I'm seeing a lot of hoopla about 'voting', which is not surprising given that today is 'Voting Day'. But there are a few things about voting we should all acknowledge before we head off to the ballot box, or rather, the unaccountable electronic voting machine.

1.) Voting doesn't make a difference in state policy. A few prime examples of this are: the Wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan; Invasion of Privacy (having our phone calls, emails, websites, forum posts, naked bodies scanned, recorded, and filed by alphabet agencies); universal support of the terrorist state of Israel - even after it kills American citizens, deliberately; Poor Food/Medicine Quality Control Standards; Bank Bailouts... etc.

2.) Voting can, and often is rigged. Take a few minutes and research these newfangled voting boxes... hackers have been able to alter the outcome of elections with a usb jump drive without violating the machines internal controls. Diebold is likely responsible for GWB getting reelected in 2004. Thinking that it doesn't happen locally is naive and ignorant.

3.) We live in neither a democracy nor a republic, and therefore your vote doesn't make a difference. While on paper, we're supposed to elect representatives to represent us, more often than not they represent themselves and uber-rich folks who donate large sums of money to their campaigns. There's also the strangle-hold AIPAC has on all branches of congress, insuring that Pro-Israeli sentiment is the status quo. How can we justify believing that we're a sovereign nation when another government from another country influences our state policy without our consent?

4.) Elections are bought. It's simple math really, when one guy can outspend another he can easily acquire more name recognition, he can also tar the other guy. More money = More ads, more staff, more TV time. Obama was outspending McCain 3:1 when it came to TV ads in the last few weeks of the 2008 Election.

My conservative and Republican acquaintances believe that the "liberal media" is destroying America. When I ask them to identify the liberal media, the usual reply is, "all of it!" I ask them about Fox "News," CNN, and point out that the TV networks are no longer independent but parts of large corporate conglomerates and that all of the "liberal" news anchors have been fired or died off.

At that point my acquaintances fall back on the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I remind them that the invasion of Iraq would not have been possible without the New York Times leading the way. Judith Miller filled that newspaper with the neoconservative/Bush regime propaganda that was orchestrated to make the public accept US aggression toward Iraq. The Times later sort of apologized and Miller departed the paper.

That left the Washington Post, apparently long a CIA asset, as the "liberal media" that is destroying America, until on October 31 the paper's long-time pundit, David Broder, wrote that Obama should spend the next two years disarming the Republicans and renewing the economy by orchestrating a showdown with Iran. Going to war with Iran, "the greatest threat to the world," would simultaneously unite Republicans with Obama and restore the economy. By following Broder's prescription, Obama "will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history."

Yawn. Here we go again. Two days ago, senior figures in the British airline industry, including the Chairman of British airways, said that Britain should stop "kowtowing" to excessive US security demands that were "completely redundant". Then today, in a crass and very obvious attempt to refute the BA Chairman's statements and reaffirm the fake reality of a 'terror threat', two 'suspect packages' are found on planes in the East Midlands and Dubai, both planes originated in Yemen and were destined for the US, specifically, Jewish synagogues in Chicago, or so we are told.

Initial reports stated that the package found in the East Midlands, a toner cartridge, had tested negative for explosives. Apparently that was the wrong conclusion for bomb disposal experts in the UK to arrive at however, because Obama later declared that the printer cartridge(s) constituted a "credible terrorist threat to our country" and that "initial examination of those packages has determined that they do apparently contain explosive material."

As with most other such terror alerts, evidence is simply made up as they go along in the interest of political gain:

Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain.

The main goal appears to have been achieved though because, "the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Americans could expect yet more security in and around air travel". That's the point, the reason, the motivation. Everything else is charade.

The fact that one of the packages was found in Dubai is not surprising, given that Dubai is essentially the playground of the Mossad and the CIA and has been ever since the CIA checked up on their spokesman Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital just before he didn't carry out the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

But the true litmus test of just how obviously false these terror alerts are is when you hear dyed-in-the-wool mainstream media pundits questioning the timing and likely motivation:

Hello kiddies! Today we're going to explore the toxins and various poisons we can enjoy consuming from our local grocery store, pharmacy and dentist's office! We're going to touch on an occasional day in average Joe American's life.

So you, Joe American, have an appointment with the dentist today, better Wake Up! and get out of bed, don't want to be late. You're missing a few hours work (unpaid) and need to get moving.. so it's off to shower and shave!

"Fight Cavities with C-R-E-S-T"

The joy of fresh breath, promises of whiter, stronger teeth and the lies that go with it. May, 2001 Congress expands its probe into the health effects of fluoride that's added to 62% of U.S. public water sources. Turns out we're mass-medicating ourselves and our kids with doses of toxic chemicals which were never meant to be ingested through our public water supply.

Publicly purchased bottled water, the stuff that claims to be pure, natural or fresh from the spring is more often than not fluoridated. And what are some of the direct effects?

Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism's advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter's discredited finding of several years ago that jobs off-shoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US.

At the time I exposed Slaughter's mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter's kool-aid than to tell the truth. Recently the US Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter's false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter's claim on its op-ed page on October 12.

I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.

Plane Madness

If you thought the volcanic eruption in Iceland was awesome, wait till you see what Mother Nature has in store for us. Increased seismic activity around volcanoes suggests we can look forward to more spectacular eruptions in the months ahead. Mount Redoubt in Alaska is stirring from its slumber while Mount Etna in Italy threatens to enter a new eruptive period. Preparations are being made to evacuate 3,000 people from the Gaua Volcano on the Pacific island of Vanuatu as renewed activity suggests a large eruption is imminent. The Ischia Volcano off the coast of Naples in Italy has some observers worried, although as SOTT.net pointed out in its Connecting the Dots installment for March, it's the 13 major underwater volcanoes off Italy's southern coast that are scientists' primary concern. Somebody had better contact air traffic controllers in central America and explain to them the intricacies of ash particles and jet propulsion. When an eruption at Guatemala's Santiaguito Volcano sent a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the atmosphere and dusted a large swathe of western Guatemala late April, regional airspace remained open for business. Either politicians there care nothing for airlines' safety or they know something the "experts" in Europe do not.

Does anyone believe it anymore? I really wish I had access to a reliable census on what the majority of people in this world believe about the purported 'Islamic terror threat', 9/11 etc. etc. Over the past 10 years several US 9/11 polls have been published. Depending on which of the shockingly few mainstream media corporations you prefer, somewhere between 36% and 62% of the US public believe that the US government is, at the very least, not telling the truth about the 9/11 attacks. If true, (and we have every reason to believe that the media corps down-play the figures) what does that mean for public perception of the 'Islamic terror threat' on which the 9/11 attacks are based?

If a majority of human beings can, at this stage, see through most of the increasingly crass US, British, French and Israeli government and assorted 'Intelligence' agency hyperbole and propaganda, can we expect them to just drop the whole charade any time soon? Sadly, recent media reports suggest otherwise and point to a deepening of the global psychological operation to which we have all been subjected these past 10 years.

Does anyone remember the "cakewalk war" that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?

Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?

Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?

Are Americans aware that the same neoconservatives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?

Readers may have noticed the recent spike in references to UFO, extraterrestrial and exopolitical topics across the mainstream media. The rumour mill has been put into overdrive as fake 'events' whip up hysteria through newspaper articles and TV programs. Are the Powers That Be preparing people for 'disclosure'? Watch this BBC advertisement for a very thinly disguised message from our "space brothers":

Sandra Brown, author of Women Who Love Psychopaths, and Harrison Koehli, SOTT editor, discuss psychopaths, empathy, domestic violence, and other topics.