CNN this week suddenly discovered that chemical weapons are being used in Aleppo. No, not the multiple attacks by militants against government-held areas of Aleppo which have affected dozens of civilians and killed two Syrian soldiers. The intrepid reporters at CNN uncovered a case of a boy aged around ten apparently suffering the effects of exposure to chemical weapons in East Aleppo. No solid evidence at this point in time has been produced showing Syrian armed forces being responsible, but CNN and its brethren in the corporate media won't let a pesky little thing such as evidence stand in the way of further demonization of Bashar Al-Assad and Russia in its relentless propaganda campaign in support of regime change in Syria.

The question begging to be asked is: 'where have you been CNN for the last few months while Syrian, Russian and Iranian media have been documenting cases of chemical weapons use by militants against government held areas of Aleppo?' RT News reporters, for example, have visited hospitals in West Aleppo several times to see first-hand civilians suffering the terrifying effects of chemical weapons.

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that samples taken proved that chemical weapons have been used by militants in attacks on government-held areas of Aleppo.

So frustrated has Russia become with the intransigence of the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in not showing any enthusiasm for investigating Russia's findings, that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia is willing to take the samples to the Hague for further analysis of Russia's findings. He said the analysis of samples leaves "no doubt" that toxic substances have been used by militants.

While all eyes last month were on the most extraordinary build-up to a US election, Earth Changes continued apace.

The curtain-raiser in October 2016 was Hurricane Matthew, which left a swathe of destruction across Colombia, the Caribbean and the US East Coast. The strongest North Atlantic storm in a decade, Matthew was also the strongest storm ever recorded so close to the equator, dumped so much water that it broke rainfall records wherever it went, and cost over $10 billion in damages. Haiti, where over 1,600 people were killed, bore the brunt of it.

Extreme weather is so 'normal' now that South Carolina last month recorded its seventh '1-in-1,000-year' flood event in just 6 years, beating rainfall records set in... September 2016. While much of the US saw record-breaking warm temperatures for October, copious amounts of snow across Russia meant that the northern hemisphere's snow cover extent by late October was second only to that recorded in 1976.

We also have a dozen mind-blowing meteor events in this month's video, a reflection of what we suspect is another end-of-year uptick in 'space visitors'. As we reported at the beginning of the year, fireballs have significantly increased over the last decade, and the skies become especially 'illuminated' during the latter half of each year.

These were 'the signs' in October 2016...

The loss by Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential elections, and the surprise win for Donald Trump, rather than exposing the Right's alleged underbelly of racism, bigotry, xenophobia and homophobia, has instead revealed something much more surprising, and potentially catastrophic for Western civilization as we know it: the cult of political correctness, obsession with identities, and a radical Left fringe that has ponerized inclusion and empathy to the point of authoritarianism. Whether it's on the domestic front of gender pronouns, safe spaces, and micro-aggressions, or on the foreign front of humanitarian intervention, human rights and the responsibility to protect, Western liberal values have lost all meaning.

On this edition of The Truth Perspective, we'll be discussing this trend, how it came about, and where it suggests we are headed.

Running Time: 01:51:22

Download: MP3

America is being overrun by a bunch of crybabies whose whining has reached a fever pitch. With the recent presidential election it's as if a switch has been flicked which gives people carte blanche to emote all over everyone else and throw tantrums in public. The ability to maintain a stiff upper lip and deal with adversity is being eroded. Feelings, however misplaced, are all that count while facts and reality are given short shrift. What are the roots of this emotional hysteria? Why do grown-ups need to hold cry-ins in their safe spaces while being protected from microaggressions? What are the effects on the individual specifically and society in general when a culture of narcissism and the eschewing of reality is not only accepted, but promoted?

Join us on this episode of The Health and Wellness show for a lively discussion of this topic. Stay tuned, as always for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic will be euthanasia.

