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SOTT Focus: US Military Increasingly Defenseless Against Formidable New Enemy: Suicide

Robert Bridge
RT
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 19:02 UTC
us soldiers funeral cemetery
America is forever researching and developing new weapons for defending itself against enemies, both real and imagined. Yet it seems to have been taken unawares by a deadly new adversary in the form of suicide in the ranks.

Many people have asked themselves at one time or another how soldiers are able to come to grips with the unspeakable horrors they must face as enemy combatants on some foreign battlefield, far from home. The tragic reality, however, is that many American men and women never actually come to grips with their war-time experiences, opting to cut their lives short instead.

From 2004 to 2008, the US Army witnessed something completely unprecedented in modern times: suicide rates among active and non-active troops surged 80 percent compared to the previous 'stable' period (1977 to 2003), according to a research report in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal. By 2012, the tragic irony was that US soldiers were actually more likely to die as a result of suicide than at the hands of a foreign enemy. And it is certainly no coincidence that the spectacular spike in suicides began not long after the US began two costly and protracted wars, one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq.
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SOTT Focus: The Health & Wellness Show: The Miraculous Carnivore Diet: Interview with Phil Escott


Sott.net
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 15:00 UTC
phil escott carnivore
So what's the deal with the carnivore diet? Many high-profile individuals have been talking about dropping everything but meat and fat from their diets and report miraculous healing benefits. Autoimmune conditions, diabetes, depression, arthritis, skin problems, weight loss - the benefits of going zero carb seem to be limitless.

Today we're joined by Phil Escott, health writer, blogger, personal trainer, novelist, drummer from the UK and author of the book 'ARTHRITIS - The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me: Healing the pain of psoriatic and rheumatoid arthritis and how autoimmunity can heal your body and soul'. Due to a crippling bout of inflammatory arthritis in 2010, which he reversed by natural means including an ancestral/seasonal low carb diet, addressing EMFs and circadian mismatches and emotional balancing, further intense study revealed many secrets of healing normally hidden behind the misleading conventional medical and health dogma. Phil's healing journey eventually lead him to the carnivore diet and he hasn't looked back since!

Join us on this episode of the Health and Wellness Show, as Phil tells us about his own path back to health, with the many steps along the way, and the benefits of a carnivore diet for health and well-being.

Running Time: 01:41:55

Download: MP3

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War Whore

SOTT Focus: Russiagate Hysteria is Fostering More Cold War Extremism And Crises

Stephen F. Cohen
The Nation
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:54 UTC
Overshadowed by the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, US-Russian relations grow ever more perilous
russia hysteria usa
Russiagate, even though none of its core allegations have been proven, is now a central part of the new Cold War, severely limiting President Trump's ability to conduct crisis-negotiations with Moscow and further vilifying Russian President Putin for having ordered "an attack on America" during the 2016 presidential election. The New York Times and The Washington Post have been leading promoters of the Russiagate narrative even though several of its foundational elements have been seriously challenged, even discredited.

Nonetheless, both papers recently devoted thousands of words to retelling the same narrative, on September 20 and 23 respectively, along with its obvious fallacies. For example, Paul Manafort, during the crucial time he was advising then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was not "pro-Russian" but pro-European Union. And contrary to insinuations, General Michael Flynn did nothing wrong or unprecedented in having conversations with a representative of the Kremlin on behalf of President-elect Trump. Many other presidents-elect had instructed top aides to do the same. The epic retellings of the Russiagate narrative by both papers, at extraordinary length, were riddled with similar mistakes and unproven allegations. (Nonetheless, a prominent historian, albeit one seemingly little informed both about Russiagate documents and about Kremlin leadership, characterized the widely discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier - the source of many such allegations - as "increasingly plausible.")
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Eye 2

SOTT Focus: The Military-Industrial-Humanitarian Complex: Spreading Western Hegemony Under The Guise of Virtue

Tomasz Pierscionek
RT
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 19:43 UTC
humanitarian bombs
Shakespeare once wrote that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Nowadays, we see the terms 'humanitarian' and 'democracy' abused to justify death and destruction.

Traditionally honorable words such as 'humanitarian' and 'democracy' have come to acquire a darker and more cynical meaning following their misappropriation to justify the invasion of sovereign nations and to promote the spread of Western military and cultural dominance across the globe. The mainstream media, alongside some human rights activists, assist these ventures by helping disseminate mistruths and by tapping into the emotions of fear, anger and revulsion to soften public opinion and make aggression against a sovereign state appear justified.

