We've already received some interesting feedback from readers about the changes on the SOTT page. It seems that there is some real confusion by the change of focus. For example, one reader wrote:

I am extremely sad to see that your coverage on the Levant is gone ? any reason were u bought out, caved-in or gave up? or are you re-directing your coverage to the more esoteric - i hope its the latter as it would be sad if any of the former was the reason.

Another reader wrote:

I'm sorry to see the changes that you have implemented in your website.

I thought it was a great place to find out news that was unbiased and found from other sources that I was unaware of. I especially loved how you covered the world situation, news, big brother, 911 truth, etc. That is how you have backed down from telling the truth. For start, I thought your mission was getting the truth, corruption, and propaganda out into the public eye and not having to rely on the state controlled media which toe's the party line.

I do not have the same values that you do when it comes to my beliefs. I am a born again Christian and I don't believe what you espouse on your website.

I wanted to thank you for what you have offered in the past and let you know I will not be returning to your site.

Pretty stupid when you think about it, all over an article that you wrote about "chemtrails" or "contrails". People have strong beliefs and will argue and fight the way they believe, just look at politics and religion. Just because you didn't like some of the comments and had your feelings hurt, you change everything that you stood for. Unless I was mistaken about you and this was what you wanted all along.

I'm very sorry to see the change.

Yet another:

I have been an avid reader of Sott for at least the last 4 years, bought several books, contributed and I had enjoyed access to real unbiased, unmolested news and views that do not make it to Lame Street Media or that have been twisted and distorted and robbed of essential facts and information.

Sadly, I no longer see the real news in your New Age and Mystic groupings. Should you still continue to give the news as before, but under different headings then I am missing the mark and therefore I do not stand by this confusing new look.

I do commend you on you sterling efforts to offer something new and improved however, I find that it now has some aforementioned elements missing.

This is important to myself and no doubt others on being able to get a handle on what is going on in the world around me/us, as I cannot trust the MSM to give me a straight and unbiased answer. I do not want to sound bitter, but the new look does rather defeat my reasons for dropping by and contributing now and again to the sott cause. I find it sad that there would be precious little on the sott site to hold my interest.

Sincerely hoping that you can address the loss of real news as we knew it.

First of all, these changes were discussed and planned long before the Chemtrails article. In fact, you could say that the Chemtrails article was a first salvo of change. Such a topic would never have been covered on SOTT before except perhaps in the "Haunted Planet" category. If you search the SOTT database for "chemtrails" you will find less than a dozen articles on the topic. However, it will now receive more coverage under the "High Strangeness" category. So will many other important things that fell by the wayside.

Let us assure you that our coverage of news from the Middle East will not cease. It will, however, be re-categorized under the heading "Society's Child." That's where you will find news that is "anthropological." That will include politics, social movements (including 9-11 Truth, anti-Big Pharma, etc), murder and mayhem, psychopaths in action, (including government and economics), and so forth. The point of this change is to consolidate all anthropological phenomena on a more-or-less level playing field.

First let's have a little musical interlude to get us in the right mood for what I'm going to say in this essay:

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - I Won't Back Down

I sure stepped in it writing about so-called "Chemtrails." The flamers and ad hominem attackers came out of the woodwork and when that happens, you know you've hit a hot button or a sore toe. Can we say COINTELPRO controlled clappers in the audience trying to keep the attention on the distraction so nobody will figure out what is really going on?

My readers know I'm into conspiracies - have been since the time I read None Dare Call it Conspiracy back in 1985 and tried to convince myself it was all paranoid nonsense and failed. What's more, I've paid a high price for what I've learned and shared. I don't do this for my health or to win a popularity contest. After all, people in mainstream religions hate and fear me, mainstream science types hate me, New Agers hate me, and even a lot of conspiracy theorists hate me. I guess it's because I don't buy into the "friend of my friend is my friend, enemy of my friend is my enemy"; I prefer to take each situation and examine it on its own merits. And when I see the kinds of reactions I got to my little piece about chemtrails, I know that something is rotten and getting smellier by the day and it isn't chemicals being spouted from the rear of passenger jets.

