The Iowa caucus scandal has continued to get more egregious by the hour, with new revelations routinely pouring in about extremely suspicious manipulations taking place which all just so happen to disadvantage the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the first Democratic electoral contest of 2020. By the time you read this article, there will likely have been more.

Following the failure of an extremely shady app developed by vocally anti-Sanders establishment insiders which reportedly was literally altering vote count numbers after they were entered, Black Hawk County supervisor Chris Schwartz shared the election results in his county on Facebook so the public could have some idea of what's going on as the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) slowly trickles out the results of the caucuses.

For the first time in US political history, no clear winner was announced in the critical Iowa caucus amid a storm of chaos. How can the Democrats hope to lead the nation if they can't be trusted to conduct a simple poll?

Already, February is shaping up to be the 'month from hell' for the Democratic Party and their hopes for beating Donald Trump in November. As Monday night grinded on into late Tuesday morning, sleep-deprived journalists from around the state of Iowa were still clueless as to the results of the hotly-anticipated caucus. Were the Democrats so consumed with impeaching Trump that they forgot how to organize a simple caucus? Finally, the Iowa Democratic Party broke the explosive news: the name of the winner would be indefinitely delayed due to "quality checks" and "inconsistencies" with the paper ballots.

Thus, for the second time in as many days, the Democrats have failed to provide the polling statistics on their favorite presidential horse. On Saturday, CNN was forced to cancel the release of a survey, conducted in cooperation with the Des Moines Register, after some vague complaints by the Buttigieg campaign were put forward.

Diet dogma. Everyone wants to avoid it and generally we all think that we are. But it seems no dietary regimen comes without adherents that get a little too fundamentalist and authoritarian. While it's so common as to become a trope within the vegan community, Keto, Paleo and Carnivore diet communities seem to have their fair share of fundies, too.

Apparently no one is entirely free of this tendency of the human condition toward tribalism and in-group bias. It's an uglier side of human psychology, but it seems that even something as innocuous as what we choose to eat can bring out this inherent "us vs. them" mentality.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we look into the phenomenon of diet dogmatism, exploring the psychology of identifying (too strongly) with what we choose to eat.


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Running Time: 00:28:42

Download: MP3 — 25.8 MB

Northern Ireland's British-Made 'Troubles'

Late at night on 31st July 1975, about 7 miles from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a minibus carrying members of a music band, The Miami Showband, was stopped by what appeared to be a group of British soldiers. The five members of the band - lead singer Fran O'Toole, trumpeter Brian McCoy, guitarist Tony Geraghty, bassist Stephen Travers and saxophone player Des McAlea - were told to exit the bus and stand by the roadside while two of the soldiers searched their bus. At least some of the soldiers were members of the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR) - an infantry regiment of the British Army recruited from Northern Ireland - but they were also members of the UVF, a loyalist paramilitary group responsible for many indiscriminate murders of innocent Northern Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland's brewing sectarian conflict.

While a soldier asked each of the band members for their names and addresses, a car pulled up and another uniformed man appeared. He was wearing a beret that was noticeably different from those worn by the others and, according to two of the band members, spoke with a "crisp, clipped English accent." He immediately took charge of proceedings, instructing the other soldiers to ask for the names and dates of birth of the band members rather than their addresses.

Healer, philosopher, psychologist, adventurer, composer, mystic - all describe a facet of who George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was, and what he did. And yet, he may also be called one of the leading figures in 'spiritual' growth that most people have simply never heard of. Gurdjieff's teachings, body of writing and the schools he started and taught were, and are, a profound testament to his insight and vision for a healthy and well functioning human being. On a personal level, he worked with hundreds of students in assisting them to not only see themselves as they really were, but to help grow the seeds of greater consciousness and conscience that would make them better people.

This week on MindMatters we discuss the life and times of one of the 20th century's most towering figures and ask, what drove him? Who did he work with? And what is the 4th Way school that has carried on his work in the generations after his death in 1949? In a world that insists that it is 'woke', why are Gurdjieff's ideas about self-awareness so relevant to the individual in the here and now?


Running Time: 01:02:03

Download: MP3 — 57.7 MB

Well, they finally got around to 'officially' marking Sott.net 'fake news'.

In October 2018, a representative of 'NewsGuard Technologies', a self-described "news rating agency," reached out and invited us to answer "some questions regarding Sott.net's background and editorial practices." Based on the false assumptions that were clear in their questions, and their ludicrous examples of Sott.net content they deemed "far-right," we immediately had a good idea of who they were and what their shtick was. (Ostensibly, "combating online disinformation." Really, cracking down on dissent.) We nevertheless humored NewsGuard with detailed responses, which apparently stumped them because it was another 14 months before they got back to us.

