so why is Maurice homeless.....

Warning to all men who are considering using Propecia to treat their male pattern baldness: it causes sexual dysfunction in nearly all users and this is often PERMANENT! The alternative, Rogaine, is not much better and carries a risk of causing skin problems, dark circles and accelerated aging. Fortunately, there IS a natural (and much safer) alternative.

The Bankia group, a Spanish lender nationalized earlier this month, will seek 19-billion euros (US$23.8-billion) of government funds as it provisions against real estate and non-property loans.

The group will ask the state’s bank rescue fund to provide the money by buying shares in its parent company, Banco Financiero y de Ahorros, it said in a filing to regulators yesterday after a meeting of the board of Bankia SA, its listed arm. The group needs a further 4 billion euros to cover real estate on top of provisions already ordered by the government, and 5.5-billion euros for the rest of its loan book, it said.

When I heard about three police offers who wound up using a taser on a pregnant woman in Seattle, my first thought was that the story was some kind of a joke. Cops tasering a pregnant woman? In some sort of attempt to subdue her? For real?! You gotta be kidding me.

Are Miami Beach Police planning to arrest 2,000 people during the notorious Memorial Day weekend parties on South Beach? As in they’ve actually set a quota regardless of whether or not 2,000 deserve to be arrested. To put that in prospective, the record number of arrests over Memorial Day weekend ever in Miami Beach was just over 1,000.

The NATO summit put on display how we can and do conjure up foreign and domestic threats to justify government control of our society. For it is fear that justifies not just our obscene military spending, but more importantly, the official violation of our civil and constitutional rights and the concession of political power to corporations.

This fear is then used to justify a growing military alliance even when there is no credible threat. It is the basis for the militarization of our police force, the erosion of our civil liberties and globalization of our economy.

This fear arises because the United States, more than any other country, still lives in the shadow of the Cold War. The culture of fear created at that time and continuing to this day frames our every government action and our federal spending of almost $1 trillion per year on our "security." The NATO summit is the celebration of that culture of fear and constitutes a show of force.

The chief of Miami Beach Police is insisting that his officers do not have a 2,000-arrest quota this Memorial Day weekend. But the department’s union vice president tells Riptide that he witnessed a major announce the quota at an officer roll call — and that his department has such quotas every year during the predominantly-black party weekend on South Beach.
“It’s racial profiling,” says Det. Gustavo Sanchez, “and it’s against our operating procedure.”

Eighteen months on, it is still too early to judge Egypt’s January 25th revolution. This was a unique revolution, transforming Egyptians from spectators into true players, who are now actively involved in shaping their country. But the revolution has not changed Egypt’s old political dynamic.

What is striking about Egyptian history, both ancient and contemporary, is how the country has been governed. All Egypt’s rulers, natives and foreigners, have shared an authoritarian mindset.

However, while Bill Clinton notoriously "didn't inhale" at Oxford, Mr Obama took an altogether more enthusiastic approach to smoking marijuana in his youth, according to a new biography.

As a secondary school pupil in Honolulu, Hawaii, in the late 1970s, Mr Obama is said to have been a member of the "Choom Gang", a group of boys who played basketball and choomed, or smoked dope.

The butler, identified as Paolo Gabriele, 40, was held by gendarmes after a special commission of three top senior cardinals had been appointed by the Pope to identify the source of the leaks which have caused severe embarrassment.

Mr Gabriele, who has been at the Pope’s side for six years, is one of the German born pontiff’s closest members of his inner circle which totals just four lay people and four nuns. Vatican sources said the Pope had been ''deeply pained and struck'' by the arrest of the man who has been a constant presence at his side

With his voice occasionally breaking with emotion, Mr Biden recounted the phone call in December 1972, telling the 29-year-old senator that his wife Neilia and one-year-old daughter had been killed in a car crash while Christmas shopping.

"And just like you guys know by the tone of the phone call, you just knew," he said. "You just felt it in your bones: Something bad happened."

As he left the US Capitol building to identify the bodies and tend to his two young sons, who were critically injured in hospital, he recalled looking up at the building's cavernous rotunda.

Activist Post

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president of Vatican's bank Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), reportedly resigned Thursday after a vote of no confidence by the bank's board.

No details were given other than that Tedeschi "failed to meet some highly important functions" and that he was removed for "for dereliction of duty."

