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Alarm over the public loss of trust in science

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | August 18, 2016

A blast of fresh air from the new Editor-in-Chief of Science. “Science editor-in-chief sounds alarm over falling public trust. Jeremy Berg warns scientists are straying into policy commentator roles.”

You may recall my previous article that bemoaned what was going on with the journal Science — Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt’s op-ed that was published in Science : Beyond the two-degree inferno. If you read my post on this (at the link), I can’t recall much that has disturbed me more than McNutt’s overt alarmisn and advocacy in the context of her role as Editor-in-Chief of Science.

A summary of my concerns:

… my main concern is this – the editorial was published in Science and written by McNutt who is the CHIEF EDITOR for Science.  Science, along with Nature, has far and away the highest impact factor of any scientific journals on the planet – Science matters. Like Nature, Science sends out for review only a small fraction of the submitted papers. Apart from the role the Chief Editor may have in selecting which papers go out for review or eventually get published, this essay sends a message to the other editors and reviewers that papers challenging the consensus are not to be published in Science. Not to mention giving favored status to papers by activist authors that sound the ‘alarm’ – pal review and all that. After all, ‘the time for debate has ended.’

Well, Marcia McNutt has moved on, she is now President of the National Academy of Sciences. I have a separate set of concerns about that one, but at least she is no longer involved in the arbitration of published scientific research in the U.S.’s premier science journal.

There is a new Editor-in-Chief at Science: Jeremy Berg. See the press release from Science [link].  Excerpts:

Jeremy Berg, a biochemist and administrator at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in Pennsylvania, will become the next editor-in-chief of Science magazine on 1 July. A former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) who has a longstanding interest in science policy.

Times Higher Education has a new article on this:  Science Editor-in-Chief Sounds Alarm Over Falling Public Trust.

Well the title certainly caught my attention. Lets take a look at what Jeremy Berg has to say about his new position. Excerpts from the Times article:

As the new editor-in-chief of Science, a highly selective journal that still has the controversial power to make scientific careers, the biochemist and former University of Pittsburgh senior manager is worried about an apparent rejection of science by some parts of the public – and thinks that academics should look closely at how their own behaviour may have contributed.

“One of the things that drew me to this position… is there’s a crisis in public trust in science. I don’t pretend to have answers to that question but it is something that I care deeply about.”

Berg acknowledges that society’s confidence in science does “wax and wane” over time but thinks that, this time, things are different.

In the US, “scientists have been labelled as another special interest group”, he says.

Part of this is down to the polarisation of American politics and the rise of an anti-intellectual spirit, Berg thinks. His fears echo Atul Gawande, an American health writer, who earlier this year told graduating students at the California Institute of Technology that “we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities”.

But researchers are not entirely blameless for this rising hostility, thinks Berg. Too often they have gone beyond explaining the scientific situation and ventured into policy prescriptions, notably in the case of climate change, he thinks. “The policy issues should be informed by science, but they are separate questions,” he says. “Scientists to some degree, intentionally or otherwise, have been mashing the two together,” he adds, and urges scientists to be more “transparent” about “where the firmness of your conclusions end”.

But some in the scientific community argue that high-profile journals such as Science are partly to blame for the very overhyping of results that Berg decries.

A paper published in 2011 made waves after it found that there was a correlation between journal impact factors (JIFs) – which measure average paper citation rates over the past two years and are highest for prestigious journals such as Science, Nature and Cell – and the rate of retractions. Science had the second highest rate of retractions among the journals studied, below only the New England Journal of Medicine.

JC reflections

Wow. I haven’t been so heartened by statements from ‘establishment’ science in a long time. What is really astonishing is that Science chose Berg, who represents a marked change from the advocacy/activism of McNutt.

Berg gives me some optimism that ‘establishment’ science may move in the direction to address some of the issues raised in my recent post The Troubled Institution of Science.

I look forward to reading Jeremy Berg’s future op-eds in Science.

August 19, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

The Democrat’s foolish War on Climate

By David Wojick | Climate Etc. | August 17, 2016

The party platform adopted at the Democratic National Convention, on page 45, calls for a national mobilization on the scale of World War II. What enemy deserves the wrath endured by Hirohito and Hitler? Climate change! Democrats want to declare a war on climate.

Here is the amazing declaration: “We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.”

This scale of mobilization is incredibly expensive and disruptive to people’s lives, something to which the Democrats seem oblivious. Great sacrifices by average Americans were required for mobilization during the Second World War, enforced by massively intrusive government authority. Is this what the Democrats want, the supreme government control that comes with a wartime effort?

To begin, there was widespread government rationing of essential products. For most families, driving was limited to just three gallons of gas a week. If the Democrat’s war on climate is designed to curtail fossil fuel use then will gasoline again be rationed, in spite of longer commutes due to massive post-war suburbanization? What about natural gas and coal-fired electric power? Meat and clothing were also rationed. Will this be repeated?

Even worse, many consumer products were simply not produced; their production prohibited in favor of war materials. These included most appliances, including refrigerators, plus cars, of course. Today’s banned appliance list might well include computers, smart phones and televisions, and again cars, as well as air conditioners and refrigerators. Will all these technologies be stopped in favor of building climate war materials like windmills, batteries and solar panels?

