The White House moved to enforce tightened sanctions against Iran on Monday because of the country’s suspect nuclear program, freezing all property of the Central Bank of Iran, other Iranian financial institutions and the Iranian government in the United States.

The new restrictions also raised new warnings to financial institutions in other nations that they could face big penalties in the United States if they did business with Iran’s central bank.

The actions were announced in an executive order signed by President Obama that started the enforcement process for a tough measure he signed into law at the end of 2011. If fully carried out, that measure could isolate Iran’s central bank and effectively choke off the sale of Iranian oil by obstructing the means of payment. Most of the revenue for oil sales by Iran, one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, is processed by its central bank.

Tensions have been rising between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear energy program, which Iran says is peaceful and Western nations say is a cover for efforts to achieve the ability to make a nuclear weapon.

Israeli leaders, who see Iran as their most serious security threat, have hinted they may order a pre-emptive military strike on suspected nuclear targets in Iran if they conclude the sanctions are ineffective. Mr. Obama and his aides have sought to restrain Israel, stressing in recent days that sanctions and diplomatic pressure are the preferred strategy for dissuading Iran.

“There has been a steady increase in our sanctions activity, and this is part of that escalation,” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said after the latest steps were announced.

Last week an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Agency left Iran after the government refused to allow it to scrutinize elements of the nuclear program that the agency had said could be military in nature. Although the team is returning to Iran this month, Western diplomats have concluded that Iran appears intent on stonewalling.

In a statement, the White House said the executive order “re-emphasizes this administration’s message to the government of Iran — it will face ever-increasing economic and diplomatic pressure until it addresses the international community’s well-founded and well-documented concerns regarding the nature of its nuclear program.”

The timing, a Treasury Department official said, was driven by the need for the administration to lay the groundwork to effectively enforce the new sanctions law, in part by reaching out to allies and other countries to explain how the sanctions will work. Many of these countries buy oil from Iran through its central bank, and their financial institutions could be blocked from the American market if they continue to do so.

The administration has been trying to persuade Iran’s oil customers to shift to other suppliers, and countries like Saudi Arabia have promised to raise production to compensate for any shortages. But some of Iran’s biggest customers, notably China and India, have signaled their intention to keep buying Iranian oil.

The penalties against Iran’s central bank, and potentially the banks of other nations that do business with it, were unanimously passed by the Senate and attached to an annual defense bill over the administration’s objections. Mr. Obama agreed to the penalties after the White House negotiated language that would give him latitude to waive them for foreign financial institutions.

Documents accompanying the executive order said foreign financial institutions risked American sanctions “if they engage in certain significant financial transactions” with Iran’s central bank rather than “arms-length” transactions.

In a statement, the Treasury Department said the executive order “blocks all property and interests in property of the government of Iran, the Central Bank of Iran and all Iranian financial institutions (regardless of whether the financial institution is part of the government of Iran) that are in the United States, that come within the United States or that come within the possession or control of U.S. persons.” The statement did not further specify the exact properties that apply.

The Senate has proposed additional sanctions that could cripple Iran’s financial system by severing Iranian banks’ access to a global communications system that virtually all banks use to transmit data. A full vote has not yet been taken on that measure.

Advocates of stiff sanctions on Iran welcomed the administration’s announcement on Monday.

“Sanctions against Iran’s central bank, if properly implemented and enforced, will severely isolate the Iranian regime from world markets and limit the capital it has to pursue nuclear weapons and fund terrorism,” said Mark D. Wallace, president of United Against Nuclear Iran, a group in New York.

Iran’s government has denounced the sanctions as an effort to bully Iranians into surrendering their legal right to pursue nuclear energy peacefully. It has threatened to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil route, and by cutting off European buyers of Iran’s oil before a planned European Union embargo of Iran’s oil to start on July 1.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said people at an organized rally against the sanctions in Tehran on Monday chanted “Death to America” and “Death to the Zionist regime” and urged Parliament to halt oil exports to European countries.

