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Friday December 13, 2013
News Articles

Is the 900-Page Volcker Rule Too Much and Too Late?
finance.yahoo.com | Michael Santoli | 12/10/13

Is the nearly 900-page stack of regulations prohibiting a litany of specific trading actions and dictating how traders are paid the best way to ensure a secure banking system?

This is the guiding hope behind the so-called Volcker rule, a measure meant to ban government-backed banks from speculative trading using their own money. The rule, which has been approved by three of five required government agencies, is a long-in-the-making piece of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law of 2010, which grew from the 2008 financial crisis.

Named for the former Federal Reserve chairman and Obama administration economic advisor Paul Volcker -- who famously said the last useful innovation from the banking industry was the automated teller machine -- the rule is aimed at making banking boring again. ... Read more
Is the 900-Page Volcker Rule Too Much and Too Late? (12/10/13) [4:00]

Budget Deal May Be Good News for Pentagon Boondoggles
MotherJones | Erika Eichelberger | 12/12/13

... Though the $22 billion in cuts to the Pentagon in 2014 were imperfect, says Ethan Rosenkranz, a national security analyst at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, they would have reined in unnecessary and wasteful spending. "Sequestration is a bad way of implementing spending reductions," he says. "However, it's an excellent way of forcing the Pentagon to make some tough budgetary decisions which they've been neglecting to make for the past 10 or 12 years."

Anticipating looming budget cuts, the Air Force was considering delaying the purchase of more F-35 fighter jets. That would have been a wise decision, Rosenkranz says, because the F-35 has not been fully tested yet, and the program is already billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. ... Read more

*How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown? 12/13/2013, roughly 33,273 people!
slate.com | Chris Kir | Update, June 19, 201

Using the most recent CDC estimates for yearly deaths by guns in the United States, it is likely that as of today, 12/13/2013, roughly 33,273 people have died from guns in the U.S. since the Newtown shootings. Compare that number to the number of deaths reported in the news in our interactive below, and you can see how undertold the story of gun violence in America actually is.

The Guns
  1. Number of guns in the US: 310,000,000
  2. Number of guns per person: About one gun for every American
  3. Countries with more guns per person: None
  4. Runner up: Yemen, with about 11 guns for every 20 Yemenis
  5. Percentage of Americans with a gun in their home: 42
  6. State with the highest rate of gun ownership: Wyoming, 61 percent
  7. State with the lowest rate of gun ownership: New Jersey, 10 percent
  8. Number of licensed firearms dealers in the US: 134,997
  9. Number of grocery stores in the US: 37,053
The Money
  1. Total spent by the NRA (2011): $231,071,589
  2. Total spent by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the largest gun control organization (2011): $2,844,489
The Polls
  1. Percentage of Americans that in March 2013 supported an assault weapons ban: 57 and in December 2013: 48
  2. Percentage of Americans that in March 2013 supported background checks for all gun purchases: 91 and in December 2013: 77
Read more

Why Chris Arnade Quit His High-Paying Wall Street Job to Photograph Extreme Poverty and Addiction
finance.yahoo.com | Nicole Goodkind | 12/10/13

Chris Arnade was a trader on Wall Street for 20 years. He had a secure spot on a foreign exchange desk at one of the biggest financial institutions in the world. Yet after two decades on Wall Street he quit his job and began spending much of his time in an area of the South Bronx where the average household income is just $16,000 per year.

"I effectually became disillusioned with Wall Street following the financial crisis," says Arnade. "As a way to try to find something to fill in the gap I started walking around New York with my camera talking to [and photographing] people." ... Read more
Why Chris Arnade Quit His High-Paying Wall Street Job to Photograph Extreme Poverty and Addiction (12/10/13) [2:29]

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, December 13 [12:49]
DN | "One of Our Greatest Coups": The CIA & the Capture of Nelson Mandela (12/13/13) [10:10]
As South Africa prepares to hold a state funeral for Nelson Mandela, we look at how the CIA helped the South African track down and capture Nelson Mandela in 1962. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela's arrest a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency's involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, "We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups." Several news outlets have reported the actual source of the tip that led to the arrest of Mandela was a CIA official named Donald Rickard.
TRNN News
*TRNN | Bill Black says 863-page Volcker rule will allow banks to continue their risky financial derivative bets by claiming speculation is mere hedging (12/13/13) [11:35]
TRNN | Ryan-Murray bipartisan budget deal would not extend unemployment insurance for 1.3 million Americans, while maintaining $100 billion a year sequestration cuts after 2015 (12/13/13) [10:56]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Domestic News - Friday (12/13/13) [1hr]
International News - Friday (12/13/13) [1hr]
The Daily Ticker | Laura Lister | Yahoo News
*Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can't Account For, Article
TYT | Shocking Government Waste at The Defense Department (11/30/13) [7:11]
*Joseph Cirincione: Budget Deal Doesn't Cut Enough from Defense. "We're spending $55 billion a year on 5,000 nuclear weapons and related programs" (12/12/13) [4:40], Article
60 Minutes
This is an interesting, feel good story, that should shows us how imaginative people can be.
60 Minutes | The Recyclers: From trash comes triumph. The residents of Cateura, Paraguay, don't just make a living from the massive garbage heap in their town. They also make music (11/17/13) [13:19]
Thom Hartmann News
Thom Hartmann | Shares Albert Einstein's thoughts on Socialism (12/11/13) [2:09]
Thom Hartmann | Congressman Peter DeFazio: Saving our Social Safety Net (12/11/13) [7:16]
Thom Hartmann | Bill Black: Volcker Rule "Result will be the Worst of all Worlds" (12/10/13) [9:31]
Thom Hartmann on the News: December 12, 2013 [6:54]
Wealth and Income Inequality in America
*Wealth Inequality in America [6:25]
*Wealth Inequality in the World [3:51]

12.13.2013. 11:12



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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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