Running parallel to politicians' lies that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD deployable within 45 minutes, a strategy was deployed to shock and awe the public into accepting the invasion through attention-grabbing headlines crafted to abhor readers with 'evidence' of Saddam's butchery and to generate strong emotional reactions which would cause people to think with their hearts rather than their heads. One such story written by Labour MP Ann Clwyd, and published in The Times just two days before the US-led Coalition of the Willing began destroying Iraq, asserted that Saddam possessed a 'human-shredding machine' into which adversaries were fed feet first and turned into fish food. The article titled "See men shredded, then say you don't back war" had the double effect of causing a reader to feel revulsion and of making the anti-war lobby appear callous and indifferent to the plight of the Iraqi people. The existence of a human shredder was later challenged and such a machine is yet to be found.
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Eye 2

SOTT Focus: 'Grassroots' outrage? George Soros Funds The Activists Behind Anti-Kavanaugh Campaign


RT
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 18:37 UTC
Kavanaugh protesters
© Joshua Roberts / ReutersDemonstrators protest US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the Russell Senate Office building on Capitol Hill
Moving videos of women confronting senators over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination have been framed as grassroots activism, but they were actually made by an organization that receives massive funding from George Soros.

A number of videos have surfaced in recent days showing activists giving Republican senators an earful about their support for Kavanaugh's nomination. The most piercing of these interactions came last week, when Republican Senator Jeff Flake was confronted at the US Capitol by two women who said they were survivors of sexual assault.

The two women berated Flake for voicing support for the nominee, who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and misconduct. Flake appeared visibly unsettled in the video, and he acknowledged that the interaction may have influenced his decision to press for an FBI probe into the allegations.

Comment: On Ana Maria Archila, the Gateway Pundit reports:
Thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez we now know Ana Maria Archila is an [alleged] illegal alien.

Via The College Fix:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist and rising star within the Democrat Party, called Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh a liar in a speech to Boston University college students on Monday...

...She went on to hail "activism" as the solution, and boasted to the crowd that one of the women who had cornered judiciary committee member Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in an elevator and yelled at him for several minutes after he agreed to vote "yes" on Kavanaugh was from her district.

"Ana Maria Archila is from our district, is from Queens," Ocasio-Cortez, prompting a round of applause. "In fact, she is an immigration activist, which just goes to show intersectionality and how interwoven all of these fights are. Because she is putting everything on the line and risking deportation ... not even for a direct immigration action but for the action of all survivors. And that's how we need to be. We need to be championing the causes of our neighbors. That is what creates power and movement, coalition building."
So we now have illegal alien Soros-paid activists influencing the Supreme Court confirmation process.


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Dreamsicle

SOTT Focus: Love Him or Loathe Him, Donald Trump is on a Mission to End The Wars and Dismantle The Pentagon's Empire

Gareth Porter
truthdig
Tue, 02 Oct 2018 07:37 UTC
trump moon korea
More than any other presidency in modern history, Donald Trump's has been a veritable sociopolitical wrecking ball, deliberately stoking conflict by playing to xenophobic and racist currents in American society and debasing its political discourse. That fact has been widely discussed. But Trump's attacks on the system of the global U.S. military presence and commitments have gotten far less notice.

He has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides, about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments and commitments to South Korea and NATO. This has resulted in an unprecedented struggle between a sitting president and the national security state over a global U.S. military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since early in the Cold War.

And now Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House has provided dramatic new details about that struggle.

Comment: Just to emphasize Porter's final paragraph, Trump may yield, but to date he's put up more fight than all US presidents since 1945 combined. As such, that makes him worthy of honor, not opprobrium. How people (who really should know better) can't see that is beyond us.

There's every reason to dislike Trump (for relatively superficial reasons): he's using US financial dominance to tax foreign countries' exports; his pro-Israeli stance is barf-inducing; he insults everyone with both his spontaneous statements and tweets, and some of his prepared speeches; he is loud and ultra-American; he (presumably) cheated on his wife with a porn star...

But if he is a 'racist' for wanting to defang the Pentagon Global Death Star, then he is the least racist US president in a while, possibly ever. That is why Sott.net is supportive of the man on this essential matter, one with the greatest actual consequences for people and planet.

