SOTT Focus:


Bizarro Earth

SOTT Focus: Mother of all gushers - BP Oil Disaster in Gulf of Mexico - A Timeline

Image
© Gerald Herbert/APWe are in deep water
"This is the Seventh Sign: You will hear of the sea turning black, and many living things dying because of it."

White Feather, a Hopi of the ancient Bear Clan.
On Wednesday 21st April an explosion rocked an offshore oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, sending a column of fire into the sky and claiming the lives of 11 oil workers. 52 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon was built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries Shipyard in South Korea. It was owned by Houston based Transocean Ltd, under contract to British Petroleum Plc. Almost immediately a federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of one of the victims in New Orleans, Louisiana, alleging the companies connected to the oil rig explosion were negligent.

The mainstream media has been performing consistently in downplaying just how catastrophic this disaster is, for marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, for inhabitants along the coast and, depending on how this plays out, possibly for the entire planet. Never before has the blind greed of so few been so immediately damaging and obvious to so many. Let us hope that the shock, revulsion and anger generated by this truly catastrophic event inspires masses of people to see how the psychopaths that rule our world guide humanity's destructive trajectory towards oblivion for all life on Planet Earth.

Arrow Down

SOTT Focus: Is It Raining Oil In Florida? This Is Just The Beginning

Image
© Sean Gardner/EPAGreenpeace senior campaigner Lindsey Allen walks through a patch of oil from the Deepwater Horizon on the breakwater in the mouth of the Mississippi river where it meets the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana
As early as May 9 it was announced that FEMA evacuation protocol for forest fires in and around Tampa, Florida could be activated at a moment's notice in the event of the oil slick approaching Florida's coastline. One proposal is to undergo a 'controlled burn' of surface oil in the Gulf to prevent the oil reaching Florida's coast. This would result in highly toxic fumes blowing ashore. In fact, toxic fumes have already been reported elsewhere as Gulf residents complain of breathing difficulties and nausea:
Oil is semi-volatile, which means that it can evaporate into the air and create a heavy vapor that stays near the ground -- in the human breathing zone. When winds whip up oily sea water, the spray contains tiny droplets -- basically a fume -- of oil, which are small enough to be inhaled deep into the lungs. We know that's happening in the Gulf Coast, because people are reporting a heavy oily smell in the air. Already my colleagues in Louisiana are reporting that people in the coastal community of Venice, Louisiana are suffering from nausea, vomiting, headaches, and difficulty breathing.
The following eyewitness account came to our attention yesterday:
Hi all,

Making this quick, don't feel well. About 4:15pm or so eastern, coming back from Tampa, Florida north on Veteran's Expressway...about 7 miles perhaps from SR 54...it sprinkled some gray watery and solid black oil on my car. Thought it was bugs, but so fast did not make sense and windshield wipers just smeared it. Got out of car at store and looked on the paint and solid black dots on my car...I touch? huh? it's wet? it's OIL!!!!!

I had several folks verify it before I sprayed it off and it came off easier than the few love bugs. Two hours later still wet like OIL! nope, not water, smell it, OIL!!!

Health

SOTT Focus: Poisoned Water

Image
© SOTT.net
Arthur Miller wrote, "An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." It's becoming increasingly clear that we are living through such a time. The information age is dissolving many of the lies of corporate capitalism. The rapid exchange of knowledge on the Internet has made the excesses of globalization transparent. It's high time for pointing out the pink elephants and debunking the myths of the system. So here's some more dirt under the fingernails of the American Empire: fluoride. For half a century in North America the commonly held belief has been that fluoride is good for our teeth. This is a PR lie concocted by the most infamous "mad man" of Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. The truth is that fluoride is poison. Yet on account of the longevity of the lie, to this day there is poison in our toothpaste and in our drinking water.

In most of North America, if you turn on the faucet in the kitchen or the bathroom, the water that pours out will be laced with hydrofluorosilicic acid. It's designated a Class 2 poison by the EPA, an acute toxin worse than lead and almost as bad as arsenic. According to the National Cancer Institute it's a known carcinogen. Hydrofluorosilicic acid is a byproduct of the Florida phosphate fertilizer industry. It comes straight from the stacks of industrial plants. It's illegal to dump it into freshwater lakes and rivers because it's toxic to life. Yet it's being trucked in oil tankers all over the United States and Canada to be sold to municipalities that pump it into our tap water. Yet enough scientific evidence has mounted against fluoride that three U.S. judges have ruled in federal court that fluoridation represents an "unreasonable risk" to the public, and the public is beginning to get wind of the danger.

Arrow Down

SOTT Focus: Smolensk Crash - A Wake-Up Call For Us All?

Image
© EPALying in state: The late president and his wife's coffins are on public view in the Column Hall of the Presidential Palace ahead of their funeral on Sunday
For the second time in 70 years, Poles were horrified to learn that the leadership of their country was almost wiped out in a sudden and tragic aircraft crash in a forest outside the western Russian city of Smolensk.

On April 10, a Polish Air Force Tupolev TU-154M carrying aboard Poland's president Lech Kaczynski, his wife and a delegation of high Polish representatives crashed in thick fog on its approach to a Russian ex-military airport in Smolensk. All 88 passengers and 8 crew on board were killed.

