Panspermia: The seeding of Earth

Aliens may have sent microorganisms to Earth inside metal balls to create seed life on our planet, an astrobiologist has claimed.

Dr Milton Wainwright claims to have found a tiny metal sphere that was oozing a 'gooey' substance in samples gathered by a balloon in the Earth's stratosphere.

The University of Sheffield and the University of Buckingham scientist says that the ball, which is about the width of a human hair, could be an example of directed panspermia - where life was deliberately sent to Earth by some unknown extraterrestrial civilisation.

Dr Wainwright said the sphere made a tiny 'impact crater' on the sampler that was attached to the balloon as it collected dust and particles in the atmosphere.

He said: 'The sphere made an impact crater on the sampling stub. This proves beyond doubt that the particle was travelling at speed from space when it was sampled.'

Dr Wainwright and his team discovered the sphere when examining samples of dust and particulate matter collected by a balloon sent around 16 miles into the atmosphere.

Using X-ray analysis to examine the sphere, he concluded that it was made from titanium and traces of vanadium, while the material appearing to come out of the side was biological.

They found that it also had a 'fungus-like knitted mat-like covering'.

He claims that it could have been carried to Earth on a comet or even sent by an unknown civilisation.

Dr Wainwright and his colleagues have published their findings in the Journal of Cosmology but their conclusions have yet to be corroborated by other scientists.

The journal often publishes papers on astrobiology but is highly controversial among scientists as it has been criticised for its peer review process and for publishing papers of a fringe variety.

Two years ago it controversially published a paper that claimed to have identified fossils of microbiotic life in a meteorite, sparking a blaze of publicity, but was also met with a great deal of skepticism.

In the past Professor Wainwright and his team claimed to have found fragments of single celled algae called diatoms in samples taken from the stratosphere.

The idea that life can survive high the Earth's atmosphere, however, is not new. Scientists working with Nasa recently discovered bacteria living up to five miles above the Earth's surface.

However, most scientists believe they are likely to have been carried up from Earth rather than having an extraterrestrial origin.

Air currents and winds are known to be capable of carrying dust and bacteria for hundreds of miles and high into the atmosphere.

But some research has shown that microorganisms can survive the intense heat and pressures of entering the Earth's atmosphere from space, raising the prospect that life may have originally been carried here.

Some astrobiologists believe life started on Earth after being carried here on a comet or asteroid, while others believe it is more likely that the basic chemical building blocks were carried in this way rather than established life.

However, the idea of directed panspermia has been proposed by some heavyweight scientists.

Professor Francis Crick, one of the team who a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, examined whether it was possible that organisms could have been deliberately transmitted to the Earth by intelligent beings from another planet.

However, he concluded that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support such a claim.

Dr Wainwright, however, insists his findings may help to provide some of that evidence.

However, he added: 'Unless of course we can find details of the civilisation that is supposed to have sent it in this respect it is probably an unprovable theory.'

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, an astrobiologist at the University of Buckinghamshire and editor of the Journal of Cosmology who also worked with Dr Wainwright on the study, added: 'I think more work needs to be done on this particular structure, for example to study its DNA, if it has any.

'But already there is clear proof from many directions to confirm that we are constantly bombarded by fragments of comets that carry living microorganisms.'

However,Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said the idea that such material were being sent out by aliens attempting to seed other planets was a 'leap of the imagination'.

He said:'This would seem to provide proof that outer space and not just the surface of our planet is teaming with life.

'I'm sceptical about this and we would need to collect more samples like this to have a better idea of where it originates from.

'It is a leap of the imagination that it came from an ET race trying to seed our planet with their biological constructs.

Climate Change, HAARP, and the Great Data Caper

Okay. You know I am a statistician and that I love to find biased reporting on numbers. You have heard from the NOAA that this was third warmest January for the Northern Hemisphere and the 19th warmest January for the Southern Hemisphere, according to NOAA.

Keep in mind, NOAA's temperatures are measured against the 20th century average, while GISS uses the 1951-1980 base period, and few records go back to the 1880 baseline they claim. Add to this that there were once 6,500 recording stations worldwide, and over the last couple of decades it has been reduced to about 1,500 surface recording stations.

Satellite measurements of the lower troposphere

For satellite measurements of the lower troposphere by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), which are measured against the 1981-2010 average we see that January 2015 was the 6th warmest January on record going back to 1979.

Keep in mind, four out of the top five warmest January's in the satellite record occurred during El Nino conditions. Satellite measurements of the lower troposphere are more sensitive to the warming influence of El Nino, which was a southern Pacific Ocean hotspot condition, compared to the land surface.

Now, the trend for the past five years has been showing a drop in global temperature. We also do not know if the temperatures compared were on the same days of the year. Shifting the overlay just three of four days, which appears to have been done on many of the reports, creates the error that we seem to be noticing of about 0.75 degrees C.

NASAs report indicates there is a 38% chance that 2014 is the warmest year on record. That really means that there is a 62% that it is not the warmest year on record. Arctic ice is a good hysteresis indicator for what is happening to the oceanic temperatures. Hysteresis means that there is a lag of the results behind the input. IN other words, heat is poured into an oven, and then some time later the air or the object in the oven reaches that temperature. In fact, if you shut off the heater when it reaches that temperature, there is often an overrun of the target temperature.

That is the way it is with oceans as well. The Sun pours energy in, and it takes about ten years for the oceans to completely distribute that energy. Well, solar cycle 24 began with a fizzle, when everyone including the Mayans predicted it would be planet ending. Heck, Gore and the climate warming crowd raised billions in fear factor money based on the idea that man was responsible for this warming.

Then, in 2007, the Arctic Ice calved off a piece the size of Connecticut. The Northwest Passage was navigable for the first time in modern times. Truth is that the global average for the period between January and May dropped by 0.642 C. It happened again in 2008.

For the next 5 years, it bounced, absorbing new solar activity. Then, in 2012, it began dropping again. 2013, 2014 again showed the drop. How is that reported? Well, it was the third warmest January. Yep. The first warmest was in 2010.

And, what about the Arctic ice? Well, according to the Arctic Sea Ice News, Arctic sea ice extent was the third lowest for the month of January. Sea ice extent in January averaged 13.62 million square kilometers (5.26 million square miles). This is 910,000 square kilometers (351,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average of 14.53 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles), and 50,000 square kilometers (19,000 square miles) above the record low for the month observed in 2011.

This below-average Arctic extent is mainly a result of lower-than-average extent in the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. On the Atlantic side, Barents Sea ice extent is near average. This is in sharp contrast to the general pattern seen since 2004 of below average extent in this region.

Hmmm. The ice report bears it out as well. Earth has been cooling for three years already. The Sun? Quietest in more than 100 years. Other planets? Well, we have only been watching for 20 years. Saturn has not even made one orbit around the Sun yet. It wont for another 16 years or so. That 30% change in atmospheric pressure we have observed is more than likely a seasonal change, but we wont know that for another 36 years. Even then, we will only have two data appoints to compare.

The Arctic Ice only has about 25% to go, which at the rate it is freezing will only take another two years, to reach the levels it was in 1981, when NOAA records are baselined. By then, the geoformation efforts will have pushed the climate into the ice age of the millennium I am afraid.

Geoformation? What geoformation?

