And yet – in very heartening news – a new poll by Rasmussen shows that the American public understands much of what is really going on: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 72% of Likely US Voters think it is at least somewhat likely that the NSA has monitored the private communications of Congress, military leaders and judges. That includes 45% who believe it is Very Likely.

The United States was founded on a belief that governments are created to protect certain unalienable rights. Today, however, more voters than ever (56%) view the federal government as a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.

“Industrial Society and its Future” was published on September 19, 1995 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, to comply with Kaczynski’s demand, in exchange for him stopping the bombings. Kaczynski, who is still alive, wrote that the increasing industrialization of America and the world, and our increasing reliance on technology, would end up short-circuiting the ability of human beings to think for themselves and act on their own ideas and abilities.

Kaczynski must wonder what it will take for Americans to wake up to the fact that their individuality and autonomy is under siege. He saw the political “left” as embracing these technologies with special fervor, because they were in keeping with the “leftist” ideology that centralized power was the way to govern men.

He saw these “leftists” as psychologically disordered — seeking to compensate for deep feelings of personal disempowerment by banding together and seeking extraordinary means of control in society. Well, Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people, was precisely correct in many of his ideas.

Up to 50% of animal tissues, bones, and the like are “wasted” in the meat processing industry. These proteins are usually composted or burned because there simply isn’t anything else that can be done with them. Until now. Researchers have been looking for ways to minimize this waste and are in the process of developing protein-rich powders and products that can be reintroduced into the food marketplace.

While it isn’t in circulation yet, it’s only a matter of time. And one has to wonder if we’ll be made aware of the presence of these meat-leftovers in our foods or if our next venture into a new ice cream flavor will have us ignorant to the tendons, fat, and organs that made it possible.

It has set off an emerging market shock and risks "blowback" from a fresh spasm of the eurozone debt crisis, and it is letting all this happen at the same time, before the US economy is safely out of the woods. It has violated its own counter-deflation strategy, tightening monetary policy even though core PCE inflation has fallen to the lowest levels in living memory and below levels deemed dangerous enough in the past to warrant a blast of emergency stimulus. It is doing so even though the revival of bank lending has faded.

The entire pivot by the Federal Open Market Committee is mystifying, almost amateurish, and risks repeating the errors made by the Bank of Japan a decade ago, and perhaps repeating a mini-1937 when the Fed lost its nerve and tipped the US economy into a second leg of the Great Depression. "It’s all about tighter policy," was the lonely lament by St Louis Fed chief James Bullard.

This is not just a debate over whether or not to reverse QE, or whether markets have become addicted to Fed amphetamines. It is whether we still know what on is going in the heads of those who command our destiny...

The report suggests one in five cash-strapped households would have to cut essential spending or work longer hours if rates went up just 2 per cent. The base rate has been 0.5 per cent since March 2009. If it rose to 2.5 per cent, still low by the standards of previous decades, the Bank estimates households accounting for a fifth of Britain’s £1.3 trillion mortgage debt would need to take action.

A family with an average £160,000 mortgage would see their monthly repayments go from £805 to £987, a hike of £182, or nearly £2,200 a year. This calculation is based on a lifetime tracker mortgage, which ‘tracks’ the base rate of interest. Its current rate of 3.55 per cent would rise to 5.55 per cent. David Hollingworth, of mortgage broker London & Country, said: ‘With base rates at such a low for four years, people are budgeting as if it’s the norm. ‘They could and should be preparing for a rise in interest rates.’

Right now, bonds are being absolutely slaughtered, and this is only just the beginning. Over the last several years, reckless bond buying by the Federal Reserve has forced yields down to absolutely ridiculous levels. For example, it simply is not rational to lend the US government money at less than 3 percent when the real rate of inflation is somewhere up around 8 to 10 percent. But when he originally announced the quantitative easing program, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that he intended to force interest rates to go down, and lots of bond investors made a lot of money riding the bubble that Bernanke created.

But now that Bernanke has indicated that the bond buying will be coming to an end, investors are going into panic mode and the bond bubble is starting to burst. One hedge fund executive told CNBC that the "feeling you are getting out there is that people are selling first and asking questions later". And the yield on 10 year US Treasuries just keeps going up. Today it closed at 2.59 percent, and many believe that it is going to go much higher unless the Fed intervenes. If the Fed does not intervene and allows the bubble that it has created to burst, we are going to see unprecedented carnage.

Markets tend to fall faster than they rise. And now that Bernanke has triggered a sell-off in bonds, things are moving much faster than just about anyone anticipated...

The Federal Reserve may not listen to the American people, but there is one institution that the Fed listens to very carefully - the Bank for International Settlements. It is the central bank of central banks. And the BIS has just come out with its annual report. In that annual report, the BIS says that central banks "cannot do more without compounding the risks they have already created", and that central banks should "encourage needed adjustments" in the financial markets. In other words, the BIS is saying that it is time to end the bond buying...

