SOTT Focus:


Attention

SOTT Focus: Across Europe Deaths Are Far Higher Now Than They Were in The 'Pandemic Years' of 2020 And 2021

emergency ambulance
In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!

If the people of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the likelihood of dying that they acquiesced in locking themselves up, voluntarily trashed their economies and stopped their kids going to school back in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn't, but the rest did), why don't we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than they had then.

If YouGov did a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it receive? Very few, I should hope. But if U.K. citizens don't think it's a good idea now, why did the Germans or the Finns or the Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they weren't given the whole picture? That they were 'had'?

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: Wagner Mutiny, French Révolution

wagner riots france newsreal
© Sott.net
Oh mon Dieu! France - nay, all Europe - is about to fall!

Or so the screamers say. In this NewsReal, Joe and Niall take a calmer look at the riots in France, and last week's high-octane events in Russia.

First hour: Prigozhin is a snake, and why Putin had to make an example out of him.

Second hour: the root cause of France's riots is a six-decades-long 'African-French' problem that is insoluble - save a miraculous paradigm shift in Western elites' worldview.


Running Time: 02:16:46

Download: MP3 — 93.9 MB


Arrow Up

SOTT Focus: Rootin' For Putin

Putin
© ShutterstockRussian President Vladimir Putin
Following in the footsteps of her illustrious predecessor Josef Goebbels, Mrs. Ursula Von der Leyen, unelected president of the "Fourth Reich", has imposed censorship. In the endless wisdom of her little brain, Mrs. Von der Leyen has decided that the inhabitants of the EU, who survived or escaped the covid death jabs she tried to force on them with her Pfizer cronies, are not to be exposed to Russian propaganda. For their own good, of course, because that is what autocrats always brandish as the main justification for imposing censorship. "We decide what is good for you," is what those people like to say. Like Von der Leyen's partner in crime, Blofeld is telling us from his Swiss retreat: "you vill own nussing but you vill bee heppy." However, EU censorship is not yet complete, but it is advancing. The goose steps of the censors and their columns of cowardly collaborationists can be heard all over the social media landscape. All the news information that is not to the liking of the rulers is branded "fake news" or "disinformation."

When so many people are being kept in the dark about so many topics for a long time, it comes as no surprise to learn that most Europeans have no clue about what is really happening in the Ukraine. Of course, Russia has already won the engagement, but the European state and corporate media staunchly maintain a mendacious narrative and, on a daily basis, spread heavy doses of fake news and disinformation. When repeated often enough, any lie will end up sounding like the truth. Dr. Goebbels knew this and Mrs. Von der Leyen knows it also. Needless to say, this does create a certain peace of mind, albeit a false one.

Colosseum

SOTT Focus: America has Just Destroyed a Great Empire

graphic four empires nato america china russia flag
Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.

Having endowed the region's cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: "If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire."

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia's vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus's army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia's gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Caesar

SOTT Focus: Russo-Ukrainian War: The Wagner Uprising - Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wild Ride


Comment: Russo-Ukrainian war commentator and military historian 'Big Serge' penned the following article shortly after last weekend's mutiny/coup in Russia, so his take on it has possibly evolved by now, but this detailed, initial analysis, and thus how he reached his conclusions, are worth reading.


red z tank rostov
The events of the past weekend (June 23 - 25, 2023) were so surreal and phantasmagorical that they militate against narration and defy description. On Friday, the infamous Wagner Group launched what appeared to be a genuine armed insurrection against the Russian state. They occupied portions of Rostov on Don - a city of over 1 million people, regional capital, and headquarters of Russia's Southern Military District - before setting off in an armed column towards Moscow. This column - replete with heavy military equipment including air defense systems - came within a few hundred miles of the capital - virtually unmolested by Russian state forces - before abruptly stopping, announcing that a deal had been brokered with the aid of Belorussian President Aleksandr "Uncle Sasha" Lukashenko, turning around, and heading back to Wagner bases in the Ukrainian theater.

Needless to say, the spectacle of a Russian mercenary group making an armed march on Moscow, and of Wagner tanks and infantry cordoning off Ministry of Defense buildings in Rostov, sparked widespread confidence among the western commentariat that the Russian state was about to be toppled and the Russian war effort in Ukraine would evaporate. There were confident and outlandish predictions pushed out in a matter of hours, including claims that Russia's global footprint would disintegrate as the Kremlin recalled troops to defend Moscow and that Russia was about to enter a state of Civil War. We also saw the Ukrainian propaganda machine kick into overdrive, with characters like Anton Gerashchenko and Igor Sushko absolutely bombarding social media with fake stories about Russian army units mutinying and regional governors "defecting" to Prigozhin.

There's something to be said here about the analytic model that prevails in our time - there's a machine that instantly springs to life, taking in rumors and partial information in an environment of extreme uncertainty and spitting out formulaic results that match ideological presuppositions. Information is not evaluated neutrally, but forced through a cognitive filter that assigns it meaning in light of predetermined conclusions. Russia is *supposed* to collapse and undergo regime change (Fukuyama said so) - therefore, Prigozhin's actions had to be framed in reference to this assumed endgame.

Comment: Sound conclusions. Our only quibble would be to take issue with downplaying "Putin's four dimensional chess game." In the above scenario, Putin was taken by surprise last Saturday morning, but then reacted well.