Well, for the past 18 years, the US government, and now 14 other major places on Earth, has been operating a multi-billion watt ionospheric heater known as HAARP. This is capable of using high-power radio signals to push a section of the ionosphere out into space. Doing this has three effects on weather:

The water goes back into gaseous state and will not condense into rain.

The movement of the ionosphere, causes the troposphere to move in to fill the low pressure above it, forming an artificial high pressure ridge. This acts like a pylon to the jet stream, routing it North to go around it. When it goes North, it carries the AR with it.

When the AR comes back South, it has been cooled significantly, making it appear to be a polar vortex.

Now, about 6 years ago, the US government began aggressively ramping up its chemtrail program. Satellite imagery shows enormous hatch patterns laid into the sky by high-altitude jets; some commercial and some military. It is not in the fuel. It is a separate spraying system that is used to dispense these vapors.

Samples taken below these fogging operations indicated high amounts of Aluminum and Barium. When coupled with HAARP, the lensing effect will let through UV, but it is quite effective at blocking IR, which is what heats the planet. Just this slight amount of haze, reflects the Suns heat back out into space. When you look at the weather the past 5 years in NA, you see exactly this pattern. The western half of the US is blue, and the eastern half is red. This results in record hot summers in the Midwest and East, and record cool days in the West. Then, when winter hits, the jet stream dumps huge amounts of snow in the Midwest and East while starving the West of moisture.

If mankind is having any effect on Earths climate, it is through the use of HAARP and not the use of cars or the burning of coal. Keep in mind that there are least two, and perhaps three other HAARP units that the US does not control that may be operated in a hostile manner against the Western US.

In September of 2014, Hurricane Norbert was bearing down on Southern California. It was tightly formed and had high winds. There was plenty of energy in the ocean to support it. As it passed north along the coast of Baja, a strange hot spot appeared in the center of this hurricane. Now, I have demonstrated this effect dozens of times in cloud vapor chambers on History Channel, Conspiracy Theory TV, and for the SyFi Channel. Within seconds of when the HAARP energy is directed at the water vapor, it falls out of the vapor phase and become gaseous. The temperature is equalized across the structure, and the wind subsides.

As Hurricane Norbert approached the HAARP facility on the island off the coast of Baja, within less than three hours, the low-pressure structure dissolved as the core was blasted away from the eye of the hurricane. A short time later, the Alaska facility blasted an enormous hurricane structure perhaps 1,200 miles across into harmless little ripples within a few evening hours on the 6th of September.

Can it cause a hurricane? No. I dont think you can make one from high pressure. Can it be used to steer the jet stream and the AR? Yes.

When chemtrails in a clear sky are combined with HAARP, the effect is much like geoformation. Why wont they tell us? Well, the original cast of the Holes in Heaven documentary and I have been working since 1997 to tell people about this. Some are listening. I would say within the next two to three years it will evident that we have turned a terrible corner, and the winter snow in some areas will fall on last years snow that still has not melted. Get ready to move South.

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US Federal Judge 1, Obama 0

A federal judge temporarily blocked President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration Monday, giving a coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, time to pursue a lawsuit that aims to permanently stop the orders.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's decision puts on hold Obama's orders that could spare as many as five million people who are in the U.S. illegally from deportation.

The White House confirmed early Tuesday morning the Department of Justice would appeal the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Hanen's decision could have the immediate effect of temporarily halting the first of Obama's orders to expand a program that protects young immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. illegally as children that was set to start taking effect this Wednesday, Feb. 18.

The other major part of Obama's order, which extends deportation protections to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been in the country for some years, is not expected to begin until May 19.

The ruling from the George H.W. Bush-nominated judge comes as no surprise. In a 2013 ruling in a separate case Hanen suggested the Homeland Security Department should be arresting parents living in the U.S. illegally who induce their children to cross the border illegally.

The coalition now suing the federal government, led by Texas and made up of mostly conservative states in the South and Midwest, argues that Obama has violated the 'Take Care Clause' of the U.S. Constitution, which they say limits the scope of presidential power.

They also say the order will force increased investment in law enforcement, health care and education. 'President Obama abdicated his responsibility to uphold the United States Constitution when he attempted to circumvent the laws passed by Congress via executive fiat, and Judge Hanens decision rightly stops the Presidents overreach in its tracks,' Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday night.

He announced the news via Twitter.

In their request for the injunction, the coalition said it was necessary because it would be 'difficult or impossible to undo the President's lawlessness after the Defendants start granting applications for deferred action.'

The White House rejected on Tuesday the arguments made by the 26-State coalition that claim Obama acted outside the Constitution. Mr. Obama insisted that the law is on his side; however, no court has agreed with that assertion.

'The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws, but only based on prosecutorial discretion. This would set a precedent not unlike a defacto line item veto for the presidency. Congress has stood firm on the idea that this would remove the separation of Powers between the Eceutive and Legislative branches of government. Some say, this is exactly the intent of Mr. Obamas tactics.

He claims that 'The district courts decision wrongly prevents these lawful, commonsense policies from taking effect and the Department of Justice has indicated that it will appeal that decision.

Still, House Republicans say Obama does not have the authority to save from expulsion large groups of illegal immigrants and they are also taking him to court over the matter. Most Americans dont understand this methodology, but actually this is exactly the proper was to address this issue.

Congressional Republicans have also vowed to block Obama's actions on immigration by cutting off Homeland Security Department spending for the program. Why is this necessary to block the DHS funding? Because, the management of these instant citizens will fall under their purview. I will explain in a moment just why this is so vital to the process.

The fate of that House-passed bill is unclear as Republicans in the Senate are six votes shy of the 60-vote majority needed to advance most legislation. Earlier this month Democrats in the upper chamber filibustered the bill, effectively blocking its advancement. It takes 60 votes to achieve cloture, which breaking of the filibuster to allow it to come to a vote.

House Speaker John Boehner, reacting to the Texas court's decision on Tuesday, said he hoped the legal development would encourage Senate Democrats 'who claim to oppose this executive overreach' to let the Senate proceed with its debate on the Homeland Security funding bill.

'Politically and practically the idea of deporting or driving out 11 million people and their families is absurd,' the House Democrat said. 'But a group of Republicans have not gotten the message that mass deportation and criminalization do not work and that getting people into the system and on-the-books is a more sensible approach.

Gutierrez, who is a La Rasa activist elected to Congress in an a majority Hispanic district, predicting his side would prevail, said he would continue telling immigrant communities to sign up for protection from deportation through the president's programs.

'We may be delayed, but we will not be deterred,' he said.

Other Democrats were not as enthused. Reacting on Twitter to the ruling, Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said, 'This is a sad day for families simply trying to remain together under the law. The DOJ needs to appeal immediately.' Yeah, thats right. Get the defense attorney general on it.

GOP lawmakers celebrated the Texas court decision on Tuesday as a 'victory for rule of law' and a 'big win.'

A group of law enforcement officials, including the Major Cities Chiefs Association and more than 20 police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country, also filed a motion in support, arguing the executive action will improve public safety by encouraging cooperation between police and individuals with concerns about their immigration status.

Immigration groups, including the American Immigration Council and the National Immigration Law Center, joined with influential labor player Service Employees International Union, to file a friend of the court briefing, as well.

