From the Trenches World Report

Naked Capitalism

Readers have often been using the term “neofeudalism” to describe the outlines of the new economic order, in which the uber wealthy and a thin cadre of their advisors, managers, and other elite professionals do well, with a network of less lofty managers helping oversee and orchestrate the provision of services to the broad base of the public, and they struggle to eke out a meager existence.

Debt appears to be the “one ring that rules them all” of this emerging order. And if that is the case, it’s likely to be much more like the old sharecropper system of the post Civil War era, where poor whites and blacks were kept on a debt treadmill that turned them into slaves in all but name. As Matt Stoller wrote in 2010:   Continue reading “The Rise of an American Debtcropper System for the Young”

The Organic Prepper

It looks like the days of trading half of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for half of your best friend’s ham sandwich may soon be over if the federal government has anything to do with it.

A Richmond, Virginia mother received the following note, telling her not to pack a lunch for her pre-school age child.   Continue reading “Brown Bag Ban: Fed Gov Tells Preschool Parents No Lunch From Home Without a Doctor’s Note”

Mirror

Homeless people will be able to move into shipping containers in a former scrap metal yard in a bid to tackle a city’s housing shortage.

The converted containers will provide temporary homes for a period of five years for 36 men and women with a history of homelessness.

Six containers are due to arrive in the New England Quarter of Brighton, East Sussex, today with a further 30 arriving by the end of the week.   Continue reading “UK: Homeless to live in shipping containers for up to five years in bid to tackle housing shortage”

Counter Punch – by ZIAD ABBAS

Although I have been living far from Palestine for a few years and I am now in my forties, I still have nightmares about the Israeli army invading my house when I was a child and about the first time I was tortured. This is the reality most Palestinian former prisoners live with for the rest of our lives.

When I was a child, friends my age who were arrested before me said they “saw the stars at noon.” This was a saying we had. You can’t see the stars at noon when the sun is shining. But when children are under torture, especially when they are beaten in the head, they see a flash, even when they are blindfolded. This is what we called seeing the stars at noon.   Continue reading “Torturing and Jailing Palestinian Children”

AmmoLand

Charlotte, NC –-(Ammoland.com)-  In October of 2009, at the U.N. General Assembly, the Obama administration reversed the positions of the two previous administrations and voted for the United States to participate in negotiating the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.

On September 25, 2013, Obama’s designs on international gun control were realized, as Secretary of State John Kerry signed the ATT on behalf of the Obama administration.   Continue reading “U.S. Senate & House Send Letters Saying ‘NO’ to U.N. Arms Trade Treaty”

Nunez Report

In his four-day trip to Tehran, Russian Air Force Chief Gen. Viktor Bondarev and his hosts, Brig. Gen. Hassan Shasafi and other senior Iranian military chiefs, laid the groundwork for a series of agreements to upgrade their military ties to a level unprecedented in their past relations. DEBKAfile’s military and Iranian sources report that Iran is deliberately accentuating those ties as a message to the Western powers that if they give the Islamic Republic a hard time over its nuclear program, it will go all the way to a full-dress defense pact with Russia.   Continue reading “Russia and Iran expanding military cooperation and arms trade”

MassPrivateI

Every smartphone these days comes equipped with a WiFi card. When the card is on and looking for networks to join, it’s detectable by local routers. In your home, the router connects to your device, and then voila — you have the Internet on your phone. But in a retail environment, other in-store equipment can pick up your WiFi card, learn your device’s unique ID number and use it to keep tabs on that device over time as you move through the store.   Continue reading “How stores are using your phone’s WiFi to track you”

MassPrivateI

The FBI is spending billions of dollars to construct a ‘Next Generation Identification’ biometrics system, but recent events show that the technology isn’t ready for primetime application.

In 2011The FBI announced the will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.     Continue reading “The FBI is spending billions of dollars to construct a giant biometrics warehouse”

Washington’s Blog

Charts Show that U.S. Policy Has Increased Terror Attacks

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Global Terrorism Database – part of a joint government-university program on terrorism –  is hosted at the University of Maryland.

START is the most comprehensive open source terrorism database, which can be viewed by journalists and civilians lacking national security clearance.   Continue reading “U.S. “War On Terror” Has INCREASED Terrorism”

Lew Rockwell – by Ron Paul

Washington, DC, Wall Street, and central bankers around the world rejoiced this week as Congress came to an agreement to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling. The latest spending-and-debt deal was negotiated by Congressional leaders behind closed doors, and was rushed through Congress before most members had time to read it. Now that the bill is passed, we can see that it is a victory for the political class and special interests, but a defeat for the American people.   Continue reading “Debt Ceiling Deal: DC Wins, Americans Lose”

RT News

The US Supreme Court announced Monday that it will consider a challenge from a Florida man who was ruled mentally disabled in 1992 but was later found competent enough to be executed after scoring the state minimum on an IQ test.

The high court will test whether Florida used a lawful process to determine if convicted murderer Freddie Lee Hall, who is awaiting execution pending the appeals process, was in fact not mentally disabled.    Continue reading “Supreme Court will hear challenge to IQ threshold for death penalty”

RT News

CryptoSeal, a virtual private network that has guaranteed its customers would be insulated from internet surveillance, announced that it will close down rather than risk exposure to government monitoring and the costly fees that accompany compliance.

CryptoSeal issued a Monday statement indicating that the company will still offer its VPN for businesses, but its customer-only service will no longer be available. For a small fee, an individual user can establish their own encrypted internet connection through a VPN service and reroute all of their traffic through that point.   Continue reading “CryptoSeal VPN service opts to close down rather than grant NSA access”

RT News

A unique space cannon developed for Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has successfully test-fired on Earth in preparation for a 2014 mission. During its upcoming journey into space, the cannon will blast an asteroid and mine samples of its soil.

The test took place in the Japanese prefecture of Gifu, paving the way for the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to extract soil samples from the asteroid, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Monday.    Continue reading “Space cannon ready: Japan to shoot asteroid for samples in 2014 mission”

It would seem they want more cannon fodder rather than decision makers.

New York Times – by Alan Blinder

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. — When Sarah Short arrived at Tennessee Technological University this summer, she had mapped out her four years of undergraduate study and well beyond: an affordable nursing degree and a commission as an Army officer.   Continue reading “R.O.T.C. Making Cuts to Expand Recruiting”

The Guardian – by Pat Lewis

Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the US Senate committee charged with holding the intelligence establishment to account, declared on Monday that the National Security Agency’s mass collection of phone records is “not surveillance” and should be maintained as an essential tool to combat terrorism.

Feinstein made the case for retaining the program, which routinely collects and stores the phone records millions of Americans, in an op-ed for USA Today, in which she wrote that the NSA‘s work had been “effective in helping to prevent terrorist plots against the US and our allies”.   Continue reading “Feinstein defends NSA data collection and insists program is ‘not surveillance’”