How easily our logic fails us in the face of the all-knowing mainstream media. Ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko has succumbed to the effects of a radioactive isotope polonium 210, one of the rarest substances on the planet, and one few could obtain according to Dr Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London. Litvinenko may, or may not have ingested the deadly isotope at a sushi bar in London

Litvinenko, a critic of Putin, had been investigating the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also a vocal critic of Putin, who was gunned down at a Moscow flat last month. Litvineko had also penned a piece back in July 2006 for the, now-defunct, Chechen press where he claimed that Putin was a pedophile. See here for the google cached article.

So, case closed? I mean, all the evidence would seem to point to Putin as the cause of Litvinenko's untimely demise. Thinking logically about it, or rather, thinking 'conspiratorially' about it (since this is, after all, a very clear case of conspiracy) it is far more plausible that Litvinenko's murder was carried out by an enemy of Putin. As with all cloak and dagger cases, in the absence of any empirical evidence, the closest approximation to the truth is generally achieved by asking "who benefits?"

Consider how utterly masochistic the Putin government would have to be to murder a man who had been publicly attacking Putin himself. Consider further how amazingly crass it is for Putin, having supposedly decided that Litvinenko had to be "taken care of" to opt for a method of assassination that was absolutely certain of being identified as poisoning. Has the Russian SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) never heard of "accidental death"? What about a "heart attack"? For god's sake, even pushing the man under a number 9 bus would have been less obvious than poisoning him with an "extremely rare radioactive isotope".

Today is the 39th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 242. This resolution was passed following the war in June 1967 in which Israel invaded its Arab neighbors after claiming it had been attacked. This excuse never seems to fail. It was also the war in which the Israelis, fearing that the US government would become aware that Israeli had precipitated the war, attacked and destroyed the US communications ship the Liberty, killing 34 US Navy personnel.

Recently it has come to my attention that there are a number of so-called "Historical Revisionists" who have taken up the idea that Adolf Hitler was a "good guy" and that, as one of them wrote to me recently, "we now need an American Leader like Hitler."

I am dismayed by such naivete, but not entirely surprised. For anyone who studies the nature of evil and its origins in psychological pathology, it is not a surprise that persons who are not fully familiar with this problem can be so easily taken in. It is, however, a perennial problem, and until normal people learn this most essential thing about our world, they are helpless, and there is no hope for change for the better. The fact is: we ALREADY have an American leader like Hitler.I frequently get emails and letters from readers who simply cannot understand how psychopaths - and other related or similar psychological deviants - can move into positions of power, how they can "put one over" on so many people. It strikes the average person as preposterous that even they can be taken in by a deviant. As I wrote in my blogpost, "The Cult of the Plausible Lie":

"Our culture agrees on the signs of lying. Ask anyone how to tell if someone is lying and they will tell you that they can tell by "lack of eye contact, nervous shifting, or picking at one's clothes." Psychologist Anna Salter writes with dry humor: "This perception is so widespread I have had the fantasy that, immediately upon birth, nurses must take newborns and whisper in their ears, "Eye contact. It's a sign of truthfulness." [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]

The problem is, if there is a psychopath - or those with related characteropathies - who doesn't know how to keep good eye contact when lying, they haven't been born. Eye contact is "universally known" to be a sign of truth-telling. The problem is liars will fake anything that it is possible to fake, so in reality, eye contact is absolutely NOT a sign of truth telling.

The practiced liar: a category of liar that even experts find it difficult to detect.

Problem is, even when dealing with people who are not practiced liars, such as college students who have volunteered for a research study of lying, most observers are not as good as they think in detecting deception. The research shows consistently that most people - even most professional groups such as police and psychologists - have no better than a chance ability to detect deception. Flipping a coin would serve as well. [Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.]

Roosevelt was a doodler, so was LBJ, Nixon and a host of other presidents. So says the author of a newbook "Presidential Doodles", an analysis the scribblings of various American presidents in an attempt to plumb the depths of their often depraved psyches. "Just as our dreams and little Freudian slips can mean something about us, doodles can be indicative of the person and issues and things that he is dealing with" according to the editor in chief of the book's publisher, Perseus Books.