Not only is mobilization horrendous, there is no scientific justification for it. It is now clear that what is called “lukewarming” is probably the correct scientific view. Human activity may be causing a modest global warming that is actually beneficial. Beyond that climate change is natural and so beyond human control.

The only purpose for which a war on climate makes sense is justifying a massive increase in government power. Mobilization means controlling both production and consumption, as well as wage and price controls, all of which require detailed central planning of economic activity. This in turn requires a host of new agencies, programs, boards, etc. We have seen it all before.

Of course we have had so-called “war” policies before, such as the war on drugs. But these were mostly metaphorical policy names, typically just a shift in focus with a modest budget increase. The Democratic platform is very different because it specifies that the scale of the war on climate will be comparable to the Second World War mobilization, which entailed wrenching lifestyle changes.

If the Democrats are in fact serious, then we are talking about central economic planning on a massive scale, imposing great sacrifices on Americans, all in the futile name of stopping climate change. Sacrifice is harmful in its own right so this raises a host of moral issues. Which immediate harms will be deemed less harmful than speculative future climate change? Medical care is now a major sector of the economy, will it be curtailed? Will poverty be left to languish, or even encouraged via wage controls? Will travel be forbidden? Unfortunately the platform gives no clue, so this should be a major election issue.

In fact the specter of a WWII-scale mobilization to fight climate change dwarfs everything else proposed in the Democrats’ platform combined. It is also contrary to most of these other proposals, given the widespread restrictions that mobilization requires. Perhaps they do not understand what they are calling for, but if they do then they need to tell us what it is. Clarifying and justifying this outrageous mobilization declaration is essential to the election process.

Voting for mobilization without knowing what it means would be incredibly foolish.

David Wojick is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

August 19, 2016 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

BBC, Indian Monsoon, And More Lies

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | August 19, 2016

 

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Welcome to the latest barrage of lies and misinformation from the BBC:

This week I went to the scene of terrible tragedy.

A river, swollen by raging monsoon floodwaters, had torn down a bridge on the main road between Mumbai and Goa.

More than 30 people are thought to have died when the great stone structure crashed into the torrent, taking with it two buses and a number of cars.

Some of the bodies were swept more than 60 miles downriver in two days.

We produced a short news report.

In the heart-wrenchingly brutal calculus of the newsroom, this isn’t a major story. But zoom out, and you begin to see the outlines of a much bigger and more worrying picture.

India, indeed the whole South Asia region, has been riding a rollercoaster of extreme weather.

The summer monsoon is the most productive rain system in the world, and this year the region is experiencing a strong one. The floods it caused have affected more than 8.5 million people; more than a million are living in temporary shelters; some 300 people have been killed.

Though what really caught people’s interest was the three baby rhinos rescued from the waters in the north Indian state of Assam.

The fact that 17 adult rhinos drowned got rather less attention.

But the important point is that the region is awash with water. Just a few months ago, it was a very different story. The previous two monsoons were unusually weak. The result was a terrible drought in northern India, and parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

And it was exacerbated by another extreme weather event – record heat.

India experienced its highest temperature ever this summer, a blistering 51C.

Rivers ran dry; water holes evaporated; reservoirs became dusty plains. And, once again, the statistics were staggering.

More than 300 million people were affected by water shortages – the equivalent of the entire population of the US. A city of half a million people was left completely dry. It had to rely on supplies brought in by train.

As if that weren’t bad enough, in spite of the drought, the country was hit by a series of unseasonal rain and hailstorms. They caused such terrible damage to crops that some farmers were driven to suicide.

All these examples of extreme weather were widely reported, rightly so. What tended not to be discussed was the underlying cause.

We are all interested in weather; few of us want to be told – once again – that our lifestyles are disrupting the global climate. Yet the truth is that many climatologists believe the monsoon, always fickle, is becoming even more erratic as a result of global warming.

The picture in the last couple of years is complicated by the fact that the world has been experiencing a particularly strong El Nino, the periodic weather variation caused by warming of the sea in the Pacific.

But a series of long-term studies have shown the number of extreme rainfall events in South Asia increasing while low-to-moderate events are decreasing. And increasingly erratic and extreme weather is precisely what scientists expect climate change will bring.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted “rainfall patterns in peninsular India will become more and more erratic, with a possible decrease in overall rainfall, but an increase in extreme weather events”.

Since the monsoon accounts for as much as three-quarters of rainfall in some areas, any change is a huge issue. The more extreme the storms, the more likely we are to see more tragedies like the shattered bridge I visited this week.

Now, since you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll excuse me if I take a moment to ram my point home a little harder because there is growing evidence that climate change isn’t just restricted to South Asia.

Ask anyone who follows the issue and they’ll tell you that this year is already well on the way towards becoming the hottest ever. The previous record was last year; before that it was 2014. In fact, the 11 warmest years have occurred since 1998.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about the weather, just that we need to talk about the climate too.

This is all too typical BBC fare – pick a weather event, hype it up as something unusual, connect it to climate change and say they are going to get worse!

So let’s do a bit deconstruction.

1) Far from the floods being a “terrible tragedy”, the Indians themselves regard heavy monsoon rainfall as being extremely benevolent. Indeed, the reporter Justin Rowlatt’s opening comment reveals the BBC’s metro liberal outlook on the world.

