Signs of the Times Christmas Fundraiser: Donate Today to Keep the Lighthouse Shining, Receive 2024 SOTT Merch!

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:33 UTC

© Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images

Anti-war protest, Rockefeller Center, New York City, November 29, 2023

As we approach the end of 2023, the SOTT.net team would like to wish all our readers and followers a peaceful and happy Christmas, and a prosperous and adventurous new year. We remain ever grateful for the continuing support we receive from this far-flung network of like-minded truth-seekers. Without your support, there would be no Signs of the Times, so thank you. If it's within your means to do so, please consider donating below so that we may keep bringing you the news and views that matter!

Israel's ongoing, shocking obliteration of Gaza is truly of 'biblical' proportions. The Israeli regime has already killed more Palestinians in the past six weeks than it killed during the Nakba ('catastrophe') that initially 'shaped' Israel in 1948-9. We say 'biblical' not just because, like the war in Ukraine, it looks set to generate another wave of refugees, and not just because it could potentially ignite a wider Middle East war. This war is 'biblical' because it's not really a war, but rather a shockingly inhuman, AI-powered, hi-tech orgy of atavistic terrorism - a viciously cruel military bombardment of a defenseless civilian population.

Gaza, November 2023

In a grotesque perversion of scripture, Israeli PM Netanyahu claims that, "We [Israelis] are sons of light, they [Palestinians] are sons of darkness," whereas, in fact, he is a modern-day mad 'king' leading a real-world 'massacre of the innocents', of children, all of whom are being sacrificed for his career and 'legacy'.

We cannot speak for the unfathomable suffering of Gazans, but the contrived events of October 7th and Israel's subsequent 'revenge' have been something of a 'test' of all people: who has a conscience, and who does not? Who Sees the crux of the matter, beyond ideological superficiality and what the Israeli regime claims happened outside Gaza on October 7th?

'Left vs Right' tribalism, as we've observed recently, isn't much of a guide in matters of Truth, and of the heart. Many on the erstwhile 'conservative-christian' Right, in cheering this, certainly appear to have 'gone over to the Dark Side'. But as appalling as it is that this is happening, with nothing being done to stop it, the 'cost' for the perpetrators is the exposure of their nature for all the world to see. The burst of 'truth-telling' this has spurred on social media and in public discourse generally (with the possible exception of the vaccine mandates) is unprecedented.

Brazil National Congress, Brasilia, January 2023

2023 opened with major demonstrations in Brazil against the declared result of that country's 2022 presidential election. Lula da Silva, as the Left-wing candidate critical of US imperial policy, in favor of engaging Brazil with emergent multipolarity, and supportive of ending the war in Ukraine, narrowly 'won' the election. But he was also a firm believer in The Science™ on Covid, and thus all the 'solutions' that came with it. This, above all other considerations, is probably what tipped the hand of the Brazilian establishment (and the CIA) to support him over President Jair Bolsonaro, who was one of only a handful of world leaders to push back against the tyrannical lockdowns and mandates in 2020-21. And so, certain that the election had been rigged in Lula's favor, millions of Brazilian voters took to the streets and effected a transport blockade, culminating in the occupation of the National Congress and Supreme Court of Brazil on 8 January.

Echoing the 'January 6^th insurrection' in Washington DC almost two years to the day, Brazilian protesters initially had 'help' doing so from security forces, which only later - after the buildings had been overrun and vandalized - arrested thousands of them. The subsequent media framing of the event saw now-ex president Jair Bolsonaro accused of attempting a 'coup' and the Brazilian Supreme Court ruling that all online content claiming or even suggesting election fraud in Brazil be censored. Thusly was the second-largest democracy in the Americas 'managed' in the interests of globalism, and against the popular will.

