I don't mean to put a damper on the everyone's summer holidays, but the current heatwaves in the U.S. and Europe has me thinking back to numerous warnings issued during last summer's major drought and "record-breaking heatwave" in the U.S.

Analysts at Rabobank, a Netherlands-based bank specialising in food and agri-business financing, were crunching the numbers and predicted at the time that food prices, specifically meat prices, would soar in 2013 as a result of the U.S. drought.

Back in 2011, the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), a research body of academics from Harvard and MIT, using data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Food Price Index, published a paper that correlated "outbreaks of unrest" in 2008 and 2011 with increases in food prices. They claimed to have identified the precise threshold for global food prices that leads to worldwide unrest: 210 points...

I find myself agreeing with the sentiments expressed by those people chosen to appear in the mainstream media to express their opinions on the publication of a "fluffed and buffed" image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

That particular image of Dzhokhar is not representative of the face of terrorism, and certainly not the face of the terrorism that struck the Boston area on April 15th and the following days. I therefore also find myself agreeing with the decision of 'tactical photographer' Sgt. Murphy of the Boston police who, in an effort to "show the true face of terrorism", released three images of the badly injured Dzhokhar crawling out of the boat, sniper rifle dot trained on his head.

This, indeed, is the true face of modern-day 'terrorism':

Last Wednesday, alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, appeared for the first time in court. Much like James Holmes who was accused of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting in July 2012, Tsarnaev appeared confused and distracted in court, and "acted weird". Such behavior is, of course, not necessarily unusual for someone who stands accused of mass murder. In Tsarnaev's case however, we have a problem that can't be explained away so easily.

Check out this video I put together of recent mainstream media reports and a short video of Tsarnaev himself.

A week after the Egyptian Army deposed President Mohamed Morsi, supporters of the ousted leader were massacred yesterday, allegedly during a sit-in protest at an "elite army base" in Cairo. So far over 50 have been reported dead, with hundreds injured. The Muslim Brotherhood is blaming the Egyptian army and police, but a military spokesman has said a "terrorist group" was responsible.

"We have people hit in the head, we have bullets that exploded as they entered the body, cluttering organs and body parts", said Gehad Haddad, a spokesman for Muslim Brotherhood.

Adamant that the role of police and army is to "safeguard the people's revolution", no matter their particular political affiliation, military spokesman Ahmed Ali said security forces acted "in self-defense against armed men attacking them from various locations, including rooftops."

No one disputes that there were clashes between Morsi supporters - at least some of whom also appeared to be armed and intent on violence - and the security forces sent in to remove them, but it's unclear who the gunmen were:

Witnesses, including Brotherhood supporters at the scene, said the army fired only tear gas and warning shots and that "thugs" in civilian clothes had carried out the deadly shooting.

This bloodbath comes on the heels of arguably the largest mass demonstrations in modern history, and is almost certainly going to spiral out of control and plunge Egypt into chaos.

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we looked back through world events in the last few weeks. With the US celebrating 237 years of 'independence', what is the state of the nation? With meteor fireballs appearing at the mass demonstrations in Egypt and Brazil, we discussed the 'human-cosmic' relationship and the likely connection between global suffering and our increasingly strange climate. What global suffering? Well, if it isn't wars or economic austerity, it's cops out-of-control cops abusing - killing even - people.

Running Time: 02:13:00

Download: MP3

This NSA-whistleblower-government-spying scandal is hard for many to digest. On one level, I am an idealist too. I would like to believe that a lone whistleblower can pull a fast one on the NSA/CIA/Mossad axis. But I know that it cannot be. People find it hugely difficult to accept that the world is now so unrelentingly corrupt that the true extent of this corruption cannot be exposed and overturned by any whistleblowing.

Edward Snowden is either consciously playing his part in a deliberate intelligence psy-op to erect a smokescreen about what is really going on, or he has been unwittingly set up by his masters to do this. (The latter is the most likely). One cannot pull a fast one on these people. They know everything and can track everything, since decades ago, and only allow things to become public that they approve of.

They plainly wanted the world to know about PRISM and all that stuff. It works like a kind of bloodletting, to make the public think they still have some say in the running of this thing we call life on Earth, when the exact opposite is the case. They create the leak, sit back and watch the outrage, then some government committee is set up to investigate. Then that committee (which is stuffed full of stooges to make sure it doesn't have teeth) takes a year to carry out its task - after which time most people have forgotten what the fuss was all about. Then the committee finds that certain irregularities have taken place which will be sorted out with some token legislation.

Meanwhile, everything behind the scenes has carried on unhindered and, in fact, deepened. And very few notice or even care.

Anyone who has taken the time to investigate all this will see that what I am saying is true. This isn't "conspiracy theory". It's just the way it is. You see, the people who run the world run both sides of the show. They run the bad guys (which everybody knows) but they also run the good guys who oppose them (which comparatively few realise). They told us a hundred years ago that this is how they would be running things. And that's how they work it today.

For example, they own organisations like Amnesty International. That's why they never really stick their necks out for the real oppressions in the world, nor oppose the serial wars the USA engineers. To make out as if they champion literacy and women's rights (because that's trendy and acceptable to the masses) in a country which is being bombed back to the stone age (and yet say nothing whatsoever about that) is the ultimate smokescreen!

