Drones vulnerable to 'terrorist' hijacking

A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine.

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground. Just a few feet from certain catastrophe, a safety pilot with a radio control saves the drone from crashing into the field.

From the sidelines, there are smiles all around over this near-disaster. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones.

They could be turned into weapons.

Computers on Wall Street are Buying and Selling to Themselves! - Mike Krieger

As if we needed another story to further solidify the running joke that has become the U.S. stock market.  In this article from Bloomberg we find out that:

High-frequency trading firms are drawing scrutiny from U.S. regulators seeking evidence that they may be distorting market prices by conducting transactions with themselves, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

But fear not America, the SEC is on the case!

The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have sharpened their focus on high- frequency and algorithmic trading since May 6, 2010, when about $862 billion was erased from stock values in 20 minutes before share prices recovered from the plunge.

Wow, that makes me feel a lot better.  Two years “sharpening their focus.”

Oh well, perhaps the CFTC will do something?

The CFTC has been considering issuing a so-called concept release, a step prior to a formal rulemaking, which could lead to new testing, supervision and oversight requirements for high- frequency and automated trading.

They are “considering a concept release!”  Must be busy working on the Jon Corzine case right?  Which beach is he laying out on this week?

GREEK DEFICIT: How Berlin encouraged Papandreou to big-up the 2009 Greek deficit - The Slog

Defence of German banks a key factor

Schäuble and Merkel….implicated in an incredible scam

How Venizelos fired ELSTAT moles to cover up the truth

Spanish European Commissioner backs story of international fraud

The Western MSM have never questioned the ‘received truth’ that Athens understated its liability and obligations for several years following the launch of the euro. But few if any outside observers know the truth behind what happened when Papandreou took over the Premiership in Greece….and for Machiavellian reasons, the debt was suddenly overstated.

In October 2009, George Papandreou stepped into what one Athens source has called ‘the shitfilled shoes of Kostas Karamanlis’, and discovered that the two previous administrations had lied about both the size of the National Debt, and the ongoing level of government spending. In Greece, the folks you go to see to find out this kind of stuff hang out in an organisation called ELSTAT – the Hellenic Statistical Authority.

What happened in the weeks following was quite bizarre – and pretty fully documented.

Cancer patients rejoice after legal victory

By Brent Daggett:

Single mother of five, Doreen Flynn, as well as cancer patients around the country can now rejoice.

Attorney General Eric Holder, as of June 25, declined to seek Supreme Court review of an appeals court decision which unanimously ruled that the sale of bone marrow donations is not illegal.

On December 1, 2011 the three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Doreen Flynn at al. v. Holder that the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), which bans the sale of organs, doesn’t apply to compensating certain bone marrow donors.

The judges’ logic are rooted in the fact that NOTA does not cover compensating marrow donors since the marrow cells donated are acquired from the blood with modern technology such as plasma and platelets.

Since Congress did not outlaw compensation regarding blood components, the court stated it could not have meant to outlaw compensation for marrow cells.

The suit was brought on by the libertarian-minded law firm Institute for Justice as well as the California non-profit group MoreMarrowDonors.org.

MoreMarrowDonors.org is a site that seeks to increase the voluntary contributions of bone marrow by offering individuals incentives such as small scholarships, housing allowances, or gifts to charity.

“This decision will not only save lives, but also reinforce the principle that doctors and patients should have the freedom to make their own choices when confronted with deadly diseases,” said Jeff Rowes, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice and lead counsel on the case.

Putin’s one smart cookie: Russia, Israel and Cyprus Gas

Mark Lytle: As superpower tensions rise over Syria, as the East pushes back against the West, Putin is smart enough to know that an isolated Israel is a dangerous Israel.
This article shows what the recent visit of Putin was all about, at the surface:

“Natural gas, aerospace, oil shale and tourism are among the areas of economic cooperation that Russian President Vladimir Putin is offering Israel during his visit this week, sources told TheMarker.”
“The most important item raised between Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday was an offer by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom to join in developing Israel’s offshore gas reserves. The largest extractor of natural gas in the world and Russia’s biggest company, Gazprom wants to open a local subsidiary that will engage in drilling and offshore and onshore pipeline operations. ”
But above all, it’s the _timing_ of this visit, which can’t help but be a factor in defusing anxiety in Tel Aviv…

Noam Chomsky & Tariq Ali - The Julian Assange Show

A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West's structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That's the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week's guests on Julian Assange's show. Source

Gold vs Paper: Max Keiser with Rick Ackerman

"Cameron doesn't get it, the colonies kicked you out, India, Cyprus, South America, Africa, they don't want you back." Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss the world looking for people looking for economic salvation in gold, the Eurozone and emerging markets and ask "what kind of stupid people put precious money into messy banks?" In the second half of the show Max talks to former market maker and newsletter writer, Rick Ackerman, about inflation, deflation, the euro and the student loan market. "the coyote has run of the cliff but just hasn't looked down yet" Source

Zero Hedge Provides Empirical Proof of Deflation (However, He Does Not Even Realize It) - Mish

Zero Hedge, citing a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report on Shadow Banking, makes (without even realizing it) a sure-fire case for deflation.

I encourage you to visit the link shown above, but also take a look at On The Verge Of A Historic Inversion In Shadow Banking by Zero Hedge.

Here is the introduction by ZH.

While everyone's attention was focused on details surrounding the household sector in the recently released Q1 Flow of Funds report (ours included), something much more important happened in the US economy from a flow perspective, something which, in fact, has not happened since December of 1995, when liabilities in the deposit-free US Shadow Banking system for the first time ever became larger than liabilities held by traditional financial institutions, or those whose funding comes primarily from deposits.

