You've heard the story about the 'Catholic terrorist' Guido Fawkes and the English parliament. You know what they did to him when he was ratted out by informers. And unless you've been living under a rock these past years, you've heard about V for Vendetta, the Wachowski siblings' movie adaptation of Alan Moore's comic book icon. Even if you haven't watched it yet, then you've almost certainly seen the lead character V's legacy in footage and images from demonstrations across the planet's capital cities this year:

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this revolutionary movie has inspired a generation to rise up. It has certainly been a fitting prop! Folks in the UK traditionally celebrate today with a bonfire in commemoration of Fawkes's death and continuity of the status quo. What most don't realise, is that they are celebrating a crime by the elite against the people.

After Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, English Catholics who had had a rough time under her reign had hoped that her successor, James I, would be more tolerant of their religion. Alas, he was not, and this angered a number of young men who decided that violent action was the answer.

One young man in particular, Robert Catesby suggested to some close friends that the thing to do was to blow up the Houses of Parliament. In doing so, they would kill the King, maybe even the Prince of Wales, and the Members of Parliament who were making life difficult for the Catholics.

To carry out their plan, the conspirators got hold of 36 barrels of gunpowder - and stored it in a cellar, just under the House of Lords.

But as the group worked on the plot, it became clear that some innocent people would be hurt or killed in the attack. Some of the plotters started having second thoughts. One of the group members even sent an anonymous letter warning his friend, Lord Monteagle, to stay away from the Parliament on November 5th.

The warning letter reached the King, and the King's forces made plans to stop the conspirators. Guy Fawkes, who was in the cellar of the parliament with the 36 barrels of gunpowder when the authorities stormed it in the early hours of November 5th, was caught, tortured and executed. [...]

The story of the Gunpowder Plot is an interesting one. It is generally accepted that it would have been unlikely that the conspirators could gather 36 barrels of gunpowder and store them in a cellar under the house of Lords without the security forces of the day getting suspicious. Furthermore, there is serious doubt about whether the letter mentioned above was in fact genuine. In fact, it is believed today to have been fabricated by the King's officials. Historians suggest that the letter was simply a tool for the King's officials who already knew about the plot from the very mouth of one of the plotters.

As a tool for the king's men, the letter was ideal. It made it easy to explain how the King found out about the Plot and stopped it just in time before his untimely death. At the same time, the letter was vague enough to give the officials all the latitude they wanted in falsifying confessions and to pursue their own anti-Catholic ends. In fact, we could go further and suggest that the entire plot was a set-up, a 17th-century "false flag", if you will.

So while the British today misguidedly celebrate the execution of a man whose main aim was to liberate them from injustice, the mask that has come to represent that man via the movie V for Vendetta is today a symbol of that same desire to liberate the ordinary citizen from the grinding, relentless death machine that is civilization in the modern age.

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and the people of the US East Coast, in particular those living on the NY and NJ coastlines and the people of NYC itself, are left to pick up the pieces.

Right now, 250,000 people in lower Manhattan are without power. The prognosis for reconnection is not good. As the sea poured over the banks of the East River near the ConEd electricity substation on 13th Street, the transformer blew in spectacular fashion.


With the underground circuitry still under water, those 1/4 million people are looking at 10 days without power, despite promises that it would take just three days. Among the powerless are many elderly and disabled people on medication. Brooklyn resident Jonathan Maimon provided the following report on the situation in his area:

Virtually every retailer, restaurant and grocery store south of 38th street is CLOSED....There is no food, other than what you have in your refrigerator....

There is no running water or flushing toilets for people living in the Jacob Riis Houses and surrounding NYCHA buildings on the Lower East Side. In my estimate, this is roughly 20,000 people....

I did not witness a single Red Cross Truck or FEMA Vehicle or in lower Manhattan. Recall the assistance these agencies provided after 9/11 - this is NOT HAPPENING. There are bound to be hundreds of elderly people, rich and poor, who live on the upper floors of buildings with elevators that are now disabled. IF POWER IS NOT RESTORED, THIS WILL MOVE FROM BEING AN ECONOMIC DISASTER TO A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER.

At times like these, before, during and after a natural disaster, the most politicians seem able to do is to point out the obvious and try to create the impression that it is they who are mostly responsible for 'getting the country back on its feet'. Obviously, this is bullshit. It's the ordinary people of any society or country that drive the bulldozers, manually pick up the pieces, rebuild homes and fix damaged infrastructure. Yet politicians would like us all to believe that, without their leadership, nothing would get done. Obviously, this is more bullshit. Yet people believe it, mainly because the media provides them with images of presidents taking to the skies to survey the scenery and polls stating that x% of people think that the president or mayor "did a good job" in "dealing with the crisis". They do a good job at capitalizing on a crisis, but that's about it.