More likely, he saw it coming and let it manifest just enough so that everyone could see Prigozhin for what he (and Wagner under his influence) had become: a danger to Russia.


Popcorn

SOTT Focus: Prigozhin's Folly: The Russian 'Revolt' That Wasn't Strengthens Putin's Hand

prigozhin
Looper
The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the "revolt," as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.

The focus slipped from Ukraine's failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin's threat to Putin's control. As one headline in the Times put it, "Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?" Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: "Putin looked into the abyss Saturday — and blinked."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken — the administration's go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine — appeared on CBS's Face the Nation with his own version of reality: "Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country," Blinken said. "Now, over the weekend they've had to defend Moscow, Russia's capital, against mercenaries of Putin's own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin's authority. . . . It shows real cracks."

Pirates

SOTT Focus: Britain's Foreign Meddling: Declassified Files Expose British Role in NATO's Gladio Terror Armies

britain document gladio
Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?

Newly declassified British Foreign Office files have added disturbing details to the history of Operation Gladio. The covert operation was uncovered in 1990, when the public learned that the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks.

Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio's aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th.

It is almost impossible to believe that inconvenient truths were not weeded from Britain's documentary record on Operation Gladio prior to declassification. Nonetheless, the recently released material is highly illuminating. Covering a fraught twelve month period after the first public disclosure of Gladio's existence, the papers illustrate how London's foreign intelligence apparatus kept a keen eye on the continent as events unfolded.

The papers not only shed fresh light on the conspiracy, they underline Gladio's relevance as British intelligence joins its America counterparts in contemporary plots involving secret partisan forces from Syria to Ukraine.

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: Trump Indicted, Again - Ukrainian 'Counter-Offensive' Failing

trump indictment putin treaty newsreal
© Sott.net
They're really going for it. The regime wants to knock the electorate's favorite to become the next president of the US out of the race. Last week's indictment of Donald Trump in a Florida court for '37 charges of mishandling top secret government documents' are patently trumped-up charges intended to negatively impact his re-election bid - perhaps by rendering his candidacy 'invalid'.

Meanwhile, the Anglo-American 'Ukrainian counter-offensive' attempt to break through Russian military fortifications across southern Ukraine is not going well. In fact, it's being obliterated, along with thousands more hapless Ukrainian men.

The war could have been avoided: Putin revealed to an African peace delegation this week the text of a peace treaty signed by both Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, which Ukraine reneged on after British PM Boris Johnson 'suddenly appeared' in Kiev and effectively ordered Zelensky NOT to accept Moscow's terms.


Running Time: 01:42:31

Download: MP3 — 70.4 MB


SOTT Logo Media

SOTT Focus: SOTT Earth Changes Summary - May 2023: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs

secs523
** Sorry the Earth Changes Summary Video for May is so late - all Sott.net chroniclers were attending a wedding! **

If you thought the unseasonable snow and cold temperatures would end in April, you were wrong. Records continued to be broken in May in both hemispheres, and many countries suffered from heavy floods due to tons of melting snow.

Some snowy events to highlight:
  • Michigan - 26 inches of record snow.
  • West Virginia - 20 inches of record snow.
  • Sierra Nevada, California - 15 inches in 48 hours. (State snowpack over 300% of average)
  • Teller County, Colorado - Heavy unseasonable snow.
  • Spain - Unseasonable snow after an early heatwave.
  • Iwate Prefecture, Japan - Record snow for May.
  • New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory - Record coldest May temperatures.
And flooding events:
  • Alaska - Catastrophic flooding after ice jams and melting snow
  • Emilia Romagna, Italy - Heavy floods take the life of 14.
  • Southwestern Germany - Heavy floods cause closure of rail lines.
  • Lapland, Finland - Worst flooding in 55 years
  • Yemen - Heavy floods leave 24 dead
  • Somalia - Devastating floods trigger the evacuation of 200,000
  • South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo - Catastrophic floods leave 400 dead.
  • Jiangxi, China - 14,000 evacuated after heavy floods
Remember, don't listen to the warm-mongers when we start getting hotter than normal temperatures, it's all caused by El Niño. And don't forget to look up and pay attention to the show provided by the increasing number of meteor fireballs... and don't let any "authority" convince you that they are Martian spacecrafts crashing into Earth!

All that, and more, in this month's SOTT Earth Changes Summary:


SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The Unbroken Individual Is the True Source of Moral Responsibility

forest passage
This week on MindMatters we take a third and final look at the prescient and resounding thoughts of Ernst Jünger's The Forest Passage and reflect on what it means - in the philosophical and practical sense - to be a forest walker, or forest rebel. For our previous episodes on the book see: How one resists and chooses to respond to totalitarianism is at least as crucial as making the choice itself. But what are some of the many considerations involved? What inner resources does one draw upon and where might one find the light that helps to make the best of all choices? What does one fall back on when many of the institutions that are meant to morally support a society have been effectively gutted, or done away with completely? What is the responsibility of an unbroken and 'concrete individual' to step in and rectify institutional failure to some degree? And where does the power of the spoken or written word fit into this complex equation?


Running Time: 01:18:45

Download: MP3 — 108 MB