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USA

SOTT Focus: America is Disneyland

USA disneyland
Welcome to America!
Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth! Millions of families visit the theme park every year to enjoy the magical place of rides, spectacular shows and cheerful cartoon figures. Everything is clean, perfect and joyful. Unless ... you realize that Cinderella might actually be homeless. That's right, 10% of Disneyland's employees are actually homeless, many more are on food stamps, and 75% struggle to make ends meet.

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SOTT Focus: The Health & Wellness Show: Interview with Brilliant Researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff

Stephanie Seneff
Today on the Health and Wellness Show, we have a very special interview with brilliant researcher Dr. Stephanie Seneff.

Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master's and PhD theses at MIT. In 2012, Dr. Seneff was elected Fellow of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA).

In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has published over two dozen papers in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.

Join us for a fascinating discussion with Dr. Seneff where we'll be covering a wide variety of topics on human health and nutrition.

Running Time: 01:17:33

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Eye 1

SOTT Focus: MI5 Poisons Another Russian Asset to Smear Putin in Ongoing Propaganda War

Putin Skripal
As you may have noticed from the title, I'm cutting to the chase on this one. Context is everything these days when attempting to understand major geopolitical events.

Sergei Skripal is a former Russian army colonel who worked for Soviet military intelligence during the Cold War. In the late 1990s he was recruited by MI6 as a double agent. In December 2004, Skripal was arrested and charged with "high treason in the form of espionage", convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In July 2010, he was released as part of a spy exchange for ten Russian agents who had been arrested in the United States as part of the 'Illegals Program'. Skripal was then settled in the UK by MI6 in the town of Salisbury. Yesterday he was found on a public bench with his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia. Both were incoherent and/or incapacitated. When medical personnel arrived, some of them also allegedly became ill.

Within a few hours of the discovery of the pair, the British media and politicians had decided that they had been poisoned at the behest of Vladimir Putin himself, with some as yet "unknown substance". British newspapers said it, so it must be true. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson threatened fresh sanctions against Russia if it is proven to have poisoned a Russian double agent and branded the country "a malign and disruptive force". No evidence was cited to back up any of these allegations, because everyone 'knows' that Putin is a ruthless dictator who just loves to bump off people that he doesn't like. British newspapers and politicians said it, so it must be true.
Lavrov-johnson
For the unfortunate cretins who still refuse to swallow the anti-Russia narrative, the British government and media duly require you to remember the case of Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian intelligence agent who became a British intelligence asset. Litvinenko was, 'everyone knows', murdered in 2006 by polonium that was given to him by two Russian spies on the 'direct orders of Putin'. The problem is that there was, and is today, no hard evidence for this claim. But who needs evidence when you have a propaganda bullhorn to addle the public brain. Mush-for-brains are highly averse to evidence anyway. It's much better to quote the words of people like Alexander Goldfarb, long-term anti-Putin activist, author of Litvinenko's deathbed testimony accusing Putin, and promoter of the activities of 'Pussy Riot'. On the Skripal situation, Goldfarb, who was (coincidentally) a close friend of Skripal, said:
"Any reasonable person would think immediately that Russia had the opportunity, motive and a prior history of this kind of crime so it is reasonable to think it was involved in this attack. This is the Kremlin's modus operandi. There are plenty of precedents. What's interesting now is that this happens just before Russia's presidential election."
Alexander Goldfarb
Alexander Goldfarb, perfidious...
The Skripal event, and the way it is being reported, cannot be understood except in the context of the vicious and persistent defamation and slander campaign that Western governments and media have waged against Russia over the past several years. To put it another way, the Skripal event is simply one more chapter in that defamation campaign. The reasons for the West's anti-Russia hysteria have everything to do with the fact that, over the past 10-15 years, Russia has re-emerged as a powerful independent player on the world stage, capable of pushing back long-standing Anglo-American designs on global control. Exceptional nations with a serious megalomaniacal streak (and their lackeys) don't like being pushed back, not even an inch. When they don't get their way, and lack the cojones to engage in a fair fight, they resort to dirty tricks and smear campaigns, at which they are very adept.

Che Guevara

SOTT Focus: Too Far Left: How Liberals Transformed Into Illiberal Social Justice Warriors

Activism then and now
Transformation of the Liberal Left
In the 1960s Dr. Martin Luther King fought for equal civil rights on behalf of African-Americans while President John F. Kennedy was trying to shift US foreign policy towards a peace race instead of an arms race. In their actions, these two men represented the qualities of the archetypal hero - their shared desire to unite society, and ultimately all of mankind.

Back then if you were a 'Liberal', you probably supported both of these men. Kennedy described himself in the following way:
"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."
That sounds reasonable to me. The trouble, however, with identifying one's politics, is that, as time goes by, the meanings of words change. For example, during the 1930s, 'fascist' applied to someone who supported the nationalistic ideology of that era. Today the term can mean a far-right or far left supporter, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The meaning of terms today also vary from person to person, so one word can have multiple meanings, even if they tend to aggregate around one 'common sense' meaning. A psychopath, you can imagine, has a totally different conception of the word 'freedom' than you have.

When Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, it soon became clear that we had moved into an era of culture wars, and that the 'left' or 'liberal' ideology had undergone a very strange metamorphosis:


How the heck did we end up here?

USA

SOTT Focus: America is a System Not a Democracy

US democracy
Are you perturbed by what's happening in America? Are you shocked by inequality, disappearing middle class, declining quality of health, police brutality, gun violence, ever-growing national debt, government's Orwellian monitoring etc.? You are not alone, but all these are confusing only if you think in terms of an "American government" or "American corporations" or "American banks" that have, or should have, unique loyalty or consideration towards the American people.