The truth of the matter is that, more often than not, in exercising their power in such situations, politicians tend to impede the most effective, efficient and humane response to a disaster. The reason is clear: politicians do not, and never have, worked in the public interest. They have their own vested interests and those of their corporate cronies that always come first.

When I lived in Vietnam I saw first hand the legacy of the use of Agent Orange the US forces had used for deforestation in the Vietnam war. 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects as a result of its use. I was teaching at a school that was supporting a local charity which cared for children still being born with horrific birth defects. They were the third generation to have their lives destroyed by these toxic chemicals. At the care home we visited the heroic nun in charge, who told us how she had first found the children abandoned by their parents in cages with chains around their arms. Many of those children still bore the scars on their wrists. Most would not live past 18. Their spines would curve as they grew until their organs could no longer function. They were there because they had been abandoned on the street by families too poor to look after them. I held a 4-month-old boy who had been found in a shopping bag behind a waste bin. He was deaf, blind and oblivious to the actions of others, and would be deprived of a life we take for granted.

I was recently reminded of that terrible scene after reading an article that stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me of just how horrifying, destructive and inhumane the actions of our world 'leaders' have been. And continue to be.

The news I'm referring to is a shocking revelation that is lost behind the backdrop of Halloween party costumes, the 24/7 coverage the US Presidential election circus and media hysteria of 'Frankenstom' Sandy.

A study recently published in the Environmental Contamination and Toxicology bulletin, found that the weapons and ammunition used by the US and its Imperial apparatus - NATO - in the illegal destruction and occupation of Iraq have led to significant rise in birth defects and unexplainable illnesses. In fact, there has been a five-fold increase in birth defects since the occupation began.

This article was first published in The Dot Connector Magazine, official publication of Sott.net.

When you think of Halloween, what is the first image that comes to mind? I took a little informal poll among my friends, family and associates. Guess what image came in first? Jack-o-lanterns! Bet you thought I was going to say "witches". Well, I sure thought it would be witches, but they only came in a close second!..

When I think of Halloween, I think of grade-school art projects where we cut out silhouettes of witches to paste onto large yellow moons made of construction paper. The witch was always on a broom with her black dress flying in the wind, accompanied by a black cat sitting on the back of the broom. I wondered even then how the cat managed to stay on and why anybody would think that straddling a broomstick as a seat would be even remotely comfortable.

IF the storm forecasters are accurate and Hurricane Sandy plays out as is being predicted, and if there are extensive and prolonged power outages lasting into 'election day', I wonder if they'll use this as an excuse to postpone the 'election' - since approximately 50-60 million may be impacted by the effects of hurricane Sandy, according to mainstream news reports.

I'm also wondering if this storm will be used as the catalyst to push forward a few 'other' things. It seems pretty obvious to me, at least, that the fear factor is being ramped way UP. If you don't believe me, check out the Weather Channel. I've also noticed the forecasters and some others have been making comments that seem a little 'defensive'. I think they doth protesteth a little too much with their repetition of "We're not hyping this, we're not hyping this..."

The storm had barely left Cuba last week when The Guardian of London was already hyping Sandy up with talk of it heralding the "End of Days"! And we are accused of being doom-sayers!

If there are extended power outages well into next week, then I guess this means the voting machines for the US elections will not be working.

Will they then hook the voting machines up to generators?

Or... they could just postpone the fake election? I've been seeing calls for people to 'vote early'. See here, for example. Obama himself did so last week. In fact, there are reports of up to 40% of Americans voting a week early this time around. I doubt the true figure's anywhere near that, but it's almost like they're trying to encourage people to vote early.

Just what is going on here?

A couple of days ago I learned that Andrea Fornella Abbott, 41, was found guilty on Tuesday of disorderly conduct after being arrested in July 2011 at Nashville International Airport. She had faced up to 30 days in jail and a $50 fine, but the judge placed her on probation for a year because she has no criminal record. 'So what?', you may ask. The thing that bothered me was her alleged 'disorderly conduct'. Her 'crime' was to argue with TSA agents, insisting they don't touch her 14 year-old daughter's private parts during a 'routine pat-down', before refusing to go through with the invasive procedure herself. You see, the disorderly conduct did not come from a mother justifiably concerned about the privacy and intimacy of her daughter and herself, but from the agents and the TSA who have institutionalized 'disorderly' - let's be frank here - pathological conduct, all based on the Big Lie of the War on Terror.

