Infowars Nightly News
July 31, 2012
Wag the Dog: Media Publish Photoshop Forgery to Sell Image of War Torn Syria
Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
July 31, 2012
Infowars.com
July 31, 2012
While mainstream press have been hailing the virtues of the alliance between al Qaeda, the Syrian Free Army and the West in opposing Assad in Syria, they’ve also been caught once again “faking the war” to play up sympathy for an all out invasion.
Austria’s largest daily paper, Kronen Zeitung, with some 3 million readers daily, published this sympathetic photo, seemingly portraying a man carrying a baby and a woman in burka fleeing from some war-torn corner of Aleppo. However, it was later exposed to be a Photoshop forgery, juxtaposing the people walking on a normal looking corner with that of a blown out city block ravaged by heavy damage.
The subjects were apparently taken from the previously-published file photo credited to theEuropean Pressphoto Agency, as the publishing notes next to the image indicate. The revealing side by side comparison was first posted to Reddit.com.
Gizmodo points out:
Just to be clear, the family in the photograph is, in fact, in Syria; the original photo (on the right) came from the European Pressphoto Agency. But merely fleeing a city ravaged by guns and mortars apparently isn’t quite dramatic enough on its own. The editors of the Krone—as it’s commonly called—needed this baby to sing.
A nearly identical example of war propaganda is depicted in the 1997 film Wag the Dog, where green screen technology was used to place an actor in a studio with a kitten in a war torn zone in Bosnia:
To be sure, the entire perception of the conflict in Syria has been (purposely) distorted in the media, including many blatant lies.
Remember the Syrian Danny hoax?
Advocating intervention, “Syrian Danny” was caught faking gun fire on CNN in order to portray heavy fighting that wasn’t really going on in the background while he literally begged for Western-backed forces to enter Syria and overthrow Assad. Paul Joseph Watson described the hoax: While waiting to be connected, Danny says, “Well, let the gunfire sound then,” before subsequently asking someone off camera, “Did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?” An explosion is heard soon after, but Danny doesn’t even flinch. The following video demonstrates this amazing stunt, which correlated with numerous other exaggerated reports issued by propaganda-activist Danny.
Another hoax was revealed after the BBC falsely portrayed an Assad-led massacre of children in Houla, using a photo from dead children in Iraq to play up the scale of the atrocity, which was later found to be the work of the al Qaeda-led Free Syrian Army.
A reported massacre in Homs was likewise a deception:
Obviously, these incredible lies and deceptions are not limited to the Syrian conflict, but have become a mainstay in this age of modern media. From the phony babies in incubators testimony to demonize Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war, to the lies about WMDs in Iraqthe next time around, false flag events to start most 20th Century wars, and so much more: these lies are not crafted to fool fact checkers, critics, historians or true investigative reporters, but to goad the general public into a wave of hysteria ensuring enough support to start a war and profit from the destruction.
Is it any wonder the chemical weapons / WMD story is being rehashed to drum up a crescendo of apparent legitimacy for an otherwise naked coup? They are literally asking the public to cheer for al Qaeda.
Modern warfare is no longer limited to the physical assault. Television and the Internet have made propaganda an indispensable force to wage war by other means– besieging allies and public support to isolate Assad and diffuse his defenses on the media/international community front long enough to complete the kill. Syria, like Libya, has been a classic proxy war, with the hidden hand of the United States and its western allies only partial obscured. That is, in the most general sectors of public knowledge, opinion and discussion about the Syrian conflict is saturated with the deliberately crafted lie demonizing the target and producing mass levels of knee-jerk support for the action. In this case: bad guy = AssadGaddafi Saddam Bin Laden baby talk about boogie men.
But the truth is plainly laid as well, for anyone willing to face it.
The engineering of bigger financial bubbles
MyBudget360
August 1, 2012
August 1, 2012
The market is perched on the edge of a chair looking out for what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have to say. The almighty Oz is the only game in town. With the Fed, the expectation is of some sort of additional quantitative easing to prime the economy once again whereas the market is looking for some big sort of action by the ECB to keep the Euro together. One thing is certain however and that is we are now in a bailout bubble. The markets are now managed proxy systems of the too big to fail banks. The system has been very effective in siphoning off wealth from the middle class of many countries and creating massive wealth discrepancies that have not been witnessed since the Great Depression. Many in the public are woefully uninformed since rarely is this analysis leaked out in the media. Yet as we go down this road, it is becoming more obvious that to keep this system going, more and more bailouts are required.
