The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. – Benjamin Franklin
– Russia Evacuates More Nationals from Syria (RIA Novosti, , Feb. 20, 2013):
MOSCOW – A Russian Emergencies Ministry aircraft has evacuated more Russians and nationals of other former Soviet republics from war-stricken Syria, the ministry reported Wednesday.
“An [Ilyushin] Il-62 [Classic] plane has landed in Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport,” a ministry spokesman told RIA Novosti.
– ‘Two-year conflict leading to mutual destruction,’ Russia warns Syria (Al Arabiya News, Feb 20, 2013):
Russia on Wednesday urged the regime and rebels in Syria to swiftly halt their almost two-year conflict, warning that seeking a military settlement risked leading to mutual destruction.
“It’s time to end this two-year conflict,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after a meeting with Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi and other top Arab diplomats.
“Neither side can allow itself to bet on a military settlement as this is a path to nowhere, a path to mutual destruction,” he said.
Read moreRussia Warns Syria: ‘Two-Year Conflict Leading To Mutual Destruction’
– Pentagon grounds F-35 fleet after engine crack found (CBS News, Feb 22, 2013):
The Pentagon on Friday grounded its fleet of F-35 fighter jets after discovering a cracked engine blade in one plane.
The problem was discovered during what the Pentagon called a routine inspection at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., of an F-35A, the Air Force version of the sleek new plane.
The Navy and the Marine Corps are buying other versions of the F-35, which is intended to replace older fighters like the Air Force F-16 and the Navy F/A-18.
…
– 60 million in path of winter storm (CNN, Feb 22, 2013):
A massive winter storm spanning 20 states dumped more than a foot of snow in some places Thursday and brought life to a standstill in parts of the central United States.About 60 million people — 20% of the U.S. population — were under winter weather warnings, watches and advisories in the 750,000 square miles affected.
Read moreUS: 60 Million People In Path Of Monster Winter Storm
From the article:
“If history is any guide, storing gold abroad is critical.”
Flashback:
– Government Cracks Safe-Deposit Boxes
– James G. Rickards of Omnis Inc.: Get Your Gold Out Of The Banking System
– RED ALERT: World’s Biggest Gold Storage Company Dumps US Citizens (Sovereign Man, Feb 22, 2013):
ViaMat, a Swiss logistics company that has been safeguarding precious metals since 1945, is literally the gold standard in secure storage.
They have vaults from Switzerland to Hong Kong to Dubai, and they count among their clients some of the largest mining companies in the world. They know what they’re doing.
And now they’re dumping US citizens.
Read moreRED ALERT: World’s Biggest Gold Storage Company Dumps US Citizens
– Farewell AAA: Moody’s Downgrades The UK From AAA To Aa1 (ZeroHedge, Feb 22, 2013):
Just the headline for now:
- MOODY’S DOWNGRADES UK’S GOVERNMENT BOND RATING TO Aa1 FROM AAA
Someone must have clued Moody’s on the fact that the UK is about to have its very own Goldman banker, which means consolidated debt/GDP will soon need four digits. In other news, every lawyer in the UK is now celebrating because come Monday Moody’s will be sued to smithereens.
Cable not happy as it tests 31 month lows…
Full report below:
Read moreFarewell Eng£AAAnd: Moody’s Downgrades UK’s Credit Rating From AAA To Aa1
Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com
– Scorecard: How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost? (Washington’s Blog, Feb 21, 2013):
How Many Constitutional Freedoms Do We Still Have?
Preface: While a lot of people talk about the loss of our Constitutional liberties, people usually speak in a vague, generalized manner … or focus on only one issue and ignore the rest.
This post explains the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution – and provides a scorecard on the extent of the loss of each right.
Read moreScorecard: How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost?
– U.S. drone strikes up sharply in Afghanistan (Los Angeles Times, Feb 21, 2013):
Their use rose 72% last year compared with 2011, and the trend is likely to continue as troops withdraw. But while the aircraft reduce risks to U.S. forces, mistakes are deadly for civilians.
KABUL, Afghanistan — One morning recently, a teenager named Bacha Zarina was collecting firewood on her family’s small farm in eastern Afghanistan. About 30 yards away, as family members recall, two Taliban commanders stood outside a house.
A missile screamed down from the sky, killing the two men instantly. Two chunks of shrapnel flew at Bacha Zarina and lodged in her left side.
