President Obama meets European Union leaders, shakes hands, puts on some smiles for the press, pretends he doesn't already know what the plan is and shakes his head thoughtfully. Obama says the US is willing to use its magic wand to help put smiles on European faces in time for Christmas. Markets climb despite a warning from several three or four letter acronyms lurking in the shadows and pulling the strings that Europe will slide into a 10 mile deep sink-hole - and Britain will follow - unless each Eurozone country delivers 13.4% of its peasants minced, lightly seasoned, vacuum packed and oven-ready to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in under 45 minutes.

This page will automatically invent apocalyptic scenarios of catastrophic proportions every 90 seconds - OFF

- Obama says even though he is married he will spend the night with Mrs Merkel if he has to
- Fitch says US downgrade possible if anyone from the Rothschild family sends an SMS
- IMF's Lagarde says their new technocrats in Italy and Greece are behaving themselves
- Despite having bad dreams, world markets go up a bit and down a little, pretty much like they normally do
- Europe 'in sink-hole' - and could take global economy with it
- JP Morgan says it's tired of waiting for downtrodden European peasants and import its own from China

21.35 It's been a long day of satirical expose of Debt Crisis Live and other such live-blogging. They don't half like creating a drama out of a crisis and it can only mean one thing...

21:25 We're currently in YAMC - Yet Another Manufactured Crisis

"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

The United States is transitioning to the days of the Great Depression. The Great Depression of the 1930s was defined as "Great" because it affected so many places in the world. Considering the state of world economics today, this description is not far from what is happening now, especially in EU and North America. I'm going to be speaking mostly about what's happening to the US economy rather than worldwide. I will assume that if you're reading this, you by now realize that the state of the economy in the US is dire. But if you haven't yet, let's review some key issues:

• The US national debt is over $15 trillion and rising.
• Unemployment is at an all-time high.
• By March this year, nine million Americans had lost their health insurance since 2009, due to job loss.
• Americans are losing their homes in foreclosures and the housing market is not improving.
• Americans have been steadily losing their pensions since 2008.
• Even veterans have been hit hard by the economy.

The above points are just some of the things going on right now that immediately affect a vast number of Americans, and this is just the beginning: I read something the other day that made me realize that things have gone from bad to worse and there is no more denying it.

It's that time of year again, a time for forgetting all that's bad in the world and instead opening the little doors on an advent calendar and putting some tinsel up around the house. That is, of course, just one of the ways that the PTB use this 'festive season' to the max to keep us distracted as they nonchalantly strip away our civil liberties, living standards and dignity. Those who rely on the mainstream media for their news will be unaware that the US Government will soon be able to declare pretty much anyone a potential 'Terrorist', but they will know why Katherine Heigl hates testicles.

As I write, The top search term on Yahoo is Katherine Heigl. I must confess, I've never heard of her, but I think that is a good thing. According to the New York Daily News, she is an actress who stars in a 'hilarious' Public Service Announcement entitled 'I Hate Balls'. The video is to promote a spay-and-neuter animal campaign, in which she jokes that the real reason she's such an advocate for spaying and neutering animals is because she simply hates "terrible, terrible testicles." She goes on to say:

"Hate balls, fix pets, save lives. It's just that simple,".

I suppose if we just read the MSM then life would be simple. But take a tour around the alternative news media sites and they are reporting on something that might just be a little more important to the average American than dogs' balls: the new legislation in process that will enable the U.S. Government to declare a suspect U.S. Citizen a terrorist, who can then be taken to foreign prisons without a court process. The new signs of terror include those who have food storage for more than 7 days, missing fingers, or own guns and ammo!

Update: We covered a list of prophecies in the first part of this series. The idea of California 'falling into the sea' was mentioned. Just a few days ago, another chunk of it did just that. Specifically, part of the Paseo del Mar road in San Pedro fell into the Pacific Ocean after a landslide on 21 November. We don't think this particular landslide is what the Cs were referring to, just thought the timing was interesting in light of bringing it up here!

Just as new discoveries in science can overturn a previously held 'consensus' in a heartbeat (often to the consternation or willful disbelief of those promoting the consensus), new historical data can turn our ideas of what we think happened in our history on their head. We often take for granted that event X occurred in year Y, forgetting that either or both of those variables may be completely false. The event may turn out to have been a fiction, created by scribes and leaders of the time (or years later) for purposes of political propaganda. Dating methods may be inaccurate or possess possible confounding factors, mucking up the accepted timeline. Or, when new documents or scientific data are discovered, the event may turn out to bear little resemblance to our previous ideas of how it happened. New actors emerge with new motivations, necessitating a revision of the history books and the way we see the events and personages of our near and distant past.