Tedeschi was tapped to run the bank in 2003 about twenty years after its involvement in one of Italy's largest banking fraud cases in history...

TEPCO says they don't know what to do if Reactor 4 collapses, instead declaring it safe from earthquakes after finding it leaning and with a bulged exterior wall.

Waukesha County Wisconsin has become known as America’s most fraudulent election battleground since April 5, 2012 when the State of Wisconsin held what would become a rigged election for Supreme Court Justice.

It was announced on election day that Democrat challenger, Joane Kloppenburg, won a narrow victory. This became a national sensation when the day after the election Waukesha County Clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, Announced the discovery of an eye popping unsealed and previously uncounted 7500 votes for the incumbent Republican, David Prosser which altered the outcome of the election. The Waukesha County Board Of Supervisors has issued an ultimatum to the County Clerk to diqualify herself from the Governor’s Recall election next week or resign.

Paul Craig Roberts
Activist Post

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst – Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere.

The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogeyman-in-the-making – China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy.

Hillary Clinton, another in a long line of unqualified Secretaries of State, informed “governments around the world: we are watching, and we are holding you accountable,” only we are not holding ourselves accountable or Washington’s allies like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the NATO puppets...

The NATO summit held in Chicago last weekend reflects everything that is wrong with our society.
The NATO summit put on display how we can and do conjure up foreign and domestic threats to justify government control of our society. For it is fear that justifies not just our obscene military spending, but more importantly, the official violation of our civil and constitutional rights and the concession of political power to corporations.

Audit the Fed (H.R. 459) is now scheduled for a vote this July in the U.S. House of Representatives!

New TEPCO estimates calculate the amount of Cesium leaked from Fukushima is 24 times higher than previously thought and equal to 4,023 Hiroshima bombs.

Those Spanish bonds are far worse than you thought. Also The Rule Of Law is to be cancelled in Spanish bankruptcy court.

The regional and local governments guaranteed debt for home builders that went bust. Think Las Vegas.

Uri Avnery argues that the longstanding strategic aim of Zionism and Israel - a Jews-only state in all of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and the prevention of an Arab Palestinian state - is a pipe dream and that Israelis has better formulate a new national aim based on peace and coexistence.

”In a bird’s eye view, the Zionist-Israeli policy looks like a river striving towards the sea. When it meets an obstacle, it goes around it. The path deviates to the right and to the left, sometimes even going backwards. But it perseveres with a wondrous determination towards its goal.

“The guiding principle was to accept every compromise that gives us what we can get at any stage, but never let the final aim out of our sight.

“This policy allows us to compromise about everything, except one: an Arab Palestinian state that would confirm the existence of an Arab Palestinian people.”

Ziad El-Hady looks at how government, elite and corporate interests shape media reports of international and domestic events, trivializing and sensationalizing news, corrupting our understanding of the world and reinforcing prejudice and bigotry.

“The corporate race for mass media consumption is a phenomenon that we as citizens pay the price for, both financially and psychologically, producing news that is generally negative, superficial and punchy; hardly ever constructive, beneficial or thought provoking.”

We can play the denial game all day long and pretend that, because the mainstream media is not reporting on it, there is no threat, but the facts are quite clear.

This is, without a doubt, the most immediate threat faced by the world. It’s so serious, in fact, that the Japanese government has considered and put into place evacuation plans for the whole of Tokyo – some 40 million people. Reports are also emerging that suggest a collapse of the spent fuel pools would be so serious that the entire country of Japan may have to be evacuated. The entire country – that’s 125 million refugees that will cause an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.

I was outside all the time when I was a kid but never found dead bees. Now I find them almost every time I step out into the garden. Colony Collapse Disorder is a real environmental threat and now Monsanto is hunting down whistleblowers who expose the fact that their herbicides are causing it.

What do the SAT, the Kellogg Company, Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler all have in common? They are all connected by the practice of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century.

From 1904 until shortly after the close of WWII, the United States aggressively engaged in a scientific quest to create a master race. This radical new science, dubbed “eugenics” by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, called for selective breeding between those deemed “fit” for existence (i.e. generally those of Nordic descent), with sterilization, marriage prohibition and even euthanasia aimed at those deemed “unfit.”

Internet Censorship advocates in Congress continue their fight against the Constitution by creating a disguise for the recent House of Representatives-passed CISPA, under the name of Cybersecurity Act 2012, or S. 2105 in the Senate.