Hunkering down
US households continue on the path of deleveraging. The personal savings rate is ticking back up which is not necessarily a good sign for an economy so reliant on spending:
Many Americans are finding their borrowing constrained as due diligence is now performed on the market. You have 46 million on food stamps so it is unlikely this group is a market to lend to. You have a large aging population that is probably a group that is unlikely to receive long-term loans. And younger Americans are already saddled with massive student loan debt. What group is willing to go into massive debt here?
The average per capita income is $25,000 so banks are simply hoarding the money to repair their badly hurt balance sheets:
The irony of the above is the Fed needs to shell out interest on these excess reserves. Now the interest paid is only .25 percent but on a balance of roughly $1.5 trillion it works out to:
$3,750,000,000 annually
This is money that banks can easily put into work by lending to Americans but instead keep them held as excess reserves with the Fed. It is essentially a closed feedback loop that allows these banks to get bigger on the action and work of the real economy. If you look back even just a few decades, banks were set to be a proxy of aiding the real economy. Today, we have a large financial sector that essentially strips profits from the real economy.
The bubble pathway is rather apparent:
Source: Global Economic Analysis
Corporate profits as a share of GDP are now at record levels while we have high unemployment, lower paying jobs, and a massive number of Americans on transfer payments. So how are these profits achieved? By allowing giant loopholes to avoid domestic taxes, bailouts that provide gambling funds to spend in global markets, and leveraging US Fed power to garner profits in lower cost markets. This is anything but a free market yet the analysis presented to the public is that this is just the way things go. Austerity for you, bailouts for us. The banking system is unfortunately too big and is extracting economic rents from sectors that would actually benefit the public more.
It is likely that there will be no movement on enforcement with teeth in 2012 being an election year. From one bubble to another but the big difference here is that this bubble is targeted directly to the financial sector.
J.C. Penney's Latest Leap: Retailer to Ditch Cash Registers, Cashiers
Daily Finance
August 1, 2012
Cash registers could join the ranks of pay phones and typewriters sooner than you think.
J.C. Penney (JCP) will say farewell to cash registers, checkout counters and cashiers by 2014, said Ron Johnson, the chain's CEO, during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, reports Time.
Penney's plan evokes Apple's (AAPL) mostly cash-register free stores -- and that comes as little surprise: Johnson was the head of Apple Retail and is considered the mastermind behind its success. He left Apple in November to take the top spot at J.C. Penney.
Johnson, who has been in the headlines lately for Penney's radical, controversial -- and so far, unsuccessful -- strategy to eliminate most of its sales and coupons, is now looking to shake up the checkout experience in the chain's stores.
His plan is to eliminate cashiers, cash registers and checkout counters, replacing them with a patchwork of technology solutions, such as WiFi networks, mobile checkout, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology tracking systems for merchandise, as well as self-checkout options.
"Think of a physical store without a cash wrap," Johnson told the audience, according to Time. "About 10% of all the money we spend, half a billion dollars a year, goes to [checkout] transactions." The money saved by replacing checkout stations with new technology could be invested in improving customer service, he said.
Ryan Taft, managing partner with OnSpot Social, an iPad app for retailers that collects Facebook "likes," Twitter followers and email addresses in-store, believes the retail industry is at the early stages of the end of the widespread use of cash registers.
Read the entire article
August 1, 2012
Cash registers could join the ranks of pay phones and typewriters sooner than you think.
J.C. Penney (JCP) will say farewell to cash registers, checkout counters and cashiers by 2014, said Ron Johnson, the chain's CEO, during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, reports Time.
Penney's plan evokes Apple's (AAPL) mostly cash-register free stores -- and that comes as little surprise: Johnson was the head of Apple Retail and is considered the mastermind behind its success. He left Apple in November to take the top spot at J.C. Penney.
Johnson, who has been in the headlines lately for Penney's radical, controversial -- and so far, unsuccessful -- strategy to eliminate most of its sales and coupons, is now looking to shake up the checkout experience in the chain's stores.
His plan is to eliminate cashiers, cash registers and checkout counters, replacing them with a patchwork of technology solutions, such as WiFi networks, mobile checkout, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology tracking systems for merchandise, as well as self-checkout options.
