SOTT Focus:


Butterfly

SOTT Focus: Enough Hand-wringing! What You Can Do

The SOTT editors receive a great deal of mail every day. A lot of those letters run on the theme of "What can I, one person, do in the face of so many problems and such overwhelming odds? It's impossible."

The SOTT News Service subscribes to the "butterfly effect", dedicating itself to continuous pushing against the pathocratic oppression we all suffer under. Small incremental efforts by many people can engender massive change, IF kept up persistently. The scope of our individual freedoms are maintained only by the collective effort of all who care about those freedoms.

Heart

SOTT Focus: In Memoriam: Andrzej M. Łobaczewski

Andrzej M. Łobaczewski
© sott.netAndrzej M. Łobaczewski, November 2005
The editors of sott.net were recently informed that, after a long period of illness, Dr. Andrzej M. Łobaczewski passed away in late November of last year. Łobaczewski was the author of Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes.

He was born in 1921 and grew up on a rural estate in the piedmont vicinity of Poland. Under the Nazi occupation of Poland he worked on the family farm, was an apiarist, and then a soldier of the Home Army, an underground Polish resistance organization. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, the family estate was confiscated and the Łobaczewski family was driven from their ancient home.

Comment: See also: The Theory of Positive Disintegration

Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes


Pistol

SOTT Focus: The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 5 - Sirhan Sirhan



JFK and RFK
©Unknown

We conclude our look at the Robert Kennedy assassination with a view to revealing new evidence and a few hints at just how wide the spider's web is.

Comment: If you'd like to know more, here is some recommended reading:

The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Turner and Christian)
An Open & Shut Case (Joling and Van Praag)
Programmed to Kill (McGowan)
Political Ponerology (Lobaczewski)

And, for your viewing pleasure
Evidence of Revision (5 DVD set)


Magnify

SOTT Focus: Target Chavez: Framing and demonisation



chavezworld
©worldproutassembly
Evidence that Chavez is planning a world communist revolution and corrupting the minds of the youth in Venezuela.

Not content with their preparations for war against Iran, a war that is worryingly looking like it will involve the use of a nuclear weapon by Israel and the US while blaming the detonation on Iran, it seems that Venezuela and particularly Hugo Chavez are in the cross-hairs of the imperial war machine.

The most recent chapter of the story starts with a Columbian air raid against a camp in Ecuador on March 1st. The camp was the location of a group from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who were negotiating the release of some 700 prisoners. The raid killed FARC's second in command and top negotiator, Raul Reyes, and 23 other people, including 5 Mexican students. The air raid, followed up by a raid by special forces, was an armed incursion into Ecuador's sovereign territory and therefore an act of war against Ecuador (consider how the US would react if such an act were carried out by Iran into Iraq, let alone by Canada into the US) but this has conveniently been forgotten in the excitement that eight perfectly intact pieces of computer hardware were found at the scene of devastation.

Comment: For additional context to the ongoing vilification of Chavez, see the following:

James Petras' Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism and Venezuela: A Dictionary of Euphemisms of the Liberal Opposition

John Pilger's Latin America: the attack on democracy

Nikolas Kozloff's Controversy Over Guajira -- U.S. Military Bases in South America

Naomi Klein's Venezuela's Media Coup

Eva Golinger's Chronology of the 4th Generation War Against Venezuela

Troy Turner's Propaganda alert : A portrait of Hugo Chavez and his influence on American lives


Fish

SOTT Focus: Penn Guinn's French adventures

Continuing his whirlwind tour of the democracies of the world: Israel, Italy, and now France; Guinn has touched down in the land of frogs' legs, feasts and funky cheese.

Sarkozystan: the arrival; Our Man Guinn arrived in style, the $200,000-a-trip private jet being used by nameless French sub-ministers was unfortunately not available, luckily under the new regime, non-cronies of Sarkozy are provided with lush travel accommodation.

Image
©Unknown
After some breathing assistance, the man from Antarctica is back, ready for his French adventures.

Sherlock

SOTT Focus: The Assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 4 -- Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole

In Part 3 we looked at one way in which people, manipulated by beliefs that have been programmed into them throughout their lives, can become unwitting accomplices in a conspiracy. However, that is the soft side of this subject; there is a hard side, too. Many more people that hold positions of power and trust are very willing accomplices.

