"[I]n a rational world the locution 'laws of war' would make as much sense as 'etiquette of cannibals.'" - Norman Finkelstein

Just over four years ago, in December of 2008, Israel invaded Gaza in an operation dubbed Operation Cast Lead, breaking the then-current ceasefire and killing 1400 Palestinians by the time all was said and done three weeks later. Most of the Palestinian dead were civilians, including 350 children; 13 Israelis died, 4 by friendly fire, including 3 civilians. That's a 100:1 ratio. The invasion, carried out by one of the most advanced militaries in the world against what was, by comparison, a defenseless 'enemy,' was overwhelmingly supported and defended by the Israeli populace.

Those are just the barest of facts included in Jewish-American activist and political scientist Norman Finkelstein's 2010 book 'This Time We Went Too Far': Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. But even those facts were either disputed or spun by media pundits, government officials, and military personnel during and after the invasion, many going so far as to exonerate Israel of any wrongdoing whatsoever and fully defend its actions. Many justified the attacks because of the 'terror' under which Israelis were living from Hamas rocket attacks.

Keeping in mind the death statistics mentioned above, consider the fact that in any twenty-two-day period of 2008, an average of 148 Israelis died from diabetes. Even pneumonia killed more Israelis than died in the conflict: 60. (You can view the 2008 cause-of-death statistics for Israelis here.)

Finkelstein argues that the purpose of Operation Cast Lead (OCL) was both as a counter to the Palestinian 'peace offensive' and to re-establish Israel's 'deterrence capability', essentially a display of murderous 'strength' and ultraviolence, enough to instill fear into the hearts of Israel's 'enemies' and to deter the Palestinians from fighting back against the harsh oppression that hasn't let up for the last fifty-plus years, or from thinking they and other Arab states could get by simply without having to worry about Israeli interference in their affairs. As Ariel Sharon had put it, deterrence capability is "our [Israel's] main weapon - the fear of us" (p. 31). And as IDF Spokesperson Major Avital Leibowitz said, in reference to OCL: "It [should be] possible to destroy Gaza, so they will understand not to mess with us" (p. 35). Charming, huh?

In this first broadcast of Sott.net's new Talk Radio show, co-hosts Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley discuss the December 14th 2012 Sandy Hook shooting from a unique perspective. Having carefully analysed the horrific school shooting from a number of different angles in a series of articles, the Sott.net editors realised that there is actually very little to go on that points directly to any conspiracy. However, when placed within the historical context of similar mass shootings and political assassinations in the U.S. over the past half century, the theory that a conspiracy took place at Sandy Hook elementary school becomes plausible.

Many of the most notable events in modern (and even ancient) history have provoked some form of 'conspiracy theory'. That is to say, ordinary people were not satisfied with the official story about how the event unfolded because all or some aspects of that story simply did not objectively make sense. Despite what the mainstream media would like us to believe about 'conspiracy theories', most conspiracy theories are based on objective problems with the official narrative. But note that I said 'based on'. The problem with conspiracy theories is that, while they usually reflect a more accurate overview of a major event, they are forced to rely on theory (due to deliberate with-holding of data by official sources) rather than hard evidence (which would disqualify them as theories) and are therefore open to abuse by people who tend to use their imaginations to complete the picture rather than the more critical functions of the human mind.

Compared to other similar events where many people found the official story implausible, the Sandy Hook massacre has provoked a veritable flood of conspiracy theories, and many of them are not based on any hard evidence.

A large majority of the alternative news pundits that have attempted to independently investigate the Sandy Hook massacre have engaged in some seriously irresponsible and shoddy journalism. Among the more outlandish and baseless theories, we find the claim that "actors" took the place of the parents and siblings of the Sandy Hook victims, and that no children were murdered at all because, the theory goes, if they were, "why haven't we seen any bodies?" I've already exposed the logical fallacies in a few of these theories elsewhere, but there is one theory that still refuses to go away, perhaps because it is slightly less obviously bogus, and many people are still touting it as the single fact that "busts open" the official story as a "hoax".

