So a 'lone wolf' 'home-grown terrorist' has been apprehended, in the nick of time, by the FBI and NYC cops. Or so the story goes. The problem is, we've heard this one before, many times. Jose Pimentel, like so many others alleged 'jihadis' before him, is undoubtedly the victim of yet another FBI sting operation rather than a dangerous terrorist. FBI sting operation? "What's that?" I hear you ask. Well, in case you've fallen victim to the 10-year-long 'war on terror' government and media mind-job, allow me to explain, or rather, allow me to point you to some fairly reliable sources.

You've heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, Berlin, Tel Aviv and elsewhere around the world. But did you know that huge demonstrations have been taking place in Tokyo as well? We certainly didn't until a SOTT forum member sent us the details. The general lack of awareness of the protests in Japan is probably due to the fact that there has been zero coverage of 'Occupy Tokyo' - which has grown out of the country's large (and growing) grassroots anti-nuclear movement - in Japan's mainstream media.

Several large demonstrations have taken place all over Japan in recent months, especially in Tokyo. The general mood is the same as elsewhere: ordinary people in Japan are fed up with their leaders' lies, particularly the lies told by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and how the government has handled the Fukushima disaster. Or rather, how it has avoided handling it. This should all be eerily familiar to Americans of course; BP's lies and the US government's enabling role from the moment the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010 has continued to this day, with the tragedy continuing to unfold in deathly silence. What is happening in Japan is almost a carbon copy; denial, smear campaigns, heavy-handed tactics and, of course, total media blackout. Up to one million people may have died as a result of Chernobyl, although we'll never really know the true death toll. Fukushima is many orders of magnitude worse...

We started this series with a pretty 'out-there' topic: prophecy. But the Cassiopaean Experiment, while pretty 'out-there' to begin with (at least from the mainstream perspective), also deals with more 'down-to-earth' subject matter. Issues relating to more conventionally understood and practiced science (albeit with often unconventional interpretations) make up a large portion of the received data.

It's been my experience that people tend to forget that scientists are 'human' too, or more precisely, scientists can be just as willfully blind, self-serving, conformist, fearful and mendacious as anyone else. Some of them are even unabashed con men who falsify their data, or intellectual prostitutes who will produce the results they are paid to, whether they believe them or not. Just because it's been peer-reviewed, or written by a person with a string of letters after their name, doesn't mean it's true, or even remotely so. And if history tells us anything, it's that the history of science is a long history of wrong or incomplete ideas. So it's best to be skeptical whenever scientists speak in terms of absolutes with certainty, whenever they put the lid on testing alternate hypotheses. Chances are, they're simply deceiving themselves, and you.

Science is a work in progress. The theories that are taken for granted as being true may very well turn out to be completely bogus following the intervention of new discoveries and innovations. Sadly, space and weather science are two areas where innovation not only rarely occurs, it is actively hindered by scientists and politicians with vested interests in keeping old, inadequate theories at the forefront of popular and academic belief systems. Like many of the examples that will follow in subsequent installments of this series, the ones below are just a sample of ideas that at first glance may look just plain wrong. But new discoveries have been proving many outdated preconceptions to be just that.

Today we are going to look at the Summary of Conclusions about Fireballs and Meteorites that Victor Clube attached to his cover letter to the Chief, Physics and BMD Coordinator of the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development back in 1996, 5 years before September 11, 2001; that, and a few other things.

I often get accused of "fear mongering" because I keep bringing this subject up again and again. I even think that it is fascinating that the big breakthrough in my experiment in Superluminal Communication came on the day that the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy began striking Jupiter - even at the very moment of the first impact - and that this communication with "myself in the future" has focused so much attention on the subject of swarms of comets and comet fragments that repeatedly barrel through the solar system, wreaking havoc and bringing death and destruction to earth. As a result of the research prompted by this communication, I wrote an entire 800 page book that is woven around the issue of cometary explosion type catastrophes that obviously have occurred repeatedly throughout history: The Secret History of The World.

In the early days of publishing the results of this experiment, I was nonplussed by the many attacks I came under from all quarters. I was accused of "channeling aliens" (not true); of wanting to "start a cult" (what is cultic about doing research into scientific subjects and exposing religion for the fraud it is?) and so on. That sort of thing really hurt and puzzled me at first, but I have now seen it for the blessing it was: it has helped me to learn about the kinds of people who are in charge of our world, the kind of people who want to keep secrets so that they can hang onto power: the kind of people who create such things as "The War on Terror" to conceal from the masses of humanity the future that may very well bring our civilization to an end; the kind of people who know that survival of cometary bombardment is possible and who want to be the only ones who do survive, and to hell with everyone else.