RFK at Rockaway
©Unknown

Sherlock

SOTT Focus: Book Review: 9-11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press

The mind of David Ray Griffin is refreshingly clear and logical. With his exceptional gift for discerning significant distinctions he has, once again, produced a meticulous critical analysis of documentary evidence that is astute and compelling. In "9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press,"

Dr. Griffin presents a sequence of irrefutable facts drawn from documents and testimony that demonstrate twenty five internal contradictions in the official 9/11 story. As each contradiction is presented, the author juxtaposes documented timelines and official memos, eye-witness testimony, television broadcasts and news articles that are logically inconsistent with the narrative contrived by the 9/11 Commission.

Griffin objectively questions these contradictory narratives, some of them inherent within individual alibis, and observes that the Commission avoided confronting these inconsistencies by eliminating all mention of them in its report. Facts that could not be logically refuted were strategically omitted, thereby erasing from the historical record all evidence of possible perjury and complicity. Each chapter is devoted to one category of contradictions and ends with the request that Congress and the press investigate this inconsistency.

Bomb

SOTT Focus: Batten down the free-speech hatches, it's time to bomb Iran



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©Nate Sullivan

The recent network related attack on SOTT.net known as ARP poisoning which redirected traffic to sites hosting malicious software comes at a curious time. While presidential candidates are pledging allegiance to Israel at AIPAC meetings, the Israeli Prime Minister is ordering Bush to prepare for strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

His warning also comes on the heels of former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, warning of an impending Israeli strike against Iran:
As a result of misguided American policy, the threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East. The United States' enemies have been strengthened, and Iran - despite being branded as a member of the so-called "axis of evil" - has been catapulted into regional hegemony. Iran could never have achieved this on its own, certainly not in such a short time.

A hitherto latent rivalry between Iran and Israel thus has been transformed into an open struggle for dominance in the Middle East. The result has been the emergence of some surprising, if not bizarre, alliances: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraq are facing Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Sunni Arab states, all of which feel existentially threatened by Iran's ascendance.

The danger of a major confrontation has been heightened further by a series of factors: persistently high oil prices, which have created new financial and political opportunities for Iran; the possible defeat of the West and its regional allies in proxy wars in Gaza and Lebanon; and the United Nations Security Council's failure to induce Iran to accept even a temporary freeze of its nuclear program.

Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: Connecting the dots of a crash: A cyclone, a quake, insanity plague, and a bloody handshake



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The events of the year are unfolding rapidly, and May indicates a huge building up of pressure in the inner and outer worlds of humanity. Once again natural disasters moved to the forefront of the news reports, with Burma suffering a huge cyclone followed shortly afterward by the devastating earthquake in China.

Not only were there hundreds of thousands of lives lost in these tragedies, but all signs point to hurried moves being made by the Powers That Be to ensure a war with Iran that could spiral out of control into a global conflict that would make World War II look like a tea-party at the beach. Then we also have a crop of other interesting patterns appearing as the US economy further subsides, including a huge spike in oil prices, plus more incidents of Taser abuse and other signs of growing public hysteria. Behind the hysteria we see the shadow of the psychopath, with which the name of Josef Fritzl became synonymous for the whole world. While predators like Fritzl give a good example for the rest of us of the damage that a single psychopath can do on their own, less obvious is the extreme potential for destruction represented by the well-adapted types - many of whom currently occupy the halls of power and have well-formed, insidious networks with which to protect themselves from exposure.

Pistol

SOTT Focus: The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 3 -- The woman in the polka dot dress



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As we dig deeper into the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, things get curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

It seems there are some things that people just "know." There are no such things as ghosts, astrology and psychic powers are just ploys used to get money from the gullible, the chances that Earth will be hit by a comet within our lifetimes are astronomical (forgive the pun) and everyone deep inside is basically the same: just trying to be good as they understand it.

The strange thing about this kind of "knowing" is that no one can tell you just how they know. Ask them how they know that two plus two equals four and they will have at least a vague recollection of their early school years. But ask them how they know about ghosts, astrology, psychics, comets and the psychology of the rest of humanity and you'll likely get a response that is something akin to, "Everybody just knows that." But the question bothers me. Just when did "everyone" learn these things and why can't they remember having learned them?