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Stock Down

SOTT Focus: Sanctions And Tariffs Have Turned American Exceptionalism Into Isolationism

D. Rodriguez
Sott.net
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 23:18 UTC
American flag burning
© AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko
On September 24, another round of tariffs was imposed on $200 billion worth of goods coming from China, with Trump threatening another $267 billion more should China retaliate. Trump promised his base he was going to come down hard on China and it looks like he's making good on that promise. But here's the problem: tariffs on China's exports to the US are not going to make America great again, nor will they really help the American people as they ignore the broader reality at hand - the US is no longer the pinnacle of the 'free market' in a multipolar world, and the trade deficit that Trump keeps shouting about is an oversimplification of the real nature of US-China trade.

China retaliated against the first round of tariffs by implementing its own on $60 billion worth of American goods, among them soybeans. As a result, the US government plans to spend up to $12 billion in aid to relieve its domestic soybean industry from the tariffs' effects. However, it's not China's retaliation that will have the most damaging effects.

The latest list of Chinese exports to be taxed includes many everyday items from food to electronics. Consumer electronics were exempted but many of the components used in electronics were not, so those will become more expensive as well. If Trump does follow through with his threat, it will encompass nearly all of China's exports to the US. This means almost everything that you buy will see some sort of price increase since China is integral to many companies' supply chain and production. Don't expect the corporations to foot the bill - it's America's lower and middle classes that get caught in the crossfire and will see higher prices everywhere.
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Doberman

SOTT Focus: The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond to The Implications of Hoax Papers Published in Postmodernist Journals


Quillette
Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00 UTC
James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian


Editor's note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or "grievance studies." Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get "absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research."

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Below is a response to the scandal from five academics who are currently researching, publishing and teaching in the fields of Philosophy, English Studies, Behavioral Genetics and Economics.

Comment: Some heroes don't wear capes. The efforts of James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian cannot be praised enough - to expose this academic corruption as the peddling of nonsense that it is. Hopefully this incident will wake up some people who are currently under the spell of social justice - particularly University students who are particularly vulnerable.

See also:

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MIB

SOTT Focus: Wilderness of Mirrors: MI6, The Cold War, Spies And Traitors From Gordievsky to Skripal

George Galloway
RT
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 20:47 UTC
Oleg Gordievsky
© FIONA HANSON / AFPFormer Russian KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, 18 October 2007
I knew the double agent Oleg Gordievsky, though he evidently didn't know me, thank God.

I was rather junior at the time, it's true, but I grew up to be less so. The absence of my name in his ghost-written memoir officially penned by The Times' Ben Macintyre is evidence either of no post facto additions to his photographically-memorized perusal of Soviet secrets regarding the British labour movement, or else it is evidence that his memory isn't quite as photographic as the memoir seeks to persuade us.

The absence of my name in this latest boost to his pension fund is the least interesting thing about the book, however.

The memoir - titled The Spy and the Traitor - is happily timed to buttress the tide of Russophobic propaganda in London around the Skripal affair, in which The Times is playing such a sterling role.

That the revelations within are only scarcely reheated souffles of discredited allegations raised by Gordievsky decades ago. It does not seem to have mattered that one such allegation was previously defeated in the courts, having been published by the same newspaper group under the same editor. These are souffles which can rise twice!
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Mr. Potato

SOTT Focus: The Dumbing-Down of Contemporary Political Discourse: British Foreign Secretary Compares EU With USSR

Neil Clark
RT
Tue, 02 Oct 2018 20:29 UTC
eussr eu flag hammer sicklle
An apt metaphor? Or does this go too far?
The comparison that UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt made between the EU and a Soviet 'prison' has been fiercely attacked. The episode shows us how superficial political debate has become today.

For right-wingers, the EU is just like the Soviet Union - a bureaucratic socialist tyranny which doesn't allow anyone to leave. For Russophobic, western-centric Europhile 'liberals', 'centrists' and the 'centre left', it's a disgraceful analogy as the Soviet Union was, along with Nazi Germany, the most evil creation in history, and did nothing good.

How did political debate descend to these kindergarten levels? Is this the price we've paid for allowing Rupert Murdoch to get such a stranglehold over our media?

Nowhere in this 'black and white' discourse is there an acknowledgement that the Soviet Union changed greatly during the 69 years of its existence. In fact, the Soviet Union, and communism in eastern Europe generally, has been reduced to the period during which Stalin carried out his purges and sent millions of innocent people to the gulag.
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