As a result, most Americans are simply not prepared for the massive storm that is heading our way. Most American families are living paycheck to paycheck, most of them are not storing up emergency food and supplies, and only a very small percentage of them are buying gold and silver for investment purposes. They seem to have forgotten what happened back in 2008.

When the financial markets crashed, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Because most of them were living on the financial edge, millions of them also lost their homes. Unfortunately, most Americans seem convinced that it will not happen again. Right now we seem to be living in a "hope bubble" and people have become very complacent. For a while there, being a "prepper" was very trendy, but now concern about a coming economic crisis seems to have subsided.

What a tragic mistake. As I pointed out yesterday, our entire financial system is a giant Ponzi scheme, and there are already signs that our financial markets are about to implode once again. Those that have not made any preparations for what is coming are going to regret it bitterly.

After seven hours of late-night talks, finance ministers from the bloc's 27 countries emerged with a blueprint to close or salvage banks in trouble. The plan stipulates that shareholders, bondholders and depositors with more than 100,000 euros ($132,000) should share the burden of saving a bank.

The deal is a boost for EU leaders, who meet later on Thursday in Brussels, and can show that they are finally getting to grips with the financial crisis that began in mid-2007 with the near collapse of Germany's IKB. "For the first time, we agreed on a significant bail-in to shield taxpayers," said Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, referring to the process in which shareholders and bondholders must bear the costs of restructuring first.

The rules break a taboo in Europe that savers should never lose their deposits, although countries will have some flexibility to decide when and how to impose losses on a failing bank's creditors. "They can affect German savers just as well as they can affect any other investor in the world," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said after the meeting.

Taxpayers across much of Europe have had to pay for a series of deeply unpopular bank rescues since the financial crisis that spread across the bloc to threaten the future of the euro.

The decision does not grant marriage rights across the US but gives gay couples in the 13 states that allow same-sex marriage equal standing to their straight peers. The court also dismissed a case on California's ban on gay marriage, effectively reinstating marriage rights for gays and lesbians in America's largest state.

The two rulings were greeted by chaotic scenes of celebration from the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington to the streets of San Francisco, the gay capital of the United States. By overturning the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Supreme Court struck down more than 1,000 regulations preventing gay married couples from receiving equal treatment on tax, property and immigration issues.

The biggest impact will be for couples where one partner is a foreigner, allowing them to apply for permanent residence in the US like any straight couple.

The five hours of talks between US and Russian officials centered on who would be allowed to attend the peace talks, which are a bit short on attendees anyhow since the US-backed rebels have repeatedly ruled out showing up. But Iran might. Or at least they’re open to attending, though the US is holding up the talks saying any appearance by Iran is unacceptable. Russia is pushing to either allow Iran or to exclude third party nations backing the rebels.

People hate the country that’s terrorizing them. That’s not a surprise. Just consider the way we react to acts of terror. That’s the way other people react to American acts of terror.

Chomsky is right. Experts agrees that indiscriminate drone strikes are war crimes. The US is not only killing people whose identity it doesn’t even know, but it is also killing children. And it is using the justifiably-vilified Al Qaeda tactic of killing people attending funerals of those killed – and targeting people attempting to rescue people who have been injured by our previous strikes. Chomsky has previously extensively documented US terrorism.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lieutenant General William Odom - noted: “Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.”

But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority's judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement.

To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to "disparage," "injure," "degrade," "demean," and "humiliate" our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homo- sexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence — indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history.

It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

And what we are seeing is a sell-off in a bond market and a sell-off in the stock market, because confidence in the US and its ability to maintain a global empire through interest rates and the Central Bank policy is crumbling before the world’s very eyes.

What’s interesting is that Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen. Booz Allen allegedly along with a few other companies are the masterminds behind LIBOR market rigging, energy market rigging, FOREX market rigging. And this is really the fuel that keeps the American military empire going, because the American economy itself cannot support its military ambitions so they’ve resorted to market manipulation and the kind of intelligence that Edward Snowden is able to aggregate is key to manipulating markets in ways that make Booz Allen, allegedly, the channel for billions and billions of dollars into America’s military campaigns.

And this is really about money, markets and manipulations. It’s not about security. It’s not to do with anything that the White House says. Remember, the White House is a puppet of Wall Street, Booz Allen, the hedge funds and the financial interests of the corrupt bankers.

China has got a fantastic card to play, one trillion US dollars that they can dump on the market anytime and jack interest rates up five or six points, which would throw the real estate market back into collapse. China is pulling the strings here and China has all the cards to play. America is the biggest debtor nation in the world. Look at the bond market today, it’s selling off spectacularly all over the world because confidence in the American hologram of finance is collapsing. They flipped the switch. They see that the emperor has no clothes.

They see that there’s no underlying economic activity to support the military and financial occupations emanating from the US. It’s game over!