The recent reports concerning National Security Agency (NSA) collusion with the world's largest IT giants provide an insight into surveillance techniques the US government is using to spy on its citizens (and the rest of the world), with blatant disregard of human rights, privacy and legality.

As well as the Orwellian 'Big Brother' ramifications of Stasi cyber spying and digital tracking, the ongoing revelations from 'NSA whistleblower' Edward Snowden provide glimpses of the cooperation between government, the internet giants, private corporations, and private contractors profiteering from what might be termed the
'Surveillance Industrial Complex'.

Despite their denial of any knowledge of the PRISM program, or any wilful cooperation with the US government, the 'leaks' raise serious questions over the extent of complicity between the big internet firms and the NSA.

If the big tech firms were genuinely unaware of government monitoring then it exposes severe security flaws and poses the obvious question of whether they can be trusted to ensure users' data is safe. If, on the other hand, these firms were aware of PRISM, but have been forced to deny it for reasons of 'national security', it means individuals and international businesses are victims of total digital surveillance with minimal oversight.

We are told Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defence contractor that is involved in virtually every aspect of US government intelligence gathering and mass surveillance, and is majority-owned by the politically-affiliated Carlyle group. How is it that private contractors have access to the most sensitive data concerning 'US national security'? Just how much of the state's intelligence infrastructure is being built, operated and maintained by totally unaccountable private interests?

It's midsummer in the northern hemisphere, where record rainfall and the coldest spring in living memory have European meteorologists forecasting 'a year without summer' for most of Western Europe. While climatologists got their long-term forecasts for global warming all wrong, do these environmental extremes nevertheless signal 'climate change', just not in the way the authorities have portrayed it?

Extreme weather events are happening globally. One direct result of this is widespread crop failure. This leads to food shortages, followed by increased inflation as billions of people find themselves priced out of being able to eat. Riots and revolution are never far behind. In fact, complex systems theorists calculate that we're less than one year away from a fireball of global unrest. And that's not all...

The geological record shows that the default climate for this planet is a very cold one. Ice Ages last up to 100,000 years and are separated by 'inter-glacials', narrow windows of relative warmth that last, on average, 11,500 years. Our civilization is currently situated on the tail-end of the Holocene inter-glacial, meaning that it's just a matter of time before the next Ice Age.

How much time? Nobody knows. But in this week's show we're also going to examine the evidence for a synchronistic relationship between climate stress and the rise and fall of human civilizations within a more recent historical timeframe. Is it possible that humanity does play a role in modulating 'climate change', but perhaps not in the way environmentalists are suggesting?

Running Time: 02:19:00

Download: MP3

prism (przm) n.

1. A solid figure whose bases or ends have the same size and shape and are parallel to one another, and each of whose sides is a parallelogram.
2. A transparent body of this form, often of glass and usually with triangular ends, used for separating white light passed through it into a spectrum or for reflecting beams of light.
3. A cut-glass object, such as a pendant of a chandelier.
4. A crystal form consisting of three or more similar faces parallel to a single axis.
5. A medium that misrepresents whatever is seen through it.

[Alternatively...]

prism noun ˈpri-zəm

[...]

4. a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it

The ongoing 'NSA surveillance scandal' has many parallels, and some direct links, with the disclosures made by WikiLeaks, the organisation its leader Julian Assange described as the "the intelligence agency of the people".

While we took satisfaction in seeing government and corporate crimes come back to haunt their perpetrators, SOTT.net remained cautious about lauding Assange or the WikiLeaks organisation as heroic. What did any of the 'Iraq War Logs' or U.S. State Department 'diplomatic cables' reveal that was not already publicly available information? Obviously some details were new, but they didn't change the fact that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was illegal under international law and that everyone involved had either committed or were ancillary to war crimes. Nor did anything so damaging come out to bring the perpetrators to justice or to catalyse real political change that would actually improve ordinary people's welfare.

Things, as you may have noticed in recent years, have only gotten worse for the masses.

So is Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower currently 'on the run' after disclosing 'top secret documents' to major media outlets, a hero or traitor? Is he neither? We discussed this and more in last Sunday's SOTT Talk Radio show on the NSA leaks. Have a listen:

So apparently NSA has been listening to our conversations, and - oy vey! - Israeli companies are involved in this too. Am I surprised? Not one bit. I understand that many, who are still dangerously ignorant and believe that governments have our best interests at heart, find this "revelation" rather shocking and outrageous, but the truth is that this is far from being new. I remember how many years ago I first read about a project called Echelon.

ECHELON, according to information in the European Parliament document, "On the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)" was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s[...]

Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.[...]

The UK/USA intelligence community was assessed by the European Parliament (EP) in 2000 to include the signals intelligence agencies of each of the member states: UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands.[...]

Echelon was created long before the War [of] Terror and prior to the arrival of the Internet, meaning that back then there was no need for thorough "shaping of the public opinion", no need for media to be an overt whore for the military or intelligence agencies. NSA, CIA, Mossad, MI5, etc. just did their bloody thing and didn't worry much about whistleblowers. Of course, there were always trouble-makers, but everything was manageable (various coup d'états, COINTELPRO projects, assassinations, etc... piece of cake!), not to mention using the wonderfully silver-tongued concept of "plausible deniability", which came in handy, oh so often. In any event, in the public's eyes, intelligence agencies still had an aura of mystique about them. Hey, who wouldn't want to be a secret agent or a spy?