Now, I want to tell you what the whole game plan is. This process has been in the planning stages for more than two years, and the President repeatedly violated the Constitution in order to make it happen so far.

Every year, there is a period when most of the Senators go back to their districts, and a few remain behind to have daily meetings in session to take care of items of business and administration. On March 27th, 2010 during one of these predictable periods of low activity, Obama appointed Craig Becker to head the National Labor Relations Board. Third Circuit concluded on May 16th, just two months later, that the appointment of Craig Becker was constitutionally invalid.

Nevertheless, he was sworn in on April 5th and served in that capacity until January 3rd, 2012. Mr. Becker was there for a reason. He asserted and acted to establish the final rule that workers do not have a choice to work outside a union. A 1978 Yale graduate, where he was the editor of the Yale Law Journal, and taught at UCLA Law School 1989-1994, and before that at Georgetown University Law School from 1987-1988, and the University of Chicago Law School.

Becker advocates an authoritarian labor picture in which no employee would have the right not to join a labor union. Says Becker: Just as U.S. citizens cannot opt against having a congressman, workers should not be able to choose against having a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent. Asserting that business owners have no legally cognizable interest in their workers' decisions vis a vis unionization.

Now, how does this tie into what is going on with the instant work permit process that is pushing forward even though the court has announced it is executive overreach? I am so glad you asked that question.

A Request for Proposal was recently posted in the governments official database for federal contracts and comes from the Department of Homeland Security agency charged with processing visa and naturalization petitions, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The complex contract is being pushed at a full-throttle pace, a government source told Judicial Watch on Friday.

A federal judge in Texas issued an order this week that halts the presidents plan to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation and bans DHS and USCIS from executing the amnesty order.

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Hours after Judicial Watch published its original report of the contract on Friday, the government cancelled the Request for Proposal.

The RFP estimated that the population of potential requesters for the presidents deferred action will be approximately four million people and that USCIS anticipates the initial filing of approximately five to six million forms related to the amnesty order, Judicial Watch reported.

Judicial Watch said the work, which calls for 200 to 600 contractors, was set to begin in mid-March and the contractor would operate out of a new center in Arlington, Virginia to accommodate the additional volume of work.

When the work permits are delivered to these 5 million illegal immigrants (notice I did not say IF), and they sign this document, they will be involuntarily be placed into a labor union. Their employers, whether they are restaurants, farms, or construction companies, they will be required to deduct union dues from their paycheck and then send that money to the union.

The largest union the US is the NEA. They have 2.4 million members. This union, at 5 million minimum and rising, will be the largest union on earth. They will bargain as one, make massive donations to the Democrat Party, and they will all vote one way; to keep their jobs. The Democrats will have a single, paid-for voting block so powerful, that they will dominate elections nationwide.

The defense attorney general, William Withholder, has prepared and will file an emergency stay to stop the injunction against the presidents executive order to give nearly 5 million illegal immigrants work permits. That stay has to be signed by the same judge, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Texas. Most people think it is unlikely to grant a stay against his own judgment, but Obama will not stop there, I can tell you.

The American Civil Liberties Union had filed a lawsuit in December against the so-called no-release policy by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on behalf of mothers and children who said they had fled violence in Central America. If the court grants them refugee status, they cannot be deported. Obama wants this Union in place. With this union in place, anything he wants to order by fiat, will be unstoppable.

Move over ISIS, There is a New Terrorist in Town

While the White House held a Countering Violent Extremism summit this week to talk about extremist ideologies that radicalize not radical Islam in particular but myriad forms of extremism domestic and foreign CNN reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has circulated an intelligence assessment on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.

The assessment, reviewed by CNN, was produced in coordination with the FBI and counts 24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010, the news group reported on Feb. 20.

According to the report, "(Sovereign citizen) violence during 2015 will occur most frequently during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect's home, during enforcement stops and at government offices."

The report adds that "law enforcement officers will remain the primary target of (sovereign citizen) violence over the next year due to their role in physically enforcing laws and regulations."

In general, the conflicts with sovereign citizens occur when they refuse to cooperate with police officers, often during traffic stops, because they claim the police lack the authority to stop them, question them, or take other steps.

CNSNews.com contacted the DHS and asked if and when its report might be made available to the public, and why it apparently was released solely to CNN. DHS spokesman Sy Lee in an e-mail response said "the report you are referring to is not public" and would not be made available to the public.

They're carrying out sporadic terror attacks on police, have threatened attacks on government buildings and reject government authority.

A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists and comes as the Obama administration holds a White House conference to focus efforts to fight violent extremism.

Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to -- and in some cases greater than -- the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention.

The Homeland Security report, produced in coordination with the FBI, counts 24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010.

The government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order.

They've lashed out against authority in incidents such as one in 2012, in which a father and son were accused of engaging in a shootout with police in Louisiana, in a confrontation that began with an officer pulling them over for a traffic violation. Two officers were killed and several others wounded in the confrontation. The men were sovereign citizen extremists who claimed police had no authority over them.

Among the findings from the Homeland Security intelligence assessment: "(Sovereign citizen) violence during 2015 will occur most frequently during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect's home, during enforcement stops and at government offices."

The report adds that "law enforcement officers will remain the primary target of (sovereign citizen) violence over the next year due to their role in physically enforcing laws and regulations."

The White House has fended off criticism in recent days for its reluctance to say the words "Islamist extremism," even as the conference this week almost entirely focused on helping imams and community groups to counteract the lure of groups like ISIS.

Absent from the White House conference is any focus on the domestic terror threat posed by sovereign citizens, militias and other anti-government terrorists that have carried out multiple attacks in recent years.

An administration official says the White House is focused on the threat from all terrorists, including from sovereign citizen and other domestic groups.

"I don't think it's fair to say the (White House) conference didn't address this at all," the official said, adding that President Barack Obama addressed the need to combat "violent ideologies" of all types.

An official at the Justice Department, which is leading the administration's counter-radicalization effort, says many of the tactics aimed at thwarting radical Islamic recruitment of young people can also be used to fight anti-government extremist groups.

While groups like ISIS and al Qaeda garner the most attention, for many local cops, the danger is closer to home.

A survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizen terrorists, ahead of foreign Islamists, and domestic militia groups as the top domestic terror threat.

The survey was part of a study produced by the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

In 2013, a man who held anti-government views carried out a shooting attack on three Transportation Security Administration employees at Los Angeles International Airport, killing one TSA officer. Last year, a couple killed two police officers and a bystander at a Las Vegas Walmart store.

Officers inspect a car outside Los Angeles International Airport in 2013 after three TSA employees were shot.

Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.

The federal government's focus on the domestic groups waxes and wanes, Potok said, in part because the threat from foreign groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Potok says sovereign citizen groups have attracted support because of poor economic conditions. Some groups travel the country pitching their ideology as a way to help homeowners escape foreclosure or get out of debt, by simply ignoring the courts and bankruptcy law.

The Homeland Security report's focus on right-wing terrorists is a subject that garnered political controversy for the Obama administration in the past. In 2009, a Homeland Security report on possible recruitment of military veterans by right-wing militia groups prompted an outcry from veterans groups.

The report was produced by staff members during the Bush administration but wasn't published until then Homeland Security Janet Napolitano had taken office. Napolitano criticized her own agency for the report.