Biologist Arpad Pusztai had more than 300 articles and 12 books to his credit and was the world's top expert in his field. But when he accidentally discovered that genetically modified (GM) foods are dangerous, he became the biotech industry's bad-boy poster child, setting an example for other scientists thinking about blowing the whistle.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Pusztai was awarded a $3 million grant by the UK government to design the system for safety-testing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). His team included more than 20 scientists working at three facilities, including the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, the top nutritional research lab in the UK, and his employer for the previous 35 years. The results of Pusztai's work were supposed to become the required testing protocols for all of Europe. But when he fed supposedly harmless GM potatoes to rats, things didn't go as planned.

Within just 10 days, the animals developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and damaged immune systems. Moreover, the cause was almost certainly side effects from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, the GM foods on the market, which are created from the same process, might have similar affects on humans.

With permission from his director, Pusztai was interviewed on TV and expressed his concerns about GM foods. He became a hero at his institute - for two days. Then came the phone calls from the pro-GMO prime minister's office to the institute's director. The next morning, Pusztai was fired. He was silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his team was dismantled, and the protocols never implemented. His institute, the biotech industry, and the UK government, together launched a smear campaign to destroy Pusztai's reputation.

"Speak My Will, Make Yourself a Prophet!"

At any given point in time there seems to be at least one charlatan running around predicting the imminent end of the world. In 2011, radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted the world's faithful would be 'Raptured' on 21 May 2011. Of course, the date turned out to be a total dud, prompting Camping to 'revise' his prediction to October 21. Needless to say, at the time of writing we weren't holding our breath, and with good reason. We might have passed out and missed another apocalyptic non-event!

But is there such a thing as valid prophecy or prediction of future events? The results of the Cassiopaean Experiment suggest that there is indeed such a thing, and more (e.g., remote access to unconventional knowledge, whether obscure or just previously unheard of). But the Cs have presented a very unique take on the subject of prediction. It is intimately tied with their cosmology and their view on 'time'. According to the Cs, our universe is a 'free will' universe and time is not a strictly linear 'one-off' phenomenon. That means the future is open. More on that below.

Most predictions are based on a pretty simplistic, and probably completely false, view of reality. According to this mechanistic idea, the universe was originally set in motion at some imaginary 'beginning' point in time by some equally imaginary 'first cause'. Religions have called this first cause 'God' while scientists have deemed it the 'Big Bang'. Once the machine has been set in motion, it obeys physical laws and plays itself out like clockwork. Theoretically, with enough data, every event in this mechanistic chain of cause and effect can be predicted. So when some prophet gives a prediction of a future event, he or she is basically operating on the assumption that because 'God' or some other divine being is omniscient and can see how everything will play itself out (and assuming this being actually exists, and that it is not simply pulling a cosmic practical joke on its subject), it's gotta be right. But things aren't that simple.

Among the many comments we have read and received on the alleged death of Gaddafi, the one most often repeated goes something like this: 'Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who deserved what he got'. The widely-held belief (at least in Western nations) that Gaddafi was a 'brutal dictator' is the result of over 30 years of (primarily) US, British and French propaganda against the former Libyan leader. The reasons for this long-running propaganda campaign are many, but chief among them is the fact that Gaddafi was not only fiercely independent as regards his native land, but he persistently sought to bring financial independence to other African nations.

It's The Media Stupid!

The average person in the street seems to find it difficult to grasp the idea that the 'national interests' of democratic governments often run counter to democratic ideals and that, in pursuing such interests, governments will attempt to maintain the appearance of remaining faithful to democratic ideals. Another way to say this is that governments will lie about their undemocratic activities in order to maintain a facade of democracy and thereby avoid disturbing the population. (For those who may have, understandably, forgotten the core democratic principles, check this link for a short refresher course.)

The maintenance of a democratic façade while pursuing undemocratic 'interests' is today only possible with the committed and almost unanimous connivance of the mainstream media, which unfailingly disseminates government propaganda to the people, and which the people in turn accept as gospel truth in the belief that the press is free and independent of government control. But virtually all Western mainstream media outlets today are owned by a handful of powerful corporations and mega-wealthy individuals who count high level members of Western governments among their close friends and confidants. The truth of this can easily be verified by anyone with a computer and a little time to do some research of their own. The extent of the actual freedom of the 'free press' can also be ascertained by revisiting the way in which the Western media blindly accepted and reported as truth government lies prior to and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is reasonable then to conclude that the Western media, by and large, acts as a 'Ministry of Propaganda' for Western governments, especially in situations where government(s) are pursuing policies that are at variance with democratic ideals.

