Earlier today SOTT posted this video of a rocket launch cum 'UFO spiral'. The person who uploaded it to YouTube managed to convince him or herself that the spectacular display was the result of UFOs "taking over control of the rocket" once it reached a certain altitude. Well I've since located other videos of the launch minus the misleading text and the "blinking lights" (which appear to have been added later for effect, if not for outright disinformation purposes). Here is a YouTube video entitled 'Launch of the Soyuz 2 rocket carrying Glonass-K satellite':


No blinking lights surrounding the rocket and no text to tell you it's aliens from another planet taking remote control of it either.

On February 22nd, 2011 a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the center of Christchurch, New Zealand. The force from the earthquake popped glass from windows, leveled buildings and laid waste to almost half of the city. New Zealand's former premier, Helen Clark, has even remarked that "[t]he building damage [she's] seen compared with Haiti." People are now evacuating the city in droves, with thousands forced to relocate, and the remaining citizens are without water and sewerage in some parts. Unspeakable tales have found their way into the media of people, trapped under buildings, sending text messages in desperation to the outside world, pleading for help, help that was ultimately too late. At this point all hope is given up for finding any more survivors; the families of the missing are just looking for closure now. The citizens of Christchurch are beat, shell-shocked, and some are only able to cope in the lowest possible ways. The situation in Christchurch is beyond tragic.

According to geologists, the fault that set off the Christchurch earthquake had laid dormant for thousands of years and only recently awoke last September when a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the outer regions of the city. This initial jolt caused considerable damage, but nothing on the scale of what was experienced recently. These earthquakes in Christchurch have caught geologists by surprise, since the major New Zealand fault, the Alpine faultline, is nowhere near Christchurch. Something is definitely going on here. The planet seems to be in the grips of a veritable pandemic of earthquakes occurring all over the globe - in places we never thought possible before. It's as if this recent earthquake in Christchurch sprung from the shadows of the past: a traumatic past that humanity has largely forgotten.

Dairy products - including all milk products, milk, cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, kefir, ice-cream, etc. - are related to all kinds of diseases including cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, cancer, allergies, asthma, digestive diseases, thyroid problems, neurological diseases, etc. The list is unlimited and I wish I could include it here, but for the sake of space let's concentrate on why this is so.

Milk can cause problems in several ways:

• through sensitivity to the protein casein which creates havoc in our bodies in a similar way that gluten from wheat and other grains does.
• through milk allergies which can juxtapose with the previous problem.
• through lactose intolerance.
• through the food livestock eats which can have, among other things, toxic lectins from consumed grains or GMO foods. Livestock can have hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, infections, etc. also
• through other problems as well

Let's cover the basic principles of each problem.

What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing - the birth pangs of a new Middle East - and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.

So said US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2006 when Israel was blitzing Lebanese civilians. I've been wondering to what extent this applies here and now as North African and Middle Eastern regimes fall left, right and center. Is this an imperial operation directed from the shadows? Or a nascent uprising coming from below? The Egyptian protesters formed a cohesive unit which articulated political aims. I think THAT more than anything frightens the Powers That Be. They can handle chaos, they can control civil wars, but people organising resistance creatively into a united mass requires drastic shock treatment. Overshadowing the nascent political movement in Egypt is a list of countries in revolt that grows by the day:

Tunisia
Algeria
Egypt
Morocco
Yemen
Jordan
Saudi Arabia
Kuwait
Bahrain
Libya
Oman
Iraq
Iran

And it's not consigned to Middle East. Mass protests have taken place against the state of Wisconsin's austerity fiscal measures, hundreds have been shot to death over a disputed electoral result in Ivory Coast, the Chinese government is stamping down on the slightest whiff of dissent, university students were recently shot in Nigeria, thousands demonstrated in Croatia this week, protests have flared up again in Greece and even isolated North Korea has caught the fever. Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi. Revolution is in the air across the whole globe. Indeed, it's already upon us.

Why has Charlie Sheen 'gone off' in such spectacular fashion? Admittedly, it's not exactly unusual for a Hollywood star to go on a drink and drug-fuelled 'bender' and end up in rehab, but for most of them that's usually the extent of the acting out. Charlie Sheen however appears to be in a different category. While he has an alleged history of drink and drug abuse dating back to 2005, his dramatically swift fall from grace really began late last year when he was arrested for causing $7000 worth of damage to a hotel suite during a weekend of drugs and prostitutes. Since then, his behavior has grown increasingly bizarre and, most recently, he seems to have adopted a 'god complex' that does not appear to be dependent on, or fueled by, any substance abuse (although there is obviously a strong possibility of him being bipolar).

Here are a few snippets of his recent public comments:

[Ed: Note: This article appeared exclusively in Issue 12 of Sott.net's The Dot Connector Magazine. Get your copy today!]

