I was pretty young when I first learned that science could make mistakes; I grew up next door to a child whose mother took Thalidomide during pregnancy. When I was 14, our family doctor prescribed "diet pills" for me: methamphetamines. They nearly destroyed my health forever. In later years, I learned from the news-magazine show, 20/20, that the recommended treatment my grandfather had received for high blood pressure, provided by the Veteran's Administration, was actually what killed him. These are just a few highlights of a lifetime of experiences with doctors and other medical professionals who actually got things wrong about 75% of the time, and the remaining 25% that they got right was non-critical. In all critical situations, had I listened to my doctor's advice for myself or my children, there would have been serious negative consequences.
Oh well, once more with feeling...
IPCC: No Evidence Mark Duggan Shot At PCs
An IPCC ballistics report said there was "no evidence" that a handgun found near where Mark Duggan was shot by armed officers had been used.
The 29-year-old died after a gunshot to the chest on Thursday. The death sparked the first night of rioting in London in Tottenham.
Mr Duggan had been a passenger in a silver Toyota Estima minicab in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale Tube station, which was believed to have been stopped by police.
His death came after two shots were fired by a Scotland Yard CO19 firearms officer, investigations show.
The initial results confirmed reports that a bullet found lodged in a police radio at the scene was police issue.
As part of this training during the last 30 years of the 20th century, British soldiers and the sectarian Northern Ireland police force (the RUC) fired thousands of 'rubber bullets' or 'baton rounds' (as they were later called) at unsuspecting members of the Irish community. At least 18 people were killed by these 'non-lethal' rounds, including 8 children, and hundreds more were left paralyzed, brain damaged and blind.
The first 'baton rounds' were made of teak wood and used in the crown colony of Hong Kong during periods of intense labor strikes and anti-British protests in the 1960′s. These wooden rounds were deemed "too dangerous" for use in Northern Ireland, so hard rubber was used instead, with no less lethality however. A case in point: Emma Groves, an Irish Catholic, was sitting in her home one evening when British soldiers were conducting raids in the area. Emma was apparently playing the song 'Four Green Fields' loudly on her record player when a British soldier fired a rubber bullet through the window from about 10 feet away striking Emma in the face. She was blinded.
Although official regulations stated that rubber bullets should be fired from no less than 20 meters and at the ground in front of the target in order to minimise damage and target the lower body, in practice they were often fired at close range at the upper body, including the head. Between 1970 and 1974, 55,000 of these were fired on the streets of Northern Ireland, virtually all of them at members of the Irish community and with little or no cause. The first fatality was an 11-year-old boy, shot from 5-6 metres. In what would become common practice among soldiers and police, a witness said a large 'D'-style battery had been used instead of the rubber bullet to increase its weight and impact.
As the stock markets around the globe plummet due to the downgrading of US credit rating, president Obama steps up to the podium today in a special address to the nation. I thought I'd listen in...
The president begins with an explanation that even though the US credit rating was downgraded from AAA, it is not so much that the agency doubts our ability to pay our debt, but, rather, they doubt our political system's ability to act. The markets think our credit rating is AAA. Warren Buffet, a man who knows something about the market, would give the US a AAAA rating if possible, or so the president says.
In other words, pay no attention to the reality of our current credit rating - pay attention to the IDEA of our credit rating. As an insider in the Bush White House said not so many years ago, "we're an empire now, so we create our own reality" and the reality the president wants you to believe in is that our credit rating is not what it actually is. He repeats that we are a AAA country.
Running Time: 01:14:25
Download: MP3
In response to the media's leading questions about this being 'Norway's 9/11', the Associated Press quoted a Norwegian police official as saying that the terror attack was more like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing than the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. It's a curious comparison to make because, as Stephen Lendman explained in an interview he gave to Press TV, the Oklahoma bombing was blamed on a right-wing extremist and his huge car bomb, but the explosives evidence later pointed to something else entirely:
There have been numerous mass shootings in recent years, but the massacre on Utoya island is the worst yet. The camp on this tiny island, which lies just 700 meters from the shore, was organised by the AUF, the youth wing of the ruling Labour Party. In fact, the island was owned by this organisation; it has held regular summer camps there for decades and is well known to Norwegians. Most of the attendees were 14 to 19 year olds with an interest in politics attending seminars, partying, taking part in debates, playing music and listening to speeches on everything from local issues to international politics. In attacking the government's headquarters in downtown Oslo and then the gathering place of the country's political future, those responsible have managed to pierce the beating heart of Norwegian society.
