SOTT Focus:


Chess

SOTT Focus: UPDATE: Connecting the Dots: The Axis of Evil in Motion Under Peculiar Cosmic Weather



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Update: Dry weather, fires, spontaneous combustion? As it turns out the Taurid meteor event was not a complete bust, more like a combustion:
1st of July 2008 - Witnesses across Southern California say they saw an object 'moving very fast across the northern sky' and falling near the San Bernardino Mountains. Officials have no firm answers on what it was.

From Hollywood Hills to the Nevada state line, people reported seeing a fireball streaking across the sky and falling near the San Bernardino Mountains this morning. But explanations of the mysterious object were scarce.

San Bernardino County Fire Dispatch reported receiving dozens of calls related to what was described as fireball moving at high speed and falling in northwest sky around 10:40 a.m.

"We got quite a few reports. It started with a gentlemen in the Lake Arrowhead reporting a fireball in the Meadow Bay area and then we started getting calls from all over," said San Bernardino County dispatch supervisor Tom Barnes. "Fire crews in Barstow and on I-15 near Stateline came up on the radio and reported an object in the sky moving very fast across the northern sky and described it as yellowish green in color with streaks of debris. It looked like it burned up before it hit the ground."
Now isn't it a "coincidence" that California became engulfed, at its peak, in 1,783 fires across the state, scorching over 527,000 acres, including one in the San Bernardino mountains. Firefighters are still battling over 300 fires. Yet, all the fires are being blamed on "unusual early-summer lightning storms".

Black Cat

SOTT Focus: Neil Entwistle: Psychopath



Entwistle
©Reuters
The face of evil.

You've probably heard the story, or at least one like it. Husband kills wife and child, seemingly without remorse, then attempts to pass it off as a murder/suicide. And, remarkably, people believe him. The latest such example is Neil Entwistle, a British computer programmer, who murdered his American wife and 9-month-old daughter in 2006. He was recently sentenced to life in prison.

The trial made for a fascinating and disturbing spectacle. Aptly described by jurors as a complete narcissist, Entwistle put on quite the display during the presentation of a video of the bloody crime scene. But before we see his reaction for ourselves, let's see what the media tells us we see.

Beer

SOTT Focus: From Cafe to Cybercafe: The Splintering of Society



Coffee and Cigarettes
©Unknown

During a recent visit to Montreal, I was struck by the many changes. I spent the greater part of my life in Montreal, but had not visited in several years. It is normal to find that a place you once lived has changed. Nothing stands still, however, the changes I am referring to go much deeper than the usual new buildings or housing developments.

The social fabric of a community is made up of many elements: knowing your neighbours, or at least recognizing faces on the street; communication with local merchants; places where people get together to meet and talk over a coffee or a drink; population density and the ease of circulating on foot or by bike, via public transportation, or by car. Neighbourhoods with small businesses run by people who live in the area have a different feel from ones that are rife with franchises.

Roaming through my old neighbourhood, the old haunts had disappeared. The local cafe, run by people from the neighbourhood and offering a spot to go and spend an afternoon or evening reading or talking over a coffee and a cigarette, populated with students, professors, artists, writers, and musicians, had gone, replaced by yet another chain offering a prepackaged and franchised atmosphere that could be found anywhere on the planet. The former rows of books, everything from novels, poetry, and drama to philosophy and social science, sitting on battered shelves for people to pick up and browse over a coffee had been replaced by, well, nothing. Emptiness. Mirrors reflecting back the image of the consumer to himself.

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.

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©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.