SOTT Focus:


Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: War On the Obese aka Blaming the Victim

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The topic of obesity is popular in mainstream media. We are constantly warned of the dangers of being overweight, and while many groups have been targeted for 'health advice' in the past, it seems those labeled as obese bear the brunt. While having more weight than one is physically comfortable with can be unhealthy, the fact that our governments and media have chosen to take a parental role by constantly telling us what we should and shouldn't look like, should give us pause. To add insult to injury, people are made to feel bad or guilty for not fitting into a restrictive and arbitrary body size. It can actually discourage people who are trying to effect change when they feel demonized. The way information is presented can sometimes be an impediment to those genuinely seeking assistance.

Take, for instance, the word 'diet'. It's one of the most hated words. There are several meanings, but the most popular seems to be understood as 'an habitual way of eating'. Viewing it this way can, and has, led to thoughts of having to restrict what we eat, but the word's original definition, according to the Oxford dictionary, means 'way of life'. If we view it as a lifestyle, perhaps it won't feel as oppressive.

The word 'obesity' is a good example of how language can change abruptly. Don't think this can happen? Back in 1998, with the adoption of the Body Mass Index (BMI), it did. The National Institute of Heath (NIH), the primary governmental health related and biomedical research agency, made changes to the definition of this word that affected 25 million Americans who, under the old guidelines were considered of average weight, but who suddenly became obese. What's interesting is that just prior to that change:
The American Heart Association recently added obesity to its list of major risk factors for heart disease and heart attack, along with smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a sedentary lifestyle.
From that moment on, not only was a percentage of the population suddenly classified as obese, but they were now considered at risk from other diseases. Was all of this just the result of good intentions gone awry?

Comment: Food Cravings, Obesity and Gluten Consumption

The Hidden Link Between Gluten Intolerance and PMS, Infertility and Miscarriage

Dairy: 6 Reasons You Should Avoid It at All Costs or Why Following the USDA Food Pyramid Guidelines is Bad for Your Health

Addicted to Sugar?

Corn Gluten Damages Celiac Patients

High-Fructose Corn Syrup is Evil: 7 Key Findings

The Dangers of Soy Are Real - and Much Worse Than You Might Think

Brain Scans Show How Meditation Calms Pain


2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: Dark Ages and Inquisitions, Ancient and Modern - Or Why Things are Such a Mess On Our Planet and Humanity is on the Verge of Extinction

Psychopaths rule our world
© Sott
This is going to be a long one so get a cup of tea or coffee and settle down. Those of you who like your information in short bytes, this article is not for you!

I've been reading a lot lately. I mean a LOT. Well, so what else is new? Anyway, the range of topics I've been covering are varied; I tend to follow my nose. I often will read one book that suggests another book, and off I go, but lately, it's been very eclectic and seemingly unconnected. Let me give you a sample going back just a couple of weeks: I picked up You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney because I read a snip of it on my husband's kindle reader. I don't do kindle because I underline and make notes, so I bought my own copy. That led to Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson which then led to another of his books: Strangers To Ourselves. That then led to Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality by Samuel Barondes. Some books I had ordered some time ago then arrived: Amarna Sunset by Aidan Dodson; Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves; Akhenaten & Tutankhamun: Revolution & Restoration by Silverman, Wegner and Wegner; Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt by Dominic Montserrat. Then came The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Next: Dark Ages: The Case For a Science of Human Behavior by Lee McIntyre, followed by The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness by B. Alan Wallace. Here and there I've been reading snatches of Bertrand Russell. (I also read three mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, but that was just fun reading.) And now I'm reading War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley alternating with Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? By Dennis R. MacDonald.

As I said, this all may seem unconnected, even to me, but the strange thing is that all of the above books circle around a particular theme: Science/academia - has really lost the plot, and the thing that was proclaimed to be the answer to all of humanity's problems has turned into the probable means of our destruction. This is no small matter, I can assure you, and deserves some consideration. In the book Dark Ages: The Case For a Science of Human Behavior, we read:
What would it feel like to live in a Dark Age? Would you realize it? Or would you just see the achievements of the day - perhaps even feeling lucky to live in such "modern times" and fail to see all that had not been achieved. Of course, no one living in a Dark Age would call it that; rather this label is placed on a backward era only by a later one, in which the state of human civilization is more advanced. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to see what has been missed. But isn't there nonetheless some way to judge one's own era?