"Think of a physical store without a cash wrap," Johnson told the audience, according to Time. "About 10% of all the money we spend, half a billion dollars a year, goes to [checkout] transactions." The money saved by replacing checkout stations with new technology could be invested in improving customer service, he said.
Ryan Taft, managing partner with OnSpot Social, an iPad app for retailers that collects Facebook "likes," Twitter followers and email addresses in-store, believes the retail industry is at the early stages of the end of the widespread use of cash registers.
Read the entire article
NEW TSA Documents: Filming & Photography Terrorist Activities
WeAreChange Correspondent Julio Rausseo on new TSA documents citing video taping and taking pictures as suspicious activity. http://publicintelligence.net/nj...
11 Signs That Time Is Quickly Running Out For The Global Financial System
Are we rapidly approaching a moment of reckoning for the global financial system? August is likely to be a relatively slow month as most of Europe is on vacation, but after that we will be moving into a “danger zone” where just about anything could happen. Historically, a financial crisis has been more likely to happen in the fall than during any other time, and this fall is shaping up to be a doozy.
Much of the focus of the financial world is on whether or not the euro is going to break up, but even if the authorities in Europe are able to keep the euro together we are still facing massive problems. Countries such as Greece and Spain are already experiencing depression-like conditions, and much of the rest of the globe is sliding into recession. Unemployment has already risen to record levels in some parts of Europe, major banks all over Europe are teetering on the brink of insolvency, and the flow of credit is freezing up all over the planet. If things take a really bad turn, this crisis could become much worse than the financial crisis of 2008 very quickly.
All over the world people are starting to write about the possibility of a major economic crisis starting this fall.
For example, a recent article in the International Business Times discussed how some economists around the globe are fearing the worst for the coming months….
The consensus? The world economy has entered a final countdown with three months left, and investors should pencil in a collapse in either August or September.Citing a theory he has been espousing since 2010 that predicts “a future lack of policy flexibility from the monetary and fiscal side,” Jim Reid, a strategist at Deutsche Bank, wrote a note Tuesday that gloated “it feels like Europe has proved us right.”“The U.S. has the ability to disprove the universal nature of our theory,” Reid wrote, but “if this U.S. cycle is of completely average length as seen using the last 158 years of history (33 cycles), then the next recession should start by the end of August.”
The global financial system is so complex and there are so many thousands of moving parts that it is always difficult to put an exact date on anything. In fact, history is littered with economists that have ended up looking rather foolish by putting a particular date on a prediction.
But without a doubt we are starting to see storm clouds gather for this fall.
The following are 11 more signs that time is quickly running out for the global financial system….
#1 A number of very important events regarding the financial future of Europe are going to happen in the month of September. The following is from a recent Reuters article that detailed many of the key things that are currently slated to occur during that month….
In that month a German court makes a ruling that could neuter the new euro zone rescue fund, the anti-bailout Dutch vote in elections just as Greece tries to renegotiate its financial lifeline, and decisions need to be made on whether taxpayers suffer huge losses on state loans to Athens.On top of that, the euro zone has to figure out how to help its next wobbling dominoes, Spain and Italy – or what do if one or both were to topple.
#2 Reuters is reporting that Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos has suggested that Spain may need a 300 billion euro bailout.
#3 Spain continues to slide deeper into recession. The Spanish economy contracted 0.4 percent during the second quarter of 2012 after contracting 0.3 percent during the first quarter.
#4 The unemployment rate in Spain is now up to 24.6 percent.
#5 According to the Wall Street Journal, a new 30 billion euro hole has been discovered in the financial rescue plan for Greece.
#6 Morgan Stanley is projecting that the unemployment rate in Greece will exceed 25 percent in 2013.
#7 It is now being projected that the Greek economy will shrink by a total of 7 percent during 2012.
#8 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says that the rest of Europe will not be making any more concessionsfor Greece.
#9 The UK economy has now plunged into a deep recession. During the second quarter of 2012 alone, the UK economy contracted by 0.7 percent.
#10 The Dallas Fed index of general business activity fell dramatically to -13.2 in July. This was a huge surprise and it is yet another indication that the U.S. economy is rapidly heading into a recession.
#11 As I have written about previously, a banking crisis is more likely to happen in the fallthan at any other time during the year. The global financial system will enter a “danger zone” starting in September, and none of us need to be reminded that the crashes of 1929, 1987 and 2008 all happened during the second half of the year.
So is there any hope on the horizon?
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