If he had bothered talking to the Indian authorities, he might have discovered that the Indian economy benefits in all sorts of ways, not just agricultural production, for instance here.

As Gaurav Kapur, senior economist at the RBS, Mumbai, stated earlier in the year:

The forecast of a better-than-normal monsoon is a welcome development coming after two years of drought and considering the state of the rural economy and the impact on food inflation. If indeed we end up having a better-than-normal monsoon, and spatial distribution of monsoon and production indicators point to a normal year, then RBI’s comfort for another rate cut will increase.

“Monsoon has a big linkage effect on not only rural income but overall growth and inflation and if we have another sub-par monsoon, then contribution of farm sector to GDP will be near zero.”

The Indians accept that floods are an unfortunate, but necessary evil. It is drought that they really fear.

2) You may have noticed that nowhere is there any input from the India Meteorological Dept, or for that matter any other local experts.

If Rowlatt had bothered to check with the IMD, they would have told him that, so far, this year’s monsoon has been perfectly normal:

 

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http://www.imd.gov.in/pages/press_release_view.php?ff=20160818_pr_51

3) They might also have told him that, historically, big swings from year to year are the norm. Quite simply, there is nothing “extreme”, “erratic”, or otherwise unusual about recent monsoons, despite Rowlatt’s claims.

 

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The consistently wettest period was from the 1930s to 50s, when the world was warming up. By contrast, global cooling after 1960, brought a succession of droughts. HH Lamb described this period:

In the first quarter of the century, there was a severe drought in N and NW India every 3rd or 4th year. Then, as the Earth warmed up and the circumpolar vortex contracted, the monsoon rains penetrated regularly into Northern India, and drought frequency declined to 2 in 36 years, from 1925-60. But since 1960, with the cooling of the Earth and the southern movement of the subtropical high pressure areas, drought frequency has been increasing again and the probability may be now more than once a decade.

4) It is well established that monsoon rainfall tends to be below normal during El Nino years, hence the the dryness of the last two years.

5) Rowlatt refers to a record temperature set earlier this year, clearly in an attempt to link this with the floods. However, long term temperature trends in India are notoriously unreliable, given the massive urban expansion across the country.

Indian monsoons are the result of land warming up faster then the sea in summer, thus drawing in moist air from the ocean.

Significantly, a study by Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll of the Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology last year found that the opposite had been happening, and that the landmass has actually been cooling as The Hindu reported:

The summer monsoon has been showing a weakening trend over the past century with decreasing rainfall over large regions of the Indian subcontinent. The monsoon occurs because the land heats up much more than the ocean and the warm air over the land rises and results in low pressure. This causes the rain-bearing winds from the relatively cooler ocean to blow on to the land and cause rainfall. That is, it is the strong thermal contrast between land and ocean that results in a strong monsoon.

However, a recent study by Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll of the Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune and others, and published recently in the journal Nature Communications contends that this thermal contrast has been decreasing in the past decades, i.e., the land has been cooling and the ocean warming and the monsoon has shown a decreasing trend during the past century.

August 19, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Putin: Vital to Revive Economic Ties With Ukraine – Putin

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© Sputnik/ Sergey Guneev
Sputnik – 19.08.2016

Russia deems it vital to restore economic relations with Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday after appointing the former education minister to the post of trade envoy with the neighboring country.

Putin accepted the prime minister’s proposal to appoint Olga Vasilyeva as the new Minister of Education and Science. Her predecessor Dmitry Livanov was assigned special envoy for trade and economic relations with Ukraine.

“The development of trade and economic relations [with Ukraine] should be in the permanent field of our attention,” Putin said during a working meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on arrival to Crimea.

Noting Livanov’s “purely civilian” credentials with extensive public sector experience, Putin noted that his “personal business acumen will help in building and reviving economic relations with our neighboring country, which is important to us.”

August 19, 2016 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

MSF leaving Yemen after Saudi airstrikes on hospitals

Press TV – August 19, 2016

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has announced that it is evacuating its staff from six hospitals in northern Yemen, saying it cannot get assurances that its hospitals will not be bombed again by Saudi warplanes.

The decision was “never taken lightly,” said the Paris-based relief agency in a statement on Thursday, condemning the Saudi “indiscriminate bombings and unreliable reassurances”.

“Given the intensity of the current offensive and our loss of confidence in the Saudi-led coalition to prevent such fatal attacks, MSF considers the hospitals in Sa’ada and Hajjah governorates unsafe for both patients and staff,” it added.

The MSF decision to pull its staff out of the war-torn country was made following a number of deadly Saudi airstrikes on MSF-run hospitals, the most recent of which was carried out on Monday on Abs Hospital in Hajjah province. The airstrike killed at least 19 hospital staff and patients and wounded 24 others.

In a report released on May, the international aid agency said at least 100 staff members, patients and caretakers had lost their lives and 130 others had sustained injures due to the Saudi aerial attacks on over 80 MSF-supported and run health structures in 2015 and early 2016.

The MSF said that it had held two meetings with high-ranking Saudi officials involved in the war on Yemen in the past eight months and had been assured that attacks on hospitals would end.

