SOTT Focus:


Bomb

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

SOTT Focus
SOTT.net
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:52 UTC


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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.
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Alarm Clock

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

SOTT Focus
SOTT.net
Sat, 31 May 2008 21:50 UTC


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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.
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Pistol

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

AB
Sott.net
Sat, 31 May 2008 00:29 UTC


Image

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?
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Bell

SOTT Focus: Voices in the Wilderness

Harrison Koehli
sott.net
Tue, 27 May 2008 19:50 UTC


fighting
©AP
This is American culture. And the world better like it...

When I look at the sorry history of this planet I can't help but come to the disturbing conclusion that our notions of human "progress" are grossly overstated. I cannot see how things are any different now than they were three thousand years ago. Sure, the outer forms of oppression have changed: we view ourselves as considerably more civilized than the empires of old; we publicly denounce slavery, genocide, and injustice. But we are the same animal. With only the illusion of freedom and a hypocritical facade of politically correct "humanitarianism", our world is still characterized by the same brutality, close-mindedness, and shameless egoism; people are still tortured in the most horrible ways imaginable; entire peoples are still butchered; and the mass of humanity is as blind and complacent as it ever was.
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Pistol

SOTT Focus: The assassination of Robert Kennedy, Part 2 - Thane Eugene Cesar

AB
Sott.net
Tue, 27 May 2008 21:04 UTC
As the 40th anniversary of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy approaches, we continue with an analysis of that horrible event. Click here to read Part 1.

RFK and crowd
©Unknown
Bobby Kennedy addresses a crowd

Before we get back to our story, a few words on the word conspiracy. Given the definition of the word that seems to be in vogue with those who seem to have a vested interest in debunking any notion of conspiracy these days, I'd have to say that I am no believer in conspiracy theories. As they'd have it, a conspiracy implies managing to get a whole lot of people, from the top to the bottom and sideways in both directions, to knowingly maintain a consistent lie over a long period of time. This would include everyone from the lowest on the totem pole to all of the attorneys, reporters and witnesses involved in an incident.
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Pistol

SOTT Focus: The assassination of Robert Kennedy - Part 1

AB
Sott.net
Sat, 24 May 2008 14:38 UTC


Bobby Kennedy
©Unknown
Bobby Kennedy campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

June 5th marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, as Hillary Clinton so insensitively reminded us recently. The facts of the assassination reveal a web of lies and deceit that continue to this day, not only in the continued refusal to release documents and re-examine evidence that might expose the truth of that horrific night, but in the continued manipulation of events and public perception that moves the world closer each day to economic collapse and keeps it in a state of perpetual war.
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War Whore

SOTT Focus: War Whores : US propaganda ramping up against Iran

SOTT Focus
SOTT.net
Thu, 22 May 2008 21:30 UTC
The rabid dogs of the US media have been out in force against Iran and Ahmadinejad in particular.

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©sott.net
For whose benefit is the US election farce being run?

Ann Coulter, that bastion of good taste and rational thought, spewed a piece with the catchy title "If we could talk to the Animals", in which she praised Bush's Knesset speech last week, paints Ahmadinejad as McHitler and Barack Obama's comment that he would speak with Iran as appeasement.

The spleen with which she rants, devoid of any truth, and the depths to which she will stoop to push her War Whore agenda knows no limits. She even refers to Barack Obama as "B. Hussein Obama" - now that is really cheap, isn't it? But when you're selling the supreme crime against humanity (war of aggression), stooping so low is a matter of course.

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USA

SOTT Focus: Piecing Together Barack Obama

Joan Wallace
Sott.net
Wed, 21 May 2008 21:40 UTC


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©Unknown

A disturbing New York Times Op Ed piece from May 12th entitled "President Apostate?" by Edward N. Luttwak indicates that Barack Obama would be viewed in the Muslim world as an apostate, given he was born to a Muslim father but left the faith, a crime that under Muslim law, Luttwak states, is punishable by death. Luttwak keeps his commentary to what he perceives to be the diplomatic complications engendered by this situation were Obama to become president, however the implied threat of assassination is not without serious resonance.
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Heart

SOTT Focus: Arna's Children

SOTT Focus
SOTT.net
Thu, 15 May 2008 14:43 UTC


Arna Ashraf
©www.arna.info
Ashraf Abu-elhaje, an actor (1996) in the theatre of Jenin refugee-camp. Ashraf leads a large group of fighters in the battle of Jenin 2002. Ashraf was killed by a rocket fired from a helicopter.

Last night I sat through the screening of a documentary called "Arna's Children". Arna was a Jewish woman, who moved to Jenin refugee camp in Palestine and there created a center for children. The screening was organized by the 'Palestine Solidarity Campaign' to mark the 60th Anniversary of Al-Nakba - the Palestinians "day of Catastrophe" when the state of Israel was illegally established on their land. The film is the work of Juliano Mer-Khamis, Arna's son and an actor. Through the creative arts and games, Arna tried to help the Palestinian children of the camp express their feelings of anger, frustration and helplessness as they see their houses demolished by Israeli tanks, their people murdered by Israeli soldiers.

Juliano created a theatre group as part of Arna's center for children which helped give a voice and meaning to the lives of Palestine's children. It also allowed them to dream of a better future. But living in Jenin camp, under the occupation and brutal oppression by the IDF, we follow their lives to see that they did not become actors, painters, teachers, doctors, whatever it was they dreamed of. Many grew up to become resistance fighters, two of them killed by the Israeli army during fights, one during a "suicide attack".
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Coffee

SOTT Focus: Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
SOTT.net
Tue, 13 May 2008 07:45 UTC


Jabberwocky
©Rodney Matthews

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings." (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll, 1872, jabberwocky)
In the last installment of my series about comets and asteroids, I quoted John Lewis of the University of Arizona who said:
Astronomy books and papers far too numerous to cite offer the assurance that "no one has ever been killed by a meteorite."
We now know, from that article, that this is very far from the truth. We also know that we do stand in some peril at the present time and that our governments seem to be concealing that fact, lying to us, distracting us, and generally making sure that the resources that they collect from the masses are not used on behalf of those masses, but rather to enrich and ensure the survival of that small minority of pathological individuals at the top; in short, we're all being royally screwed.

In that last article, I also quoted some excerpts from a couple of news items that expose the fact that science is controlled and manipulated by politics. It has, apparently, become something of a scandal during the Bush Administration. Scientific reports have been censored, suppressed and falsified particularly in regards to health and environmental research. Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, came right out and said that the White House itself has been directly involved in the suppression and falsification of science. Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists informs us that "the public and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific information." (Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics)
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