The vote on the Cybersecurity Act is rumored to be occurring between May 28th, 2012, and June 1st, 2012, so action needs to be taken as soon as possible, as next week is a recess week for Congress. Any updates on this information will be posted here.

Enable Thorium & Molten Salt Technology: Grant the US both Energy and High-Tech Independence. Our Thorium regulations severely restrict Thorium and Rare Earth development. Until we enable Thorium in the US, High-Tech Manufacturing dependent on Rare Earths will remain impossible here.

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

Past slavery was largely based on force (thus was much more obvious), but modern-day slavery is actually more widespread because global slave masters use all of the scientific tools at their disposal to win hearts and control minds, convincing us that our hands and feet are free, so we must be living self-directed lives.

1. Media and Intelligence - Information is knowledge and knowledge is power -- this is where it all starts.

2. Health and Agriculture - Why do tyrannical systems always move to declare methods of independence such as farming, vitamins, raw milk, and natural medication like cannabis as underground contraband systems that threaten the health of society?

First the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed that their research confirms Japanese milk and vegetables are safe for human consumption. They reported that radiation levels are below cancer-causing levels.

Here is a short list of the half-life of five of the radioactive isotopes in the air, food and water that are poisoning us and children:

- Cesium 137: 30 years
- Plutonium 239: 24,000 years
- Strontium 90: 29 years [mimics calcium in the body]
- Uranium 235: 700-million years
- Iodine 131: 8 days [absorbed into the thyroid and gives heavy radiation dose]

Here in the US, the EnviroReporter, through their Inspector Alert nuclear radiation monitor, conducted over 1,500 radiation tests after a severe storm in Southern California. The findings were astounding.

The radiation levels were the highest ever seen; at 506% above normal background levels.

My next sentence is one which, for much of the past year, I never considered possible I would write. There is a real possibility that the London Olympics will not sell out.

I'm not just talking about football tickets, which the organisers were always going to struggle to persuade enough people to buy - I'm talking about a number of other key Olympic sports, like weightlifting, beach volleyball, boxing and even basketball.

Ever wonder how many of your tax dollars are going to the federal government censoring music blogs based on no real evidence, but just the say so of the RIAA and MPAA?

In this episode, Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss self-reporting financial crimes and private equity ripping teeth out of four year olds for profit. In the second half of the show Max talks to Teri Buhl about JP Morgan's Wells Notice and what bad news that could mean to the troubled bank's fortunes.

Nations that carry out cybercrimes and wreak online havoc pose the greatest threat to the future of the internet, the chairman of Google has warned.

The real crash will come from the "government's phony cure" for the economic troubles that have swept our nation, Schiff details in his new book The Real Crash: How To Save Yourself And Your Country.
Video Attached.

(NaturalNews) It's not just Fukushima, though that may be enough. The northern hemisphere especially had been inundated with radioactive fallout by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing from 1950 to 1963. The Nevada testing area alone produced 1200 nuclear explosions that emitted radioactive particles across the USA.

The Chernobyl incident in 1986 affected hundreds of thousands throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. The boom in nuclear reactor power plants had already started and was constantly increasing, along with considerable radiation leaking.

A 1996 international court interpretation of international treaties opened the door for widespread use of depleted uranium (DU) that had been prohibited for use as ammunition projectiles that could pierce armor. Tons of DU ammunition has been used in Bosnia and the Mideast since, leaving a radioactive mess that will last for life times.

Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton says that the US government is engaged in propaganda wars with their own operatives – al-Qaeda.

Clinton sat with Admiral Bill McRaven, head of US Special Operations Command, at a conference that featured more than 100 US and international special operations commanders.

On Yemeni tribal websites, the US government seeks to replace anti-American adverts. Apparently al-Qaeda has been bragging about their impact on Yemen...

At the Group of 8 (G8) meetings this past weekend, President Obama and the leaders of the rest of the world's richest nations abandoned their governments' previous commitments to donate $7.3 billion a year to end hunger in Africa, after disbursing only 58 percent of the total pledge of $22 billion and giving less than 6 percent in new money they pledged three years ago.

Instead, rich nations will leave the problem in the hands of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition where private corporations will invest $3 billion over 10 years -- Monsanto has committed $50 million -- beginning in three countries, Tanzania, Ghana and Ethiopia.