Much background digging has been done on this outfit in the meantime, but for now I'll summarize NewsGuard's pitch then share with readers some of our most recent correspondence with them. NewsGuard's 'technology' is a free opt-in browser extension that flags search engine results and social media posts that include links to content from news and information sites with a color-coded 'nutrition label'. They base it on nine 'journalistic criteria', five for credibility and four for transparency.

If you download the NewsGuard app and see a red shield appear next to a post or search result, this means it comes from a site NewsGuard has deemed 'fake news'; if a green shield appears, users may proceed to click on it, safe in the knowledge that it's from a 'trustworthy' news site. While they don't actually say 'Sott.net is fake news', that is clearly implied given the climate in which this is taking place. The red shield contains an exclamation mark and next to it appears a warning to "proceed with caution," and a link to "see the full Nutrition Label" (here's Sott.net's). They even have a third category: a yellow shield with a smiley face in it, reserved for satirical news sites like The Onion, along with this helpful explainer: "This is a satire or humor source. It is not an actual news source."

While this is a free opt-in browser extension for now, NewsGuard has big plans to roll it out nationwide in the US - and its powerful backers are also intensively lobbying the EU to do likewise - as a default feature in libraries and educational institutions, and is in the process of securing big contracts with Big Tech to have it baked into devices and operating systems like Microsoft Windows, and/or 'at source', directly with Internet Service Providers. NewsGuard isn't the only such initiative taking off; a plethora of similar 'news ranking initiatives' are competing to "turn media credibility into a booming business."

As Newsguard's project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site's ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.

Soon after the social media "purge" of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider - Jamie Fly - was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was "just the beginning" of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.

Oliver Stone's films have won 12 Academy Awards including two for Best Director, as well as a bunch of Golden Globes and BAFTAs. His new focus is documentaries - on Venezuela, Ukraine, and Edward Snowden - all reflecting on the dubious activities of the US government both at home and abroad.

Oliver Stone, the award-winning American director and a relentless critic of US administrations, has called his country an "evil empire".

The term was coined by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 when he was referring to the Soviet Union and its arms race with the United States.

Things have changed a lot since then, at least for Stone. "Empires fall. Let's pray that this empire, these evil things... because we are the evil empire," he said in an interview to RT. "What Reagan said about Russia is true about us."

Stone - best known for his films Platoon and Wall Street - has long criticised US foreign policy, particularly its involvement in armed conflicts in the Middle East.

During the George W Bush administration it was popular in conspiracy circles to speculate that events might be orchestrated which would allow the Bush family to complete a coup against the US Constitution and hold on to power indefinitely.

Such paranoia and suspicion of government power in the wake of the extraordinary post-9/11 advancements in Orwellian surveillance programs and unprecedented military expansionism were perfectly understandable, but predictions that the younger Bush would not cede power at the end of his second term proved incorrect. In today's hysterical Trump-centric political environment we now see mainstream voices in mainstream outlets openly advancing the same conspiratorial speculations about the current administration, and those will prove incorrect as well.

What these paranoid presidential prognostications get wrong is not their extreme suspicion of government, but their assumption that America's real power structures require a certain president to be in place in order to advance depraved totalitarian agendas. As anyone paying attention knows, intense suspicion of the US government is the only sane position that anyone can possibly have; the error is in assuming that there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the same agendas carry forward from one presidential administration to the next.

I'm white and that's OK with me. I'm not proud to be white because I did nothing to achieve it. I just happen to be white because both my parents were. I had no say in their decision. It was nothing to do with me.

In December 2019 posters appeared in Perth saying "It's okay to be white." According to the BBC, hardly reliable, this caused some people to say, "It's sickening and disgusting to know that people think like this." The Scottish government seemingly agreed, with John Swinney MSP stating, "We must stand together to resist this unacceptable material."

Why is it unacceptable? Would it be unacceptable to say it's OK to be black, brown, yellow or red? Perhaps it would but, if so, why? What's wrong with being OK with the skin you live in? Must we all be uncomfortable with our own ethnicity? What does skin colour matter anyway? The knee jerk reaction itself assumes the posters were inherently racist. Maybe this says more about those reacting than those posting.

I think it's OK to be black, fine to be brown, great to be yellow and neat to be red. In modern developed nations, I consider anyone who imagines themselves superior by virtue of their skin colour to be either brainwashed or an idiot. It is the brainwashed and the idiots who deny people equal opportunities because of their skin colour. They are the cause of remaining systemic racism. Regardless of their own individual skin colour. Thankfully, there are less of them, but they still exist.

Laws have been passed to stop the idiots discriminating. Unfortunately, many of the idiots who still discriminate are immensely wealthy and therefore powerful. They can afford other, very expensive idiots who will win court cases for them. So the law generally doesn't apply to the idiots who can afford not to care about the legalities. We are about to find out who they are.