SOTT Focus:


Comet 2

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Cosmic Catastrophe, Drones and Social Hysteria

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The meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, Friday 15th Feb. 2013. Almost 1,000 people were injured and many buildings damaged.
The final tally of injured people from the overhead cometary airburst in Russia last February 15th stands at 1,500. It's a miracle no one was killed. But will we be so lucky next time? The explosion above the city of Chelyabinsk was the largest since the 1908 Tunguska airburst, also in Siberia. What are we to make of the fact that this recent blast happened 12 hours before another asteroid about twice as large was scheduled to pass Earth by in 'the closest fly-by ever'?

This week hosts Joe and Niall sat down with Jason Martin and Laura Knight-Jadczyk to discuss this freak event.

But was it really a freak event, a 'coincidence', as NASA reassured us? If they didn't see this one coming, will they see others coming? In fact, there is strong evidence that, over the course of human history, repeated cometary bombardment from space has wiped the slate clean on our little planet. These cleansing events were naturally terrifying for people who lived through them. In time, the progenitors of those who survived rebuilt civilizations anew and eventually the horrors of the past were forgotten.

Running Time: 02:14:00

Download: MP3


Comment: See also SOTT's report on the Chelyabinsk airburst: Fireball explodes over Russian city: Widespread panic and structural damage, Thousand people injured


USA

SOTT Focus: The American Way of Life: Kill Lists and Torture

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Soon-to-be CIA director, John Brennan, and one of the CIA drones he wants to introduce you to.
How many Americans are aware that their government has claimed the authority to arbitrarily kill their fellow citizens when it chooses, and that it can do so 'legally', without any evidence that the citizen in question posed any threat to anyone, let alone the US government or its 'interests'?

How many Americans are aware that the US government has responded to court cases brought by the ACLU questioning the US government's authority to engage in targeted assassinations of US citizens by saying that this is a political question and that US courts and judges have no say in the matter ("There exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations")? I'd wager not many. But that's precisely what the US government has done, according to a leaked unsigned and undated Justice Department white paper, obtained by NBC News. You can read the white paper here.

The actual legal justification as defined by Justice Department lawyers in 2010 is being kept secret by the government, but the 'white paper' explains that, not only has the government decided that targeted assassinations without due process are legal, but that no evidence of any imminent threat from a target is necessary for the target to be deemed an imminent threat. (Go figure).

Comet 2

SOTT Focus: Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses

[Editor's Note: With the truly alarming increase in the number of meteorites/cometary fragments entering our atmosphere over the past 10 years, and the startling meteorite detonation over Russia this morning, it is long past time that every single person on this planet informed themselves about the clear and present threat to all life on earth posed by these celestial 'visitors'. To this end, Laura Knight-Jadczyk has recently published the first in a new series of books that presents clear evidence that, not only has human history been regularly punctuated (or 'punctured') by 'rains of fire from the heavens,' we may be overdue for another round of cosmic catastrophe.

Below we present a relevant excerpt from this first new volume: Comets and the Horns of Moses (available from all Amazon web sites).]





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As I read through the piles of books on the archaeology, history (assumed and reasonably reconstructed from data), and especially the input from the sciences such as astronomy, geology and genetics that should accurately parallel the archaeology and history, but usually doesn't for all the reasons we've discussed so far, in order to collect the material for this series of volumes, the one thing that became increasingly apparent was that, over and over and over again this planet has been bombarded by various types of impacts, the most common being the overhead comet fragment air burst of the Tunguska type. These events have repeatedly brought cultures, nations, even civilizations, to their knees. Dark Ages are inevitably the result, and then, when human society begins to recover, myths are created, religions are born, or re-born with twists and distortions, and always and ever, the facts of the previous era of destruction are covered up in veils of metaphor and allegory.

Why? What sort of madness is this?

It is actually very simple. Historically, when a people begin to perceive atmospheric, geological, climatic disruption and all the ills that these bring on a society, including famine, plague and pestilence, they individually and collectively look to their leaders to fix things. That is where the concept of the Divine King came from to begin with: the king was supposed to be able to intercede for his people with the gods. If the king was unsuccessful with his intercession, a solution had to be found. Sacrifices were made, rituals were performed, and of course, if that didn't work, if the gods remained angry, then the king had to die. This is possibly due to a similar brain switch that drives people to seek whatever relieves the stress on their brain: if the gods are angry, find a scape-goat. And when it is the nation that is threatened, the most obvious guilty person or persons are those in charge, the king and his elite. What's more, they know their vulnerability to this reaction instinctively.