From the outset, personal and political interest seems to have been high on the agenda for the trip, with security notably lacking.

No Entry

SOTT Focus: 'Ashteria' is a Pretext to Shut Down International Air Travel

Volcanic revolution
© SOTT.net
The pathocracy's desperate push for control is leading many otherwise intelligent people to believe they are seeing things that are not really there. On April 15 British airports were told by the British Civil Aviation Authority to begin grounding flights. At the same time, the Air Traffic Control Service for the UK (Nats) imposed restrictions on where planes could fly after the government's Meteorological Office warned that ash could damage jet engines. By April 17 most routes in northern Europe were suspended and the shutdown had spread to TransAtlantic flights. All the while Europeans were subject to nauseating platitudes from politicians about passengers' safety being their "paramount concern." If jet engines could not withstand the "dangerous ash cloud" that had magically disguised itself as clear blue skies, why then was NATO playing multiple war games over European airspace during the lockdown? At least 60 aircraft (including fighter jets) from Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, USA, France, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom and Sweden took part in the Brilliant Mariner maritime exercise... while all commercial jets were grounded (because "safety was our paramount concern"). In fact, there may have been more military exercises taking place during this time.

If passenger safety was the primary consideration throughout this fiasco, why then has the airline industry and the relevant regulatory authorities repeatedly suppressed the findings of independent studies that sound the alarm over a very real danger facing passengers and crew alike during air travel?

Book

SOTT Focus: Satire: Leaked Reports Declare Obama's Unwritten Novel Wins the Lost Man Booker Prize

Obama book
© unknownObama shares ideas for his new book with critics
London - Leaked reports reveal that on Wednesday, début Hawaiian novelist Barack Hussein Obama II, 49, will win the Lost Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, with "No Peace for the wicked!". It will be the first time in it's 41-year history that an unwritten book will claim the award.

He will receive a designer bound copy of his novel (once it is published) at a gala dinner in London and can expect not only overnight literary fame but also a sharp rise in much needed popularity he has lost in the run-up to House of Representatives and Senate elections.

The Lost Man Booker Prize is a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1970.

To pre-empt any potential controversy, Booker organizers have announced that they have a written certificate dated 1970 that clearly shows Obama had an intention to write a book about peace one day. The organizers have stated however, that this certificate will never be released to the public and they should just take their word for it.

Phoenix

SOTT Focus: Connecting the Dots: Plane Madness Redux and Looking-Glass Weather

Image
Mother Nature revealed its awesome beauty this month as our Big Blue Marble continues to open up in breathtaking fashion. The sight of Eyjafjallajokull coming to life, while beautiful to behold, may set a terrifying trend as volcanoes wake from their slumber and impact our climate in a sudden and system-changing way. Perhaps it is not without meaning that the first significant volcanic eruption to draw people's attention to our rapidly cooling climate took place in IceLand... the harbinger of IceWorld?

April witnessed deluge after deluge of torrential rains bringing flooding, landslides and misery to many in the Americas and China where large cities are underwater. Arctic-cold weather in the least expected places, more frequent earthquakes and hailstorms of unusual ferocity have extended winter in the northern hemisphere into May, raised seabeds and pelted homes with ice.

Dramatic and significant though it was, did the volcanic eruption in Iceland really merit the unprecedented shutdown of European airspace for a week, with knock-on effects across the world? Who made the call, and on what basis? These are important questions to ask because Eyjafjallajokull's wandering ash cloud now apparently holds the near-term fate of international air travel in its plume, so to speak. With cosmic bombardment underway and magma erupting from the oceans' floor, wrangling over the immediate fiscal losses detract from necessary preparations for the approaching ice age.

As always, the stresses and strains in our environment are mirrored back at us in the political and social events of which we play a more immediate role. We will analyse the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Polish government air crash, the political and corporate back-room manipulation of "Tea Party" activism and the psychopaths on Wall Street's engorgement upon humanity through economic terrorism. We'll observe how The Big Brother Surveillance State and naked scanner racketeering expand unchecked, and consider the geopolitical chess moves behind the Kyrgyz and Thai "Red Shirt" revolutions.

And, of course, we couldn't connect the dots in April without acknowledging the high strangeness of the global UFO wave...

Eye 2

SOTT Focus: An Odd Rash of Stabbings

Image
It had been so long since I checked in with a "mainstream" news site, I decided to visit cnn.com this morning for fun.

An article that caught my eye was (All bold print in this article will be my added emphasis):
Minnesota man charged with stabbing 29 pigs (5-5-2010)
A drunk man stabbed 29 pigs in Minnesota, hurting them so badly they had to be slaughtered, according to charges filed against the man by police.

Curtis Adams, 23, said he did not remember stabbing the pigs, but did not deny having done it, Detective Matt Owens said in court papers. (continues)
It turns out the man was drunk, but something struck me as odd. I decided to search via Google News to see what other stabbing events, if any, had occurred recently.