On February 6, the Federal Bureau of Investigation held a news conference about a growing problem faced by local law enforcement agencies. According to the FBI, police all around the country have been contacting the Bureau with requests for information and training on the sovereign citizen movement.

Over the next week, the online reaction to the Bureaus statements ranged from confused to outraged. Conservative pundits were wringing their hands, fearing that the FBI is going to target their Tea Party readership as enemies of the state, while liberal pundits expressed glee that the FBI now considers Tea Party supporters to be domestic terrorists.

Image via Wikipedia

For example, conservative commentator Glenn Beckaired a 12-minute segment on his show last week in which he concluded that there is no such thing as a sovereign movement, since hes never heard of it, and that the government is using this fictional group as a boogeyman in order to do nefarious things to Glenn Becks fans.

Im in the news business. I dont even know who they are. Sovereign citizens? Glenn Beck

Alas, Mr. Beck, sovereign citizens do indeed exist. And sorry, both sides of the political battle field, they arent the Tea Party.

The good news for Beck is that the overlap between his fan base and the sovereign movement is probably minor. The bad news for the rest of us is that state and local law enforcement agencies are having a heck of time educating their officers about how best to identify and deal with this very real and potentially violent group.

So whats the definition?

The short answer: a sovereign citizen is someone who believes that he or she is above all laws.

The long answer is a bit more complex.

Think about a law you dont like. Any law, at any level of government. It can be a big law, like paying income taxes, or a tiny one, like licensing your pet Chihuahua with the county.

If youre a member of the Tea Party movement, the solution to this bad law is to protest your opinion in DC and in other metropolitan areas, write angry letters to your Congressmen, and vote for politicians who agree with you that such a law should be scrapped as soon as possible.

If youre a member of the sovereign citizen movement, your approach is a bit different. You start by looking for a combination of quotes, definitions, court cases, the Bible, Internet websites, and so on that justify how you can ignore the disliked law without any legal consequences. Be imaginative. Pull a line from the 1215 version of the Magna Carta, a definition from a 1913 legal dictionary, a quote from a founding father or two, and put it in the blender with some official-sounding Supreme Court case excerpts you found on like-minded websites. Better yet, find someone else online who disliked that same law and pay them $150 for a three-ring binder filled with their word salad research.

Et voil, not only have you proven that you dont have to obey the law you dislike, heck, its your patriotic duty to disobey it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just plain un-American and is probably part of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to ensure that Chihuahuas are slaves to the US government.

When you can pick and choose which laws to put through your special blender, you are effectively putting yourself above all laws.

So why are they a problem for state and local police?

Sovereign citizens are true believers. They generally entered the movement by buying into a scam or conspiracy theory that not only promised them a quick fix to their problems, but wrapped such solutions in a heavy layer of revolutionary rhetoric. Once a sovereign feels the flush of excitement and self-importance that comes from acting as the David to the U.S. governments Goliath, they know, with all of their hearts and souls, that their research is correct, that their cause is just, and that anyone who disagrees with them is a criminal who deserves to be punished.

These sovereign citizens are also doomed to failure; the tax collector, prosecutor, and judge have all heard these same legal theories dozens of times already and understand that they are bogus.

When a person believes his cause is just, yet he meets failure over and over and over again, there comes a point where he has to make a decision: he can admit his theory is wrong and walk away, or he can fight dirty.

Non-violent retaliation against government employees and law enforcement is the most common response, and can take the form of filing false liens, filing bogus Forms 1099, sending threatening correspondence, suing government employees for millions of dollars, and cyber-stalking individuals in government who disagree with the sovereigns legal theories.

Some sovereigns plot a violent revenge, hoping to inspire others in the movement to reach their breaking point sooner. For example, after twenty years of attempting to persuade the IRS and the Tax Court that his blender salad of legal theories was accurate, in 2010, private pilot Joseph Stack flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin Texas, killing one tax collector, and injuring thirteen others.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, lets try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well. Joseph Stacks suicide note

Other such planned events have included bombings, shootings, murders, and armed standoffs.

Most sovereigns who act violently, however, have no grand plan in place; they simply lash out when theyve failed one too many times. Some commit suicide, but for most of them, the final straw can be something as small as being pulled over by a highway patrolman for having a busted tail light or something as big as being evicted from their home when the bank forecloses on their property.

Since most people dont have any direct contact with government other than with local law enforcement, officers are at a particularly high risk of bearing the brunt of sovereign citizen anger.

Why do officers need training?

On the surface, sovereigns believe some pretty outrageous things, and to an outsider, their legal theories seem fairly silly. Up until the recent wave of violence, most police officers who encountered sovereigns found them more amusing than anything else. Following recent police shootings in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania, officers now need to rethink their opinion of this group.

Also, sovereign citizens dont call themselves that. In fact, if you ask a person if she is a member of the movement, she is likely to respond that the sovereign citizen label is an oxymoron, and that she is an individual seeking the Truth. She may then launch into a ten minute lecture about 18th century ideals of individual sovereignty. A non-sovereign simply answers, No.

Perhaps the most difficult hurdle for law enforcement is dealing with stereotypes. The first generation sovereign movement (from 1970 to 1995) was comprised mostly of middle-aged, high-school educated, white men with some military background, and extreme-right, often racist values, located mostly in in rural communities west of the Mississippi. Today, the second sovereign wave (1999 to present) can include anybody: black, white, rural, urban, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, armed, unarmed, male, female, conservative, liberal, semi-literate, college-educated, from any walk of life. For example, dentists, chiropractors, and even police officers all seem drawn to the movement in recent years.

Sovereigns are also difficult to identity because there is no membership group for them to join, no charismatic leader, no organization name, no master list of adherents, and no consistency in the schemes they promote and buy into. There are hundreds of sovereign legal theories being peddled in seminars, in books, and on the Internet, and many of these theories contradict each other.

Conclusion

The sovereign citizen movement is big and is growing fast, thanks to the Internet. There are an estimated 300,000 people in the movement, and approximately one third of these are what I would call hard-core believers people willing to act on their beliefs rather than simply walk away.

While there is no guarantee when it comes to officer safety, police departments do indeed need to teach their front-line officers how to identify sovereign markers and take appropriate precautions in case a particular encounter becomes a sovereigns final straw.

Clinton Uranium Deals Fuel Black Market

Here's a fascinating politics/energy/international relations story that's flying below the radar now, but feels as though it could get huge. The closer Hillary gets to making the official announcement she will be the next president, the more important this information becomes. Those in favor of saving the Republic know that when it comes to the Clintons, even the perfect bullet fired too soon will never damage the target. We must wait until aiming the guns of justice at this crime gang.

The news starts with Uranium One (UUU), a Toronto-listed uranium miner, whose shares plunged 38% on recent news that the Kazakhstan government was probing whether certain Kazakh mines it owns were acquired illegally. Specifically, it's looking at potentially illegal asset sales by Mukhtar Dzhakishev, the former head of state-owned uranium miner Kazatomprom, who later sought favors from the man who sold the assets to, Frank Giustra, and Bill Clinton.

Reuters: Heres the deal, and believe me the financial world has been numbed from the blatant criminal aspects of this transaction. At question was the sale of a 30 percent stake in the owner of the country's largest uranium mine, Khorasan, although it did not specify the buyer. It said the stake was sold for paltry $104,000.

