SOTT Focus:


Evil Rays

SOTT Focus: Trump Introduces New Word Into Mainstream Media Lexicon


Sott.net
Sat, 13 Jan 2018 11:41 UTC
Trump shithole
The mainstream media isn't known for its truth-telling. Too much political correctness and a belief in 'less said soonest mended' has resulted in an institutional paucity of forthright and objective opinion, calling a 'spade a spade' if you will. But Donald Trump is putting an end to all that.

While most of the mainstream media loves to hate Trump and takes great delight in excoriating him over his low brow and 'unpresidential' utterances, his most recent faux pas has been seized upon by leftist pundits across the board and indulgently repeated to the extent that we start to wonder if they aren't secretly thankful for the opportunity offered by the President to let loose and publicly say the words they always wanted to.

For those of you that may have been out of the loop on the goings-on in the world (or at least the 'international community') over the past few days, just watch this short video and be assured that you are now up to speed.
Read More...
Snowflake Cold

SOTT Focus: Enough With the Global Warming Nonsense: It's Freezing Out Here!

Corey Schink
Sott.net
Fri, 12 Jan 2018 23:40 UTC
frozen Buzzards Bay
© Ryan Canty / YouTubeNo that's not the north pole; that's just outside Boston last week.


"Children just aren't going to know what snow is." Thus spake 'climate science' at the turn of the new millennium.

And then the cold waves came on so hard and so fast that 'climate scientists' had to invent a new term for them: 'polar vortex'. The current one over the eastern half of North America has broken records left and right - and I mean century-old records. It's so cold on Mount Washington in New Hampshire that it's literally out of this world: it's colder there than on Mars. And what about that superpowerful storm in the US northeast? They had to invent a new name for that too.

The weather they told us would 'soon never happen again' is not just happening in spades in North America. The UK had its heaviest snowfall in four years in early December. It's freezing cold in India too, where some 70 people have died from exposure, and the Sahara Desert (yes, one of the hottest places on Earth) just got a substantial snowfall for the second winter running.

Read More...
Gold Seal

SOTT Focus: It's Neocon Think Tanks, Not Russian Media, That Is The Enemy Within

John Wight
Sputnik
Fri, 12 Jan 2018 18:54 UTC
neocons
The latest salvo in the ongoing attempt to de-legitimize and demonize Russia-based media has arrived with a directive from the US Justice Department that Sputnik News in the US must register as a foreign agent.

In this regard Sputnik now joins RT America (previously directed to register as a foreign agent) in being stigmatized as peddling propaganda instead of news and news analysis, its journalists and contributors smeared by association, in the context of a wider neo-McCarthyite offensive unleashed with the aim of pushing back against opposition to neoconservative nostrums and influence on Western foreign policy, along with its neoliberal economic counterpart.

What needs to be stressed is that this offensive is being waged not so much against Russian media as against Western dissident voices who dare appear on Russian media. It is an attack on the free speech of US citizens - and also on UK and European citizens given that the same offensive is underway in those parts of the world - on their right to ply their trade as journalists, writers, broadcasters and political analysts.
Read More...
Chart Pie

SOTT Focus: Merkel Steps Closer to Coalition Deal For New Government, But at What Cost?

Niall Bradley
Sott.net
Fri, 12 Jan 2018 17:52 UTC
merkel coalition germany
'Yay, we kept our jobs!'
There was relief in Berlin and Brussels today as Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and its Bavarian CSU ally announced that they were, in principle, on track to form a repeat coalition of Germany's previous government with Martin Schulz's left-center Social Democrats party (SPD). The deal is not yet clinched, however, as SPD party members won't vote on any arrangement until they hold a special congress on 21 January. And even then, predicts Horst Seehofer, head of the CSU, a government may not be in place until April, some 6 months since the election in late September 2017.

This is uncharted territory for modern Germany. Drawn-out electoral processes are something they're used to mocking Italians about, but with both Merkel's and Schulz's parties clocking their worst election results since the Weimar Republic, political instability has returned to Germany in a big way. Unlike the CDU/CSU-SPD 'grand coalition' government from 2013-2017, this time around the largest party they face in the Bundestag is the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which, as a new right-wing nationalist party, poses a 'dangerous threat' (from the establishment's point of view) as the 'official' opposition.
Read More...
SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: The Health & Wellness Show: Lies, Damned Lies and Scientific Research


Sott.net
Fri, 12 Jan 2018 16:00 UTC
bad science, corruption science
Evidence-based medicine (peer-reviewed and published clinical research results) is the life-blood of conventional medical knowledge and practice. All standard allopathic medical treatments rest upon it with physicians relying on the results of this clinical research to guide their practice. But what if this gold standard of medical practice is based on research that is largely wrong, biased or outright fraudulent? It is estimated that up to 90% of biomedical studies are false. More and more scientific papers are being retracted because of sloppy research, data calculation and collection errors or purposeful lying on the part of researchers. We've gotten to the point where that anything read in a scientific journal needs to be take with a large grain of salt.

In this episode of the Health and Wellness Show we explore the dubious nature of scientific study; the conflicts of interest, the hidden (and not so hidden) corporate funding that guides research, the censorship of negative results and the lies and obfuscation that plague so-called evidence based studies.

Stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment about pain in cats.

Running Time: 01:36:31

Download: MP3

Read More...
Gold Seal

SOTT Focus: Watch 2016 Abby Martin Interview With Palestinian Resistance Teenager Ahed Tamimi (VIDEO)

Abby Martin
teleSUR
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 13:45 UTC
ahed tamimi
Recently, the struggle for Palestinian human rights gained international attention surrounding a new icon of resistance - 16 year old Ahed Tamimi.

While in the West Bank in late 2016, Abby Martin interviewed Ahed Tamimi about her hardships and aspirations living under occupation and it becomes clear why her subjugators are trying to silence her voice. Her brother Waad and father Bassem also talk about their experiences with Israeli soldiers harassing their village and targeting their family.

In this exclusive episode, Abby outlines the Tamimi family's tragic tale and unending bravery in the fight for justice and equality in Palestine and how the story of their village of Nabi Saleh is emblematic of the Palestinian struggle as a whole.

Read More...
Russian Flag

SOTT Focus: Watch RT Chief Margarita Simonyan Turn The Tables on Lesley Stahl in 60 Minutes Hit-Piece Fail (VIDEO)

Zoya Klebanova
Sott.net
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:01 UTC
margarita simonyan
Margarita Simonyan, 37-year-old RT Editor-in-Chief, mother-of-two, and toppler of mighty regimes the world over.
On the January 6 episode of 60 Minutes, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl 'interviewed' (or rather, attempted to frame) Margarita Simonyan, head of supposed global election-meddling behemoth RT.

Without even a whiff of irony (Stahl had freely traveled to 'the belly of the beast' in Moscow to conduct the interview), the 60 Minutes report managed to cram in every piece of fake intelligence on Russia thus far dished out to Western media by the 'US intelligence community'.

You can read a transcript of the brief exchanges here, but first watch Simonyan attempt to pierce Stahl's armor-plated reality-bubble:

Read More...
Cult

SOTT Focus: There Is No Such Thing As 'The Poor'

J. Martin
Sott.net
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 21:37 UTC
Economic gap
Knowledge is a curse. Having even a rudimentary understanding of anything is guaranteed to spoil any kind of fun and community you might have.

The current time is marked by collectivism of a particular sort. It is marked by a unity of resentment against one group or another. The ability to fall in and march to the orgy of rage is largely dependent on selective ignorance.

Even the smartest just don't want to 'go there' on something. More often than not, the 'there' they don't want to go to is basic economics. Not because they don't have the mind for math, economics isn't really about math anyway. Not because they can't find quality information, there's plenty of introductory books or youtube lectures available. Not because they don't consider it important, the most grandiose economic theories and plans are almost always espoused by people with the least education on the topic.

No. The reason people don't care to become educated is because they know education will spoil the enjoyment of everyone's secret vice: righteous anger.
Read More...
Bullseye

SOTT Focus: Love Him or Loathe Him, Trump is Liberating us All From The Empire's Lies

Vladimir Golstein
Sott.net
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 20:28 UTC
trump fake news
Trump and the Fine Art of Dialectics

Alexander Blok, one of the smartest and most noble of Russians, wrote this amazing essay on Catiline, a Roman rebel whose plot was crushed and who was utterly maligned by the father of all bullshit, Cicero.

So Catiline was this patrician, a decadent SOB who, when mistreated and challenged by the Roman establishment, organized the Roman deplorables and started a rebellion.

It was squashed of course, but for Blok, he remained a hero. Blok calls Catiline the Roman Bolshevik, and insists on approaching him not from Cicero's moralizing NYT-like perspective, but from the perspective of World Revolution.

For Blok, as he puts it, the heart of the Roman Empire stopped when Christ was born. It continued for another few hundred years, but in a zombie-like state until its petty, militaristic, provincial, materialistic character was finally exposed as the bluff it always was, and it collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. And here is Blok's paradoxical view: Catiline's rebellion makes sense only from this perspective.
Read More...
Cardboard Box

SOTT Focus: No US Support For Protestors in Honduras as 80,000 March Against Election Fraud and Corruption

Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net
Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:58 UTC
Honduras demonstration US flag
© ReutersSupporters of the opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla burn the US flag as they take part in a march to protest against the results of Honduras' general elections in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
The recent support of both US government officials and American media pundits for protestors in Iran - or rather, the recent attack on the Iranian government - which goes as far as suggesting arming the Iranian opposition with the goal of regime change - contrasts sharply with their silence in the face of a blatantly stolen election in Honduras and mass demonstrations. Since the election, thirty people have been killed in police operations and 800 arrested.

On Saturday, some 80,000 people marched in San Padro Sula, the country's second largest city, against the reelection of US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernández and in support of opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla who was almost certainly the legitimate winner of the election. Demonstrators called for a national strike, threatened to boycott Hernández's inauguration and blocked roads and airports. The Honduran National Police and the elite military police - which are responsible for attacking peaceful protestors and collectively punishing them by using tear gas in their houses - have been the recipients of $114 million in US security support since 2009.
Read More...