BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening to disrupt key ocean currents that keep the climate of the Northern Hemisphere temperate. It is also inflicting a wound on the ecosystem by poisoning and killing a large number of sea creatures and interfering with their breeding cycles.

At the same time, the global weather is turning extreme again - this time in the form of torrential rain and floods. In some countries the storms have come after harsh droughts. Such drastic changes destroy crops and affect our food supply, which in turn affect food prices. This would not be the first time the world has faced a food crisis, but now it comes two years into an economic recession that more are beginning to realise is a full-blown 'depression'. As people reach their limits of desperation, they are more likely to take to the streets to voice their anger.

Our leaders, however, are showing no interest in covering the basic needs of the masses nor delivering economic justice. On the contrary, war is all they wish to bring, starting with the Middle East.

It is always a matter of concern when people look to a single individual for their worldview. The Right has its ideological spell-binders from Fox to Republican Congressional leaders. Religious fundamentalists have their "Man" who holds the staff of knowledge and soothes or inflames the congregation. Sports fans have TSN and the Military have their one stop mind-shop in Jane's Defence News along with their catalogue of the latest and greatest in destructive war toys. Fact is, every group and sub-group of people, more often than not, defer to something or someone to help shape their views.

This perhaps is a path of least resistance, chosen usually because one can solicit the goings-on of both sides of the fence from one single source rather than discovering the totality for themselves by direct exposure. Life is so much easier when your reality is pre-digested for you. As it happens, this tendency is just as true of the Left as it is of the Right.

This brings us to one representative of the Left World-View who is extremely intellectual and influential, not only in North America, but the world over. To the many Left thinking/leaning, there are not many of his calibre, and so when issues arise, many may acquiesce first to the words of Noam Chomsky before forming their own opinion which usually ends up being a kind of synthesis of Noam's own mind-view.

In an ideal society, those chosen to represent and lead the people would be chosen because they had shown 'leadership qualities' - honesty, integrity, intelligence (both emotional and intellectual) and, most importantly, a paternal or maternal protective instinct towards others. In short, leaders would be those that could effectively lead the society in a way that secured the best interests of all. Ideal leaders would certainly not be 'war-like' but rather peace-makers. So why don't we have societies like this around the world today? Does power really corrupt? Is it inevitable that any human being elevated to a leadership role will succumb to the lure of power and control over others and ultimately turn bad and against the people? Do we conclude therefore that the very idea that one or a few should lead the many is simply a bad one?

It's true that human history is embarrassingly bereft of these ideal leaders. The ones that history records as being 'great' were very often the most war-like and directly or indirectly caused the most suffering to innocent people. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, FDR, Winston Churchill....George W Bush?

There have been a few notable exceptions though, Martin Luther King, is one, JFK is another, and there are undoubtedly many less-well-known examples from all over the planet (Benazir Bhutto for a more recent example). But in the case of these three, and many others of similar calibre, you may have noticed that they have an unfortunate tendency to be assassinated by, we are told, irate citizens who bizarrely, cannot abide their attempts to be truly great leaders in the ideal sense. Of course, I am being a little facetious here, because there is strong evidence to suggest that MLK, JFK, Bhutto and many others who were allegedly assassinated by 'lone nuts' were in fact murdered by the competition - the corrupt leaders.

It's been nine years since 9/11. Millions of people, civilians and soldiers have died world wide in the following war on terror. The American people have lost basic rights due to the Patriot Act. In Europe and other countries, similar "security measures" have been implemented. Anyone who has been on an international flight has experienced some of it first hand. Trillions of Dollars are spent on the war on terror, while millions of people have lost their jobs and homes as the economy is disintegrating worldwide. The emperor is naked and there is an elephant in the living room, but to this day the official story of 9/11 has not been significantly challenged publicly.

I find it interesting how people in this day and age talk about a "shift in consciousness" or "awakening" into a "New Age" while after 9 years the biggest lie is still in place. Especially Liberals and people who themselves believe to be "aware" and "conscious", yet they vote for Obama and dare not to question 9/11 or man-made "Global Warming". I think most people simply don't want the truth, for the truth is a tricky thing. It's a can of worms most people are not willing to open, as it will challenge their beliefs and ideals on a core level. Hence, they rather defend/ignore the lie and the lies they tell themselves.

The furthest most people go in regards to 9/11 is that "Bush let it happen" à la Michael Moore, but to realize, by looking into it deeper, that it was actually an Inside Job leading to Israel and not "Islamic Extremists" is still too far out for most people. It's a touchy subject, because it'll require them to question much of what they ever thought to be true about this country and the world in general.

If, as many people are saying nowadays, psychopaths are the ones running our governments, how come we don't know about it? Why isn't it common knowledge, discussed in households and classrooms across the land? Why isn't academia devoting courses to it? In short, why is such a simple, yet revolutionary idea so seemingly secret? The answer may actually be in the question: it is revolutionary, but not in the sense you're thinking! You see, most revolutions are either caused, influenced, or hijacked by psychopaths and quite often this is done by what is called "abuse of psychiatry."