You name the weather or geological type of phenomenon; someone in the world had it: volcanoes, earthquakes, torrential rain, floods, sinkholes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires ... even summertime snow! Let's review them all as best as we can, starting from the top: the cosmic factor.
Cosmic Changes Are Under Way
Changes on planet Earth comprise such a wide variety of phenomena, from extreme weather anomalies to volcanoes and earthquakes, so perhaps it's a good idea to zoom back and see if we can make sense of any changes in the cosmic climate that may be affecting us. Yes, we are aware that this approach goes against the sanctioned narrative claiming that these changes are caused by carbon-burning human beings living in an isolated bubble that can only grow warmer. But the pieces of the puzzle on the table point to a different, larger picture.
A huge central piece is our sun, which is not surprising, since this ongoing explosion in space is what brings order to our corner of the universe and to life to Earth. For the last couple of years the sun was expected to go into high activity in accordance with its usual 11-year sunspot cycle. But scientists were left scratching their heads as our local star remained quiet. Now it's giving off such a display of flares that it has NASA scientists going 'ooh and ahh'.
It seems there is a veritable fever going around at the moment, all centered on Comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and the possible connection it may have to Nibiru - or Planet-X as it's known in some circles. This is the supposed "12th planet" that's been prophesied to come plowing through the Solar System causing a doomsday scenario for us earth-dwellers. Right now, YouTube is awash with videos on Comet Elenin, making this and that claim. Last I checked, a search for "Comet Elenin" returned over 5,000 results on YouTube alone (and that says nothing about what's going on in the blogosphere).
As we've noted here on SOTT over the years, when the noise starts to overpower the signal, that's when there's usually something brewing behind the scenes. The Powers That Be don't just put resources into obscuring certain topics for nothing; and it seems that their disinfo machine is cranked into high gear for this one. Due to all this noise surrounding these topics many questions abound: Is there something special about Comet Elenin? Does Elenin have anything to do with Nibiru/Planet-X? Is Elenin related to the chaotic weather we've experienced lately? Is Comet Elenin really a spaceship from another galaxy? Is all of this somehow related to the end of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 doomsday prophecies? These questions are understandable given all the lies we're swimming in and the frantic nature of the material we're dealing with. Hopefully a lot of these questions will clear up towards the end of this article.
To summarize the situation, it seems that we have certain folks claiming that Comet Elenin is everything from an elaborate hoax, to a piloted alien spacecraft, to a stray neutron star, to Planet-X itself, and on and on... All the while, NASA and friends seem to be sitting back comfortably in their chairs saying, "nothing to see here, folks!" So who's figured it out? Or hasn't anyone really put all the pieces together yet? Clearly, there's a lot of truth being mixed with lies - that is for certain. The hope here is to dissect some of the noise and inject a little sanity into what is otherwise an insane discussion.
Are these just unseasonal conditions, an immediate knock-on effect from the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland perhaps? Or are we on the brink of entering an ice age as SOTT has been predicting for a number of years? Was the sudden flip this week - "as though a switch had been thrown" - a taster of the Ice Age to come? Is this 'mini Winter rebound' pointing out how suddenly glacial rebound can develop? When will we approach the tipping point as more volcanoes erupt and magma comes up from the ocean floor? Laura Knight-Jadczyk explains the mechanism that can precipitate sudden climate change towards an Ice Age:
That's the hard science. There's going to be the day. It's already happening. The magnetic field is degenerating. That means magma is going to start welling up under the oceans. It's already happening because it's heating the oceans up.
When the oceans start heating up, that means more evaporation. When that happens at the same time that the planet is being clouded by volcanic eruptions, which is cooling the atmosphere, you have precipitation that comes down as snow.
The geological record shows that the onset of every ice-age was so sudden as to be unbelievable. In other words, next winter could be the winter when a lot of undersea volcanoes begin to erupt and dump magma into the oceans. A lot of evaporation takes place.
If it happens in the winter time that means that snow can fall in amounts that are beyond your wildest imagining. It's happened! It's geologically a fact. It's happened repeatedly. Can you imagine 9 stories of snow in a single day?
Comment: A reference to 'police anti-terrorism exercises' occurring 48 hours before the attacks was originally included in this article. It has since come to our attention that these exercises took place in 2010. As a result, the reference has been removed.