Sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing all over the globe. Public health departments report staggering increases in cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis with more than 2 million cases recorded in 2016. Gonorrhea is reaching antibiotic-resistant superbug status, chlamydia is evolving into new strains and oral HPV cases among men have surpassed cases of HPV caused cervical cancer.

On this episode of The Health and Wellness Show we'll take a look at the precipitous rise in STDs and its correlation to pornography, dating apps, the hookup culture and the general moral degradation of society. Is the spread of STDs just a symptom of the collapse of civilization?

And stay tuned at the end of the show where Zoya's Pet Health Segment will lighten the mood with interesting facts about octopuses.

Running Time: 01:15:33

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Hillary Clinton has been officially outed as having rigged the Democratic primary so that she would win. She was therefore ineligible as a presidential candidate, yet the deep state media continues to cover this up and insists on focusing on the "Russia collusion" non-story. The situation is so farcical that it's fair to say that today American politics bears more similarity to that of a banana republic than the 'world's greatest democracy'.

Their attacks on RT and Sputnik are absurd; the accusations pale in comparison to what U.S. propaganda networks like RFE/RL are on record as doing. Their witch-hunt on social media ads from "Russia-connected accounts" is utterly paranoid. Day after day, the emptiness continues to be poured into the void while the Russiagate narrative tears itself apart at the seams.

The US political system looks like THE most corrupt and undemocratic political systems in the world. It's worse even than dictatorships. At least with a dictator no one is being fooled. In the USA, the totalitarian 'elite' have been fooling Americans for decades.

Tune in to Behind the Headlines at 6-8pm CET (4-6pm UTC / 12-2pm EST), as we discuss the latest in the Russiagate/Clintongate tragicomic farce, among other breaking news from this last week.

Running Time: 01:52:22

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You've heard the story about the 'Catholic terrorist' Guido Fawkes and the English parliament. You know what they did to him when he was ratted out by informers. And unless you've been living under a rock these past years, you've heard about V for Vendetta, the Wachowski siblings' movie adaptation of Alan Moore's comic book icon. Even if you haven't watched it yet, then you've almost certainly seen the lead character V's legacy in footage and images from demonstrations across the planet's capital cities in recent years:

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this revolutionary movie has inspired a generation to 'rise up'. It has certainly been a fitting prop! Britons traditionally celebrate today with a bonfire in commemoration of Fawkes's death and continuity of the status quo. What most don't realise is that they are celebrating a crime by the elite against the people.

After Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, English Catholics who had had a rough time under her reign had hoped that her successor, James I, would be more tolerant of their religion. Alas, he was not, and this angered a number of young men who decided that violent action was the answer.

One young man in particular, Robert Catesby suggested to some close friends that the thing to do was to blow up the Houses of Parliament. In doing so, they would kill the King, maybe even the Prince of Wales, and the Members of Parliament who were making life difficult for the Catholics.

To carry out their plan, the conspirators got hold of 36 barrels of gunpowder - and stored it in a cellar, just under the House of Lords.

But as the group worked on the plot, it became clear that some innocent people would be hurt or killed in the attack. Some of the plotters started having second thoughts. One of the group members even sent an anonymous letter warning his friend, Lord Monteagle, to stay away from the Parliament on November 5th.

The warning letter reached the King, and the King's forces made plans to stop the conspirators. Guy Fawkes, who was in the cellar of the parliament with the 36 barrels of gunpowder when the authorities stormed it in the early hours of November 5th, was caught, tortured and executed. [...]

The story of the Gunpowder Plot is an interesting one. It is generally accepted that it would have been unlikely that the conspirators could gather 36 barrels of gunpowder and store them in a cellar under the house of Lords without the security forces of the day getting suspicious. Furthermore, there is serious doubt about whether the letter mentioned above was in fact genuine. In fact, it is believed today to have been fabricated by the King's officials. Historians suggest that the letter was simply a tool for the King's officials who already knew about the plot from the very mouth of one of the plotters.