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Two Iranian naval ships have docked in the Saudi port of Jeddah. Iranian officials say the move aims to project the country’s “power on the open seas” and “confront Iranophobia.”

The supply ship Kharg and destroyer Shaid Qandi docked on Saturday in the Red Sea port in line with orders from the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Iran’s news agency, Fars.

“This mission aims to show the power of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the open seas and to confront Iranophobia,” Fars quoted navy commander Admiral Habibollah Sayari as saying.

The commander added that the mission would last between 70 and 80 days, but did not specify its route.

Tehran says boosting its naval presence in international waters is in part motivated by the need to protect Iranian ships from Somali pirates. This is why Iranian vessels were deployed to the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden last year. In February 2011, for the first time ever, it also sent two naval vessels into the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

The rise in Iran’s naval activity comes amid a steep deterioration of its relations with the West. Its ties with Saudi Arabia are also in poor health, and have gone downhill fast since America accused Tehran of masterminding a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

As if that weren’t enough, relations between Tehran and Riyadh deteriorated further after EU countries agreed to impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports over the country’s nuclear program. In return, Tehran assured the European Union that it is not afraid of its sanctions and that the EU would be the one to suffer. However, Saudi Arabia quickly offered to make up for any shortfall in Europe’s oil supplies. Tehran, in response, called on Riyadh to reconsider, saying its move was unfriendly.

The EU oil embargo has also increased tensions in the Strait of Hormuz – a vital link for oil transit between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.  Iran has threatened to block the Strait in the past, and its determination was underlined when a senior official said Iran would “definitely” close the Strait of Hormuz if the EU oil embargo disrupted the export of crude oil.

The situation around the Strait and the Iranian nuclear program – which the country states is purely peaceful – has already prompted Washington to send squadrons of war ships into the area, while Britain and France have expressed willingness to back the US navy in opposing attempts by Iran to block the Strait.

The Israeli Deputy PM added fuel to the fire, claiming that Iran has also succeeded in building a long-range missile capable of putting the US within its reach. These latest statements are very much in line with the position of Israel and its allies who are accusing Iran of using its nuclear industry to mask plans to develop nuclear arms, a charge official Tehran has frequently and vehemently denied.

The gravity of the crisis became particularly apparent when US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Israel could attack Iran in the next few months. The attack would allegedly occur before it enters a so-called “immunity zone”, ie: before Iran has time to fortify its nuclear facilities against attack.

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The West and Russia had a major showdown Saturday Feb. 5 over the Arab League resolution calling on Bashar Assad to step down and allow the formation of a national unity government. US President Barack Obama demanded a UN stand against the Syrian president’s “relentless brutality” and a vote before the end of the day. It was put to the vote and defeated by Russian and China vetoes.

Moscow sources charged that the motion had been intended to pave the way for war in Iran and a bid to overthrow the Tehran regime.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Russians backed their hard line against the West by putting Rapid Reaction Force (aka Spetsnaz) units in Black Sea bases on the ready to set out for Syria and defend Damascus. A Cold War dimension has been injected into the Syrian crisis, which is fast descending into a sectarian war between Syria’s ruling Alawites (Shiites) and the majority Sunnis. The regional dimension is provided by pitting Iran and Syria against Turkey and the Gulf Arabs.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s earlier announcement that he would visit Damascus next Tuesday, Feb 7, with Russian Foreign Intelligence Service chief Mikhail Fradkov was meant to buy Bashar Assad another three days’ grace to polish off the opposition before a possible UN-ordered ceasefire.

However, the US and Western powers refused to wait for further Syrian excesses to take place after various sources reported earlier Saturday that Syrian troops had shelled the Homs district of Khaldiyeh, killing an estimated 350 people there and injuring some 1,500, in the worst military bombardment of nearly 11-month-old uprising,.

Syrian government officials denied the charge accusing “gunmen” of killing civilians.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources note that Moscow’s gesture to send the Russian foreign intelligence chief to Damascus alongside the foreign minister is supported additionally by the presence in the Syrian port of Tartus of Russia’s only aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov with two destroyers and a marine force.