Uranium One bought this 30 percent stake in that mine, while a group of Japanese firms owns another 40 percent. The rest is owned by Kazatomprom.

Uranium One said its Kazakh assets, which also include stakes in the Akdala and South Inkai mines, were acquired in 2005 by UrAsia Energy, which Uranium One bought in 2007. I know it sounds complicated, but that is the idea. Shell corporations are legit corporations as far as the paperwork goes, and reverse merging with them allows ventures to become public entities, able to raise money very quickly through the sale of common and preferred stock.

Ok, so far so good. But who is UrAsia? The shell company was the subject of a NYT piece in 2008 that explored its close ties to Bill Clinton, just a few days after Hillary conceded the nomination to Barack Hussein Obama.

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest of the former Soviet States, but it is sparsely populated with most everyone living in one of three cities of modest size. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan. But what his shell company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton....

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstans state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The small amount of money they had and the fact that no one in their organization knew a thing about Uranium mining, stunned the mining industry when they mysteriously turned their unknown shell company into one of the worlds largest uranium producers. The transaction was ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra and his partners, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, the Clinton Foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he recently acknowledged it under pressure by Reuters.

So... The former President accompanies an unknown venture capitalist to Kazakhstan, who easily closes the mining deal of the century, and then just a few months later donates $31.3 million to the Clinton foundation. Maybe that's not so bad. After all, if the former President, but his wife was currently serving as a US Senator from New York and their non-profit Foundation gets a commission payment.

The point is that the deal was illegal, not just based on Clintons connections, but actually based on the laws of Kazakhstan, and the suspicion that Mr. Giustra got special political favors in exchange for the money.

Uranium One says it has did nothing wrong and that UrAsia paid full value for its stake, although it was only $104,000. But perhaps Kazatomprom and its CEO Dzhakishev -- who sold UrAsia the stake -- had another angle.

Back to the NYT:

In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share.

That same month, Mr. Dzhakishev, the Kazatomprom chief [who sold Giustra the mining assets two years earlier], said he traveled to Chappaqua, N.Y., to meet with Mr. Clinton at his home. Mr. Dzhakishev said Mr. Giustra arranged the three-hour meeting. Mr. Dzhakishev said he wanted to discuss Kazakhstans intention not publicly known at the time to buy a 10 percent stake in Westinghouse, a United States supplier of nuclear technology.

Nearly a year earlier, Mr. Clinton had advised Dubai on how to handle the political furor after one of that nations companies attempted to take over several American ports. Mrs. Clinton was among those on Capitol Hill who raised the national security concerns that helped kill the deal. By the way, the Chinese, known to be huge cash contributors to the Clintons elections, now own those ports. The entire West coast is on union shutdown now, and there is some chatter out there that the East coast may join the effort to extort more money out of the American economy.

Anyway, Mr. Dzhakishev said he was worried the proposed Westinghouse investment could face similar objections. Mr. Clinton told him that he would not lobby for him, but Mr. Dzhakishev came away pleased by the chance to promote his nations proposal to a former president.

Mr. Clinton said this was very important for America, said Mr. Dzhakishev, who added that Mr. Giustra was present at Mr. Clintons home.

Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Giustra at first denied that any such meeting occurred. Mr. Giustra also denied ever arranging for Kazakh officials to meet with Mr. Clinton. Wednesday, after The Times told them that others said a meeting, in Mr. Clintons home, had in fact taken place, both men finally acknowledged it.

Ah, denying a meeting took place and then "remembering" it. That's not suspicious or anything.

It's hard to see how this story doesn't hook both Bill Clinton and Hillary if it doesn't just go away quickly. I dont think it will as just weeks after this meeting in New York, Kazakh state nuclear fuel company Kazatomprom announced it will buy 10 percent of Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC from Toshiba Corp. for $540 million, the companies said Monday.

Kazatomprom plans to use the deal to enter new export markets for its uranium fuel, the companies said. Kazatomprom is the third-largest uranium producer in the world and aims to become the leading uranium miner by 2010 with planned output of over 15,000 tons.

Kazatomprom Chief Executive Mukhtar Dzhakishev declined to say with how much uranium and nuclear fuel his company plans to supply U.S. nuclear reactor manufacturer Westinghouse. Kazatomprom funded the deal from its own resources and the deal closed in late 2007 while Hillary was still in the Senate. She said nothing about the transaction.

Russian Hackers Commit Largest Bank Heist in History

Russian Hackers Commit Largest Bank Heist In Human History $1Billion Gone!

Using malware, Russian hackers steal more than $1 Billion in whats being described as the biggest bank heist in human history.

As much as 650 million is thought to have gone missing after the gang used computer viruses to infect networks in more than 100 financial institutions worldwide.

The hackers managed to infiltrate the banks internal computer systems using malware, which lurked in the networks for months, gathering information and feeding it back to the gang.

The illegal software was so sophisticated that it allowed the criminals to view video feeds from within supposedly secure offices as they gathered the data they needed to steal.

Fox-IT and Group-IB called the crime group Anunak, and described how the crooks sent malware laced Microsoft Office attachments in spear phishing attacks to compromise specific users inside targetedbanks.

Most cybercrime targets consumers and businesses, stealing account information such as passwords and other data that lets thievescash out hijacked bank accounts, as well as credit and debit cards, my December 2014story observed. But this gang specializes in hacking into banks directly, and thenworkingout ingenious ways tofunnel cash directly from the financial institution itself.

The attacks from the Anunak/Carbanak gang showcase once again how important it is for organizations to refocus more resources away from preventing intrusions toward detecting intrusions as quickly as possible and stopping the bleeding. According to the Fox-IT/Group-IB report, the average time from the moment thisgroup breaks into bank internal networks and thesuccessful theft of cash is a whopping 42 days.

The Dead Vet Slush Fund

President Obama and the Veterans Administration bureaucracy are already sabotaging the VA reform law passed in August. The ink is barely dry on the 8.6 million "Choice Cards" that supposedly allow vets to see a doctor outside the delay-plagued system.

Obamas budget tries to snatch the $10 billion allocated for the Choice program and allow it to be spent however VA top administrators want. Its a sickening betrayal.

Even worse, VA secretary Robert McDonald is telling federal lawmakers that this underhanded move will better serve "VA system priorities." Thats the problem. Hes more interested in protecting "the system" than vets. Its all about bureaucratic turf and union jobs.

With a straight face, McDonald says it has " nothing to do with us trying to gut the Choice Card or anything like that; it was about flexibility." Flexibility for VA bureaucrats, not for ailing vets who need it. Removing the funding definitely will gut the program because the law says the Choice program expires whenever funding runs out.

At a Feb. 2 press briefing, VA administrators facetiously claimed that sick vets don't want to see outside physicians, and that use of the Choice Cards was "much lower" than they had expected. Thats a whopper. When asked, they couldnt provide any specifics.

Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, can provide those specifics. He reports that vets get the runaround when they call the VA for permission to use the Choice Card. "The VA is making a concerted attempt to undermine anything that looks like choice."

Vets get told they dont meet the requirement for living 40 miles or more from a VA facility, or they havent endured an unacceptably long wait for care, or their care isnt medically necessary.