As a tool for the king's men, the letter was ideal. It made it easy to explain how the King found out about the Plot and stopped it just in time before his untimely death. At the same time, the letter was vague enough to give the officials all the latitude they wanted in falsifying confessions and to pursue their own anti-Catholic ends. In fact, we could go further and suggest that the entire plot was a set-up, a 17th-century 'false-flag', if you will.

So while the British today misguidedly celebrate the execution of a man whose main aim was to liberate them from injustice, the mask that has come to represent that man via the movie V for Vendetta is today a symbol of that same desire to liberate the ordinary citizen from the grinding, relentless death machine that is civilization in the modern age.

After more than a year of nothing but spurious allegations that the Russia government or Russian trolls or just "Russia" (like the entire country) 'hacked' the US presidential election and secured victory for Trump, we now have the hard evidence to back up those claims.

Over the last 2 days, technology executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google testified before Congress and laid out the damning evidence for all to see. Russia had indeed used social media platforms to turn the minds of the American people (or at least the 27% of the electorate that voted for Trump) against Clinton. It was a travesty, a dastardly attack on truth, justice and the American way.

The primary way in which the evil Russians achieved their nefarious goal was by making posts and paying for some ads on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said that up to 130 million Americans may have seen at least one of the posts/advertisements made on the platform. While that's a large number of alleged 'impressions', the offending posts represent 0.004% of all impressions on Facebook during the time period, but let's not quibble over numbers. Then again, maybe we should.

"With great power, comes great responsibility", that's a quote from the movie, Spiderman. The superpower known as America is a stranger to that concept however, because it can't stop waging incessant, futile wars. With the rapidity that change can occur in geopolitics these days, this callous American attitude can easily provoke a catastrophic global war. Although one can justifiably blame the elites for this debacle, equally culpable are the American people who loudly cheer or silently bless the perpetual wars. Selling a war in the U.S. is like giving out candies on Halloween.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution. Russia may be a vastly different place today, but there's no shortage of chaos in the world. The aftermath of the Catalan Independence Referendum is still reverberating. After Catalonian leaders refused to nullify the region's vote, Madrid took the nuclear option and activated Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, dissolving the Catalonian parliament and assuming direct control in a move of questionable legality. For their part, Catalan leaders declared independence, calling for peaceful resistance to Madrid's attempts to deny the region's independence.

Over in the U.S., it has been 25 years since the U.S. government promised to release all their relevant JFK assassination files. The deadline came, and went. Trump could have simply allowed for what was promised; instead, he caved in to CIA and FBI pressure to delay the release for "national security reasons". While some documents were released, thousands were withheld pending redactions. Whether existing redactions in the publicly available files will ever be removed or previously withheld documents will ever see the light of day is up in the air. In six months, Trump has the power to delay them again, and so on, ad infinitum. The question is: what value are the documents, anyway?

For these topics and more, tune in to Behind the Headlines at 6-8pm CET (4-6pm UTC / 12-2pm EST), only on the SOTT Radio Network.

Running Time: 01:35:32

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A civilization where women and children are sexually commoditized is one in terminal decline. The next enduring superpower will be one that had successfully shielded its women and children from the ongoing epidemic of mass-mediated sexualisation. Any futurist worth his salt will vouch for this axiom, as well as note the inverse correlation between the enfeeblement of the current superpower and the procession of phallic chevrons that accompany its military compulsions abroad.

But the faculty of reason - and of cause and effect - is inevitably lost on a society where adjunct professors may resort to prostitution in order to make ends meet. And believe it or not, this is exactly what is happening in the United States.

Professorial Prostitutes

According to a Sept 28 report in The Guardian, a quarter of part-time college academics or "adjuncts" in the United States are subsisting on public welfare programs such as Medicaid, food banks and charities while they live off the streets, in shacks or in their cars. "Adjuncting" is the result of runaway capitalism that has benefited a privileged 1% at the expense of an overworked and underpaid rabble. It is a convenient way of providing substandard teaching for higher fees and revenue at US universities and colleges.