Aside from a few Turkish brigades strung out along the Syrian border, the West maintains no troops on in the vicinity of Syria since the American military withdrew from Iraq last December.

The United States presented a tough front at the UN Security Council Saturday, with President Obama insisting that the council vote on a Arab League text without further delay or changes to accommodate Moscow and that its president step down over his “unspeakable assault” on Homs.

The hard lines taken by Washington and Moscow over the Syrian crisis produced a harsh showdown over the “Arab Spring” per se, which Russian has been building up to since NATO helped Libyan rebels overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who runs for his third term as president in a month’s time, and President Dmitry Medvedev appear to have determined, even at the price of military intervention, not to let NATO and Arab states repeat the Libyan exercise in Damascus. The gauntlet they threw down was picked up by President Obama Saturday. If the Russians continue to obstruct the US, European and Arab role in backing the Arab revolt and the Muslim Brotherhood, The United States, the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs are likely to redouble their efforts to unseat Bashar Assad.

Source.

How to Become a Serf

Man is a pathetic creature; a brute trying to be god but traveling in the wrong direction.

Educational systems now train workers to fulfill the needs of companies. A society in which people exist for the sake of companies is a society enslaved. But there’s a deep problem with the notion that education should equal vocational training. To paraphrase a very famous and renowned person, man does not live by work alone. Indeed, the knowledge and skills needed to earn a living in a capitalist industrial economy are of little use in human relationships, and human relationships are the core of everyone’s life. Schools devoted to vocational training provide no venue for teaching cultural differences, for trying to understand the person who lives next door or in another country. Value systems are never evaluated; alternatives are never considered. As a result, although we all live on the same planet, we do not live together. At best, we only live side by side. At worst, we live to kill each other. Education as vocational training reduces everything to ideology, our devotion to which causes us to reject the stark reality that stares us in the face, because our ideologies color the realities we see and people never get wiser than those of previous generations. People have become nothing but the monkeys of hurdy gurdy grinders, tethered to grinders’ organs with tin cups in hands to be filled for the benefit of the grinders. And this is the species we refer to as sapient. What a delusion!

For many years, I have been troubled by what I saw as the results of what passes for education in America and perhaps elsewhere too. Why is it, do you suppose, that one generation does not seem to get any smarter than the previous one? Oh, it may know more of this or that, but what it “knows” does not translate into smarts. In other words, why don’t people ever seem to get wiser? Why do they repeat the same mistakes over and over?

For centuries, an education was thought to be comprised of considerably more than one providing the skills and requirements needed to carry on a trade or profession. For instance, consider this passage:

“Education is not the same as training. Plato made the distinction between techne (skill) and episteme (knowledge). Becoming an educated person goes beyond the acquisition of a technical skill. It requires an understanding of one’s place in the world—cultural as well as natural—in pursuit of a productive and meaningful life. And it requires historical perspective so that one does not just live, as Edmund Burke said, like ‘the flies of a summer,’ born one day and gone the next, but as part of that ‘social contract’ that binds our generation to those who have come before and to those who are yet to be born.

An education that achieves those goals must include the study of what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been known and said.’ It must comprehend the whole—the human world and its history, our own culture and those very different from ours. . . .”

This idea of an educated person was often summarized in the phrases, a Renaissance man, and un homme du monde. But these expressions are hardly heard any more. Educated people no longer exist. We are nothing but the monkeys of hurdy gurdy grinders, tethered to grinders’ organs with tin cups in hands to be filled for the benefit of the grinders.

“Governor Rick Snyder wants to tie retraining programs to companies’ needs . . . and encourage more Michigan residents to earn math and science degrees under an initiative aimed at making workers more competitive in the global marketplace.”

The hurdy gurdy grinder’s monkey exists for the sake of the organ grinder; Governor Snyder wants Michigan’s residents to educate themselves for the sake of companies. Workers are to fulfill companies’ needs rather than vice versa. President Obama has said similar things.