A few things that should be considered when talking about so-called "chemtrails":

1) Obviously, there is some "spraying" that goes on and it's not for the benefit of humanity. I've heard a few stories from people about very low flying planes dispersing stuff that lands all over everything or makes people sick. And I do mean LOW flying.

2) Spraying that actually affects a designated area beneath the sprayer (the plane in question) must be at a fairly low altitude otherwise what is sprayed will not come down on the area beneath the spraying. This is due to the fact that our atmosphere has a number of layers and each layer has its own temperature and wind speed and direction, and very often, things in one layer take a very long time and distance to mix or mingle with other layers, IF they mix at all. Usually, the wind speeds in the upper layers are such that anything deposited there might only penetrate to lower, weather, layers, after many thousands of miles of travel. It's a very nonlinear situation and highly, impossibly, unpredictable.

3) So, if you are talking about chemical spraying that you can see above in the sky, that then falls on the area below it, you must be talking about low altitude spraying.

4) Therefore, trails that are very high in the sky that have no hope of ever interacting with the ground below them cannot properly be called "chemtrails" except, perhaps, if a chemical is being sprayed that is supposed to affect the weather (and even that is done fairly low). Cloud seeding is done by dispersing elements such as dry ice crystals or silver iodide in the atmosphere with an airplane or even ground based stations. Seeding clouds is believed to promote condensation of water droplets, thus, rain.

Often, some of the most important news comes from local papers, stories that don't make it up the feeding chain and onto the news wires or major newspapers or nightly network news. It can be news that at first glance wouldn't appear to have a national or international impact. Second glance, and a good memory, can reveal that the impact may well be quite significant.

The other day a reader sent us an article link that he found on another alt.news website: Bad news - we are way past our 'extinct by' date

Since we had run the same story back when it first came out, we thought "yeah! Flashback!" After all, with all the talk about Global Warming, it served to remind readers that human caused CO2 levels are not all there is to what is going on here on the BBM today.

And the Procession of Damned Data continues...

Yesterday, January 4th, RyanX discussed the recent mysterious deaths of blackbirds and fish in Arkansas. As reports about mass deaths of birds and sea creatures continue to pour in from all over the world, perhaps it's time to, how should I put it... "open up the field" ?

January 4th: Canada: Hundreds of Dead Fish 'A Natural Occurrence'

Sarnia, Ontario - Hundreds of dead fish that washed up on shore in the north end of the St. Clair River is a natural occurrence and not the result of a chemical spill, a government officials say.

Only one species was affected, further supporting the idea it was a natural occurrence, she said.

"There was nothing to indicate that it was man-made."

January 4th: US: Thousands Of Fish Dead In Spruce Creek, Florida

Thousands of dead fish are floating in Volusia County Tuesday. They were all in Spruce Creek in Port Orange. The fish kill is unusual, according to people who live along the creek, because it's warm.

It's been a week since there were freezing temperatures, but there are fish lining the banks. Some said it's the worst kill they've ever seen; thousands of fish lined the twists and turns of Spruce Creek.

The sheer number of fish and the smell were both overwhelming.

Most of the fish were mullet, ladyfish and catfish, and not the valuable sporting fish called snook that died in mass during a cold spell last year.

"A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten..."

- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

Yes, and rotten is what Beebe, Arkansas woke up to on the opening day of 2011: A whole lot of rotting red-winged blackbirds. Initial estimates put the number of dead birds littering the yards and streets of Beebe at around 5000. Not only this, but about 125 miles west in Ozark, Arkansas an estimated 100,000 dead drum fish have turned up on the shores of the Arkansas River.

So what gives?

To coincide with the mass of dead birds and fish from Arkansas, Chile also experienced a mass death of sooty shearwater birds along the shoreline between Mela and Colmo Yao counties. This comes on the heels of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the Santiago Del Estero region. Likewise, on the opposite side of South America, at least one-hundred tons of dead fish -- mostly sardines, croaker and catfish -- have turned up on the shores of Paraná, Brazil since last Thursday. These signs do not bode well for 2011!