Last week , (Aug 7th) the SOTT Team sat down to watch Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, which I highly recommend to anyone who thinks that there is any semblance of honest and factual news reporting by the Zionist controlled media in the U.S.

What I didn't know was that, as I was watching this documentary, my 85 year old mother, in the U.S., was having a massive stroke - what is called a CVA. I learned about it after I had gone up to get ready for bed. It was late, and the phone rang... the call you always know will come when you have an aged parent, but you never believe that today will be the day.

Let me say in advance that I highly recommend The Lost Gospel, and I hope that the excerpts I am going to present here will stimulate interest in the details that Mack presents in his fascinating discussion of the discovery of Q (the theorized source document for the basic ideas of Jesus) and the subsequent analyses that helped to extract the truth of early Christian history.

When properly translated the Iranian president actually calls for the removal of the regimes that are in power in Israel and in the USA as a goal for the future. Nowhere does he demand the elimination or annihilation of Israel. He called for greater governance for Palestine. The word map does not even feature. And the president makes plain that the Holocaust happened, but, he argues western powers have exploited the memory of the Holocaust for their own imperialistic purposes. What the mainstream ran with is complete deception.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, she did so prompted by the highest of motives. Yet she, herself, relates the incident that when she first met Abraham Lincoln in 1863, he commented "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"

Few will deny that the printed word in this instance fanned the flames of passion which brought about one of the bloodiest and saddest wars of American history, with brother sometimes pitted against brother, father against son. Perhaps if there had been less appeal to the emotions the problems might have resolved themselves through peaceful means. However, almost universally read at the time, few people then recognized the potency of one small book or the injustice done the South through its wide acceptance as a fair picture of slavery in the South.

Propaganda, as a weapon of psychological warfare is in even wider use today. Communists were masters of the art. Often they used the direct approach; just as often they employed diversion tactics to focus the eyes and ears of the world in directions other than where the real conflict was being waged. For many years, through propaganda alone, the dead threat of Hitler and Nazism had been constantly held before the public in a diversion maneuver to keep attention from being directed against the live threat of Stalin, Khrushchev and Communism.

Such has been the effect, if not the deliberate intention of many who have promoted its distribution, of a book of popular appeal-The Diary Of Anne Frank. It has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp after two years of abuse and horror.

Historians, when writing about history, not only discuss the theoretical facts that are being proposed as the timeline, but also the means by which they arrived at their ideas. Generally, they draw their conclusions about history by reading "sources," or earlier accounts of the matter at hand. In some cases these are eye-witness accounts, in others, accounts told to a scribe by a witness, and so on.

Historians try to make a distinction between sources as "primary" and "secondary." A primary source is not necessarily an eye-witness account - though it would be nice if it was - but is defined by historians as one that cannot be traced back any further and does not seem to depend on someone else's account. Secondary sources are those that are essentially copies or "re-worked" primary sources. Often, they consist of material from several sources assembled together with commentary or additional data.

Well, obviously this could present a problem if the primary source is completely falsified.

In August of 1976, John Roselli would be found with his legs sawed off, and stuffed in a 55 gallon oil drum. His last meeting was with one of the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination-- Santos Trafficante. (Trafficante worked directly with Dulles, John Rosselli, and Sam Giancana in the attempts to kill Castro). The barrel was weighed down with chains, sealed and dumped in Dumbfoundling Bay off the Florida coast, but the gasses from the decomposing corpse caused it to rise to the surface. Just a few months before in April of 1976, he was grilled before the Church Committee on earlier claims regarding the Castro retaliation theory-- that Fidel Castro turned the CIA/Mafia hit teams against JFK when Robert Kennedy cracked down on the Mafia at home. The Mafia felt especially embittered and wrongly assumed that Dulles informed the Kennedys that Mafia hit men would be used in the attempts.