It's flu season folks, and the yearly hype and scare-mongering are upon us. How such a relatively benign and short-lived cluster of symptoms that nearly everyone on Earth experiences from time to time can generate such maniacal focus boggles the mind. It seems that every year there are warnings that this flu season will be the worst and we must prepare for a possible pandemic. The CDC's guesstimated statistic that 36 thousand people a year die from the flu is trotted out with almost clock-like regularity and quoted by esteemed health 'experts' nationwide in order to pressure people into obtaining their flu shot.

On this episode of The Health and Wellness Show we'll examine the flu, flu propaganda, flu shots, flu prevention, flu treatment and all other things flu-y. Join us!

And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic will be upper respiratory infections in cats.

Running Time: 01:28:28

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Män som hatar kvinnor - 'Men Who Hate Women'. That's the original Swedish title of Stieg Larsson's runaway best-seller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Those who have read the novel or seen the Swedish film adaptation know that it's the perfect description. Larsson weaves a story of rape, sadism, spousal abuse, human trafficking, white-collar crime, and political corruption around the iconic characters of Lisbeth Salander and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Yeah, it may just be a novel, but after the research I've been doing lately, I'm convinced that there's more to the Larsson's subject matter than just a page-turning good read. As the character 'V' put it in V for Vendetta, "Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up." That's the truth, and if I've learned anything in recent years, it's that truth is stranger than fiction, and even more disturbing.

While I'm a fan of Larsson's work, and fiction in general, there's something to be said about true accounts. They have a way of 'seating' in the mind, making what was at first only 'interesting' and perhaps 'entertaining' fiction become real: solid, vital, life-altering. Fiction gives us the truth, but at a distance. It's up to the reader to divine the real-life applications and implications. But when they become clear, it can be a profound and painful experience. It's all too easy to take the easy way out when that experience is just too painful, with the potential of shattering too many deeply held illusions about the way reality really works. "It's just a story, after all." Those six curiosity-killing words are enough to prevent a person from doing the research to see that there may be more to a story than just the product of a good imagination. There may be a disturbing underbelly to the surface events of everyday life. In my case, that's where real-life investigative reporter Nick Bryant's 2009 book The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal comes into the story. It's the book that made a lot of things hit home for me, and it was absolutely devastating.

Bryant is a professional journalist, having published articles in many 'mainstream' newspapers and journals. But after deciding to research the infamous 'Franklin scandal' of the late '80s and early '90s, no mainstream editor would take his story. It was just too hard to believe. For those readers unfamiliar with the scandal, you can watch a never-aired documentary produced by UK-based Yorkshire Television titled Conspiracy of Silence. The documentary was commissioned by Discovery Channel, who pulled out at the last minute. Luckily, someone with access to a rough cut of the piece leaked it and Bryant has made it freely available on his website, here. The Franklin Scandal not only confirms what the Yorkshire team presented, but adds reams of new details and documents demonstrating a level of criminality, corruption, perversion of justice, and sadism that is simply mind-blowing.

Three weeks on and there's still no proper account of what happened on the Las Vegas Strip on the night of October 1st 2017. The official investigation and mainstream media coverage has focused on the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Festival venue, apparently conducted exclusively by 64-year-old gambler Stephen Paddock from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino resort, providing the public with a nonsensical timeline and a highly suspicious explanation of events as detailed by Joe Quinn in this article.

Since then, survivors from among the 22,000 people in attendance at the venue, along with other guests, residents and employees present on the Strip that night, have begun speaking out about what they saw and heard and to say their statements diverge from the official narrative would be a massive understatement.

Comparing police reports on published audio recordings of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department (LVMPD) scanner with videos taken by multiple eyewitnesses, along with eyewitness statements made to the media on the night, and in published testimonies they have been making since then, a picture emerges of terror and chaos deliberately spread over a much larger area than just the venue, a picture that casts further doubt on the official story of a lone gunman.