Now in a world such as ours, with nearly every square inch of the planet polluted beyond living tolerance, it would seem that mass animal deaths should not be so uncommon. After all, in the past several years we've seen mass die-offs of honeybees, bats, dolphins, pelicans, frogs and likely other species that have gone unnoticed. The cause of these mass animal deaths has often turned out to be specific diseases, pollutants, or some combination of the two. The odd thing about these dead blackbirds in Beebe is that they just dropped dead in mid-flight. As Karen Rowe, an ornithologist for the wildlife commission commented, "it's important to understand that a sick bird can't fly." So what exactly caused over 5,000 blackbirds to take flight in the middle of the night then drop out of the sky? These Blackbirds are normally sleeping at night and they have very poor eyesight in the dark, according to experts.

Jesse Ventura's TV show Conspiracy Theory is turning out to be hard-hitting stuff for the US mainstream media. His latest episode touches on the nuts and bolts of the scale of BP's ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico - the toxicity, the coverup, the questions about deliberate sabotage of the Deepwater rig, comparisons with Katrina, etc. It even brings up Obama's possible background as a CIA asset, interviews Gulf community leader Kindra Arnesen, talks about depopulation/evacuation programs to relocate the entire population of the Gulf Coast. It even brings up the fact that the Gulf Loop current became severed from the Gulf Stream and how this would contribute to a global "mini ice age".

It is perhaps unsurprising then to see "conspiracy insider" Alex Jones being planted next to Jesse because that is a sure sign that his vectoring is planned.

As noted in the recent article Flu Crisis Hits Cancer Surgery: Britain Teeters on the Brink of an Epidemic, the flu seems to be hitting Brits pretty hard this winter. So much so that they are now short on inpatient hospital beds in some facilities. The article states that the British health care system is at near epidemic level with the flu:

So far this winter nine children and 18 adults are confirmed to have died from the virus, although in reality this number is expected to be much higher.

One intensive care doctor described the outbreak as the worst he had seen in two decades. Dr Ian Jenkins, former president of the Paediatric Intensive Care Society, who works at Bristol Children's Hospital, said: 'I've not seen this much flu in more than 20 years.'

In another article, Swine flu kills 10 in Britain; sparks fear of another pandemic in 2011, the ghost of the Swine Flu virus is resurrected as the cause of this recent spike in flu-like illness.

While the article starts out with the words, "It's back!", we have some doubt that this soon-to-be flu epidemic is solely the result of this virus. Let's not forget that virus experts stated from the early days of the so-called global Swine Flu pandemic that the Swine Flu virus went global before health authorities could do anything about it. In other words, everybody has experienced this virus to some extent by now, and the results have been somewhat blasé compared to the dire predictions of dead millions initially made by the WHO.

While the spike in flu cases in Britain is very real, the purported Swine Flu virus as the cause is likely another example of medical propaganda run amok. But if this recent epidemic in Britain isn't the result of a measly virus, then what is?

Anyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: "you are with us or against us."

Bush's words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government's respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

"No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. [...] Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment."

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse "and sometimes even anger public opinion."

In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: "I'm not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."

The spinmeisters are playing the same record over and over, recovery, recovery, scratch, scratch, recovery's in da house! The Associated Press trumpeted, "After two years of recession, Christmas 2010 will go down as the moment when Americans rediscovered how much they like to shop." On December 28th, Yahoo Finance reassured us at 9AM, "The recovery is on track," but an hour later, it featured a new headline, "Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Falls in December."

With its attendant social chaos, crime and despair, the country is sinking into an economic quicksand, yet Americans are injected daily with a massive dose of tranquilizing nonsense. Today's top stories, "Elton John Becomes a Dad," "Air Force Mascot Goes Missing at Game," "10 Best Celebrity Hair Moments" and "Synchronized Walking Routine."

The cheeky and cheery are occasionally contradicted by grimmer admissions, however. Even Voice of America, that Cold War relic and official mouthpiece of Washington, has this exchange:

[VOA]: "How does it feel from the beginning of the Christmas season from your point of view?

[Cashier]: "It's not that good. It's like so-so, you know."

[VOA]: "So business isn't so great right now."

[Cashier]: "No I don't think so. Because people don't have the money to buy, there are lots of people who don't have jobs."

[VOA]: "Is your job in danger?"

[Cashier]: "Yeah."

Weird, such candor from the VOA. Maybe their CIA check bounced?