“Aerial bombings have however continued, despite the fact that MSF has systematically shared the GPS coordinates of hospitals in which the organization works with the parties involved in the conflict,” the statement further read.

Yemen has been under Saudi military strikes since late March 2015. The war was launched in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who has stepped down as Yemen’s president but is now seeking to grab power by force.

The air campaign, carried out without any international mandate, has killed about 10,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local Yemeni sources.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

Hasidic ‘Shomrim’ receive no punishment after assaulting black American

RT | August 18, 2016

A gay black man was brutally attacked by five men in 2013 and has spent the last three years fighting for justice. Unfortunately, he may never see it. Two of five Hasidic neighborhood patrolmen have been sentenced, but will spend no time in jail.

On Tuesday, two men charged with gang assault, punishable by up to 25 years in prison, walked away with a sentence of community service and three-year probation for an attack that left 24-year-old Taj Patterson blind in his left eye.

Pinchas Braver, 22, and Abraham Winkler, 42, were two of five men that assaulted Patterson.

Whether Patterson was attacked for being gay or black or a combination, he’ll never know.

“I was alone. I was an easy target. I’m black. I’m gay, a whole slew of reasons,” Patterson told the Gothamist.

Patterson was walking through South Williamsburg when he was stopped by five members of the neighborhood patrol group known as the Shomrim. Patterson told the New York Daily News it was about 4:00am when the men knocked him down, shouting, “Stay down, f****t!”

Multiple people claim to have seen the attack.

Evelyn Keys, an MTA bus driver, intervened when she saw what was happening. She described the jackets the men were wearing to the Daily News in May, saying, “I know the first letter is an ‘S.’ Under those three letters there was a word that started with an ‘S.’”

“That wasn’t a misdemeanor,” she said.

Mariano Ortiz, 33, told the Daily Mail that his attempt to photograph the attackers’ license plates nearly ended with him being mowed down.

“One of [them] tried to hit me,” Ortiz said.

Despite the witnesses, the case faced a number of hurdles before even being investigated. Patterson attempted to report the attack to the police, but was dismayed to discover that it had been closed a day later. The report said that Patterson was attacked by only one man and claimed that Patterson was “highly intoxicated, uncooperative and incoherent.”

Patterson believes that racial issues factored into their decision, telling the Daily Mail, “I think they saw this black kid . . . and they might have seen the Jewish guys and thought he must have done something wrong because the Jewish guys wouldn’t do anything wrong.”

It took his mother, Zahra, to contact media sources for the attack to be investigated.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 1 Comment

NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for ‘American Power’–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime

By Jim Naureckas | FAIR | August 17, 2016

“How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?”

New York Times: How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer

The New York Times‘ “faith in American power.”

The piece never really got around to explaining, though, how Honduras became the most dangerous place on Earth. That’s American power, too.

Reporter Sonia Nazario returned to Honduras after a three-year absence to find

a remarkable reduction in violence, much of it thanks to programs funded by the United States that have helped community leaders tackle crime…. The United States has not only helped to make these places safer, but has also reduced the strain on our own country.

Nazario described US-funded anti-violence programs in a high-crime neighborhood in the Honduran city San Pedro Sula:

The United States has provided local leaders with audio speakers for events, tools to clear 10 abandoned soccer fields that had become dumping grounds for bodies, notebooks and school uniforms, and funding to install streetlights and trash cans.

She offered the results of this and similar programs as evidence that “smart investments in Honduras are succeeding” and “a striking rebuke to the rising isolationists in American politics,” who “seem to have lost their faith in American power.”

But Nazario failed to explain how American power paved the way for the shocking rise in violence in Honduras. In the early 2000s, the murder rate in Honduras fluctuated between 44.3 and 61.4 per 100,000—very high by global standards, but similar to rates in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala. (It’s not coincidental that all three countries were dominated by violent, US-backed right-wing governments in the 1980s—historical context that the op-ed entirely omitted.) Then, in June 2009, Honduras’ left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup, kidnapped and flown out of the country via the joint US/Honduran military base at Palmerola.

The US is supposed to cut off aid to a country that has a military coup—and “there is no doubt” that Zelaya’s ouster “constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup,” according to a secret report sent by the US ambassador to Honduras on July 24, 2009, and later exposed by WikiLeaks. But the US continued most aid to Honduras, carefully avoiding the magic words “military coup” that would have necessitated withdrawing support from the coup regime.

Internal emails reveal that the State Department pressured the OAS not to support the country’s constitutional government. In her memoir Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton recalled how as secretary of State she worked behind the scenes to legitimate the new regime:

In the subsequent days [following the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras, and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.

With a corrupt, drug-linked regime in place, thanks in large part to US intervention, murder in Honduras soared, rising to 70.7 per 100,000 in 2009, 81.8 in 2010 and 91.4 in 2011—fully 50 percent above the pre-coup level. While many of the murders involved criminal gangs, much of the post-coup violence was political, with resuscitated death squads targeting journalists, opposition figures, labor activists and environmentalists—of whom indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was only the most famous.

At one point, it seemed like Nazario was going to acknowledge the US role in creating the problems she gives “American power” credit for ameliorating. “We are also repairing harms the United States inflicted,” she wrote—but the explanation she gives for that was strangely circumscribed:

first by deporting tens of thousands of gangsters to Honduras over the past two decades, a decision that fueled much of the recent mayhem, and second by our continuing demand for drugs, which are shipped from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras.