Then again, given that human history appears to be defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites, and if we are to assume that such corruption (and its spread throughout society) is the mechanism by which a civilization attracts cosmic catastrophe, blaming and deposing the elite is a good solution. The problem, however, is that the underlying mechanism is not understood by the people, which means that they lack the knowledge that, if they are to prevent further destruction, they must, at all costs, prevent the establishment of any future corrupt elite.

Fireball 3

SOTT Focus: Fireball explodes over Russian city: Widespread panic and structural damage, Thousand people injured

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The thick plume of smoke left behind by an incoming meteor/comet fragment that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Southern Russia on Friday 15th February, 2013.
Today was supposed to be the day when we witnessed the 'closest fly-by ever' of a space rock measuring about 45 meters in diameter. Government space agencies, 'experts' and the mainstream media have spent the past few weeks reassuring us that asteroid 2012-DA14, although coming within the orbit of some satellites, would safely pass the planet by. And indeed, it probably will have done so by the time you are reading this. But while people have fixated on this asteroid, the cosmos apparently had other plans - the actual impact of a different and totally unexpected fireball... on the same day!

At 8:45am local time today, a large fireball appeared out of the clear blue sky above South-central Russia, dramatically lighting up the surrounding region before exploding with a tremendous bang as it fragmented near the city of Chelyabinsk, located east of the Ural mountains.

Multiple smaller explosions (between 5 and 6) followed the shock wave from the initial explosion as the bolide fragmented. Eyewitnesses across a wide area have also reported seeing burning objects fall to earth, suggesting that perhaps some of the later booms were sounds accompanying meteorite impacts as debris was scattered over a wide area. Witnesses described the initial explosion as being so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunderbolt had struck at exactly the same time. Once the immediate danger had passed, residents of Chelyabinsk reported "huge trails of smoke across the sky".

Bell

SOTT Focus: Limbic Warfare and Martha Stout's "Paranoia Switch"

911terror
© AP/ReutersThe events of 9/11 traumatized the American public. The Bush administration exploited that fear and today the Obama administration continues to do so.
Martha Stout's newest book, The Paranoia Switch, is a welcome addition to the new and growing science of ponerology: the study of the root causes and genesis of evil, on both the social and interpersonal levels. Stout uses her years of experience as a trauma therapist to clinically diagnose the sickness of our 'terror culture,' and those who would manipulate this trauma for their own self-interest.

The paranoia switch

Traumatic events overload our limbic system. The heightened response of our amygdala, which registers the emotional significance of the event, leads to a decreased response in the hippocampus, which usually prioritizes information and allows the higher brain centers to create coherent memories, based on their emotional importance. So, traumatic events do not get integrated by the higher brain centers as true memories, but instead leave us with non-integrated fragments of memory: isolated images and sensations. These memories can then be "triggered" by similar images. In this way, a backfiring car can trigger a war vet into a state of paranoia. His "paranoia switch" has been flicked.
"Most overwhelming of all are traumatic experiences caused not by accident (unintended explosions or car crashes), or by "acts of God" (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.), but rather by the deliberate acts of other people, acts such as assault, violent abduction, rape - or terrorism. It would seem that, for whatever reason, we are hardwired to be most fearful of harm when it threatens to occur maliciously, at the hands of our fellow human beings, and this special variety of fear is the most contagious of all." (62)
As Stout explains later in her book, fear brokers maintain their power through the exploitation of human weaknesses. Ironically, it is often the very people we are genetically "programmed" to fear (i.e. psychopathic individuals), that exploit this fear by focusing it on an arbitrary and convenient group. Hitler used anarchists, communists, and Jews. Our leaders are using "terrorists", Muslims, and critics of their policies.

Eye 1

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Are Psychopaths Cool? Uncovering the predators among us

Ponerology
In this third SOTT Talk Radio show broadcast live on Sunday February 3rd, 2013, SOTT.net editors Joe and Niall were again joined by Jason Martin, along with special guests Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Harrison Koehli, editor of Red Pill Press, publisher of the underground classic, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil, Adjusted for Political Purposes. Together they discussed arguably the most important topic of our time: psychopaths and their influence in our world.

The 'virtues' of CEOs, political leaders, heart surgeons, soldiers and others possessing 'psychopathic qualities' is being heavily promoted through the mainstream media, academia and popular culture. References to psychopaths in TV shows like Dexter and movies like Seven Psychopaths would seem to suggest that psychopaths are not only generally known about and understood, but are also appealing to ordinary people.