The theory in question is that a man named Christopher Rodia was the REAL owner of the black Honda Civic, which has been identified as the car of Adam Lanza's mother that was found outside the Sandy Hook elementary school. The basis for this erroneous belief, still held by many, is police scanner audio that was picked up from the morning of Dec. 14th and which details Connecticut State Police response to the massacre.

There have been an increasing number of reports about rape in the news recently.

I don't know how many out there who have been paying close attention to these reports, but I have. The most recent ones reported via Signs of the Times (Sott.net)) have involved gang rapes and child rapes that occurred and continue to occur in places like India, Pakistan and of course, here in the United States.

Articles like these:

Murder charges are filed against 5 men in New Delhi gang rape

India gang-rape victim dies in Singapore hospital

Date-rape in Ohio: Tale of rampant corruption, cronyism and cover-up

2 year-old girl, 4 other minors raped in India

Ponerized society: UK's Guardian publishes favourable article on pedophilia - 'Bringing dark desires to light'

When 20 children and 6 adults were murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre we, like most other people, were shocked and horrified at what appeared to be an act of senseless brutality. When a person experiences the tragic and untimely loss of a loved one, particularly in unusual or apparently inexplicable circumstances, the initial intense feelings of grief usually give way to a desire to understand HOW and WHY the tragedy occurred, in an effort to make sense of it and achieve some kind of 'closure'. This is a very normal and natural human reaction. We have an innate need to understand the world around us and how things 'work'. In our modern, technological world, most of what we understand about our world and how it works is provided to us by some authority or other. And most of us accept the conclusion of those authorities as being true. In some cases, those explanations are true.

In relation to the Sandy Hook massacre; while the HOW of the attack has been explained, as yet, there seem to be few authoritative answers as to WHY the massacre occurred. That is to say, WHY a lone gunman decided to walk into a school and murder 20 children and 6 adults. At this point, three weeks after the event, it seems that the world will ultimately have to accept the narrative that a lone, disturbed individual murdered those children because he was, well, disturbed. Specifically, it is claimed that Lanza had 'Asperger's Syndrome', yet according to experts, people with this condition do not run a higher risk of killing others or themselves and indeed that they 'rarely harm others'. The 'disturbed individual' answer is, therefore, a rather unsatisfactory one, but it's an answer nonetheless.

But here's a question. What if the explanation provided by authorities about how something happened doesn't make sense in any truly objective way? More to the point, what if you have reasonable cause to suspect that the official version of events may not be accurate? Logically, you'd think that the same desire to make sense of the tragedy and find closure would remain unsatisfied in such a case. But you'd be wrong to think so, because it seems that most people, particularly those affected most directly by a tragedy, will gratefully accept the first plausible official explanation that is offered to them, even if, as in the case of the Sandy Hook massacre, it doesn't really explain WHY the tragedy occurred. The reason that most people react in this way is probably due to the same desire to find closure and 'put it behind them'.

With that in mind, we'd like to state that our previous analyses of the Sandy Hook massacre were in no way motivated by any desire to 'stir up some shit just for the sake of it' (as several individuals suggested). Our motivation was, rather, to satisfy our desire to find a more satisfactory explanation of HOW and WHY the massacre occurred, a desire that really resulted from our inability to simply ignore the outstanding inconsistencies in the official story.

I broke one of my own rules recently. I loaned out my copy of Political Ponerology to someone who just doesn't 'get' anything that's going on. This is a huge deal for me, since I usually keep that book close. I regularly urge others to purchase this book, but have never been willing to part with my own copy. The only reason I even considered loaning it out this time is because I now also have Political Ponerology on my Kindle. Still, it just feels a little weird. At the rate this guy I loaned it to is reading (and thinking), I'll age ten years before I see it again. I'm often compelled to do stuff to provoke people to think, even though at times I have this sneaking suspicion that no matter what 'stuff' I do, some people out there are just not capable of real independent thought, even when, and especially if, nudged into it.