No mention of the US supporting Honduras’ coup, or the political murders of the US-backed regime.

At one point, three-quarters of the way through the lengthy piece, Nazario did acknowledge in passing the sinister role the US plays in Latin America:

It will take much more than this project to change the reputation of the United States in this part of the world, where we are famous for exploiting workers and resources and helping to keep despots in power.

Surely it’s relevant that some of the despots the US helped keep in power were in the country she’s reporting from, and that this led directly to the problem she’s writing about? But she dropped the idea there, moving on immediately to talk about the US’s interest in reducing the flow of child refugees.

The most troubling part of the op-ed is that it didn’t feel the need to acknowledge or even dispute the relationship between US support for the coup and Honduras’ shocking murder rate. The New York Times covered much of this ground, after all, in an op-ed by Dana Frank four years ago (1/26/12). Now, however, that information is down the memory hole—leaving the Times free to tout donations of trashcans and school uniforms as an advertisement for American power.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

John McCain NGO banned as ‘undesirable group’ in Russia

RT | August 18, 2016

Russian prosecutors have recognized the International Republican Institute NGO headed by US Senator John McCain as an undesirable organization, banning the group’s operations in the country and forbidding Russian organizations and citizens from cooperating with it.

“After studying the received files [describing the activities of the International Republican Institute], the Prosecutor General’s Office has made the decision to recognize it as an undesirable group on the territory of the Russian Federation,” reads an official statement from prosecutors, released on Thursday.

Another US organization, the Media Development Investment Fund, was also recognized as undesirable.

Prosecutors added that they had established that the work of the two groups posed a threat to the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order and state security, but gave no further details.

The International Republican Institute was founded in 1983 with the declared goal of the promotion of democracy worldwide through helping political parties in foreign countries.

Since 1993 the institute has been headed by John McCain – a Republican senator for Arizona known for his numerous anti-Russian initiatives and statements.

In early 2015 Russia reportedly included McCain in the list of people subject to personal sanctions, including an entry ban and assets freeze, introduced in response to a similar measures imposed by the United States against Russian officials in 2014.

The Russian Law on Undesirable Foreign Organizations came into force in late May 2015. The act requires the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Foreign Ministry to make an official list of undesirable foreign groups and outlaw their activities. Once a group is recognized as undesirable, all its assets in Russia must be frozen, its offices closed and the distribution of its information materials banned. If the ban is violated, both the personnel of the outlawed group and any Russian citizens who cooperate with it face heavy fines or even prison terms in the event of repeated or aggravated offenses.

About a month after the law came into force, Russia’s upper house released a list of foreign organizations it believed should come under the new restrictions. The list consisted of 12 entries, including such groups as the National Democratic Institute, the US National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute also known as the Soros Foundation.

Several of these groups have already been put on the list of undesirables, including the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation, the US-Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (USRF), and the US National Democratic Institute – chaired by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brazil’s Rousseff vows snap elections if survives impeachment

Press TV – August 17, 2016

Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff has pledged to hold early elections if she survives a vote on her removal from office in an impeachment trial that is expected to conclude this month.

Rousseff, accused of illegally manipulating finances to hide a growing public deficit ahead of her reelection in 2014, is due to stand trial in the Senate on August 25, four days after the Rio Olympics end.

The Globo news organization reported that the actual judgment vote could take place between August 30 and 31.

In a letter to the federal Senate and Brazilian people that she read out on Tuesday, Rousseff said Brazil’s political and economic problems could only be resolved “through popular vote in direct elections.”

“The full restoration of democracy requires that the population be the one to decide what is the best way to expand governability and perfect the Brazilian political and electoral system,” Rousseff said.

“It’s the only way out of the crisis,” she wrote.

Rousseff admitted she had made mistakes, but said she had done nothing worthy of impeachment.

“I have listened to the tough criticisms of my government, for the errors committed,” she said. “I accept these criticisms with humility and determination so that we can build a new way forward.”

Rousseff further said that forcing her out through impeachment amounts to “an unequivocal coup.”

Rousseff impeachment: A timeline

October 9, 2015: Brazil’s federal audit court rules that Rousseff broke the law while managing the 2014 budget, paving the way for opposition groups to argue that the leader should be impeached.

December 2, 2015: Eduardo Cunha, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, agrees to start anti-Rousseff impeachment proceedings.

December 11, 2015: Rousseff presents a petition before the Supreme Court to stop the process.

March 17, 2016: The Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian National Congress, elects a special impeachment commission, which has a majority derived from the ruling coalition, including the Workers’ Party and the Democratic Movement Party (PMDB).

March 29, 2016: The PMDB leaves the ruling coalition, in a split that hurts Rousseff’s chances of derailing impeachment proceedings.

April 6, 2016: The special impeachment commission publishes a report recommending Rousseff’s impeachment.

April 11, 2016: The impeachment commission decides, in a 38 to 27 vote, to let the Chamber of Deputies vote on the president’s impeachment.

April 15, 2016: The Brazilian Supreme Court rejects Rousseff’s motion to stop the process.