A normal person's actions and reactions, his ideas and moral criteria, all strike the abnormal individual as abnormal. If a person with a personality disorder such as psychopathy considers himself and others like him normal - which is of course significantly easier if he and his friends are in power - then he would consider a normal person different and therefore abnormal.

That explains why, when psychopaths rise to power, as they naturally tend to do, their social systems - including education and medicine/psychiatry - always have the tendency to treat any dissidents - or potential dissidents - as "mentally abnormal". As Lobaczewski wrote, "A normal person strikes a psychopath as a naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories; calling him "crazy" is not all that far away."

Thus, such governments generally control psychology and psychiatry via control of funding and ideationally alert "thought police" in academia, and the myriad ways in which normal people unconsciously respond to a pathological environment begin to be defined as illnesses and "psychiatric solutions", including drugs, are promoted to force normal people to live in a pathological world and think it is normal.

The truth about psychopathy must be degraded and marginalized to prevent it from jeopardizing the system itself, and this very practice is then used as an expedient tool in the hands of the pathological authorities. Anyone who is too knowledgeable about psychopathy will be accused of anything that can be trumped up, including psychological abnormality. They're "crazy", "paranoid", "mentally unstable", and "dangerous".

Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, "Obama's US Assassination Program."

It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.

Nothing was done about it. "National security" placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.

Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a "threat." "Threat" was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.

Originally published in the July-August 2010 issue of The Dot Connector Magazine.

At approximately 4am on May 31st 2010, a group of vessels attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza were attacked by the Israeli navy in international waters off the coast of the occupied Palestinian territories. Nine civilians aboard the largest vessel, the Mavi Marmara, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers and dozens more were wounded. The Israeli government claimed it was exercising its right to self defence. Flotilla members, and much of the international community, saw it as an act of piracy and murder on the high seas that has exposed deep flaws in the Israeli mentality and further alienated it from the rest of the world.

Israel Shamir recently published his opinion on the Wikileaks exposé and in the process took issue with those who had dismissed the leaks as a distraction. While I wasn't named by Shamir as one of the dissenters, I had waxed skeptical in a recent Sott.net editorial on the topic.

I sent the following letter to Shamir:

Dear Shamir,

You title your last missive Wikileaks - The Real Stuff, yet you fail to point to anything "real" or valuable in the Wikileaks documents. Can you point to any detail, either within the documents or within those documents that have been published by the mainstream media that was not already publicly available?

Alternatively, can you point to some evidence that the release of the documents has in some way effected a sea-change in the general public opinion of the US misadventure in Afghanistan? I ask this because, such is the hype surrounding the release of the documents, I think we are all justified in expecting 'big things' as a result.

I don't doubt that the coverage of the Wikileaks documents by the mainstream media has lent extra weight to the long-established truth (as purveyed most notably by the alternative news sites) that civilians are being murdered in Afghanistan, but the precise number of dead is all important, as is where to lay the blame.

Do you really think the Wikileaks documents and the mainstream media reporting on them serve up a dish of raw Truth to the public? Or is it possible that it has been cooked to some extent?

As regular SOTT.net readers will know, a few months ago we inadvertently became caught up, albeit briefly, in the disturbing world of Jim Humble and his alleged cure-all potion 'MMS'. For those that are interested in how that unsavory episode played out, you can read the details here.

To be honest, by now we thought we had closed the book on the Right Honorable 'Bishop' Humble and his friends at Nexus Magazine. Lines had been drawn, positions taken, everyone knew where they stood. But we really should have known better. There's a strange phenomenon that crops up over and over again in our line of work: when you disagree with pathological people, they seem singularly incapable of letting it go and exercising a little 'live and let live' philosophy.

A little over two weeks ago, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a safety alert for MMS which stated that Humble's 'Miracle' solution created a "potent bleach". Now and again, even US government agencies have to get something right. Of course, they only did this after the controversy on SOTT.net brought the issue out into the open.

July 2010 saw extreme weather and the further apparent collapse of our planet's eco-system come front and center. Despite these dire warning signs, the psychopaths in power continue to do their best to obfuscate the facts and embroil as many normal human beings as possible in conflict, strife, suffering and death.

On July 15th, three months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced it had successfully capped the gushing oil well. Its vice president Kent Wells was so relieved that he said, "I am very excited that there's no oil in the Gulf of Mexico." It's hard to know what to make of such a comment after his company leaked 5,000,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps he thought that with the oil flow halted, BP was suddenly off the hook and free to carry on as normal? Apparently so, as the company announced several days later it will soon begin drilling to even greater depths off the coast of Libya. So did this latest effort to cap the well actually work? We can't know for certain because we have to take BP's word for it. Remember that it was in BP's interest to underestimate the oil flow rate; the lower the oil flow rate, the less they have to pay the US government and the local Gulf population in fines and compensation. The true cost to the whole planet may be higher than anyone could have imagined.

Read on for the web's best comprehensive summation of the current state of our planet...