But that's the wrong way to think about American today. Everything becomes clear if you think of it as a "System".

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SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Putin The World To Rights: Russia's New Nuclear Weapons And The End of 'Unipolarity'

putin nuclear weapons speech
"I warned you this would happen."
President Putin's 'state of the union' address to Russian legislators this week included an unusually blunt message to the self-styled 'masters of the universe' in Washington, DC: "You never listen to us. Now, you listen!"

Taking the opportunity to announce the completion of an overhaul of Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal, including some new hi-tech weaponry that he claims is unstoppable by any other military systems, Putin put the smack down on American pretensions to single-handedly ruling the world.

This week on Behind the Headlines, we'll discuss the significance of this development for world affairs, along with our regular round-up of recent events on the Big Blue Marble.

We're live from 12 noon - 1:30pm US Eastern, 5pm - 6:30pm UTC, 6 - 7:30pm Central European, this Sunday March 4th, 2018. If you can't tune in then, download the show from the Sott Radio Network archive!

Running Time: 01:44:27

Download: MP3


Dominoes

SOTT Focus: Postmodern Feminist Ideology: UK Courts Instructed to Treat Men Unequally Before The Law

feminist ideology meme
We're living in dangerous times folks. The postmodern feminist worldview has been officially adopted in UK courts.

In making their rulings, British judges use a guidance manual named the 'Equal Treatment Bench Book', which is published by the Judicial College, a body responsible for training all UK judges. The manual was just updated with a very pro-feminist, anti-male worldview taking hold. Judges are now being advised to avoid offending any of the snowflakes that might appear in their courtroom:
"Judges are now being urged to refrain from using certain words, including 'ethnic minorities,' 'afro-Caribbean' and 'transsexual,' while 'postman' should be replaced by 'postal operative'."
But the politically correct language doesn't stop there. It gets much worse:
"The guidelines also call for judges to be "slow" when it comes to jailing women, as imprisonment is believed to be more damaging to females than males. Going against the long-standing social norm whereby all are treated equally before the law, the guidelines suggest the opposite. "True equal treatment may not always mean treating everyone in the same way," the new version reads."
It's hard to imagine a more ludicrous statement. Equal treatment absolutely means treating everyone equally. Anything else is unequal treatment, plain and simple. This cannot be denied, yet the wizards at the Judicial College somehow have convinced themselves of something that is completely at odds with both the function of the English language and observable reality. Welcome to the liberal feminist ideology, where black is white and unequal treatment is fair if it benefits those poor victims of the patriarchy.

Cross

SOTT Focus: US Coup in Ukraine Has Produced Religious Persecutions

C14 fascists
© Zurab Javakhadze/TASSC14 fascists
When the democratically-elected President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in the bloody US-backed coup of February 2014, turning Ukraine against Russia, one of the beneficiaries was Ukraine's 'anti-Russian church': the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyivan Patriarchate (UOC-KP).

This church was established in 1992 by a former Metropolitan of the Moscow Patriarchate, Filaret (Denisenko), after he failed to be elected Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). This caused him to break entirely from the church and create a new one in Ukraine. Later in 1995, when the elected head of this new church died, Filaret declared himself Patriarch of the UOC-KP.

Today, the intensely anti-Russian post-coup Ukrainian Government is allowing Filaret's clergy to lead their congregations in raids to take control of the churches and other facilities of the original Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate, UOC-MP).

Furthermore, Filaret's speeches are openly hostile toward residents of the far-eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, where over 90% of the local population had voted for the overthrown President, and then refused to accept the coup-regime and thus declared the breakaway republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

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SOTT Focus: The Health & Wellness Show: Health Tips From Dummies: The Dangers of Mainstream Dietary Advice

Tumeric
Mainstream news is full of health advice. The fact that most of it is bad doesn't seem to stop the endless stream of awful recommendations based on faulty science and questionable motives. A quick review of the news can reveal the following: Saturated fat is bad and should be limited to 13 grams a day; Take statins to reduce cholesterol and prevent heart disease; Have no more than a half teaspoon of salt per day; Whole grains are the foundation of a healthy diet; Mobile phones and other sources of ionizing radiation can't cause cancer; Increase your intake of polyunsaturated fats; Only plants make proteins; Glyphosate poses no risk to human health and is safe for consumption; Red meat kills. If this egregious advice wasn't enough, mainstream health writers go out of their way to lambast herbs and natural remedies with thousands of years of safe and beneficial use for humans. What's a person to do?

Join us for this episode of The Health and Wellness Show where we separate the lies from the truth and tried to figure out why mainstream health authors seem to have it in for us. And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment, where she spoke about the rabies virus.

Running Time: 01:25:32

Download: MP3


Russian Flag

SOTT Focus: Putin Delivers Landmark 'State of The Union' Speech: Puts The Smack Down on US, Shows Off Latest Russian Nuclear Weapons

putin speech
© Grigoriy Sisoev / SputnRussian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall
Russian president Vladimir Putin today delivered a landmark address to the Russian Federal Assembly - a joint session of the two chambers of the Russian Parliament - in what is the Russian equivalent of an annual 'State of the Union' speech.

Despite its name, the audience of the address is not limited to Russian legislators. Members of the cabinet, senior civil servants and important public figures are also invited. There were so many people invited this year that the event was moved from its traditional venue at the Georgievsky reception hall in the Grand Palace of the Kremlin to the larger venue at Moscow's Manege.

Taking advantage of the new venue's better multimedia capabilities, Putin announced that Russia has developed a number of advanced weapons systems, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile which render all US capabilities aimed at undermining the Russian nuclear deterrent - including its anti-missile systems - obsolete.