Orlando shooter, US army Fort Hood shooter both linked to psychiatric drugs
US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30 others in a violent attack at a Texas Army base this past week. He reportedly opened fire at the Fort Hood army base without any particular reason or motivation. In fact, as a psychiatrist, he had counseled many other soldiers on how to cope with the consequences of extreme violence (losing limbs, mental anguish, etc.).
As an army psychiatrist, he was also allowed to prescribe powerful psychiatric drugs to both his patients and himself. Many psychiatrists self-medicate, and Hasan was extremely anxious about the possibility of being sent overseas by the army, according to statements from family members (Reuters, below). Although official confirmation will probably never be made, it seems altogether likely that Hasan was treating himself with powerful psychotropic medications.
The mainstream media, not surprisingly, has utterly failed to raise this question. But it's being raised by independent media like Prison Planet (http://www.prisonplanet.com/was-for...), where writer Paul Joseph Watson says, "Psychiatrists have a history of 'self-medication' because of the easy access they have to psychotropic drugs. In almost every major mass shooting over the past two decades, since anti-depressant drugs became popular, the killer has been on SSRI's – serotonin reuptake inhibitors."
An informative article in The Examiner also asks the same question: Was Major Hasan on mind-altering prescription medications when he opened fire? (http://www.examiner.com/x-8358-Detr...).
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Gangster Government
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The Evil Empire
BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
- The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
- Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion "defense" spending that goes to private companies. In American "capitalism," an amazing amount of taxpayers' earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about "socializing" health care.
- Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.
Truth: The First Casualty Of War
Researchers reporting in BioMed Central's open access journal Conflict and Health found that the discrepancy in media reporting of casualty numbers in the Iraq conflict can potentially misinform the public and contribute to distorted perceptions and gross underestimates of the number of civilians killed in the armed conflict.
In February of 2007 Associated Press conducted a survey of 1,002 adults across the United States about their perceptions of the war in Iraq. Whilst the respondents accurately estimated the death toll of U.S. soldiers (the median estimate was 2,974 while the actual toll at the time was 3,100), they grossly underestimated the number of Iraqi civilian casualties (the median answer was 9,890 at a time when several estimates put the toll at least 10 times that number and some as high as 50 times that number). To assess the potential reasons for this discrepancy, Schuyler W. Henderson and colleagues at Columbia University examined 11 U.S. newspapers and 5 non-U.S. newspapers to collate the number of Coalition and Iraqi fatalities reported in the media between March 2003 and March 2008. They specifically looked at tallies (numbers of death over a period of time) and the descriptions of specific casualty events.
The results of their study showed U.S. newspapers reported more events and tallies related to Coalition deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there were substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.
We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
SOURCE: VILLAGE VOICE
Where did our wealth go? How do we claw it back? When are we going to punish the culprits?
When Barack Obama donned the crusader's mantle during the 2008 presidential campaign, his Web-savvy campaign team created KeatingEconomics.com and pushed it on millions of voters. The main video showed the Ichabod Crane–like Charles Keating—the wealthy, politically connected poster child of the '80s savings-and-loan scandal—in handcuffs.
The Obama video portrayed John McCain as Keating's stooge and likened the S&L crash to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, except that the current crisis is global and its bad guys bigger and badder. Today's corporate villains were flashed on the screen, among them AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The opening narrator was Bill Black, a Ph.D. criminologist and lead lawyer at the Office of Thrift Supervision, who helped steer the brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L industry and won more than 1,000 felony convictions of senior insiders while recovering millions of their ill-gotten dollars.
Those watching the compelling attack ad (still online) had every reason to believe that Obama's approach would be just as hard-edged, and that felon-busting G-men would rout the crooks and recover our money.
This was not to be.
As it stands now, there is only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration's Justice Department in June 2008.
Dwain Deets at Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice
Excerpts from a multimedia presentation at Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, on the campus of University of San Diego, on October 21, 2009. The Six Pillars of Controlled Demolition: Evidence of the Controlled Demolition of Three Steel-Framed Skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, the Iconic Twin Towers, and World Trade Center Building 7. Presentation of the evidence for controlled demolition from the perspective of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth). Deets is a former engineering executive at NASA.
AE911Truth Presents…
BY MARIAN GALBRAITH | AE911TRUTH
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is proud to announce a number of well-qualified individuals who are following the lead of Richard Gage, AIA. With the help of the 9/11: Blueprint for Truth presentation materials, these dedicated speakers – many of them experts in their field – are making dynamic, interactive presentations all over the U.S. and beyond. Each presenter brings his/her own unique perspective to the table, depending on location, background, and motivating factors. Most are available to travel and would be pleased to make a 9/11: Blueprint for Truth presentation in your area. We'd like to highlight just a few of them in this article.
Dwain Deets, AIAA
Dwain is a 37-year veteran project manager for NASA, an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and now living in the San Diego area. With his impressive "rocket science" credentials and well-honed public speaking skills, he's made several presentations in a short time with increasingly productive results.
For starters, he's inspired two different PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) Clubs to adopt resolutions for a new 9/11 investigation. Both these clubs plan to submit these resolutions to higher levels of the California Democratic Party. Next, his presentation at San Diego City College landed him on the front page of the campus newspaper, and soon thereafter, at the University of San Diego, he even managed to "convert" some Young Republicans who were protesting outside his venue after inviting them in to listen and participate in the Q&A.