Here is footage of the event. Although it has no audio, it is clear that Andrea Fornella was only arguing her point. So much for the illusion of free speech.


This case illustrates in micro-cosmos the situation in which we the people find ourselves at this point in time in relation to the holders of power and their agents. Things have gone far beyond basic management of the population you would expect from government. Similar to some of the darker moments in history, we are facing pathological extremes. Think of the systematic imprisonment and extermination of entire groups of people as "lice", to use Hitler's expression for Jews. Or the excesses of Roman Emperors. Or the Stazi in East Berlin suspicious of households which had their TV antennas facing west. Although the manifestations are not always the same, the nature and essence of the pathological conduct are. It is about treating people as objects. Nowadays, however, I think we are going through a particularly bad phase of the historical cycle of abuse. Some of the things being done to innocent people you would not even do to objects you value.

I recently had a rather interesting conversation with one of those people who, in a way that's hard to come by in America these days, can look you in the eye and treat you like a human being.

How rare, I thought.

I was impressed by how simple, how nice, this man was. Before I realised it, we'd spent nearly an hour talking while the sun set and the dull darkness fell on our dull American street, a street made momentarily more habitable by the genuine kindness of a stranger.

And then, the inevitable occurred. The dreaded question: "So, who are you going to vote for?" I looked away for a moment. "You do vote, don't you?" he pressed.

Being respectful toward a person who had just offered me the simple pleasure of conversation, I gave as real an answer as I thought was suitable. "Nope. I'm pretty burnt out by the whole thing." And surprisingly, he actually acknowledged my answer before, well, you know, 'the lecture'.

"The simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated explanations." Occam's razor

For those of us keeping up-to-date in the alternative-news-a-sphere, political theatre has become increasingly predictable. Events occur, tragedies happen, 'evil' scapegoats are blamed, politicians say craftily scripted words and the media exalts them. Innocent victims suffer and the general 'herd' are delivered top-ups of fear to maintain their terror-anxiety levels and faith in Governments to protect them from non-existential threats. This process has played out time and time again, especially over the last decade in the wake of 9/11, and remains effective on an ill-informed populace that is unaware the FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US.

In the run-up to elections, terror-related popularity-boosting events are laid out for politicians to capitalise on. They are normally precise and clearly orchestrated. Take the recent case of the FBI foiling their own terror plot against the New York Fed. This is a classic tried and tested method of framing a patsy in order to perpetuate the myth of Islamic extremists for political gain. However, when a terror attack happens that causes confusion and finger-pointing amongst the political elite in the run-up to a presidential election, then clearly something is not quite 'optimal'.

Five weeks after the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the way that the Obama administration, intelligence services and media have reacted has been somewhat perplexing. No elected official has yet to reveal with certainty who led the attack, and at times, both the White House and the US State Department have provided completely different explanations for the assumed motives of the attackers.

What on earth is going on?

"One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways. When the habits of subconscious selection and substitution of thought-data spread to the macrosocial level, a society tends to develop contempt for factual criticism and to humiliate anyone sounding an alarm."

- Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology

The presidential elections in the US are coming up soon. Many people argue for their chosen candidate to vote for. As usual it is Republicans vs. Democrats. Romney vs. Obama. I've written before about the futility of engaging in this circus side show that is designed to give the illusion of choice and simply re-enforces the prison without bars where people get distracted by the shadows on the wall in a global Stockholm Syndrome. It doesn't speak much for a "shift in consciousness" or "global awakening", especially if many self-proclaimed "spiritual" and "aware" folks still ignore the facts and are driven by identification and wishful thinking, participating in a system that is deeply ponerized.

Before leaving for work this morning, I posted a report on my FB profile about the Estelle, a humanitarian aid ship en route to Gaza, which was surrounded and stopped by the Israeli military, having come so close to its final destination.

In the report, I read the following comment made by a Senior Israeli Defense Ministry official:

"He denounced the activists as 'provocateurs who are driven by hatred for Israel' and dismissed the 'humanitarian crisis in Gaza' ..."

We are constantly subjected to similar language coming from the Israeli political leadership regarding who 'hates' Israel. According to the mouthpieces for the Israeli crime syndicate 'government', if we were to actually believe what they tell us, then we would believe that all the world 'hates' Israel. Israel's propaganda machine has been saying the exact same thing - that this or that one 'hates' them - for the whole of my life to date - and for far longer than I've been alive.