VA administrators are lying to Congress when they say vets dont want choice. A Tarrance Group poll the first week of February found that 88 percent of vets polled said it is "extremely" or "very important" to increase their healthcare choices.

Heres another whopper: The presidents budget parrots the VAs claim that the money allocated for Choice is urgently needed to "support essential investments in VA system priorities."

What are those priorities? How urgent are those priorities? When asked these questions at their press briefing, the VA brass couldnt name a single one.

House Veterans Affairs Committee Chair Jeff Miller, R. Fla., dismisses the notion that the Choice money is needed elsewhere, pointing out that the VA has "left hundreds of millions in healthcare funding unspent since 2010 while thousands of vets languished on waiting lists." Not to mention that the presidents new budget proposal increases VA funding by another 7.5 percent.

"Its not about money," says Hegseth. "The VA wants to perpetuate its dysfunctional system" by keeping vets from choosing to go elsewhere for care.

The shenanigans against the Choice program are one sign that little progress has been made at the VA since the celebrated enactment of the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014. Politicians took their bows, and then the VA administrators got busy dismantling the reforms before they could succeed.

Too bad the lives of our soldiers are at stake. On Feb. 12, President Obama signed a suicide prevention bill, named for Clay Hunt, a Marine who had served in Iraq and later killed himself. By the way, 24 veterans follow Clay Hunt every single day. It passed Congress unanimously. Too bad no lawmakers followed up on whether it has any chance of succeeding.

The answer is, probably not. The law says VA suicide prevention programs will get outside evaluations. From whom? So what if they do? The VA has been inspected ad nauseum by the General Accountability Office, Inspectors General, and other auditors. The reports pile up, unread, and the VAs dysfunction lives on. The statistics are staggering documenting the graft, fraud, and criminal neglect.

Indeed, the GAO unimpressed with the reform promises of the new VA secretary just named the entire Veterans Administration a "high risk" program.

Whats needed is a system that puts vets in the drivers seat, allowing them to take their medical care funding wherever they choose. On Feb. 26, a bipartisan task force that has been assembled by Concerned Veterans for America will unveil such a plan. Its already attracting support of powerful lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R. Calif., and Miller. But with the VA leadership and unions lined up against them, they have their work cut out for them. This will not be easy, and it is likely to be bogged down in court for a decade.

Onward Christian Soldiers

Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.

Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 - a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted.

"It's very different," he said, asked how the experiences compared. "Here I'm fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and more brutal."

Thousands of foreigners have flocked to Iraq and Syria in the past two years, mostly to join Islamic State, but a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting as well, citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.

The militia they joined is called Dwekh Nawsha - meaning self-sacrifice in the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Christ and still used by Assyrian Christians, who consider themselves the indigenous people of Iraq.

A map on the wall in the office of the Assyrian political party affiliated with Dwekh Nawsha marks the Christian towns in northern Iraq, fanning out around the city of Mosul.

The majority are now under control of Islamic State, which overran Mosul last summer and issued an ultimatum to Christians: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword. Most fled or were trapped, killed, and had their children sold into slavery.

Dwekh Nawsha operates alongside Kurdish peshmerga forces to protect Christian villages on the frontline in Nineveh province.

"These are some of the only towns in Nineveh where church bells ring. In every other town the bells have gone silent, and that's unacceptable," said Brett, who has "The King of Nineveh" written in Arabic on the front of his army vest.

Brett, who like other foreign volunteers withheld his last name out of concern for his family's safety, is the only one to have engaged in fighting so far.

The others, who arrived just last week, were turned back from the frontline on Friday by Kurdish security services who said they needed official authorisation.

"STOP SOME ATROCITIES"

Recent veteran Jordan Matson left the US and went to fight with the Christian Kurds until ISIS is stopped. He is currently conducting nightly video reports with Sean Hannity. He is in nightly firefights with ISIS soldiers. I did some checking to verify his armed service record. Some were saying he was a marine. He was not a marine. He served for about a year in the US Army, being discharged in 2007. I know that there was heavy pressure to lighten the serviceman load in 2007, and there are clauses that allow honorable discharges for what they call suitability, which has more to do with whether your free will survived boot camp or not. Its obvious he joined to fight evil. He volunteered to do so, without pay.

He has been wounded already with shrapnel to his foot while fighting ISIS gangs who were repelled at the end of a 6-hour clash, despite the heavy weapons the gangs had.

He says he was slightly injured by pieces of a mortar shell that landed close to him at the very beginning of the clash, and was taken back to the YPG base by another fighter for a check-up, and that they had returned to the fight after they understood that the injury was not serious

He is still fighting every day to save the world. There at least 3 Americans that have joined the YPG, recruited by their website pleading for skilled fighters to come and help them rid their country of ISIS. Last night, he said that if the Americans would give them some better weapons and more ammunition, they could take back most of the territory ISIS now patrols with terror.

He said ISIS will decapitate the men, and hang them on trees at each village. They tell the villagers that if they discover villagers have removed any of the bodies, they will return and kill everyone. The girls are sold as slaves to Europe, Asia, and the royal families in Saudi Arabia.

He is not alone. Jeremy Woodard from Mississippi is also there fighting with the Kurds. 43-year old Desert Storm veteran Brian Wilson from Ohio, is also there offering his leadership and appealing the US for more help. At a meeting last week chaired by U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.N. Security Council said all countries should make it a serious criminal offense for their citizens to fight abroad with militant groups. The United States has no specific law preventing individuals from joining groups like ISIS, but it has anti-terrorism laws that it has used to prosecute those associated with such groups.

During this weeks Summit on Fighting Violent Extremism, Obama said 60 nations were marshaled against ISIS now, under his leadership, but to this day those 60 nations have done nothing, contributed no money, no soldiers, no weapons, and no speeches against ISIS or the Islamaniacs.

A British businessman named Tim shut down his construction business in Britain last year, sold his house and bought two plane tickets to Iraq: one for himself and another for a 44-year-old American software engineer he met through the internet.

The men joined up at Dubai airport, flew to the Kurdish city of Suleimaniyah and took a taxi to Duhok, where they arrived last week.

"I'm here to make a difference and hopefully put a stop to some atrocities," said 38-year-old Tim, who previously worked in the prison service. "I'm just an average guy from England really."

Scott, the software engineer, served in the U.S. Army in the 1990s, but lately spent most of his time in front of a computer screen in North Carolina.

He was mesmerised by images of Islamic State militants hounding Iraq's Yazidi minority and became fixated on the struggle for the Syrian border town of Kobani -- the target of a relentless campaign by the jihadists, who were held off by the lightly armed Kurdish YPG militia, backed by U.S. air strikes.

The only foreign woman in Dwekh Nawsha's ranks said she had been inspired by the role of women in the YPG, but identified more closely with the "traditional" values of the Christian militia.

Wearing a baseball cap over her balaclava, she said radical Islam was at the root of many conflicts and had to be contained.

All the volunteers said they were prepared to stay in Iraq indefinitely.

"Everyone dies," said Brett, asked about the prospect of being killed. "One of my favourite verses in the Bible says: be faithful unto death, and I shall give you the crown of life."