East Palestine, Ohio, February 2023

In mid-February someone from within the bowels of the US Intelligence Community decided to make a big deal out of Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloons - which the Pentagon also sends up all over the world as part of its 'ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capability' - by shooting them down with missiles. This absurd hysteria was flagrantly whipped up to encourage Americans to view the Chinese as 'our enemy', and also served to distract Americans from the dark cloud (literally) hanging over a swathe of the US Northeast following the highly suspicious train 'accident' that occurred on February 3d in East Palestine, Ohio (an interesting place name given what's occurring now in the Middle-East).

The industrial freight train, loaded with hazardous materials, derailed after one of its cars caught fire, whereupon the rail company and government officials decided to immediately dump and burn tens of thousands of gallons of highly toxic and flammable gas and liquids. The air and water for miles around became unbreathable and undrinkable, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate their homes, and causing mass wildlife die-off. The media ridiculed 'conspiracy theories' suggesting that sabotage 'sparked' the derailment, or at least malfeasance in handling the incident, and downplayed the potential for long-term environmental harm to people and animals, but this hasn't allayed suspicions that a 'hidden hand' lies behind the pattern of industrial 'accidents' at industrial facilities like food-processing plants in the US.

© Fulton County Jail, Atlanta, Georgia

Running in the background, all year long, were growing signs of the eastward shift in global influence, such as the surprise announcement in March that Beijing had brokered a thaw in Iranian-Saudi relations. This was followed by a visit of newly re-elected Xi Jinping to Putin at the Kremlin, days after the International Criminal Court had issued a warrant for his arrest, and which concluded with Xi being overheard telling his counterpart that "we are driving changes the likes of which the world has not seen for 100 years."

March also saw the first of four farcical 'indictments' of Donald Trump, charging him with a total of 91 felony crimes, with trial dates set to coincide with the 2024 US presidential election. If you can't see by now that this is all part and parcel of the same discredited 'Russiagate' political witch-hunt against him while president, and that it's continuing in order to either dampen, or outright prevent, his chances in the upcoming election, we don't know what to say to you! They got the mugshot they wanted too, but we doubt that it will play in the 2024 election the way they expect it to.

Deep State election interference was even explicitly acknowledged the following month when US media reported that the Intelligence Community (specifically the CIA, in cahoots with soon-to-be Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken) swung the 2020 election for the Bidens by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop leaks. Sure, it's not the same as rigging the actual votes, but it was an influence operation based on a lie, and the source was American, not Russian.

Speaking of censored-information-that-later-turned-out-to-be-true, on September 11th 2023, an auspicious date, the House of Representatives' Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealed testimony from "a senior-level CIA whistleblower" that CIA scientific experts were bribed in early 2020 into supporting the zoonosis theory (over the lab-leak theory) for Covid's origins. The scamdemic was led by The Science™ alright, and The Science™ paid good money to get the devastating lockdown results it wanted.

Back to the 60s: RFK Jr announces candidacy as Democratic nominee, April 2023

April also saw the last great American TV News anchor, Tucker Carlson, fired from Fox News, although he quickly returned to command even greater audiences on the last free social media platform (Twitter is dead - Long live X!). The announcement that month by Robert F Kennedy Jr that he intends to run in 2024 added further explosive energy to an already charged political race, but he has since sullied his truth-telling on Covid 'vaccines', the Fauci-CIA bioweapons program, the military-industrial complex, and the wilful impoverishment of the American middle and working classes... by declaring his undying love for Israel.

In May, Russian forces finally 'denazified' Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine following a titanic 6-month battle. Actually, to the Western media's disgust, the Russian private military contractor 'Wagner' captured Bakhmut (with the full support of the Russian military command), but there were signs in the lead-up to its conclusion that something was seriously wrong with Wagner's civilian co-owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Anxious to maintain the illusion that Ukraine stands a chance of 'winning' against Russia, Kiev-backed forces - no doubt with the assistance of NATO 'specialists' - began droning high-profile Russian targets like the Kremlin, shooting down helicopters inside Russia proper, and sending squads of NATO-trained Russian neo-Nazis across the border to terrorize Russian towns.