At the beginning of 2009, the non-profit public interest group The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) brought a class action lawsuit against the Coca Cola Company for making a range of claims about its product 'VitaminWater' that go beyond those allowed by the Food and Drug Administration. The beverage company stands accused of selling what amounts to little more than sugar, artificial colouring and water and promoting it as something that can boost immunity, give energy and reduce risk of disease.

Stephen Gardner, director of the litigation for public interest group said it best: "It truly shocks the conscience that a company like Coke would try to keep customers by selling them a soft drink and telling them it's a vitamin."

Over a year later, as the case came to trial, the lawyers defending VitaminWater shocked anyone who was paying attention by making the statement that, despite the product's claims, "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking VitaminWater was a healthy beverage."

To clarify, the product's name contains the word "Vitamin", an essential compound fundamental to the proper functioning of the human body, and "Water", an equally essential component of the human body, a lack of which leads to quick death. Advertisements for the beverage depict professional athletes at the top of their game sincerely stating that they drink the beverage daily. Flavours of the beverage have names like "Energy", "Focus" and "Power C". Yet, according to those representing the company, believing this product is good for you is unreasonable.

Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski with commentary and additional quoted material by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies and turned them into caricatures of themselves. This occurred as a result of the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians.

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a "new class" within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.

- Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes

I hope you are all getting the point of this series so far: psychopaths are a big problem in our world! But it's not that simple. Take an analogy. Timmy is sick. He caught a bug at school the other week and is down for the count. Thankfully for his parents, they're somewhat eccentrically obsessed with health and cleanliness and had immediately placed Timmy in a microbiologically sterile bubble in their guest bedroom, before proceeding to decontaminate the entire house and its occupants. The pathogen that threatens the health of those he might come in contact with is successfully locked in. (Unfortunately for Timmy, so is he!) However, Timmy's parents didn't factor Sunshine, the family's pet pit-bull, into their anti-infection equation.

So, one afternoon, while Timmy is reminiscing about his former life outside the bubble, along comes Sunshine who pokes a hole in the bubble's protective layer with his favorite stick. The highly contagious, airborne infection is now free to surf the air waves of 21st century climate control, and through a series of highly improbable events, Timmy's sister, parents, dog and goldfish all come down with the nasty bug. The infection then spreads throughout the neighborhood, city, and eventually, the world, as local businessmen who don't mind an aggressive pat down from the TSA and exposing their genitals to puerile airport security personnel via Peeping-Tom-Technology, travel to very serious and important business meetings. So, what's the point of this? Simply put, psychopaths need a number of things to have their effect in lieu of the direct interaction of personal relationships. Among a psychopath's best tools to spread his malevolence are fanatic bulldogs and the cold theories of human nature that determine the intellectual climate of a society. It's through these intermediaries that our bodies and minds are systematically infected - ponerized.

[Note: This article appeared in issue 12 of The Dot Connector Magazine. Part 2 will appear in Issue 13, coming soon! Get your subscription today!]

"Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years."
- Adolf Hitler

Since WWII, many people, groups and nations have been compared to the Nazi regime and the personalities therein. In fact, the analogy is overdone in American culture to the point of being meaningless. There is even a satirical law called Godwin's Law which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis goes to 1." This is quite true. I've witnessed this law in action in online discussions, and it tends to be sardonically humorous when somebody calls it out. Despite the comedic value, the main point Godwin makes is that many Nazi comparisons tend to be baseless, and many others employ a good deal of pseudo-logic. A better understanding of history, while fostering a saner world, would probably prevent a good deal of invocations of Godwin's Law too.

When it comes to bad Nazi comparisons, few have been more boisterous and outright buffoonish than the vituperations of Tea Party mouthpiece and Fox News host Glenn Beck. One of Beck's recent Nazi comparisons involved taking a closer look at the concept of empathy in politics and - get this - how Hitler used 'empathy' to euthanize baby Knauer, a child born with significant birth defects in 1938 Germany, amid the debate over Hitler's eugenics policies. Beck's conclusion: "Empathy leads you to bad decisions every time." While Glenn Beck's logic is certainly twisted, I think we can safely say that he takes Godwin's Law to new heights.

Over the past few months, numerous nations have taken the step of officially recognising a Palestinian state, or the right for Palestinians to have a 'sovereign' state of their own. Over the course of a few weeks at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru all declared Palestine as a 'free and sovereign State". On January 19th, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev joined the chorus when he met with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank oasis town of Jericho and reaffirmed his country's support for a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.

While such moves are to be welcomed, we shouldn't allow them to obscure the reality on the ground in Palestine and Israel. For several decades, Israeli authorities have followed a policy of building illegal (according to international law) Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. As of early 2011, half a million Jewish settlers are living in over 150 settlements (comprising small to medium-sized towns) in both the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. The simple reality is that the extent of these settlements is such that, unless most of them are removed, there is simply no 'sovereign' Palestinian land on which a Palestinian State could ever be established. As a result, all affirmations by other nations, however well-intentioned, of a Palestinian right to statehood ring rather hollow.