Related Links:
Where did generation snowflake come from? (video)
Maybe it's time to protest the protesters! (video)
Precious snowflakes: Grieving liberal students beg for exam cancellations in wake of Killary's loss
7 Harsh Realities Of Life Millennials Need To Understand
Professor explains the increase of 'precious snowflakes' - cites narcissism, over-nurturing
​Precious snowflakes

Running Time: 01:21:07

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The more I think about the US media's claim that Hillary won the popular vote, the more I think it's bogus, that the numbers were fudged. I mean, you have a male candidate who is lambasted primarily for being a sleaze, misogynist and all-round disreputable character for the entire campaign, and his opponent is a woman whose worst sin (as far as the media reported) was some missing emails, and yet - according to exit poll data - a majority of women still voted for him?

From that I don't conclude that the women vote numbers were fudged in favor of Trump (after all, if anyone was gonna rig this election, it was gonna be the Hillary camp, or the 'deep state' behind her) but that the Hispanic and African American votes were likely fudged against Trump.

It's been a recurring pattern in recent major elections and referenda. We've now had more or less 50-50 split votes in the Scottish independence referendum, the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. How is it that in these major-issue-votes, a country is almost always divided down the middle? Is a large majority of the people never on the same page on any major issue? That 50-50 split is pretty useful for perpetuating the worn-out 'left-right' paradigm we've lived under for decades. When one party gets 51% in an election, it's always plausible to have the other party get elected 4 or 5 years later because the last election was 'so close'.

In this way, these bogus left/right parties can maintain control and pursue their identical policies forever. If an outsider President or PM were ever elected in a Western nation with, say, 80% of the vote and if he/she performed decently enough, it would be pretty hard to justify why, in an election 4 years later, his/her support had plummeted and he/she was kicked out.

That's why 'they' never want a truly populist and decent leader to get into power; with his or her 'left' or 'right' track record, they'd never be able to get him/her out, short of assassination. Russia is an interesting contemporary example of this, where Putin has been in power in some capacity for the last 16 years, and there's no sign of his popularity waning. And guess who really, really hates Putin and Russia...

Have you been 'triggered' by the election of Donald Trump? Are you experiencing more 'microaggressions' than usual? Do you feel that you are witnessing the collapse of everything that you held dear and all that made America 'great'?

This week on Behind the Headlines, we'll be doing our best to dry the liberal tears and offer some truth, sanity and perspective on what has undoubtedly been a very unusual Presidential election. We'll also be considering the prospects for a very different America, at home and abroad, under a Trump administration.

Running Time: 02:09:24

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Trump suggested that he might not accept the election results if Clinton won. Hillary and her supporters in the government, media and public called this "horrifying" - a stunning rejection of America's longstanding democratic practice. Now, in a repeat of anti-Bush protests in 2001, Clinton supporters are refusing to accept the results. Not only that, at least some Hillary supporters are turning out be exactly what they accused Trump supporters of being: violent and hateful bigots. As The Duran's Alex Christoforou puts it, "For liberals and progressives, love and peace is only acceptable if it falls in line with their definition of such."

First there were the calls for Trump's assassination on Twitter. Shockingly, a freelance journalist for the UK's Guardian and New York Times, Monisha Rajesh, even called for president-elect Trump to be assassinated in a tweet to journalist Mark C. O'Flaherty, who writes for the Financial Times, Sunday Times, among other propaganda outlets. O'Flaherty responded "haaaa - that's all we've talked about for the last hour." Rajesh quickly deleted the tweet and her account, but not before it was seen and captured by other Twitter users.

The fact that Donald Trump was elected President of the USA is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is the conditions that allowed for him to be elected President of the USA.

So what drove Americans to vote for either Trump or Hillary in this week's US presidential election? Ask the mainstream media, or any Hillary supporter, and they'll probably tell you it was issues like liberal values and social justice. They'll also tell you that Trump supporters were motivated primarily by racism, sexism, and hatred. In reality, Trump voters were just as concerned about social injustice. In fact, this is the issue behind most popular votes around the world these days. And ironically, Trump voters were arguably more concerned about social justice than the liberals who voted Hillary because the social justice that drove millions to vote for Trump is very different to the 'social justice' that concerned Hillary supporters.