– Nationalized Bankia To Post Largest Corporate Loss In Spanish History (ZeroHedge, Feb 21, 2013):
Just in case anyone is confused about how fixed Europe is, insolvent Spanish TBTF megabank, which F’ed last year and had to be bailed out by the government, will post earnings (and in this case we use the term very loosely) next week at which time it will report the biggest corporate loss in Spanish history. From Telegraph: “On Thursday Bankia will report full-year earnings, including a €12.6bn provision taken at the end of last year. The writedown is a result of the lender moving assets into Spain’s “bad bank” at heavy discounts. Bankia, which is seen as a symbol of Spain’s financial woes, was created through the merger of seven smaller savings banks before being listed on Madrid’s stock exchange. When the company failed, hundreds of thousands of people who had been sold shares saw their savings wiped out. The collapse forced Spain to ask Europe for a bailout for its banking sector, which has meant the lender is subject to tight controls. Bankia is trying to sell its 12pc stake in International Consolidated Airlines Group, the parent company of British Airways, which is valued at about £510m, and 5.3pc of the power company Iberdrola, which is worth about €1.24bn.”
Read moreNationalized Bankia To Post Largest Corporate Loss In Spanish History
– European “Democracy” Full Frontal – EU Parliament Head Tells Italians Not To Vote For Silvio (ZeroHedge, Feb 21, 2013):
To say that Germany does not love Silvio Berlusconi would be an understatement. But not even we thought European “democracy” would stoop so low as to tell Italians not to bring Bunga back or else. As Reuters reports, the German president of the European Parliament, once compared to a Nazi concentration camp guard by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, warned Italians on Thursday not to back the scandal-ridden media tycoon at the ballot box. Martin Schulz is the latest in a line of German politicians to express fears about a possible Berlusconi comeback largely due to worries he will halt Rome’s reform drive that has helped to lift investor confidence in the euro zone. “Silvio Berlusconi has already sent Italy into a tailspin with irresponsible behavior in government and personal escapades,” Schulz was quoted as saying in German daily Bild.
Ironically, as today’s PMI data confirm, it is somewhat hypocritical of Germany to accuse Italy of anything since in the Zero-Sum mercantilist union, it is only Germany, now that France has careened off the cliff, that benefits from everyone else’s misfortune. The irony is that Germany should be rooting for Silvio – after all they need that EURUSD some 1000 pips lower to boost German exports, and when all hell breaks loose with Italian bond spread, Germany will simply inject another €500 billion in current account liquidity via Target2 (even if it means crushing PIMCO and their long Italy bond position). To pretend that anything in Europe at this moment is about solidarity is hypocrisy of the nth degree.
– America’s TBTF Bank Subsidy From Taxpayers: $83 Billion Per Year (ZeroHedge, Feb 20, 2013):
Day after day, whenever anyone challenges the TBTF banks’ scale, they are slammed down with a mutually assured destruction message that limitations would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance. So what if you were to discover, based on Bloomberg’s calculations, that the largest banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers? The stunning truth is that the top-five banks account for $64 billion of an implicit subsidy based on the ludicrous (but entirely real) logic that: The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail. Perhaps this realization will increase shareholder demands – or even political furore? The market discipline might not please executives, but it would certainly be an improvement over paying banks to put us in danger.
Read moreAmerica’s TBTF Bankster Subsidy From Taxpayers: $83 Billion Per Year
And yes, why have they searched the vehicle at NIGHT?
YouTube Added: 25.01.2013
Description:
Just skip ahead to 0:40. You see the cop rack the slide of a long gun and set it on the left side of the trunk. Then a white suited guy picks up what you can clearly see is a long gun from the right side of the trunk.
Around the same time, a guy picks up the long gun set on the left side of the trunk by the brown suited cop. The guy who picks up the gun from the left side does it in a shady way so its hard to see the gun, but you just saw a cop clearly set a gun on that left side of the trunk where the white suited guy reached in.Sandy Hook Massacre: Both Long Guns Found in Trunk of Car
http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/…Connecticut School Massacre Briefing from local police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_ubdj…4 Handguns Found In School, AR-15 Left In Car According To Several Federal And CT State Officials
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqpjJ6…
– Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year? (Bloomberg, Feb 20, 2013):
On television, in interviews and in meetings with investors, executives of the biggest U.S. banks — notably JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon — make the case that size is a competitive advantage. It helps them lower costs and vie for customers on an international scale. Limiting it, they warn, would impair profitability and weaken the country’s position in global finance.