Look around you. We live in a time of enormous technological achievement, when we are able to bend nature to our will, and yet we suffer from the same social problems that have plagued the human race for millennia. Despite the enormous progress that we have made in our understanding of nature, who can honestly say that the bulk of the problems that are the cause of human misery today are not of our own creation? And yet what have we done about them?

The comparison between our success in understanding nature and our failure to understand ourselves is vast. We have satellites and fax machines that transmit stories of barbarous cruelty that could have been told by our ancestors. We have ever more sophisticated weaponry of war and yet no true understanding of what causes war in the first place. ...We are as ignorant of the cause-and-effect relations behind our own behavior as those who lived in the eighth or ninth centuries ... [we're ignorant of the causes] behind disease, famine, eclipses, and natural disasters. We live today in what will someday come to be thought of as the Dark Ages of human thought about social problems. (McIntyre, MIT, 2006)

Comment: See also: The Inquisition


2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: Lieberman's Bill to Kick Off Internment Camps

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For those readers who are part of the 40% of human beings who think Ignorance is Bliss, stop reading now. This article is about a truth so hard that it was actually depressing to write it. You might think that working on SOTT for many years, most of us are pretty tough and can deal with the hard stuff. But sometimes, you see something that rings a bell, and you know that you've had a glimpse behind the curtain, because somebody went before and left a map to show you the way. In this case, that person was Hannah Arendt.

The modern world can't be an easy place to live in for those who are born genetically predisposed to crave absolute power over others. I mean, these days, any would-be totalitarian has only a very small chance of being born into one of the world's few remaining overt dictatorships, and a much greater chance of being born into a large Western nation that is nominally democratic. While fulfillment of the megalomaniac's innate drive is a walk in the park in a dictatorship, it requires all sorts of protracted subterfuge in a democracy. Bummer.

The main problem with giving free reign to one's dictatorial leanings in a democracy is the whole 'citizen's rights' and 'Rights of Man' thing. How is any self-aggrandizing despot to lord it over the masses, and watch them squirm and suffer and beg, when everyone seems convinced that there are not only democratic and legal rights but also natural 'inalienable' rights that come with just being a human being? Ideas that everyone is 'created equal' and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness etc. can cause a lot of problems for the average authoritarian. Naturally then, in any democracy, all those rights would have to be removed before any oligarchy could transform citizens into subjects, and they'd have to be removed under the cloak of 'protecting' the very rights that were slated for extinction. A tall order indeed, but there are ways to do it. One tried and tested way is to create a foreign or external threat from which the people of a democracy must be protected. All sorts of draconian laws that subvert civil rights can be passed to combat this 'threat', and if the 'threat' can then be made internal or domestic, and suspicion of 'siding with enemy' cast over the citizens, you're well on your way to banishing those pesky legal and natural rights.

Nuke

SOTT Focus: Fukushima For All of Us: Deception, Monopoly Profit, Weapons & Death

nuclear towers
© n/a
At 2:46 pm on a Friday afternoon in March last year, residents in the prefecture of Fukushima in Japan were jolted by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake centered off the Pacific coast at a depth of approx 15 miles. Almost immediately, three of the six reactors which were in operation at that moment in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - located on the eastern shore of Honshu Island - automatically shut down as a result of the shaking.

The plant automatically switched to its backup diesel-fueled generators to supply the uninterrupted electric power required to keep the plant's reactors cooled. Approximately one hour later, a 46 foot tall tsunami wave swept over the seawall between the Fukushima plant and the Pacific Ocean, flooding and disabling the backup generators and washing away their fuel tanks. The seawall had been designed to withstand a 19 foot wave and was considered sufficient to protect the plant from the worst possible tsunami that could ever happen.

We know now that within days, fuel rods in three of the reactors melted and breached the reactor containment structures designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment, though nothing of the sort was revealed at the time. We are still not certain how much airborne radioactive contamination escaped.

There were violent explosions and multiple fires at the plant which some observers now indicate were far more serious than how they were initially portrayed. There were, and continue to be, unspecified large releases of extremely contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, but no data on what the results of that might be. It took several months for TEPCO, the Japanese utility company running the plant, to publicly admit the severity of the accident. There have been repeated 'explanations' that downplayed, understated or outright ignored the risks to the public and hid the reality of what was actually happening at any given time.

Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: 2012 - On The Eve Of Destruction?

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Happy 2012?
Here we are, New Year's Eve 2011, and a whole lot of folks on this planet believe that the World is going to End - one way or another (again) - sometime in December of the coming year: 2012. All I can think is "Geezus! Here we go again!"

Back in 1996 and 1997, there was the Hale-Bopp Flopp that resulted in the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate Cult. I was out there at the time desperately trying to convince people that most of what was flying around the internet was a load of Horse Hockey, and all I got for my trouble was flamed and defamed. But I was right.

Then, there was the Millennial Madness that was gaining steam in 1999. By this time, we had a website and I wasn't just doing battle on discussion lists, so I published an article in November of that year trying to calm things down a bit. Things were so weird then that even my cousin, who was (at that moment) an aerospace engineer employed by NASA, told me in full confidence that things WOULD get squirrely because there was a flaw in computer dating systems and the global computer systems would glitch up in unpredictable ways, causing chaos. Not even that happened! Anyway, the take-home message of my article at that time was pretty clear:

Bulb

SOTT Focus: Laura Knight-Jadczyk & Arkadiusz Jadczyk - Q&A Session - Barcelona Conference Oct. 2011

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Over the course of 90 minutes, Laura and Ark answer questions from the audience at their day-long, World Trade Center, Barcelona conference, October 15th 2011. As always, many fascinating topics were covered and vital information conveyed.


Happy Holidays To All.

Family

SOTT Focus: The Cs Hit List 04: Nature, Nurture, and My Monkey Genes

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The reader should probably be getting the idea by now: the approach SOTT.net takes to the Cassiopaean Experiment really is a case of 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. One question asked, or one answer given, is often enough to inspire a whole line of research leading to data and conclusions that might only be tangentially related to the original question. That's the whole point: discovery, and in that sense, the data in the Cs transmissions is more like the thread of Ariadne than a book of 'Divine Revelation'. The clues given lead those interested to take up the search through a vast labyrinth of information and 'disinformation' to what I like to think of as the heart of the matter: those areas of study that are not only highly relevant to coming to an understanding of the human condition and the nature of the cosmos, but which are also closely interrelated and always seemingly one step beyond what is currently accepted as 'common knowledge'. In other words, one mystery reveals another, then another. It's a never-ending journey of discovery, which is what I think lies at the heart of science and mysticism. Anything else, like the belief that 'we finally know all there is to know on this subject', only leads to intellectual stagnation and the death of curiosity. As we like to say around here, there's no such thing as free lunch... nor infallible texts.

For those curious to know, the research inspired by the Cs experiment has led the SOTT team to many of the topics that we focus on. Without them, and the life experiences that we surely wouldn't have had if not engaged in this project, we probably never would have learned what we have about the history and danger of cometary catastrophe, the electrical nature of the universe, psychopathy, ponerology, polyvagal theory, and separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the vast number of 'conspiracy theories' on the market. Or at least, it would have taken us a lot longer. After all, all of these fields have their respective authorities and advocates, those scientific mavericks who have come to the conclusion all was not right in their particular field of study, whether in history, politics, psychology, ufology, astrophysics, meteorology, or any other science. But this is usually done on their own, disconnected from the bigger picture and how to tie it all together. Often a lifetime of research will go into this process, with the downside that other possible areas of research are left untouched. (Witness researchers into the paranormal who deride 'conspiracy theories', or '9/11 conspiracy theorists' who deride ufologists.) But we try to bring as many of them as possible together, to give as comprehensive as possible a view of reality as we can. One of these areas, the one I'll deal with below, has to do with genetics, and the possibilities inherent in that mysterious building block of life: DNA.

Christmas Tree

SOTT Focus: Christmas DisGraced

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© Calamitiesofnature.com
This year, as I bear witness to the quickening changes in our world, I find that I also can't ignore the various reminders of the holiday season. I face an interesting conundrum as I attempt to walk the line of allowing those around me the free will to celebrate carelessly as if all is well while knowing it is not.

This situation gave rise to thoughts of Christmas traditions as we know them today and how they began. What's the story behind the Christmas tree? Going a step further than Virginia O'Hanlon, I wondered if Santa was really an actual person. In short, why is Christmas - Christmas? Perhaps with some digging, we can get a bit closer to the truth.