But there’s something wrong, something terribly wrong, with this picture. A society in which people exist for the sake of some non-human entity is a society enslaved. And this picture gets even more horrid with the realization that workers are expected to pay to acquire the required skills. Students are being asked to pay for the privilege of becoming serfs.

Living things in the natural world exist as ends in themselves. Everything they do is done for their own benefit or the benefit of their offspring. Horses in the wild do not acquire skills in order to perform tasks that benefit other horses. When a human being acquires a horse and trains it to perform a skill for the person’s benefit, the person provides for all the natural needs of his horse. Horses don’t come begging to be trained to be ridden. What kind of perversion is the requirement that people should beg to be trained to be serfs?

But neither a hurdy gurdy grinder’s monkey or a riding horse are educated; they are trained. There is no such thing as a Renaissance monkey!

Education in America, and perhaps other places too, is as fractured as shattered glass. The federal agency called the Department of Education’s only power is the ability to cajole schools mainly by offering them money. There are public and private schools, and the public ones are governed by local school boards, the members of which are not even required to be able to read or write. State school boards exist to have some influence over local boards, but again, the power of the states is limited. Education in America is a local affair. The people on these school boards are the ones that control what is and how it is taught. For instance, creationism is often given equal standing with evolution. Students are often required to engage in practices that are clearly unconstitutional. All of this is done to suit the views of school board members, not society or even students.

Teachers are certified by subject matter. Perfectly good mathematics teachers may not be able to write literate essays. English teachers are not required to understand even elementary algebra. The schools do not employ hommes de monde. And what is true in the primary and secondary schools is also true in colleges and universities. Les spécialistes rule the classroom. Trained monkeys all!

Now vocational training works, of course, if people know what industries need workers and if workers want those jobs. But often, especially in times of crisis, this knowledge doesn’t exist. Yet there’s a deeper problem with the notion that education should equal vocational training. To paraphrase a very famous and renowned person, man does not live by work alone. Indeed, the knowledge and skills needed to earn a living in a capitalist industrial economy are of little use in human relationships, and human relationships are the core of everyone’s life.

Although the United States is often referred to as a multicultural melting pot, most highly developed nations today have multicultural populations. Different cultures embody different values. Those values often clash and erupt in violent behavior. If people understood these cultural differences, these clashes could be ameliorated. But schools devoted to vocational training provide no venue for teaching cultural differences, for trying to understand the person who lives next door or in another country. Various value systems are never evaluated, and alternatives are never considered. As a result, although we all live on the same planet, we do not live together. At best, we only live side by side. At worst, we live to kill each other.

Education as vocational training reduces everything to ideology. Religion is an ideology and no one ever questions a person’s right to her/his own. Economics, although often touted as a science, is an ideology. Part of free marked economic theory is the belief that when an established industry falters and declines, some new industry will come forth and employ the newly unemployed. But nothing in economics can compel that to happen. This belief is akin to the belief in a Second Coming. It is purely ideological. Even science has become an ideology. People believe, for instance, that science will discover solutions to all of our problems. But again, there is nothing in science that compels that. It is perfectly possible that, as human beings destroy their environment, science will be unable to correct the damage and that life on this planet will perish. Worse, ideologies contribute to human stupidity; our devotion to them causes us to reject the stark realities that stare us in the face. (See here and here.)

So what is required if we are to make one generation smarter than the previous one? We need to educate Renaissance men who comprehend the whole human world, its history, our own culture, and those very different from ours. Vocational training will never produce such people.

John F. Kennedy was glorified when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” Shouldn’t he have been vilified? Do countries exist to benefit their peoples or do their peoples exist to benefit their countries? What good is a country that requires the sacrifice of its people?

Since the Enlightenment, it is generally agreed that legitimate governments are those that govern with the consent of their peoples. Does anyone really believe that people would consent to living in a nation that made it clear that the lives of most citizens would be fated to live for the benefit of the few who control the nation’s institutions? Isn’t that exactly what slavery is?