Well that's how it seems anyway - and moreso every single day. Especially here, where I live, in State College, Pennsylvania, a bubble of unreality populated by alot of Penn State grads who came here for 'higher education', but found themselves only getting 'higher'. Many of them are stuck in the memories of their past college 'glory days' and live out their lives as if time had stood still and they're still Penn State students.

It's a weird place to live, filled with people who refuse to see themselves as they really are, who refuse to admit that past is past, who refuse to acknowledge a whole other world out there beyond the confines of this bubble, a world that is steadily unraveling, and a society that is quietly crumbling along with it.

In an article on Sott.net earlier this year entitled How is the World Going to End in 2012?, Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote:

The world is ending in 2012. That is, the final implementation of the fascist, totalitarian New World Order will be accomplished this year and you will be in that "New World" that the global elite have designed for you, and planned to implement for a very long time now. Oh, indeed, similar New World Orders have been staged in the past on smaller scales, but this time it's global because they are all in on it together! Former 'New World Orders' didn't really fail, even if they ostensibly fell; they've just been passing the torch around for millennia, spreading the disease, growing the sickness in society, until finally, now, with global communication and incredible weapons of destruction in their hands, they are ready to finalize the Faustian bargain that you, the people, signed with your blood.

That's what 2012 is all about. It's not about some grand and glorious transformation or ascension to another existence! It's not about being 'raptured' to heaven at the right hand of Jesus because you helped to 'initiate the Eschaton'! It's not about 'Starseeds' being taken aboard spacecraft and getting airlifted to some other planet of the '5th dimension', but it is also not about 'life continuing on as normal'. Pure and simple, prophecy is coming true, it's just that it's going to be much more mundane and much less sensational than you might have imagined. It is the end of your world as normal, free human beings, and your reduction to pure grinding slave-hood, your children turned over to be sex toys or cannon fodder for psychopaths, and there's nothing you can do about it now.

Those are some pretty serious charges! Are they in any way an accurate description of human life on planet earth at the end of 2012?

In the following passage of my previous article on the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, I made the following reference to Ryan Lanza being the named second suspect caught armed in the adjacent woods:

Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.

I have since found the original Associated Press report, which in fact states that it was "Ryan's younger brother", Adam Lanza, who was arrested in the woods. So let's take a closer look at this revealing report.

The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, four days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar 'lone gunman' narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly 'go postal' and target the most vulnerable members of society.

On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final 'official' analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I'm going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

~ 2 Corinthians 4:18

The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let's fix our eyes on what remains unseen...

As you probably know, a lot of conspiracy web sites and '2nd amendment' types in the USA are up in arms (literally?) right now about what they suspect is a covert attempt by the US government (or some section thereof) to rob them of their right to own guns.

The plot, according to the hard-line conspiracy theorists, is that the recent massacre in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut was in some way 'staged' and was, essentially, a means to an end, the end being that the massacre provides plausible just cause for the government, congress, etc., to table legislation to abolish, or at least water down, the 2nd amendment right to bear arms.

Why would the government want to disarm the US population? Well, it's pretty obvious! The only thing stopping the US government from implementing an overt police state in the USA is the 100 million Americans that own guns. That's the theory anyway. Of course, probably very few gun lovers in the US are hardened conspiracy theorists who think that the government was behind the Sandy Hook school massacre, but you can bet that most of them are conspiratorially-minded enough to believe that the government may try to use the massacre to rob them of their favorite piece of cold hard steel.

My take on the Sandy Hook massacre is that there are enough surpassingly strange and as yet unexplained aspects of the shooting for me to, at the very least, question the veracity of the official 'lone nut' story. At the same time however, my take on the gun lovers' conspiracy theory is that it is bunk. That is to say, if the Sandy Hook massacre was some kind of government psy-op, it had nothing to do with any attempt to take guns out of American society so that the government could implement an overt police state. The reasons are as elementary as the classes that were being given to those beautiful children just before they were slaughtered.