Wagner tank 'Siberia' in Rostov-on-Don, June 2023

And then, in June, Wagner mutinied! The whole world held its breath as tanks took up positions in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and several thousand fighters from among the 'heroes of Bakhmut' formed an armored convoy in the direction of Moscow. For about a whole day, Western Russia-haters enjoyed the single best moment of their entire year, reveling in speculation that civil war was about to engulf Russia and break it apart, or that Putin was on the verge of being deposed. However, once again, their ignorance of Russian politics, and their misreading of the months-long struggle between Prigozhin and the Russian military command, let them down. Given how swiftly the danger was dealt with, and how emphatically all sectors of the Russian state and people got behind Putin, this was most likely a risky, but necessary, power move by Putin to lull the mutineers within Wagner into a trap, in the process bringing Wagner PMC fully into the fold of the Russian military. As for Prigozhin and his unfortunate plane crash outside Moscow in late August, let's just say that those who live by the sword, die by the sword.

Not to be outdone in the drama department, the US media was abuzz in June with the 'revelations' from US Air Force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch, who testified in a congressional hearing that he had conversations with unnamed officials that led him to believe that the US government maintains a secretive UFO recovery program and is in possession of "non-human" spacecraft - along with their "dead pilots." NASA and the Pentagon of course denied everything, but this was nonetheless a fairly big 'splash' in the ongoing 'drip-drip-disclosure'. Normies are being accustomed to what we at SOTT term the 'hyperdimensional reality' - levels of reality 'above and beyond' ours, from which non-human intelligences greatly influence 3D events - it's just a question of when, and to what extent, this will become 'the new normal'.

Paris, July 2023

Late June saw riots erupt in some French cities following the fatal police shooting of a French-Algerian teenager who had been pulled over for reckless driving. Remarkably, the riots ended suddenly a week later when urban drug-lords called them off because the disturbance was eating into their profit-margins! Though smaller in scale than the 3-week-long riots in France in 2005 over the accidental police killing of two teens of African origin, the episode served as another reminder that governments' complicity with organized crime and shady NGOs in rapidly importing multiple millions of people into the West, many of whom do not integrate and instead become extremely anti-social, constitutes a clear and present danger to maintaining basic social order.

Followers of our monthly Earth Changes Summary videos know how wild the weather has been this past year, but the media's overbearing focus on just one aspect of increasing climatic extremes - heatwaves and associated wildfires - has gone truly off the charts. Speaking once again on behalf of The Science™, they told us that the planet experienced, on four consecutive days in July, its four hottest days in the last 120,000 years. Whew! But even that hyperbole was soon topped by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who proclaimed that, "The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived." And this despite the fact that the actual, lived summer for most people in the northern hemisphere was a relatively cool and wet one.

Strong earthquakes in Morocco and Afghanistan killed several thousand people later in the year, but the two 7+M quakes in southern Turkey in early February were the most devastating by far, killing almost 60,000 people, flattening tens of thousands of buildings, and leaving millions affected in both Turkey and neighboring Syria. (If you're wondering how such natural disasters fit into the climate loonies' man-made CO₂ global warming models, they don't.)

Those poor people, subject to a decade of war and millions of refugees, hardly 'deserved' then to experience one of the region's most devastating natural quakes in a millennium, but we suppose the same can be said for the unfortunates in Libya, where Storm Daniel - the deadliest Mediterranean cyclone in recorded history - in early September killed an estimated 20,000 people when it caused two dams to collapse, shoddy infrastructure being a legacy of NATO's 2011 bombing campaign that led to the murder of Qaddafi and the igniting of a 'civil war' in the country.

Front Street in Lahaina, Maui, August 2023

And then the terrifying 'wild'-fire in Hawaii happened. 100 people were killed when a series of fires - reportedly sparked by "downed power lines" and "high winds" - somehow simultaneously surrounded and devoured pretty much the entire historic town of Lahaina on Maui island, Hawaii. All month long, locals reported strange goings-on both during and after the fire: police blocking cars from evacuating the town, local authorities delaying the release of water with which to fight the fire, black-out 'dust-screen' fencing erected around the town's perimeter in the aftermath, Maui's emergency officials being on another island for a FEMA disaster training session at the moment the fires began, and - when it did finally come - a completely botched emergency response.