Analytical thinking, even when valid, can lead people down invalid roads, because analysis alone tends to overly simplify questions. When used to answer the question, What must be done to put unemployed people to work?, it leads to attempts to make education equivalent to vocational training. But when put into practice, it results in people who lack the ability to understand their value systems and evaluate them properly. They end up being hurdy gurdy monkeys or, as Arnold put it, the flies of a summer, born one day and gone the next. If a nation’s institutions do not exist to benefit its citizens, the institutions, not the people, are faulty.

In Classical Greece it was known that the unexamined human life is not worth living. Vocational training never presents people with opportunities to examine one’s life; so people end up relying entirely on ideologies which have no intellectual basis and are often absurdly false, but “falsehoods are not only evil in themselves, they infect the soul with evil.”

If human beings wish to endure, their ideologies must be subjected to serious criticism; otherwise, no generation will ever be smarter than its predecessors and continuing to refer to ourselves as sapient is a sheer delusion.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States and NATO of aiming an antimissile system being deployed in Europe at Russia despite assurances that it is intended to guard against attacks from rogue states.

With his Kremlin reelection plans in full swing, Putin said on the “Cold Politics” (Kholodnaya Politika) program on February 2 that its former Cold War adversaries have “undoubtedly aimed at neutralizing the nuclear rocket capability of Russia.”

Putin said the antimissile system can cover “territory to the Urals [Mountains], the places where our ground nuclear forces are based.”

Putin added that “today there is no threat from Iran or North Korea” and said NATO is not offering any guarantees, written or otherwise, that the system is not targeting Russia.

NATO two years ago invited Russia to cooperate to create a “security roof that protects us all.”

“We need a missile-defense system that includes not just all countries of NATO but Russia, too,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at the time.

Russia responded coolly to that and other Western initiatives on missile defense.

In his February 2 appearance, Putin described the U.S. as the initiator of an antimissile system in Europe and called it the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons, and that against non-nuclear Japan in 1945.

“What should we do, just black this out from our memory?” Putin asked. “We will always respond to threats that appear along our borders.”

Putin said Russia is the only country besides the United States with a “nuclear triad” — ground, sea, and air nuclear forces.

Putin accused Russia’s “partners in the UN Security Council” of producing evidence of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in some countries and calling for the invasion of these countries or changing the governments of these countries. He said he doubts the sincerity of such partners.

“It seems to me our partners don’t want allies, they want vassals,” Putin said. They want to rule” but “Russia doesn’t work that way,” he concluded.

Putin’s remarks come a little more than a month before a Russian presidential election in which Putin is seeking to return to the presidency after serving as prime minister since 2008, when Russia’s constitution obliged him to step down after two consecutive terms.

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The Navy’s biggest amphibious exercise in a decade, Bold Alligator, is not specifically designed to counter Iranian threats in the Persian Gulf. But it comes awfully close, according to two senior service officials.

The joint Navy and Marine Corps exercise is geared toward honing the services’ amphibious warfare capabilities. Training operations began this week off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina, U.S. Fleet Forces Command chief Adm. John Harvey told reporters at breakfast here today. The massive exercise comes as Marines are in the midst of returning to the sea after a decade of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The combat scenarios in Bold Alligator are not tailored to mimic any particular country, Lt. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, head of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command, said at the same breakfast. But a closer look at those scenarios could lead some to conclude otherwise.

Navy and Marine forces involved with the exercise will work scenarios involving mine warfare, countering small boat attacks and other irregular threats and fighting in shallow coastal waters, Harvey pointed out. Those threats, among others, are the hallmarks of Iranian naval forces. Reiterating Hejlik’s comments, Harvey did note the Bold Alligator scenarios were “certainly informed by recent history.” Tehran has been flexing their naval muscles over the past few months as part of an overall show of force in the Straits of Hormuz. That said, “everything we are going to do” during the exercise can be applied to a potential conflict with Iran in the Straits, Harvey said.