Comment: There has been yet another fatal multiple stabbing incident reported in China today (May 10):
Eight killed in stabbing spree in East China
Zhou allegedly killed his 10-year-old daughter Zhou Xiaomin at home first, before stabbing his 80-year-old mother despite the woman's pleas for mercy, media reported.

He then broke into a neighbor's home and allegedly killed his wife, 36-year-old Kang Qiuying, their neighbor Hu Dongsheng and Hu's 83-year-old mother, Wu Xiu.

Two other villagers, Ye Wen'e and Zhou Nian Mei, tried running away from the scene of the attack to seek help from the police. But Zhou allegedly stabbed them to death as well. A man, Zuo Huasheng, reportedly became Zhou's eight victim when he ran into the suspect in the street.

Local villagers considered Zhou to be a genial person before the attacks, the village's Party chief, surnamed Gao, told China Daily.

Zhou and his wife also have a 5-year-old son. The family's financial status is reportedly not good and Zhou sometimes went to cities to do odd jobs while his wife farmed at home.

"There has never been such a serious case in the village. The villagers are now very nervous," Gao said.
Update There has been yet another multiple stabbing at a kindergarten in China today (May 12):
Man Hacked 7 Children and 2 Adults in Latest Attack at School
An attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven children and two adults at a kindergarten in northwest China on Wednesday, the latest in a string of savage assaults on the country's schools. Eleven other children were wounded.

The killer, 48-year-old Wu Huanming, returned home after the attack on the outskirts of the city of Hanzhong and committed suicide, the local government reported. A motive wasn't known, although reports indicated he and the school administrator may have known each other. [...]

The attack began at about 8:20 a.m., as children were arriving at the private Shengshui Temple Kindergarten in Hanzhong's Nanzheng county, the government statement said. The area is on the city's rural outskirts in a relatively poor part of the country.

Wu killed the school's administrator Wu Hongying and a student on the spot, then hacked at 18 others, the statement said. Six students and Wu Hongying's mother later died in hospital, it said. [...]

"I saw him (the attacker) before and he looked quite normal," said the man, who would identify himself only by his surname, Li. [...]

Early reports on Wednesday's attack were removed from Chinese Web sites or moved from the home page to inside sections, an apparent attempt to play down the incident. There was no mention of it on state television's national noon news report. [...]

State media has also steered clear of examining what might be motivating school attackers, preferring to focus on increases in security.



Book

SOTT Focus: The Psychopath: A New Subspecies of Homo Sapiens

Image
© AgentSeta
Contrasting Several Evolutionary Hypotheses

The psychopath is a unique and quite dangerous subgroup within our species. He, or she, is capable of deadly manipulations executed with unbelievably cold, calculated intellectual and emotional maneuvers. Charming, lacking in empathy, guilt, responsibility and the normal range of human emotion, they move among us with an often impeccable mask that makes them virtually undetectable. There are several evolutionary hypotheses which attempt to explain their behavior, however the best fit is that they represent a cheating reproductive strategy, one geared towards the production of many offspring for which they afford no long term care.

Support for this thesis comes in a various forms. We know that psychopaths are callous, deceptive, promiscuous, and egocentric (Cleckley, 1941: 337-364). They are also mostly male: almost four times as many more psychopathic men then women (Sigvardsson, et al, 1982). This makes them ideal for mating with many women and then leaving them subsequently, once the deed is done, so to speak. It also confers a psychological advantage in that they have the ability to manipulate women by mimicking emotional attachment, or deceiving them about resources they can offer. The same is also true for female psychopaths, who can often create the impression of being in distress which elicits more financial and physical support from the men they mate with. There is a genetic basis to the trait, demonstrated in many twin adoption studies (Viding et al, 2005 & Larsson et al, 2006: 221-30).

Eye 2

SOTT Focus: Ponerology 101: Snakes in Suits

Image
The criminal psychopath has been observed and studied for almost a century. But except for a short mention by Cleckley, the idea of a successful psychopath - ordinary by almost all external standards - has remained shrouded in that pervasive "conspiracy of silence". As this series progresses, it will become clear why this is the case and what exactly are the ramifications of such a dangerous gap in knowledge and awareness. So far the only in-depth presentation of the problem of successful psychopaths has been Paul Babiak's and Robert Hare's book Snakes in Suits, published in 2006. The book is essential reading, and has the potential to save your life, literally. The information it contains is universal and can be applied to interactions on any social level.

Babiak, as an industrial and organizational psychologist, encountered his first corporate psychopath in 1992. By studying operators like "Dave" in the corporate environment, Babiak not only brought into focus the methods by which psychopaths infiltrate and ascend the corporate ladder of success, he shattered previous illusions about what was and wasn't possible for psychopaths to accomplish. Many in the industry thought psychopaths wouldn't be able to succeed in business. They thought that psychopaths' bullying and narcissistic behaviors would be off-putting to potential hirers, and that their abuse and manipulations would inevitably lead to failure within the company. In fact, the so-called "experts" couldn't have been more wrong. They seemed to have neglected the uncanny ability of psychopaths to present an image of extreme normality, and even excellence, to their victims. And that is what we are to them: victims, potential "marks", suckers.

Comment: Go to Part 4 in the Ponerology 101 series