Slava Ukraini

Meanwhile, the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine saw the much-hyped summer counteroffensive epically fail, despite NATO sending $billions-worth of war machinery, Kiev sending countless thousands of conscripts, and God-only-knows how many NATO regular troops serving there 'under cover'. If "we" are at war with Russia, then "we" are losing. Not the US 'elite' though - they still "win" because, as senior-citizen senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham explained, most of the money is being spent on propping up the US' rusting industrial base (although we wager that most of that is just kickbacks), and anyway, it was "the best money the US ever spent because we get to kill Russians" in the process.

Also in the process, as the Russian Foreign Minister points out, "Europe is being deindustrialized, on purpose, by the US," because it sees Europe "as a competitor." The US wants puppet leaders in Europe so that European companies will relocate to the US. This was always the back-up plan. Plan A was to weaken Russia militarily and economically in the hope that it would disintegrate through protests, riots and civil war. When this failed, Plan B was to weaken Europe economically and throw it out of the geo-economic race between the US, Europe and China. It's interesting to note that 'dedollarization' entered US mainstream public discourse for the first time this year, particularly after BRICS, the geo-economic alliance counterpart to the Western G7, doubled in size, with even US petrodollar lynchpin, Saudi Arabia, joining.

© RTÉ

O'Connell Street, Dublin, November 2023

Completely lost on 'exceptionalist' Washingtonians, however, is that they're losing dollar hegemony because their unilateral sanctions against other countries - which are intended to ensure that the US dollar remains the global reserve currency - are effectively forcing those countries to increasingly conduct trade in their own currencies. Meanwhile, real wages still haven't risen since the 2008 debt crisis, and the recent inflation caused by runaway spending (not "Putin's war") has resulted in a 'cost-of-living' crisis that saw more major protests - mostly in Europe, for now. If the energy behind that mixes with the energy behind the anti-immigration protests, the situation is going to ignite - and possibly in the very near future. We saw a flash of this recently in Dublin, Ireland, when members of working class communities, who had been protesting peacefully for two years against mass immigration and rising commodity and property prices, erupted in flames over the stabbing of children outside a school by an Algerian migrant.

With the Anglo-Americans beginning to 'nudge' Kiev towards entering into negotiations with Moscow, and with Western media beginning to acknowledge that the pro-Western, neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine cannot actually defeat Russia militarily, Israel apparently felt the time was right to wage genocide against the remaining Palestinian hold-outs in Gaza and the West Bank. Because it needs Washington's full military and political backing to undertake this gargantuan crime against humanity, Israel apparently calculated that it must do so now while it retains full political support from (or is that control of?) the 'uniparty' in the US, and before US military power and influence is eroded or otherwise ended by the strategic alliance of Russia and China on the world stage.

Gaza destroyed, Oct & Nov 2023

Launching Armageddon without condemning yourself to death is a tricky business. For now the only 'blowback' Israel has faced in the Middle East has been Hezbollah forces striking Israeli military targets along its border with Lebanon, and Yemeni Houthis attempting to hit Israeli targets with rudimentary missiles, and seizing several Israeli cargo ships. But the major US military build-up in the region suggests that the Empire of Lies is gearing up to 'take out' Syria and/or Iran. That's always their solution to everything: more pathological "creative destruction" and chaos.

So, here's where we're at as we go into 2024:

They know that we know that they caused the Covid pandemic in order to inject a bioweapon into billions of people; they know that we know that they rigged the 2020 US presidential election; they know that we know that the UFO phenomenon is real; they know that we know that the Ukraine war was never meant to be won; they know that we know that mass migration is deliberately encouraged to suppress wages and divide-and-conquer the population; they know that we know that Israel is attempting to ethnically cleanse Gaza on the basis of a phony '9/11'; and they know that we know that their overall objective is to wreck civilization in order to 'save' it.