Earlier this month, Iran infuriated Western leaders by threatening to shut down the Straits, the main waterway entering into the Persian Gulf. It also began a new round of naval exercises focused on defending the Straits from an attack, according to reports from Tehran. Weeks of diplomatic saber-rattling between Tehran and Washington forced Iran to back off, but not before it banned U.S. Navy warships from entering the Straits. But the Pentagon’s decision to send two carrier strike groups to the region put forces on both sides back on high alert. But the warships were able to sail through the Straits earlier this month without incident.

While the sailors and Marines in Bold Alligator are training for war, service leaders are working hard to make sure the situation does not boil over with Iran. The Navy’s Fifth Fleet, stationed in Bahrain, have established ship to ship communication with their Iranian counterparts, Harvey said. These ties are designed to prevent “the chance of miscalculation” between U.S. and Iranian forces, he said. Despite these links, Harvey admitted that Navy leaders are “not always sure what [they're] dealing with”, in term of Tehran’s unpredictability in the region.

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A grim report just issued by the Finance Ministry that is circulating in the Kremlin today says the United States Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) has ground to a virtual halt signaling that a major global economic collapse is currently underway and could very well likely enter into the dreaded “freefall zone.”

Virtually unknown to all but the global financial elite, CHIPS is the main privately held clearing house for large-value transactions in the United States, settling well over $1 trillion a day in around 250,000 interbank payments that together with the Fedwire Funds Service, which is operated by the Federal Reserve Banks, forms the primary US network for large-value domestic and international US dollar payments where it has a market share of around 96%.

The cause underlying the collapse of CHIPS, this report says, is due to the “unprecedented” demand for immediate liquidity relief being sought by the largest banks in the US and EU that are being crushed under of the combined debt of both the United States and Europe said to total near $39 trillion.

Important to note is that what is currently happening is a virtual repeat of the 2008 Financial Crisis that the United States Senate’s Levin–Coburn Report found “was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”

Grimly echoing this Ministry report is the latest data [see chart 2^nd photo left, or click on link] from The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) that is a number issued daily by the London-based Baltic Exchange and shows it in freefall dropping 65% in the past 30 days alone, a terrifying amount of loss not seen since the dark days of late 2008.

Not restricted to Baltic Sea countries, the BDI tracks worldwide international shipping prices of various dry bulk cargoes that has collapsed so severely global shipping has all but ceased thus leaving our world’s largest transport ships anchored and empty off the coast of Singapore in what is described as“the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history whose numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined.”

During the 2008 Financial Crisis an outright global economic catastrophe was only averted after the US Federal Reserve secretly gave out to US banks and corporations, and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland, over $16 trillion that was only discovered due to an amendment to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed by the American Congress that called for their being audited for the first time in their 99-year history.

Note: To place that $16 trillion into perspective, remember that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States is only $14.12 trillion, and the entire national debt of theUnited States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion.

Curiously, the aforementioned amendment to the Dodd-Frank law only called only for a one-time audit of any emergency lending facility established by the Federal Reserve since 1 December 2007 and ending with the date of enactment of the law when it was signed by President Obama on 21 July 2010 thus keeping hidden from the American people who is getting their money.

To if anyone in the world, even the powerful US Federal Reserve, has the power to avert this coming catastrophe, this Ministry report warns, it is unlikely due to the cascading collapse of the global derivative market due to the mounting gridlock in liquidity that US billionaire and Obama confidant Warren Buffet warned back in 2003 were “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Though the word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before.  Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.4 quadrillion.

$1.4 Quadrillion is roughly: -40 TIMES THE WORLD’S STOCK MARKET. -10 TIMES the value of EVERY STOCK & EVERY BOND ON THE PLANET. -23 TIMES WORLD GDP.

Failing to be noticed by the Western peoples about this global economic collapse is that it has been, in all probability, a “planned event” due to occur so as to initiate a New World Order that has long been sought after by the elites, but was condemned by the ancients who warned that the uniting of our world as an economic dictatorship would lead to every human being having to obtain the Mark of The Beast thus bringing this present age to its end.