Why This Real Estate Bust Is Different
Unrealistic assumptions, layers of investors, sky-high prices, and possible fraud will make it hard to clean up the mess in commercial real estate
SOURCE: BUSINESS WEEK
When Goldman Sachs (GS) sold complex bonds backed by the Arizona Grand Resort and other commercial properties in 2006, it suggested the returns would be strong. The 164-acre luxury Arizona Grand, set against the Sonoran Desert in Phoenix, boasted an award-winning golf course, deluxe spa, and several swank restaurants. The on-site water park was named one of the best in the country by the Travel Channel. With the resort's new owners planning to refurbish hotel rooms and common areas, Goldman told investors that the renovations would help boost cash flow.
As was so often the case during the real estate boom, the lofty projections didn't pan out. When the economy softened and business travel slumped, Arizona Grand's bookings slipped to 67%, from 80%. The resort defaulted on the $190 million underlying loan in 2009—a hit that alone could largely wipe out investors who bought the riskier pieces of the Goldman mortgage-backed securities deal.
"It's one of the largest losses we have forecasted for an individual loan," says Steve Kuritz, a senior vice-president at Realpoint, an independent credit-rating agency. The property, once valued at $246 million, is now worth just $93 million. A spokesman for Goldman says the pricing on the bonds was in line with market levels at the time and not above what investors could get on similar securities. Grossman Co. Properties, which owns Arizona Grand, didn't return calls for comment.
Two Battles Won: PATRIOT Reform AND State Secrets Reform Bills Pass House Committee
After a long two days of legislative battle, the House Judiciary Committee just finished its second day of debate on Chairman Conyers' PATRIOT reform bill, HR 3845 (see our wrap-up of the first day). Thanks in no small part to those of you who used our action alert, the Committee rejected almost all amendments that would have weakened the bill's reforms and voted to recommend the bill to the House floor by a vote of 16 to 10.
Even better, the Committee kept going after it was finished with PATRIOT to consider Representative Nadler's State Secret Protection Act (HR 984), which would reform the state secrets privilege that the government has repeatedly used to try and throw EFF's warrantless wiretapping cases out of court. After an impassioned defense by Mr. Nadler, who described how the government has used the privilege like a "magic incantation" to cover-up wrongdoing and warned that state secrecy "is the greatest threat to liberty at present," the bill passed with even better numbers than the PATRIOT bill, 18 to 12!
It was, to say the least, a busy couple of days in the House Judiciary Committee. If you want the entire blow-by-blow of both day's meetings, check out our Twitter stream at @EFF.
Admittedly, the PATRIOT bill isn't all we had hoped for — as we described yesterday, it's been weakened in a number of ways due to quiet pressure from the Obama Administration — but it passed through the Committee with most of its major reforms intact, and it is a substantial improvement over the PATRIOT bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.
An unpopular war
SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES
Britain’s military effort in Helmand has suffered many setbacks in the three years since UK forces were first deployed there. This week, however, marks the lowest point yet in the nation’s Afghan campaign. On Wednesday, five British soldiers were killed by a rogue Afghan policemen who they had been mentoring in good faith. The same day, Kim Howells, a respected Labour figure, called for UK troops to come home. All this has come on top of the debacle over the Afghan elections, with Hamid Karzai this week re-apppointed as president in a process that was manifestly flawed.
Gordon Brown has again tried to contain public unease over the war, in which 93 British soldiers have been killed this year. The arguments in his speech on Friday on Afghanistan are sound. He insisted that the biggest domestic threat to the UK comes from the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan – and that Britain cannot resile from “the first line of defence”. He said the core task of mentoring the Afghan national army must continue, despite this week’s horrific shootings. Above all, he made the most forthright demand yet by any western leader for Mr Karzai to root out corrupt practice and improve governance. As Mr Brown put it, there is no way that UK troops can go on dying in the name of a civilian partner that “has become a byword for corruption”.
Yet this is not enough. The difficulty for Mr Brown is that, while his arguments are sound, the British public increasingly turns a deaf ear to them. Two weeks ago, a YouGov poll showed that 25 per cent of Britons wanted troops out now. Now, that figure is 35 per cent. Astonishingly, three-quarters of the British public now want troops out within a year.
California bank failure will cost FDIC $1.4 billion
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Five more banks, including a California-based institution that reportedly received federal bailout funds in 2008, were closed Friday by regulators, bringing the 2009 total to 120 failed banks.
The latest banks to be taken over were United Security Bank of Sparta, Ga.; Home Federal Savings Bank of Detroit; United Commercial Bank of San Francisco; Gateway Bank of St. Louis and Prosperan Bank of Oakdale, Minn., according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
United Commercial, which had branches across the U.S. and also in Hong Kong and Shanghai, focused on the Chinese-American market in the U.S. and had obtained a very difficult to get banking license in China, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The Times said United Commercial received $299 million in federal bailout funds last year.
The FDIC estimated United Commercial's failure would cost its insurance deposit fund $1.4 billion.
It said United Commercial, whose U.S. and Chinese operations will be taken over by East West Bank of Pasadena, Calif., had assets of $11.2 billion and deposits of $7.5 billion as of Oct. 23.
The FDIC estimated the total impact on its deposit insurance fund from the four smaller banks would be $132.7 million.
The last time more than 100 banks failed in a single year was 1992. By number, banks in Georgia account for one-fifth of all U.S. institutions closing in 2009, with 21 failures, followed by Illinois with 209, California with 14 and Florida with nine.
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