We can all see them doing this, and they know that we can all see them doing all this, because they monitor social media and crack down hard on anyone pointing out that we know what they're doing. And yet, they keep on doing it, pathologically convinced that they know what's best. Leave them to it, we say. Speak out against them if you can, counter their lies with the truth, but most importantly, discern for yourself what is true and what is false.

Support SOTT.net in 2024

Last year, we said:

2023 will be a Big Year in more ways than one. Not to be outdone by the Russians, Sott.net will be getting its own hypersonic upgrade. We know, we promised the same thing last year - or was it two years ago now?! The difference is that this time, development is progressing nicely. [...] We can't promise a deadline just yet, but keep in mind that Sott.net's 21st birthday is on March 26, 2023. Just sayin'!

Okay, so we were a little bit off... What happened to the long-promised upgrade, you ask?? The big update is Officially Done and Working (as of 2 days ago). All that's left as we go into this holiday season is a nice coat of wax, vacuuming out the interior, and we should probably remove our smudgy fingerprints from the windows... Then she's ready to roll. Barring an extinction-level event, look for an all-new shiny SOTT in January 2024!

We editors want to thank you again for your continued support of SOTT.net, which still refuses corporate advertising and sponsorship, achieving its objectives solely via its own resources and reader donations. This is how we keep this website, the monthly Earth Changes videos, the MindMatters and NewsReal podcasts all going, and try to provide you with as objective a picture of the global reality as possible - day in, day out, (for 21 years now!) through the diligent efforts of dozens of volunteer editors around the globe. Any and all 'advertisements' you see on our sites are either ads for our own products, which directly support our work, or our non-commercial support for others engaged in the fight against lies, corruption and the general 'ponerization' of our world.

And so, before the end of the fiscal year, we would just like to remind you that if you have a bit of extra income this year, donating to SOTT, which operates as a project of a US registered 501(c) (3) Non-Profit Organization, namely, Quantum Future Group Inc., is tax-deductible in the US. Wouldn't you rather give your money to a good cause, to the fight for truth and real news, than have it funding war, corruption and fake news?

Make your (tax-deductible in the US) donation today. You can send a check or money-order by mail to:

SOTT/Quantum Future Group, Inc.
295 Scratch Branch Road
Otto, NC 28763
USA

Or you can donate via Credit Card or Paypal. (For direct bank transfer details, please feel free to contact us.)

SOTT 2024 Calendar

Readers who donate via the form below can select a copy of this year's A4-size SOTT Calendar (for donations of 40 USD and above). An ideal gift for the critical thinker, our 2024 Calendar features a selection of images and insightful quotes, making it both a chronological companion and a narrative tapestry capturing the pulse of current (and historical) events shaping these times. Check it out:

We're also offering donors these two beautiful souvenirs:

SOTT Notebook

For donations of 30 USD, we're offering readers this gorgeous space-themed, spiral-bound, A5-size SOTT Notebook:

Bookmark

For donations of 15 USD we're offering readers this SOTT Metal Bookmark, which is 5cm by 7.7cm in size and marries the beauty of our planet with the vastness of the cosmos in a stunning, high-quality design:

**** Anyone who donates 40 US dollars (or 40 EUR) or more will receive a calendar. And for other goodies, check the box below! ****

(NOTE: If you wish to receive the calendar or any of the other offered items below, please use the form below to make your donation. Click on the item(s) you wish to receive, select the quantity, enter the information required, and the products are yours!)

Another way to contribute to the upkeep of SOTT.net is to visit our stores and purchase one of our many books or a DVD set for yourself or as a gift for your loved ones. All our books and DVDs are listed on the Red Pill Press online store and at Pilule Rouge, and are also available on Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.es, Amazon.it, and Amazon.co.uk, in paperback and electronic format.

A thousand thanks, dear readers, and let's continue shining the light for as long as we can!

God bless you, Merry Christmas, and a very Happy New Year!