In a Western world devoid of morality, and lacking the knowledge of the ancients, it is beyond doubt that this coming economic collapse will take them by complete surprise (as the last one did) as they have been trained like dutiful slaves to only adhere to those voices leading them to their doom.

But for those who know the truth, the time is nearing an end for preparing… it will come much sooner than anyone will believe.

February 1, 2012 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com.

The FBI has got tired of monitoring social media sites manually and wants to reinvent the process. So, soon your posts may instantly light up on a map as a big red dot if considered suspicious, marking the location of the ‘bad actor.’

“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” says the Request for Information published by FBI on January 19.

The FBI’s ‘market research’ shows that the bureau is planning to monitor all ‘publicly available’ data on social media sites through a new game-changing system.

The bureau is looking for a company which is interested in and capable of building such a system and has published a list of requirements for it.

The enquiry says that the system should provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crises, and threats that meet the search parameters defined by the FBI.

It should also be capable of automated filtering of the data and of providing the operator with instant notification of breaking events and emerging threats.

The FBI places strong emphasis on the fact that the system should access only ‘publicly available’ data, taking every occurrence of this phrase in quotes throughout the whole document.

But most people do not realize that the data they are sharing with their friends on social networking sites is in fact publicly available.

The average user believes that only a narrow circle of close friends and relatives are reading his or her blog, and this gives them “the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse,” says Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as cited by newscientist.com. “But these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US.”

All the collected data will be stored in the FBI database and conveniently displayed on a map upon request (by the way, FBI prefers Google, ESRI, and Yahoo maps to any other service). Of course the functionality of the map will be increased beyond the limits set for the common user.

The interactive map will have additional layers, such as US domestic and worldwide terror data, US embassies and military installations around the world, weather conditions and forecasts, and video feeds from surveillance and traffic cameras.

The revelation of the FBI’s ‘market research’ raises even more concerns about the aspects of private data safety on the Internet, as more and more data about the users is being collected and stored – for different reasons – in numerous databases around the globe.

Collecting the information in not a challenge anymore, but analyzing the data is. But there are companies, for example Google, which can crack such a problem.

Recently Google announced plans to bring all data collected from users’ separate accounts on its sites into a combined profile. Google is seeking ways of creating a simpler product experience and providing better services to its clients. But that move has triggered a lot of outrage and raised more questions about privacy on the Internet.

Source.

The United States is not at war with Iran yet, but just in case,the Pentagon says they want to be prepared. To do so, the Department of Defense has dispatched 15,000 troops to the neighboring nation of Kuwait.

Gen. James Mattis, the Marine Corps head that rules over the US Central Command, won approval late last year from the White House to deploy the massive surge to the tiny West Asian country Kuwait, which is separated from Iran by only a narrow span of the Persian Gulf.

The latest deployment, which was ushered in without much presentation to the public, adds a huge number of troops aligned with America’s arsenal that are now surrounding Iran on literally every front. In late 2011, the US equipped neighboring United Arab Emirates with advanced weaponry created to disrupt underground nuclear operations. In adjacent Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, American military presence has long been all but enormous.

While the US has not placed any boots on the ground in Iran, an unauthorized surveillance mission of a US steal drone in December prompted Tehran to become enraged at Washington. US officials insist that Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weaponry program, despite lacking sufficient evidence or confirmation. During the drone mission, Iran authorities intercepted the craft and forced it into a safe landing. Tensions have only worsened between the two nations in the month since, but Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that stealth missions into Iran will continue “absolutely,” despite ongoing opposition from overseas.

In calling for the latest surge to Kuwait, Gen.Mattis said the deployment was necessary to keep Iran in check and keep America prepared for any other threats in the area. It comes only weeks after the last American troops vacated nearby Iraq, where the US still in actuality has an advance presence — the American embassy in Baghdad employs thousands of armed military contractors.

The move to build up military presence in Kuwait comes at a time when the foreign government is at odds to a degree with a US. While protesters in America this week have demonstrated against the ten year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, the Kuwait government has increased efforts to have two of their own men transferred out of Gitmo and sent back home. Both Fawzi al-Odah and Fayiz al-Kandari have been detained at Guantanamo since 2002, although only one of the two Kuwaiti citizens has ever been charged.