USA

SOTT Focus: This is Where the American Illusion Comes to an End - 2012 The End of the World As We Know It

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.... There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." -- William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice from 1939--1975
US flag at Guantanamo
© Brennan Linsley/Pool/ReutersA US flag waves within the razor wire-lined compound of Camp Delta prison at Guantánamo Bay in 2006
Ever since the US Senate approved the infamous FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act I have been in a very pessimistic mood. A few days ago there was hope that Obama would veto it - not because the man and his lawyers had concerns about the beating that civil and human rights would take thereby, but because the language would "challenge or constrain the president's ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists, and protect the American people"; in other words, because the authority of the president could somehow be limited (God forbid). Now that slim hope is gone; Obama has withdrawn the threat of veto and nothing stands in the way of an iron boot kicking any of us, American or not, all the way to Guantanamo Bay.

Could it be any worse than that? The situation was bad already with Bush and his gang of neocons pushing the envelope on shredding the U.S. Constitution. Remember how naive we were to entertain the idea that a change of administration would put all that draconian nonsense to an end? That Barack Obama really was about "Change" and would put things to right that had gone so wrong under the Bush Administration? Some people still hold on to that hope because they genuinely believe that the United States is an essentially democratic country which works on solid principles of morality and justice, even if now and then it gets sidetracked. Surely good-looking, well-spoken Barack would make things right, yes?

As someone who was born and raised south of the border, I always found the myopic belief of the American people in their institutions and government quite alien to my own experience. In my country people also believe in democracy and justice, but only as principles that hopefully can be materialized one day. The overwhelming majority is naturally distrustful of their government, thanks to its long history of corruption and the social inequalities that come with it. Likewise, they are distrustful of the US government which so much likes to get involved in the affairs of other countries. In contrast, the American culture that reached me through the mass media portrayed people quite proud of their government and the military. (The military! Where I come from the military is only thought of in the most derogatory terms when, at 17-18 years old, you are trying your best to avoid military service, and you would certainly be considered to be out of your mind or in desperate need if you chose a military career.)

When I was younger this American pride produced in me a mixture of admiration and jealousy. Later, as I got better acquainted with politics and American intervention, I regarded this attitude with puzzlement and contempt. In recent years I have felt mostly sorry for the ignorance most US citizens are forced to live in, and admiration for those precious few who can see the true nature of their authorities and have the courage to speak up, and who have taught me so much. I have also tried to understand that many Americans, having enjoyed excellent living-standards for generations, never got bitten by the consequences of the corruption, greed and imperialism of their leaders.

Until now, that is.

Cow

SOTT Focus: Monsanto: Poison the World, Let Them Know it's Christmas Time

Monsanto Poison
© SOTT.net
There's a world outside your window
And it's a world of dreaded fear
Where the only water flowing is a bitter sting of tears
And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom


"Do They Know It's Christmas Time" by Band Aid
After a recent Christmas carol service, I got chatting to a local farmer who dropped into conversation something that not only alarmed me in regards to the corruption in the commercial food industry, but also just how vulnerable we are to the profiteering of the 'food' producing multinationals:

When you buy a roasting beef joint from one of the major chains in the UK, were you aware that the beefy part is sourced locally but the fat around it - essential for cooking the roast - is flown all the way over from Brazil, cut up and slapped around it before sale?

The reason for this, I'm told by the farmer who has full knowledge of these absurd practices, is that the large supermarket chains squeeze local farmers by insisting that the fat content of the procured meat must be below a certain level. In doing so they greatly reduce the price at which meat is purchased for the supermarket shelves. It would stand to reason that the pressure would also encourage the use of hormones/feeds/varieties that produce lower fat carcasses. If I understood correctly, the consumer ends up paying a similar price for the beef that's been transported locally and the fat that's been shipped halfway around the world.

Now, I don't know, how it can be cheaper for the supermarkets to import the fat from Brazil, perhaps it is a by-product from some food-processing monolith. This isn't uncommon, as we know, in the globalized planet in which we now live. For their Christmas dinner, undiscerning consumers will enjoy turkey from Brazil and dog salmon from China. However, what really concerns me is just how little we are told about where our food comes from and what's in it. We are unwittingly part of the world's largest experiment and in this example we don't know whether the Brazilian fat comes from cows fed on GMO's or not. The likes of Monsanto are using their vast wealth and lobbying power to obfuscate important information that rids us of the freedom to make choices that could save our lives.