So what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?
Read moreWhy Should U.S. Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion A Year? (Bloomberg)
– 171 Bq/Kg measured from a meal in Fukushima (Fukushima Diary, Feb 21, 2013):
Disaster measure department of Fukushima prefecture announced they measured 171 Bq/Kg from a meal. It was a meal of a person living in North part of Fukushima. It’s 430 Bq/day. The survey was conducted from September to November of 2012.
The total testees are 77 people. From the meal of the rest of 76 people, 0.074 ~ 2.5 Bq/day was measured.
– USDA Received Pathogen Warning BEFORE Deregulating GM Alfalfa (Activist Post, Feb 20, 2013):
Following a 6 year approval battle, the USDA fully deregulated Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa in January 2011. A week later, they partially deregulated GM sugar beets. This occurred despite Secretary of Agriculture’s Tom Vilsack’s knowledge of a stark warning letter by Dr. Don M. Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology, Purdue University two weeks prior, who found a link between the modified organisms and the proliferation of the new pathogen. Huber knew about its presence in Roundup Ready soy and corn and sought to hold off the GE alfalfa calling the situation an “emergency.”
Dr. Huber said (vid below) “we don’t know what it is” – it’s a new entity first noticed by veterinarians in the late ’90s, new to science. It’s not a virus, although similar, actually smaller in size and like a fungus that spreads like a virus. It’s contained in Roundup Ready (RR) and Roundup sprayed plants and feed and bizarrely affects all farmland animals often with infertility and spontaneous abortions – an inter-species syndrome that could be the first of its kind.
Read moreUSDA Received Dire Pathogen Warning BEFORE Deregulating GM Alfalfa
– Death from a swarm of tiny drones: U.S. Air Force releases terrifying video of tiny flybots that can can hover, stalk and even kill targets (Daily Mail, Feb 20, 2013):
- Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hover
- The Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefield
- They can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives ‘for precision targeting capability’
The U.S. Air Force is developing tiny unmanned drones that will fly in swarms, hover like bees, crawl like spiders and even sneak up on unsuspecting targets and execute them with lethal precision.
The Air Vehicles Directorate, a research arm of the Air Force, has released a computer-animated video outlining the the future capabilities of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs).
The project promises to revolutionize war by down-sizing the combatants.
‘MAVs will become a vital element in the ever-changing war-fighting environment and will help ensure success on the battlefield of the future,’ the narrator intones.
‘Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal – Micro Air Vehicles, enhancing the capabilities of the future war fighter.’
In other news:
– 800000 Pentagon staff face unpaid leave (Financial Times, Feb 20, 2013):
The “vast majority” of the Pentagon’s civilian personnel will be put on temporary unpaid leave if automatic spending cuts take effect on March 1, leaving 800,000 workers without pay for one day a week for more than five months.
In a letter to all US defence department employees, defence secretary Leon Panetta warned of “a serious erosion of readiness across our force” that would occur under sequestration – budget cuts worth $1.2tn over a decade under which military spending will take a big hit.
But Mr Panetta also said he was “deeply concerned” about the fate of Pentagon staff and their families. “We are doing everything possible to limit the worst effects on DoD personnel – but I regret that our flexibility within the law is extremely limited,” Mr Panetta said. Military personnel will be exempt from the automatic cuts, but civilians will be affected – and beginning in April will be subject to a one day per week furlough for 22 weeks. Mr Panetta said employees would be given 30 days’ notice before the furloughs.
…
– Pentagon awash in pink slips, preparing 800000 civilian furloughs (Washington Times, Feb 20, 2013)
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. (File photo)
– Pentagon to place 800,000 civilian workers on unpaid leave: Leon Panetta (PressTV, Feb 20, 2013):
The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced that 800,000 civilian employees are to be placed on unpaid leave if across-the-board budgets cuts take effect in March.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Congress on Wednesday that the Pentagon is to place nearly a million civilian defense employees on unpaid leave as congressionally mandated budget cuts worth USD 46 billion start on March 1.