April 17, 2016: A total of 367 out of 513 legislators in the parliament’s lower house vote in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment.

May 12, 2016: Senators vote 55 to 22 to suspend the president for 180 days and hold an impeachment trial in the Senate, the upper house of National Congress, with Rousseff slamming the vote and saying she was “being judged unfairly.”

Michel Temer becomes interim president and announces his new cabinet.

May 24, 2016: The interim government is rattled by a leaked audio tape suggesting a plot against Rousseff, a scandal that forces a number of key ministers in the new cabinet to resign.

June 28, 2016: An investigation by a team of independent auditors, comprised of career Senate budget technicians, concludes there is no evidence that Rousseff participated in budget manipulation.

July 18, 2016: Cunha resigns less than three months after he orchestrated the impeachment.

August 16, 2016: The Senate votes to hold an impeachment trial for Rousseff, pushing her one step closer to dismissal from office. Her trial is due to take place in the week after the Olympics closing ceremony.

A week ago, the Brazilian Senate voted to hold an impeachment trial for the country’s first female president.

A two-thirds majority of the Senate, or 54 votes, would be needed to see her permanently removed from office.

If the trial acquits Rousseff, she will be allowed to serve out her term until 2018. But if it removes her permanently, then acting President Temer will become the full-fledged president until the next election in 2018.

Rousseff is also under fire over a graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras, where she was the manager before taking office as president in 2010.

The embattled leader has denied the allegations and repeatedly asserted that she has fallen victim to a plot by the extreme right.

In recent months, Brazilians have held numerous counter rallies in support of and against the impeachment process.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 1 Comment

George Schwartz Soros – The Oligarch Who Owns The Left

By Gilad Atzmon | August 18, 2016

An email leaked recently by Wikileaks reveals that in 2011, Jewish oligarch George Schwartz Soros gave step by step instructions to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on how to handle unrest in Albania.

Soros even nominated three candidates whom he believed to “have strong connections to the Balkans.”

Not surprisingly, several days after the email was sent to Clinton, the EU sent one of Soros’ nominees to meet Albanian leaders in Tirana to try to mediate an end to the unrest.

Soros’ email sheds light on who really sets the tone for the West. Clearly it isn’t our so-called ‘democratically elected’ politicians. Instead, it is a small cadre of oligarchs, people like Soros, Goldman and Sachs. People who are driven by mammonism – Capitalism that is based on trade as opposed to production. The mammonites are interested in the pursuit of mammon (wealth) purely for the sake of mammon.

Soros is, without doubt, the most illustrious mammonite of our time. The Jewish billionaire is the “man who broke the Bank of England,” an adventure that made him more than $1 billion in one day in September of 1992. In 2002, a Paris court found Soros guilty of using inside information to profit from a 1988 takeover deal of Bank Societe Generale. In the days leading to the Brexit vote the speculative capitalist used The Guardian’s pages in an attempt to manipulate the Brits into following his advice on Brexit. Apparently the Brits didn’t heed Soros’ wisdom. And, so far, it seems that Soros’ predictions of doom were far fetched, verging on phantasmic. Still open is the question of why the Guardian provided a platform for the speculative capitalist oligarch. Is it a news outlet or an extension ofMammonism’s long arm?

The Jewish oligarch has developed a huge infrastructure that assists him in pursuing his speculative capitalist agenda. Soros realised many decades ago that it is very easy to buy leftist institutions and activists. Since the 1980s, Soros has used his Open Society Institute to invest a fraction of his shekels in some ‘left leaning’ political groups and NGOs worldwide. Soros funds NGOs, activists and Left institutions that are willing to subscribe to his agenda. They support a cosmopolitan philosophy and are dedicated to Soros’ anti nationalist mantra. The outcome has been devastating. Instead of uniting working people, Soros funded ‘left’ organisations divide workers into sectarian groups defined by gender, sex orientation and skin colour.

Many of those who support Palestinian causes were shocked to discover that Soros funded the BDS movement although he was simultaneously invested in Israeli industry and Israeli factories operating in the West Bank such as Soda Stream.

Soros also bankrolls J Street, the American Jewish lobby group that controls the opposition to the ultra Zionist AIPAC. Looking at the huge list of Soros’ supported organisations reveals that the light Zionist oligarch supports some good causes that are particularly good for the Jews and Soros himself.

Soros seems to believe in the synagogueisation of society. He supports the breaking of society into biologically oriented tribes: e.g., Blacks, Women, LGBT, Lesbians. He has invested millions in dividing the working class. Divide and rule is what it is.

Traces of his destructive Open society Institute can be identified in Iran’s failed Velvet Revolution,  anti Assad NGO activity in Syria, behind  anti Putin intense activism and of course the Gazi Park events in Turkey. These so called ‘civilian’ and ‘popular’ uprisings have at least one common denominator. They attempt to destabilise regimes that oppose Zio-cons as well as the mammonite world order.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Video | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Open Letter Of Aleppo Doctors Is Easily Torn Apart – Bottom Of The Barrel Propaganda

By Brandon Turbeville | Activist Post | August 16, 2016

In 2016, we have become accustomed to relatively childish and easily deconstructed propaganda narratives that are circulated by the U.S. State Department and its mainstream media mouthpieces in order to discredit the Syrian government and drum up support for a NATO-led war on the secular government of Bashar al-Assad.