Then there are the problems inherent in the study of prehistory, before the advent of 'history' as we know it. There, we only have scarce clues to rely on, all built on sciences which are themselves built on certain assumptions about the way things work. Archaeology, paleoanthropology, population and molecular genetics, climate science, geology... all of these contribute to a story of the past that historians create for us. When we consider the relatively young age of many of these sciences, the amount of information that we have amassed in that short amount of time is pretty staggering. But it's important to keep in mind that history too is a work in progress; new theories and advancements in science can prompt a radical revision of old ideas.

Prehistory occupies a good portion of the Cs transcripts. While archaeologists and anthropologists can piece together broad outlines of migrations, genetic mixing, human behaviors, population bottlenecks, etc., this was a period from which no written records appear to have survived. As such, it's hard to verify specific historical details and much of what the Cs say about these times remains interesting conjecture. But while much of it is unverifiable, it also provides opportunities to test the material as new discoveries come to light: fossil finds, climate studies, evidence for catastrophes and extinctions, and more.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of those politicians who really makes my flesh crawl. In fact, whenever I hear or see her speak, hairs really do stand up on the back of my neck. She seems to cause a reaction in me similar to the reaction 'fingers scraping a blackboard' brings to sensitive ears.

Nearly all politicians are scheming, lying parasites that wallow in their cosy, smug little club of elite buddies, nodding, shaking hands, signing bits of paper that will result in the deaths of thousands then turn and smile to cameras telling us plebs that 'it's for the greater good' or 'God told them to' and all sorts of tripe. But Hilary ... AARRGGHH - there is just something soo false and contrived about how she delivers her political spin to the masses that gets my goat up.

As U.S. Secretary of State she has been rather busy of late dictating to the media which of the few remaining sovereign nations on the big blue marble are due for some much needed 'intervention' so that they can come to enjoy some beautiful American-style democracy. The kind of democracy that has turned a once great nation into a dwindling empire on its last legs.

Having 'successfully' brought 'humanitarian aid' to Libya - by destroying its infrastructure, murdering countless civilians and injuring thousands, while lining the pockets of military and defence contractors, I wonder how long it will be before we hear Hillary chuckling with psychopathic glee over the murder of YA'E'L (Yet another 'Evil' Leader') - This time in Syria? Iran? Pakistan? Maybe all three at the same time?

I will assume that if you are taking a few minutes to read this article you are, like me, more or less a news addict. Every day you wake up and while fixing breakfast you turn on the radio and a laptop to check what is up with this world. As you eat you protest at the comments that come through the airwaves and correct every attempt at subtle propaganda, although sometimes you just have to laugh. Meanwhile you compare the radio broadcast with what is coming through the net in alternative news websites such as Sott.net. You also check out Facebook or some other social media site where you have a number of friends who are also into hunting interesting news items, so you want to see what they have spotted in the last twelve hours.

A week ago I had a surreal moment while reading headlines on Facebook. It was the clear impression that the world had indeed gone mad - and not in a harmless or amusing mad way, but in a cruel and soul-less way. Among the things that caught my eye:

• 10-Year-Old Survives Life Threatening Complications To Give Birth To Son Prematurely Likely a victim of rape.
• House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable To 'Prevent Overly Burdensome' School Lunch Regulations. They grow on trees, you would think.
• How the Telecom Industry Seeks to Confuse About the Dangers of Cell Phones. "From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use."
• TSA Puts Off Safety Study of X-ray Body Scanners. At least they are backtracking in Europe. But what harms Europeans is OK for Americans?
• Seattle Police pepper-spray 84-year-old woman and pregnant teen. Because they can.

It is these sort of shocking items that make us feel that urge to understand how and why. What is the point of it all? What is the bigger picture? Horror moves us to seek knowledge, which is why I have been thinking lately about the main lines of force in the current state of global affairs. The way I see it, the major interrelated threads are the economic crisis, revolutions, imperialism and climate change. The first three are like standing lines of dominoes about to collapse. The last one can 'rain' down on us at any point - in fact it already has, but how strongly will it be when it does again?

Something Wicked This Way Comes

As Thanksgiving quickly approaches, I feel a sense of doom knowing that Black Friday (BF) looms like a coming storm and wonder who will get hurt or die this time. This time every year, just after dinner, the countdown to shopping madness begins in the US and we are inundated with news of who got trampled in the crazed rush to buy stuff. We shake our heads with pity and cluck our tongues in self-satisfactory hubris that we are somehow better than they are and then return to having our third or fourth helping of leftovers. Yes, I'm guilty of this as well.

It reminds me a bit of the television show Celebrity Deathmatch where, essentially, a few are pitted against each other for the entertainment purposes of the many. We wonder, "Who are these people?" Who indeed. Little do we realize, they are us.

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.