So, in light of all that, let's consider the question: "was Gaddafi really a 'brutal dictator'?"

At the time, much was made of the capture of Saddam Hussein. Touted by the US government-controlled American mainstream press as a fatal blow to the insurgency that would lead to rejoicing in the streets of Baghdad, the reality, as we have seen, has turned out to be rather different. Iraqis, logically enough, seem to be less concerned about Saddam's capture and trial than about the fact that a brutal US military force of occupation has essentially taken possession of their country and its resources and has caused the deaths of 655,000 of their fellow citizens.

After his initial capture in December 2003, Saddam was paraded in front of the press at his first court appearance in July 2004 where he stood accused of up to 12 crimes, including the alleged gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. But fate (and in Iraq these days "fate" wears the red white and blue ) has decreed that "Saddam" will not suffer the ignominy of answering those particular charges because his first trial for the killing of 148 people in a Shiite town in 1982 was enough, it seems, to convict and sentence him to death. The sense of relief in the White House over the fact that the "gassing" allegation will not have to be dissected is surely palpable, given that, if Saddam gassed anyone, it was with the chemical weapons supplied to him by the US government.

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln

I was born in Iran in 1985 when the country was recovering from the effects of the 1979 revolution and the fascist take-over of the Islamic Republic. That, however, is not what I want to write about today. I'm writing about my experiences throughout my life with smoking and anti-smoking, and how closely the anti-smoking lobby, and the social attitudes it has produced, resembles fascism.

My father was a smoker, and my mom was not. In fact, after my parent's divorce, my mom became a complete anti-smoker. One reason was perhaps because she associated smoking with my father, whom she had begun to dislike. I had a different idea of smoking. Most of my father's family smoked, and I had nothing but fond memories from smokers - especially my father. The smell of tobacco on his clothes when he held me, the look of pleasure when he lit up a smoke after a nice meal and the hours of conversation that was spent between adults around the hookah.

My first experience with the anti-smoking lobby came one day at school, when my school (which, I should mention, was a complete by-product of the Islamic Republic's religious belief system) dedicated a whole day to inform children about the harmful effects of smoking and how we should all convince our parents to stop smoking if we wanted them to live. They even gave us stickers to take home with us that said, "Dear parent: do you want to live to see me grow up? Then stop smoking now!"

I remember being quite shocked and scared after that 'lesson' about smoking. I cried thinking my dad was surely going to die because he smoked a lot! My parents had divorced at that time, so when I went home I waited for my dad to come pick me up from my mom's house for our daily visit. When I returned home, I was still quite upset so my mom asked me what was the matter and I told her that I thought my dad was going to die because he smoked. She didn't say much except that smoking was indeed very bad and to go ahead and give my dad the sticker. When my dad came to pick me up, he was shocked to see my sad face and my puffy eyes from crying all day. I told him what had happened, gave him the sticker and begged him through tears to stop smoking. He became upset too, and in a low voice he said, "I'll try." But that wasn't good enough for me. I told him, "But don't you want to live to see me grow up?" He said, "Of course I do, but life is more complicated than that." Then he faced my mom and asked, "What kind of crap have they been teaching her in school?!?" My mom replied, "I happen to agree with what they taught!" And he replied, "Since when do you agree with the fascists of Islamic Republic?" My mom went silent and said nothing else.

"Never ascribe to malice those things which may be explained by stupidity." That is an important phrase, and a necessary one; it keeps people from being paranoid. However, it has a corollary most people don't know: "One MAY ascribe to malice those things which stupidity cannot explain." Robert Canup

As the mail continues to come in on the COINTELPRO issue, a number of questions have been raised - mainly about how to tell the difference between Truth and Lies - and I thought I would take some time this morning to try to cover a few aspects of this issue.

I've covered many aspects of this issue here and there on our websites, but since google manages to ensure that we are suppressed on search results, many people have not yet discovered these collections of observation, evidence, and supporting material. (Regarding google, we have been collecting data and making experiments for over a year now and will soon publish some of the results, but don't expect to them to be trumpeted by google!)