Here we need to note the clear distinction between the working-class 'rednecks' in the USA, and some of those in a more upwardly mobile financial position. Most people who voted for Trump were the 'rednecks' and they did so because they are feeling the negative effects of 8 years of the Obama government's 'liberal' economic and foreign policies that have continued unchanged since the 'conservative' Bush years (you might wonder why that is and how it works - hint: the president isn't the 'decider', by a long shot). Those policies coincided with the 2008 'crash' and the bank 'bailouts' that saw millions of American homes repossessed and many traditional manufacturing job losses, both of which disproportionately affected the poor.

It was precisely this marginalization of the most vulnerable in society that was behind the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year. Both the British people's vote to leave the EU and American people's vote for Trump were not primarily votes for racism or xenophobia but votes against the neoliberal status quo under which the poor saw their living standards drop further and everyone saw war and death abroad increase.

To underline the bipartisan nature of these protest votes; in the US it was the nominally 'left' government candidate that was rejected while in the UK the protest vote occurred under the nominally 'right' Conservative government. The point being; the supposed 'left'/'right' political paradigm in Western democracies no longer exists. It has been replaced by a combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, two fancy words that describe ideologies that together form the 'elite' project for transnational globalization and domination of the world's resources by corporations and their political friends through the 'projection' of US military power around the world.

So while the mainstream media, largely supportive of Hillary as the establishment candidate, spent the last 12 months spreading the line that Trump supporters are 'deplorables' and that Trump himself is a raging racist, sexist, xenophobe, liar, cheat, and narcissist, this was a gross lie that hid the truth that most Trump supporters were motivated by a desperate desire for better jobs, better wages, better health care (or any health care), etc. In other words, real social justice.

When Trump was offered to these marginalized and war-weary people as the only alternative to Hillary, they took the offer without much further thought. In addition, based on emerging voter poll data, it seems that it was not only the poor who rejected Hillary and all she stands for, but 54% of white male college graduates voted for Trump. Broken down by income bracket, while 52% of voters earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Clinton, and 41% for Trump, of the 64% of American voters who earn more than $50,000 a year, 49% chose Trump, and 47% Clinton. So, far from the core voter motivation in this election being one of 'anyone but Trump', it may have been closer to 'anyone but Hillary'.

Join us for another Connecting the Dots episode where we'll catch up on the most recent news and timely topics in the world of health.

Winter is coming and Seasonal Affective Disorder will descend upon millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere. What part does shifting light cycles, either natural or artificially enforced through daylight saving time, play in mood and circadian rhythms? How can the effects of waning daylight be mitigated?

Winter also means that flu season is upon us and if the CDC had its way we'd all be vaccinated. We'll check in with that mega-organization and their partners in crime -- Big Pharma and the FDA -- to see what mischief they've been up to most recently.

We'll also discuss Italy's first Veggie City, protein intake and the wonders of vitamin B12, the disturbing rise of anxiety and suicides in children and how to naturally increase mental well being.

Stay tuned, as always, for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where she connects the dots in animal health news.

Relevant links for the show:
Why Daylight Saving Time is bad for you
High schoolers create new light therapy device to treat seasonal affective disorder
CDC won't allow its own whistleblower to testify in vaccine-damage case
The toxic and flawed science behind flu vaccines
Miracle' drugs big pharma now regrets
A recipe for disaster? Turin, Italy's first 'vegetarian city'
Supplements accelerate benzodiazepine withdrawal: A case report and biochemical rationale
Six herbs that promote mental well-being
Running Time: 01:48:11

Download: MP3

Riding a wave of anti-establishment sentiment, Donald Trump has won 276 electoral votes, becoming the 45th president of the United States. His rival Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate, did not concede the election from her headquarters in New York but instead chose to do so by telephone. Rumor has it she originally planned to do so by email, but someone took her server.