From scares related to chemical weapons (later demonstrated to be the work of NATO’s terrorists), unproven and largely discredited claims that Assad is “killing his own people” or even that Assad is “supporting ISIS” has become the order of the day in American media. Recently, however, the State Department, office of origin of the “Ghaddafi is handing out Viagra to rapists” propaganda line, has issued yet another pathetic propaganda ploy against the Syrian government – an alleged letter written by alleged doctors alleging that the Syrian military is encircling Aleppo in order to allegedly kill civilians.

Are you sick of the word allegedly yet? Imagine how Syrians must feel. The only truth in the propaganda narrative of the West is that the Syrian military is encircling Aleppo. Beyond that, it has been demonstrated over and over again that Assad’s forces are not targeting innocent civilians. Neither have the doctors in question been confirmed as actually being doctors or even that the letter was written by whoever these individuals might turn out to be. In other words, the whole story of the letter is merely a . . . well, allegation.

Still, the letter has been reported by the Guardian and a host of other Western mainstream media outlets as fact that conveniently tugs at the heartstrings. The letter is being referred to as the Open Letter Of Aleppo Doctors.

In reality, the letter is a semi-carefully crafted act of pro-war propaganda which calls on the United States and the West to “do something” and includes accusations against the Russian and Syrian governments as well as claims of Assad’s (and Russia’s) alleged targeting of hospitals. The letter even has incubator babies for extra effect!

The letter reads:

Dear President Obama,

We are 15 of the last doctors serving the remaining 300,000 citizens of eastern Aleppo. Regime troops have sought to surround and blockade the entire east of the city. Their losses have meant that a trickle of food has made its way into eastern Aleppo for the first time in weeks. Whether we live or die seems to be dependent on the ebbs and flows of the battlefield.

We have seen no effort on behalf of the United States to lift the siege or even use its influence to push the parties to protect civilians. For five years, we have faced death from above on a daily basis. But we now face death from all around. For five years, we have borne witness as countless patients, friends and colleagues suffered violent, tormented deaths. For five years, the world has stood by and remarked how ‘complicated’ Syria is, while doing little to protect us.  Recent offers of evacuation from the regime and Russia have sounded like thinly-veiled threats to residents – flee now or face annihilation ?

Last month, there were 42 attacks on medical facilities in Syria, 15 of which were hospitals in which we work. Right now, there is an attack on a medical facility every 17 hours. At this rate, our medical services in Aleppo could be completely destroyed in a month, leaving 300,000 people to die.

What pains us most, as doctors, is choosing who will live and who will die. Young children are sometimes brought into our emergency rooms so badly injured that we have to prioritize those with better chances, or simply don’t have the equipment to help them. Two weeks ago, four newborn babies gasping for air suffocated to death after a blast cut the oxygen supply to their incubators. Gasping for air, their lives ended before they had really begun. Despite the horror, we choose to be here. We took a pledge to help those in need.

Our dedication to this pledge is absolute. Some of us were visiting our families when we heard the city was being besieged. So we rushed back – some on foot because the roads were too dangerous. Because without us even more of our friends and neighbors will die. We have a duty to remain and help.  Continued US inaction to protect the civilians of Syria means that our plight is being wilfully tolerated by those in the international corridors of power. The burden of responsibility for the crimes of the Syrian government and its Russian ally must therefore be shared by those, including the United States, who allow them to continue.

Unless a permanent lifeline to Aleppo is opened it will be only a matter of time until we are again surrounded by regime troops, hunger takes hold and hospitals’ supplies run completely dry. Death has seemed increasingly inescapable. We do not need to tell you that the systematic targeting of hospitals by Syrian regime and Russian warplanes is a war crime. We do not need to tell you that they are committing atrocities in Aleppo.
We do not need tears or sympathy or even prayers, we need your action. Prove that you are the friend of Syrians.

The letter was signed by the following names:

Dr. Abu Al Baraa, Pediatrician
Dr. Abu Tiem, Pediatrician
Dr. Hamza, Manager
Dr. Yahya, Pediatrician and head of Nutrition Program
Dr. Munther, Orthopedics
Dr. Abu Mohammad, General Surgeon
Dr. Abu Abdo, General Surgeon
Dr. Abd Al Rahman, Urologic Resident
Dr. Abu Tareq, ER Doctor
Dr. Farida, OBGYN
Dr Hatem, Hospital Director
Dr. Usama, Pediatrician
Dr. Abu Zubeir, Pediatrician
Dr. Abu Maryam, Pediatric Surgeon
Dr. Abo Bakr, Neurologist

Of course, the doctors are calling for war and, in this, there is no question. They want the U.S. to intervene directly in Syria and no doubt “liberate” Syria and spread the “democracy” that has left every other “liberated” country the burning heaps of rubble and savagery that they are today. They are calling for the forces of Bashar al-Assad to be defeated so that “rebels,” aka al-Qaeda, al-Nusra (excuse me, Jobhat Fatah al-Sham), Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS, etc. can take over take over the city and impose their pre-historic Sharia rule over civilized people, all with the requisite amount of rape, murder, torture, and pedophilia to go along with “rebel” liberation. Nice work, docs.