Read moreLeon Panetta: Pentagon To Place 800,000 Civilian Workers On Unpaid Leave
– Is Your Local Police Department Using Pictures of Pregnant Women and Children for Target Practice? (Reason, Feb 19, 2013):
What if I told you police in your town could desensitize themselves to the idea of shooting a (armed) child, pregnant woman, or young mother, for just a couple of bucks? The “No More Hesitation” series from Law Enforcement Targets Inc. offers exactly that. For less than 99 cents per target, police can shoot at real-life images “designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.”Update: The marketing team at Law Enforcement Targets, Inc. sends along this helpful explanation for the “No More Hesitation” series:
“The subjects in NMH targets were chosen in order to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training. I found while speaking with officers and trainers in the law enforcement community that there is a hesitation on the part of cops when deadly force is required on subjects with atypical age, frailty or condition (one officer explaining that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty). This hesitation time may be only seconds but that is not acceptable when officers are losing their lives in these same situations. The goal of NMH is to break that stereotype on the range, regardless of how slim the chances are of encountering a real life scenario that involves a child, pregnant woman, etc. If that initial hesitation time can be cut down due to range experience, the officer and community are better served.”
Law Enforcement Targets, Inc.
The series contains seven targets in all, titled Pregnant Woman, Older Man 1, Older Man 2, Older Woman, Young Mother, Young Girl, and Little Brother. Each of the depicted subjects is armed.
I’ve reached out to Minnesota-based Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., for comment on what inspired the series and whether it’s popular with law enforcement groups (see comment added above). Considering that the company has landed $5.5 million worth of contracts with the federal government, it might also be interesting to know if these targets are being used by federal law enforcement agents.
– 20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble In The Months Ahead (Economic Collapse, Feb 20, 2013):
Is the U.S. economy about to experience a major downturn? Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of signs that economic activity in the United States is really slowing down right now. Freight volumes and freight expenditures are way down, consumer confidence has declined sharply, major retail chains all over America are closing hundreds of stores, and the “sequester” threatens to give the American people their first significant opportunity to experience what “austerity” tastes like. Gas prices are going up rapidly, corporate insiders are dumping massive amounts of stock and there are high profile corporate bankruptcies in the news almost every single day now. In many ways, what we are going through right now feels very similar to 2008 before the crash happened. Back then the warning signs of economic trouble were very obvious, but our politicians and the mainstream media insisted that everything was just fine, and the stock market was very much detached from reality. When the stock market did finally catch up with reality, it happened very, very rapidly. Sadly, most people do not appear to have learned any lessons from the crisis of 2008. Americans continue to rack up staggering amounts of debt, and Wall Street is more reckless than ever. As a society, we seem to have concluded that 2008 was just a temporary malfunction rather than an indication that our entire system was fundamentally flawed. In the end, we will pay a great price for our overconfidence and our recklessness.
Read more20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble
From the article:
“When you get 800 résumés for every job ad, you need to weed them out somehow,”said Suzanne Manzagol, executive recruiter at Cardinal Recruiting Group, which does headhunting for administrative positions at Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh and other firms in the Atlanta area.
– It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk (New York Times, Feb 19, 2013):
ATLANTA —The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.
Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh here in Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous growth in the college-educated population. Like other employers across the country, the firm hires only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that do not require college-level skills.
This prerequisite applies to everyone, including the receptionist, paralegals, administrative assistants and file clerks. Even the office “runner” — the in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents back and forth between the courthouse and the office — went to a four-year school.
“College graduates are just more career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff, the firm’s managing partner. “Going to college means they are making a real commitment to their futures. They’re not just looking for a paycheck.”
Read moreRecovery: It Takes A B.A. To Find A Job As A File Clerk
– In The Strange Case Of Gold’s Regular Morning Mugging (ZeroHedge, Feb 20, 2013)
– Unmanned Flight (National Geographic, Issue March 2013):
The Drones Come Home
Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions: patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?
At the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy sky. It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon—a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering images of a nearby highway.
– New cancer ‘wonder’ drugs trigger cancer spread to bones (Natural News, Feb 20, 2013):
Most cancer drugs are used to hopefully kill tumors and keep malignancies from spreading. Unfortunately, new research from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis raises serious concerns that Big Pharma’s highly touted class of cancer drugs known as IAP antagonists actually increases the risk of tumors spreading to bone.
Read moreCancer ‘Wonder’ Drugs Trigger Cancer Spread To Bones