Alabama Holds the Marriage LineFor Now

President Barack Obama is correct when he says federal law trumps state law, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore told Fox News, but Moore says the president is forgetting one thing: judge's rulings are not law.

Moore appeared on "Fox News Sunday" to discuss his order to Alabama probate judges not to issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Callie Granade that the state's same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional.

Granade has power only over the case she was ruling on, Moore has long argued, pointing to Rule 65 of Federal Rules of Procedure, which Moore noted "states very clearly" that no person is bound by a lower court ruling if that person is not before the court.

Granade noted Moore's argument in her later ruling, requiring Mobile County's probate court to abide by her original ruling and issue the licenses.

"She now has one judge under authority, but not the other remaining probate courts of Alabama," Moore told Fox News.

Still, 50 of Alabama's 67 probate judges are set to begin issuing licenses next week. Moore said that will have them breaking Alabama's Constitution, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Moore denied that he is defying the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals or the United States Supreme Court in the issues since he said nobody has yet ruled on the case's merits.

"If they had ruled on the merits we wouldn't be needing to go to the United States Supreme Court in April with a decision on this issue," he said.

The 11th Circuit did not rule on the merits, he said, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled only on injunctive relief, which Moore said applies only to Alabama's attorney general.

He called the ruling a "federal intrusion of state sovereignty" and said no one but him is standing up to them.

"Twenty-one states have bowed down to federal court orders when they didn't have to," he said.

"What a judge says is not law," Moore added.

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage, Moore says he would recuse himself if a related case comes before his court. He believes the ruling would go against the U.S. Constitution, as did Dredd Scott, which denied a black man the right to escape slavery, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" as the law of the land.

DHS Shutdown Eminent

House Speaker John Boehner is raising the possibility that the Department of Homeland Security may shut down at month's end because of a budget impasse, and is blaming Senate Democrats for it.

Democrats responded by saying responsibility would fall on the Ohio Republican and the country would suffer from the needless closing of vital part of government.

The agency is caught up in a fight over President Barack Obama's immigration actions, with Feb. 27 as the date when the $40 billion budget would shut off.

A House-passed bill would cover the department through Sept. 30, the end of the current budget year, and overturn Obama's move to limit deportations for millions of immigrants who are in the United States illegally.

But in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has declared a stalemate and urged the House to make the next move. Senate Democrats, while in the minority, have been able to block action on the bill in protest of the Republican language on immigration.

Asked what if the department funding were to run out, Boehner said, "Well, then, Senate Democrats should be to blame. Very simply."

He then told "Fox News Sunday," when asked if he were prepared to let that happen, "Certainly. The House has acted. We've done our job."

Democrats pounced.

In linking immigration and the budget, Boehner "knew exactly what he was doing," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

If Boehner persists, Schumer said, "he will be responsible for shutting down a large part of the government, the American people will perceive it that way, and his party and the country will suffer for it."

Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, said there are enough votes in the House now to pass legislation without the immigration provisions "if only Speaker Boehner will get out of the way."

Earlier Sunday, Obama's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, tried to pressure the Republican-run Congress to act. During an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," he noted that Congress would keep getting paid, but vital employees at the border and airports among other places would have to work without pay while the funding dispute lingered.

Most department employees fall into exempted categories of workers who stay on the job in a shutdown because they perform work considered necessary to protect human life and property.

About 200,000 of the agency's approximately 230,000 employees would keep working even if Congress fails to fund their agency

War Robots: Remember Battleship

A research firm in Stamford, Connecticut, is working with the Navy to build an amphibious drone that can storm beaches, Defense One reports.

The device, called GuardBot, is a rolling ball that can move over water at 4 mph and over land at 20 mph. If you want to see how one works, look at the alien attack drones in the movie Battleship.

GuardBot can climb a 30-degree incline and uses a nine-axis stabilization, "pendulum motion" propulsion system, Defense One reports. The GuardBot is propelled by shifting its center of gravity back and forth.

Creator Peter Muhlrad told the website that the Guardbot can be reproduced in a variety of sizes from 10 centimeters to nine feet.

GuardBot, Inc., has a cooperative research development agreement with the Navy, which provides research and resources. Companies under such agreements get to produce their products commercially, and the government gets the right to use the technology.

Eventually, the GuardBot will be deployable anywhere in the world using geographic information system data.

The GuardBot has cameras on either side and is designed primarily for surveillance and object inspection, but when asked whether it could carry explosives, Muhlrad answered, "Yes."

Net Neutrality: Nothing Neutral here.

Republican on the Federal Communications Commission blasted the net-neutrality proposal from the agency's chairman as a "332 page secret plan to regulate the Internet" that "opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes" on broadband services.

FCC Commissioner, Ajip Pai said in addition to the eight pages of new rules, there were 79 pages detailing other telecommunications regulations the FCC would exempt or not exempt Internet providers from complying with. There also were additional pages containing "extensive discussion" about how regulations would be interpreted and applied," Pai said.

Commissioner Ajit Pai said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, was misleading the public about what's in the plan. At a Tuesday news conference, Pai held up a copy of the thick draft proposal and called on Wheeler to make it public before the agency votes on it on Feb. 26.

Normally, when a proposal is made public in the Federal Register, the public has between 30 and 90 days to comment on the proposed rule. Normally, there are only a few comments, and sometimes as many as 20 thousand or so. There were more than 4 million comments that were posted concerning Net Neutrality.

Most of the 332 page regulatory document was believed to be responses to those comments. But that has turned out not to be true. The plan would put wired and wireless broadband service providers in the same legal category as highly regulated telephone companies, although Wheeler said the FCC would take a light-touch approach that would not include rate regulation.

This means that areas with marginal service, and believe me there are thousands of these some trapped inside older metropolitan areas that have never received fiber cable, will lose their wireless broadband service because there is not enough profit from the few customers out there who use it commercially.

For instance, our plant sits just 5 miles outside of metro Charlotte. The cable companies have said it will cost $26,000 to bring us cable for internet. There is no fiber cable that reaches that far outside the city. To get it would cost us more than $50 thousand. So, we use wireless broadband. It is horrible with not only data limits that run out before half the month is gone, but service that goes to crap between 2:30 and 6:30 PM on weekdays. We cannot even check email with it.

If this regulation is approved, we will lose even that service.

Here is the really scary part about this whole thing. Neither the FCC, nor its army of private expert contractors had anything to do with writing the 332 page document. It was allegedly delivered to Mr. Wheeler by Obamas staff, who was operating a parallel FCC in the back room.

Congress ordered Friday that the FCC has until Monday afternoon to produce unredacted email messages, focused on net neutrality rules, between FCC staff and officials with the Obama administration, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said in a letter to the FCC Friday. The Utah Republican is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Chaffetz's committee is "investigating the potential involvement of the White House" in the creation of proposed net neutrality rules that the FCC is scheduled to vote on next Thursday, he said in the letter.

In fact, the FCC Chairmanthere are 3 democrats and 2 republicans on the boardstated as recently as last October his plan would regulate Internet service much like phone service or any other public utility by applying Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

1934? Did he say 1934? That was when Roosevelt formed the FCC, which was formed officially by Congress only 8 days later. That act did not get rid of a monopoly. It created one. After numerous lawsuits, all of which were lost to government lawyers, and more than 62 years of Congressional pressure by Republicansthey were in power for only 8 of those yearsthe FCC finally designed the Communications Act 1996 to provide for a pro-competitive, de-regulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced information technologies and services to all Americans by opening all telecommunications markets to competition.