As a reminder, Zero Hedge has been covering the topic of Shadow Banking for over two years, as it is our contention that this massive, and virtually undiscussed component of the US real economy (that which is never covered by hobby economists' three letter economic theories used to validate socialism, or even any version of (neo-)Keynesianism as shadow banking in its proper, virulent form did not exist until the late 1990s and yet is the same size as total US GDP!), is, on the margin, the most important one: in fact one that defines, or at least should, monetary policy more than most imagine, and also explains why despite trillions in new money having been created out of thin air, the flow through into the general economy has been negligible.

'Obama Truth Team' Orders GoDaddy To Shut Down Website

The Day Of The Deflationists: Jim Sinclair

My Dear Extended Family,
Never before in the entire period of 1968 to 1980, or 2001 to present, have I received so many copies of classical deflationist scenarios in one day. It would seem as if the God of Deflation overflew the gold guys and dropped their leaflets.
Classical deflation does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of occurring now for any length of time. To assume that you have to hold the belief that Bernanke is a mole in the present administration, placed their covertly to bury the present administration so deep that there will never be a democrat in office after 2013 anywhere.
If you believe there is a political appetite for the collapse of the Western financial system, they had a perfect chance in 2008 and did not accept that great opportunity to purge the system of Banksters for political reasons.
The problems of 2008 are here now and greater. Derivatives still challenge the entire system at a greater level. A major under the covers audit is being done right now of some major banks for serious OTC derivative problems. Market miscreant activity allowed the break to near nothing for many financial institutions. The activity specifically is the absence of the uptick rule, which is still missing. The regulators are controlled by Washington which in turn is owned by the hedge fund and bankster’s lobby.
Nothing whatsoever has changed except the degree of difficulty which has risen to a level never existing in market history.

Sledgehammer! Turkey’s false flag attack kicks off NATO’s Syrian invasion - You Bastards!

By Richard Cottrell:

A decade ago the Islamist government of Turkey uncovered the now legendary ‘sledgehammer’ – or Balyoz in Turkish – false flag plot hatched by the Turkish High Command  to justify a coup d’état.

The plan called for a Turkish fighter plane to be shot down by friendly fire somewhere over the Aegean and the blame then shifted to the Greeks. It was a blatant attempt by the secular military establishment and their friends in the underground secret state to destabilize the freshly-installed ‘soft’ Islamic AK government before it had time to establish strong roots.

The same plan called for mosques to be bombed during Friday prayers. Military guard posts would be attacked by ’sharia dressed persons.’  As I explain in my new book about NATO Gladio secret armies (see below), elements of Sledgehammer bore a startling resemblance to the US supreme commander General Lyman Lemnitzer’s infamous Northwoods Plot to attack American navy ships and civil airliners and then blame Castro.

There is never anything that is entirely fresh or original in the false flag playbook.  So, the downing of a Turkish fighter operating in international air space – we understand by a Syrian missile – served as the excuse for Turkey to summon an immediate conclave of NATO chiefs.

As the Turkish daily Zaman observed in a somewhat under-stated editorial, the attack stoked tensions in the 16-month Syrian crisis to a new level ‘raising the possibility of further measures to internationalize the situation.’

‘Further measures’ sounds fairly soft and imprecise. In fact Turkey immediately invoked the famous all-for-one and one-for-all Article 5, which states that any attack on one member of the alliance is an attack all 27 members of the pact.

It seems incredible, yet the Turkish authorities apparently lifted the essential elements of the original Sledgehammer Plot as an excuse for a full-scale alliance intervention in Syria, even as the culprits named in the original indictments are still on trial in Turkey’s highest criminal court.

True, it appears – at this stage, at any rate – that a Syrian missile did bring down a Turkish warplane, instead of the friendly fire envisaged in the Sledgehammer Plot. But of course this scarcely matters now that the NATO war chiefs are getting ready to shoulder their holsters.

The affair provides the perfect false flag cover to justify a full-scale Libyan-style alliance ‘humanitarian intervention’ in order to get rid of yet another squalid Arab dictator who just happens to be sitting on lakes of oil.

Nor is it any coincidence at all that Sledgehammer Mark Two struck just three weeks after the annual Bilderberg conclave held at Chantilly, Virginia, close to Washington D.C.

Nobody in the UK sector believes this BS about an RBS ‘computer glitch’. - The Slog

RBS/ULSTER ‘GLITCH’: Slog survey of users plus analysis of the numbers raise further doubts. - The ‘problem’ that netted RBS an extra £73bn of liquidity

NatWest….saved by the bell?

A broad spectrum of NatWest/Ulster Bank customers and suppliers have raised new doubts about how and why last week’s RBS ‘glitch’ occurred. Also RBS’s current financial position doesn’t inspire confidence: and the ‘glitch’ gave the Group what might have been a vital windfall of £73bn in liquidity.

Yesterday, The Slog put out an appeal to those private and business users affected by the group’s Nat West/Ulster ‘computer problem’. I asked them to supply any and all experiences in recent times suggesting that this site’s suspicions about the explanation offered for hanging onto customer monies might be justified, or just pure conspiracy theory bollocks.

The inbox here in Slogger’s Roost has been busy ever since. The overwhelming finding from the input is that there seem to be problems in RBS that go way beyond pure technical snafu. I’ll start with two key quotes from business suppliers:

“In the last couple of months, particularly with Ulster Bank, the withholding of invoice payments has reached new depths. In one case, for work done in February, we are still working through the, ‘failed to raise a purchase order, raised an incorrect purchase order, missed some information on the PO, wanted the invoice readdressed, can’t pay because the payment system is down’. We are beginning to feel that this is moving beyond incompetent administration to a deliberate policy of holding back payments to suppliers. Won’t pay, or can’t pay. Neither are good characteristics for a major bank.”