But, perhaps I should sarcastically congratulate the State Department instead? After all, there is little evidence these doctors actually exist. Even the Guardian itself was quick to point out that “It has not been possible to verify the names of all the doctors listed in the letter.”

Proving the names of the letter writers is no doubt a difficult task. After all, most of these doctors are pediatricians and, the Telegraph as well as a number of other mainstream outlets told us that the last pediatrician in Aleppo was killed on April 28 (by Assad’s forces of course – rebel bullets are incapable of harming doctors even if they wanted to). Thus, they will truly be difficult to track down.

Not only that, but the names of the doctors who signed on to the letter appear to also be names of well-known terrorists. One name is not even that of a person, but a well-known parlor in Aleppo. What significance this has remains to be seen but, needless to say, we must getting very close to the bottom of the barrel of propaganda narratives.

As Ali Ornek writes for Moon Of Alabama :

We are used to quite a lot of warmongering propaganda against Syria. The “last hospital in Aleppo gets destroyed” – week after week after week, reports by Physicians For Human Rights on Syria turn out to be scams, videos and pictures of “children rescued” by the U.S./UK payed media group “White Helmets” are staged.

. . . . .

Our “western” and Gulf governments pay a lot of our taxpayer money for such anti-Syrian warmongering. The “White Helmets” alone receive $60 million. We should at least demand better fakes and more plausible lies for such large expenditures of our money.

There are three options to consider after analyzing the latest FAIL! of the U.S. propaganda machine. Either the State Department is running out of money, Americans are so dumbed down that cheap narratives such as this one actually work, or the war machine is simply throwing everything against the wall in its march toward Syria and its Path To Persia.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 1 Comment

Turkey considering military ties with Russia as NATO shows unwillingness to cooperate – Ankara

RT | August 18, 2016

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has lashed out at NATO, saying the alliance is not fully cooperating with Ankara. In an interview with Sputnik, he hinted that Turkey would consider military cooperation with Russia.

Cavusoglu says that Ankara has become alarmed at the lack of willingness shown by NATO to cooperate with Turkey, which is a member of the alliance.

“It seems to us that NATO members behave in an evasive fashion on issues such as the exchange of technology and joint investments. Turkey intends to develop its own defense industry and strengthen its defense system,” he said in an interview with Sputnik.

“In this sense, if Russia were to treat this with interest, we are ready to consider the possibility of cooperation in this sector,” Cavusoglu said when asked about the possibility of working with Russia in the defense sphere.

It is Cavusoglu’s strongest rebuke of NATO to date. In an interview with the Anadolu news agency on August 10, he said that Turkey and Russia would look to establish a joint military, intelligence, and diplomatic mechanism, while adding that relations with NATO were not as satisfactory as he would have wished.

“Turkey wanted to cooperate with NATO members up to this point,” he said. “But the results we got did not satisfy us. Therefore, it is natural to look for other options. But we don’t see this as a move against NATO,” he told Anadolu.

Meanwhile, a week ago, the Turkish ambassador to Russia, Umit Yardim, said NATO has no right to dictate foreign policy to Ankara.

“In no way can NATO limit our contacts with other countries… It means NATO has no right to dictate its terms and tell us who we should or should not meet and communicate with,” Yardim said on August 11, as cited by RIA Novosti.

The warming of relations between Turkey and Russia, which were previously at a low after a Turkish warplane shot down a Russian warplane over Syria in November, has led to apprehension in the West.

Cavusoglu also previously pointed out that there is growing resentment in Turkey due to a perception that the EU and US have only been giving mild support to Ankara in the wake of the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 15.

Turkey has been incensed by the US’ refusal to hand over cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara believes organized the attempted coup.

The Turkish government wants Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, to be extradited to face trial at home, but Washington has repeatedly refused. The US says it needs clear evidence that there was a link between Gulen and the attempted coup before it will consider complying with Turkey’s request.

Speaking to Sputnik, Cavusoglu accused the West of treating Turkey and Russia like “second class countries” simply because they did not see eye-to-eye.

“They consider Russia and Turkey to be second class countries, and they are outraged that these second class countries dare to criticize them… Therefore, faced with the straightforwardness and resilience of Erdogan and [President Vladimir] Putin, they feel very worried and anxious,” Cavusoglu said.

Cavusoglu’s criticism was not restricted to NATO, as he launched a broadside towards the West, saying it was largely responsible for the crisis in Ukraine.

“Look at what has happened in Ukraine,” he told Sputnik. “They were always threatening the country and forcing it to make a choice between them and Russia. They were saying, ‘you will either be with us or with Russia.’ This course of action is futile. What is happening in Ukraine is a reflection of the main problems in the region.”

In contrast, the Turkish diplomat says that Ankara wants peace around the Black Sea region and does not want it to become an epicenter for tension. He called on all parties to try and find a peaceful resolution and said there needed to be greater dialogue between Russia and NATO.

“There should be no threats emerging in the region for anyone, for Turkey, for Russia or for anyone else,” Cavusoglu said.

According to the minister, the need for dialogue with Russia was apparent at the last NATO summit. “In my opinion, all existing issues should be overcome through establishing dialogue,” he added.

August 18, 2016 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 1 Comment

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