The instant result was the creation of the worlds first completely free communications. Within 12 months, the world began to change. The internet, except in China and Russia, is completely free to all lawful content. The consumer has determined what will and wont be successful, not the access providers.

With the reapplication of the fascist regimes Title II FCC regulatory authority, billions in new taxes, fines, regulations, police actions and content control will be applied.

The end of internet radio, blogs, independent news organizations, and most of all home-based businesses will disappear overnight. If you dont believe me, try opening an Amazon Store in North Carolina, or California. You see, those states charge sales tax on all transactions in those states, even if the buyer is in another state. That effectively charges someone in Ohio, the North Carolina sales tax. Amazon deletes States that make them collect sales tax. Ask more than 100,000 small business owners who lost their businesses overnight when that happened.

How many will lose when this goes through, and federal tax is collected on the connection, the content type, and all the transactions that take place where commerce is paid for? Millions.

What can be done to stop this? Nothing. Because the FCC did not write this regulation. Obamas secret internet team wrote it. That is why the neither Congress, nor the public will be allowed to see it before it becomes law. Go figure. A trillion-dollar industry is nationalized overnight with one document, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

The government recently nationalized health insurance. How did that work out for us? Well, the healthcare industry is a hot dog stand compared to the internet. How large and how powerful do you think the new Department of the Internet will be? Liberty is gone on February 26th. We will stay live as long as we can.

The HSBC Scandal Continues

Gary Osen, who is litigating a case against HSBC and other banks in Loretta Lynchs U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York, told WND that while he has no hard evidence that the bank is continuing money laundering, its difficult to change the ways of a bank the size of HSBC. Loretta Lynch is a long-time Democrat operative first appointed to the court by Clinton, and then Obama in Suffolk County New York as US District Attorney, and is now nominated by Obama to be Attorney General. As I reported last week to you, she signed the deferred prosecution order allowing HSBC to go free after being caught laundering more than $189 billion in drug cartel money in one year in her jurisdiction. The CIS fined HSBC a mere $1.92 billion and prosecuted no one. Only the whistle Blower John Cruz was fired.

Occasionally, there really are changes in management and culture in a bank like HSBC after a settlement like the 2012 settlement HSBC reached with the Department of Justice that really do improve the culture of the bank, Osen said.

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/02/Gary-Osen.jpg

Attorney Gary Osen

But as a general rule, its really had to turn around a large international bank like HSBC except on the most superficial level.

Osen said the reason is that foreign, multinational banks have a tremendous competitive advantage to engage in illegal money-laundering.

When you think about it, the profit margins in illegal money-laundering are incredibly high; its super profitable, he said.

Its a niche market where banks like HSBC can compete with U.S. banks, and its hard for the multinational large commercial banks to forgo illegal money-laundering or dealing with government-sanctioned foreign banks, because they know their competitors will come in and sweep up the business from them.

Osen is suing HSBC along with Credit Suisse, Barclays, Standard Chartered and Royal Bank of Scotland in a case brought by Charlotte Freeman, whose husband died in an attack by Iranian-trained militants in Karbala, Iraq, on Jan. 20, 2007.

Osen represents a group of U.S. citizens with family in the U.S. military who were killed in combat in Afghanistan or Iraq. The plaintiffs allege the international banks handled hundreds of billions of dollars in international transfers for U.S.-sanctioned Iranian financial banks that Osen contends were responsible directly or indirectly for losses of loved ones suffered by his clients.

Herv Falciani, the whistleblower in the HSBC private bank scandal in Geneva, also has expressed his belief HSBC has not stopped illegal banking activities, despite its insistence every time it is caught that tighter internal compliance procedures will be instituted.

It is impossible that the system of finance and banking at HSBC have changed their manner of functioning, Falciani said in an article published in Mexico Feb. 12, 2014. Where is the control that everybody thinks exist in banking but in reality do not exist?

Osen affirmed its particularly hard for large, foreign-domiciled international bank like HSBC to change.

Banks of that kind, he said, have these off-shore capabilities and have made a lot of money in these illegal rackets to ignore the constant earnings pressure change the corporate culture so they give any credence at all to compliance.

All too often these multinational banks have the architecture for compliance, but they do not treat compliance issues seriously, he said.

Its sort of like when we depose bankers and they point to their giant, shiny software package that cost them $12 million to install; and they are very proud of what they have bought until you find out they never actually put it into their system, Osen said.

They may have bought the compliance package, but they never installed it.

Central bank of the global drug trade

The raid of HSBC in Switzerland came a week after completion of a massive investigation by the the Indian Express, an English-language newspaper based in Mumbai, in conjunction with the Paris-based Le Monde newspaper and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a global network of 185 investigative reporters in more than 65 countries who collaborate in in-depth investigative journalism under the auspices of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity.

The investigation uncovered secret documents from HSBCs Swiss private banking arm containing the names of HSBC account holders and their balances in more than 200 countries with a the total balance of more than $100 billion.

Reporting on the investigation, the news website Great Game India observed last week that for years, when banks have been caught laundering drug money, they have claimed that they did not know, that they were but victims of sneaky drug dealers and a few corrupt employees.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that a considerable portion of the global banking system is explicitly dedicated to handling the enormous volume of cash produced daily by dope traffickers.

Great Game India said that contrary to popular opinion, it is not demand from the worlds population which creates the mind destroying drug trade.

Rather, it is the world financial oligarchy, looking for massive profits and the destruction of the minds of the population it is determined to dominate, which organized the drug trade. The case of HSBC underscores that point. Serving as the central bank of this global apparatus, is HSBC.

Great Game India traced HSBC back to the 1890s when British intelligence agents operating the drug trade in the Opium Wars launched the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation as a repository for their opium proceeds.

A criminal organization

Cruz began working at HSBC on Jan. 14, 2008, as a commercial bank accounts relationship manager, and was terminated for poor job performance on Feb. 17, 2010, after he refused to stop investigating the HSBC criminal money-laundering scheme from within the bank.

Cruz worked in the HSBC southern New York region, which accounts for approximately 50 percent of HSBCs North American revenue. He was assigned to work with several branch managers to identify accounts to which HSBC might introduce additional banking services.

Cruz told WND he recorded hundreds of hours of meetings he conducted with HSBC management and bank security personnel in which he charged various bank managers were engaging in criminal acts.

I have hours and hours of recordings, ranging from bank tellers, to business representatives, to branch managers, to executives, he said. The whole system is designed to be a culture of fraud to make it look like its a legal system. But its not.

Cruz explained that after many repeated efforts, he gave up on the idea that HSBC senior management or bank security would pursue his allegations to investigate and stop the wrongdoing.

My conclusion was that HSBC wasnt going to do anything about this account, because HSBC management from the branch level, to senior bank security, to executive senior management was involved in the illegal activity I found, he said.

Despite repeated attempts to bring the information to the attention of law enforcement officers, Cruz hit a brick wall until WND examined his documentation and determined his allegations were sufficiently substantiated to merit publication.

HSBC is a criminal organization, Cruz stressed. It is a culture of crime.