But are psychopaths really cool? And what is a psychopath anyway? How many of them are out there and how long have they been around us? Everyone has an opinion about psychopaths, but are we all talking about the same thing? Bestselling books like Kevin Dutton's Wisdom of Psychopaths encourage people to 'unlock their inner psychopath'; does that mean we are all potentially psychopaths?

Running Time: 02:18:00

Download: MP3


Vader

SOTT Focus: Terminator Obama-2013: The Rise of Domestic Killer Drones

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Acclimatization: Cover of upcoming Time Magazine
In absolute disregard for both the US Constitution and international law, US drones are currently killing civilians, including women and children1, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Uganda and the Philippines. Thousands have been killed, and tens of thousands more terrorized, by fleets of remote-controlled 'drone' aircraft.2

For those living in these drone-infested regions, the reality they experience on a daily basis is horrifying. In the dark future envisaged in the science fiction Terminator movies, human decisions are removed from strategic operations once an artificial intelligence (AI) called 'Skynet' takes control. In real life we have the conscienceless Military-Industrial Complex - run by humanoids in the CIA, Pentagon, British Ministry of Defence, US and UK Government administrations and weapons manufacturers - working together to develop a war machine that has removed all semblance of humanity from combat operations. In the movies we're invited to excuse Skynet's creators because it is no longer under their control. In real life, terminator drones are programmed to 'double-tap' their targets, a euphemism for deliberately targeting rescuers attempting to drag victims from rubble in the aftermath of the initial drone strike. The predictable result, is that for every "terrorist" killed in Pakistan 49 civilians are murdered also .

10,000 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) aka drones are said to be currently in service around the globe, "protecting Western civilization from terrorists". A thousand of these are armed and most of them are American-operated. It is reported they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11 (and that's just the 'official estimates'). While military personnel cuts have shrunk the sizes of standing armies, 'theaters of operations' have expanded. In the US, the 'FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012', has seen the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA and other agencies work towards the total integration of commercial drones into US airspace. Ethical and privacy concerns are simply swept aside while the proliferation of drone technology is driven by the greed of powerful defense contractors.

Pistol

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Gun Control USA: Do Guns Protect Freedoms?

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In this second SOTT Talk Radio show, co-hosts Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley discuss the recent furor over proposed US government gun control legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, and the implications for Americans' right to bear arms. Many 2nd Amendment advocates insist that a 'well-armed citizenry' is the last defense against tyrannical government, but are 80 million armed Americans really the solution to the problems of a corrupt government? An armed populace has not hindered the destruction of other civil liberties in the US to date, so is it a question of the curtailment of gun rights opening the way to tyrannical government, or is tyrannical government already here?

Along with their special guest, Jason Martin, a life-long student of martial arts and the history of warfare and combat theory, Joe and Niall discuss the root causes of the culture of violence in the USA, the history that gave rise to the US constitution and the Bill of Rights, citizens' justified fears that they cannot rely on the corrupt authorities to protect them and what kind of a revolution it would take for people to achieve real justice.

Running Time: 02:23:00

Download: MP3


Pistol

SOTT Focus: Liars, Gun Control and Money in a Culture of Violence

Liars, Gun Control and Money in a Culture of Violence1

Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's overboard and self-assured
Oh, no, I know a dirty word


'Smells Like Teen Spirit' - Kurt Cobain2

Gun control is a hot topic right now. As usual, COINTELPRO is in full force trying to control and define the debate within the narrowest possible field, limiting the questions people ask and presenting loud and obnoxious pundits who are supposed to represent "the people." We doubt the people are this mentally backwards.

Gun and weapon control has a long and illustrious3 history. It has never led to any tangible results. Murders are just as prevalent, if not more, than at any other time in history (rates of murder and violence tend to rise and fall throughout history4). If history is taken as a lesson, reliance on gun control in the forms of registration of ownership and limiting of the types of arms and ammunitions, has caused more deaths than it has ever prevented.

People are focused on the now. The collective memory of a civilization is very short. I have heard the number 3 years suggested as the average duration of recall for the ordinary person; sometimes it is more, sometimes less. I really don't know. I only know that it is shorter than it should be.

Each successive generation appears to feel as if they have moved beyond the influence of the problems of their forebears in a poorly defined and mentally retarded concept called 'progress'5. There is no such thing as progress. Man is a bit like a hamster in a cage; eventually he always comes full circle.6 No matter how hard he runs, he's never going to get anywhere until he learns to step off the damned wheel.

It's the same dance, just a different tune.

Star of David

SOTT Focus: Chutzpah, Hypocrisy, and Lies: A review of Norman Finkelstein's 'This Time We Went Too Far'

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

too far book
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?