Source.

A disturbing report prepared by the Ministry of Defense circulating in the Kremlin today states that Russian Military Officials were rebuffed by NATO yesterday after questions were raised regarding massive troop and war equipment movements in the United States region of California and said to involve over 78,000 soldiers from various countries.

Reports coming in from the United States verify these extraordinary troop movements are currently underway with videos showing massive amounts of tanks and other war equipment being brought into the California region by train near Santa Cruz [see video HERE] and Morgon Hill [see video HERE] along with reports detailing that areas of Los Angeles were cordoned off this week for secret military exercises.

Important to note, this report says, is that even though Russia had withdrawn in 2007 from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) it was still able to get explanations for the transferring and movement of Western European and American troops from the United Kingdom under a separate agreement, but which was suspended without notice or explanation by the British government this past 25 November 2011.

Concerns over the military movements of the Western Powers, this report continues, are due to the United States and its European allies accounting for nearly three-quarters of the entire amount spent on armed troops and equipment in the entire world and that over the past decade have unleashed wars in various parts of the globe which they show no signs of stopping.

Russian military intelligence analysis of the camouflage pattern indentified on the thousands of military vehicles and tanks flooding into the California region [see both videos linked above] note that it is a variant of the MARPAT woodland pattern designed for use by US Marine Forces intended for use in urban environments located in temperate zones or tropical areas, but most certainly is not one used in any of Americas current war theaters of operation.

Analysis as to why these troops are currently massing in California, this report says, could involve any number of scenarios including: 1.) A planned US-EU invasion of either Mexico or a South American nation. 2.) Preparations to put down large scale rioting erupting in the United States. 3.) Preparations to assist the civilian population in the aftermath of a catastrophe caused by war or natural disaster.

Russian military analysts in this report note that Mexico could be a prime target” for US-European military action as its Drug War which began in 2006 has claimed nearly 48,000 lives and during this pivotal election year is now threatened with disintegration as its drug cartels now have more power than the government.

Another analysis in this report notes the United States growing anger at both oil rich Venezuela and Brazil whose left-leaning governments are becoming increasingly opposed to American-European domination and increasingly siding with China and Iran against the West. Important to note in this scenario are that war concerns in Brazil have increased to the point that many are now calling for Brazilians to begin preparing to crush an expected American invasion.

As to the likelihood that these forces massing in California will be used to put down internal dissent appears to have strong validity due to many experts analysis, including Obama regime backer and billionaire George Soros who this week warned that a violent class-war is about to erupt in the United States and stating, The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.”  Important to note in this scenario is that United Statescrackdown on protesters has become so violent that the international association known as Reporters Without Borders downgraded press freedom in America to 47^th this week, an astounding fall of 27 places for a country that claims it has the most freedom in the world.

To if these troops massing in California are to be used in the event of a catastrophe we had noted in our previous report, Megaquake Warning Issued For US-Mexican Pacific Coast, that there is, indeed, a growing concern among Russian experts this region may be about to experience a devastating earthquake.

In our world today where the Obama regime has called for more of its troops to be deployed to the Philippines to counter China, has ordered 15,000 more of its troops to Kuwait in preparation for a war with an Iranian nation that is itself “preparing for Armageddon,” these strange and massive troop movements in California do raise a number of concerns, but which without the American people themselves demanding to know what is going on will, as always, leave these poor souls at the mercy of the tyrants who rule over them.

And to how truly barbaric the United States has become, one need look no further than Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy who offered to collect information on US drone strikes killing innocent civilians if it would help protect his family, but within 72 hours of making his offer was assassinated by the Americans along with his 12-year-old brother when the car he was travelling in was blown up by a missile fired by a drone.

If even children are now considered enemies by the new god” Obama who now rules completely over Battlefield Earth,” one must surely ask themselves what chances anyone has anymore…May the Lord have mercy upon us all.

January 26, 2012 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com.