Israel Grants Settlers Millions to Monitor Palestinian Construction in West Bank
Israeli forces carry out a demolition in the Massafer Yatta area. (Photo: via Twitter)
Palestine Chronicle | January 2, 2021
Israel has granted illegal settlements more than $6 million to fund drones and patrol units to monitor “unauthorized” Palestinian building in the occupied West Bank.
The Settlement Affairs Ministry published on Thursday the criteria for settlement councils to gain access to the $6.2 million in funding, Haaretz reported.
The councils will be able to buy drones, vehicles and electronic monitoring equipment and pay the salaries of inspectors with the funding.
Those inspectors will monitor Palestinian construction in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is under full Israeli control.
Palestinians living in Area C must acquire Israeli permission to build, but such permits are near-impossible to get. Just 1.4 percent of requests were approved between 2016 and 2018, according to official data.
Buildings constructed without an Israeli permit are regularly demolished by the military.
The funding will also go to erecting fences to close-off areas.
It is the first time settlement councils will have access to such funds as part of the state budget.
Under the arrangement, settlement councils will then report to an “Area C situation room” to report to officials what Settlement Affairs Minister Tzachi Hanegbi described as the “hostile takeover of land in Area C”.
More than 400,000 Israelis live in settlement communities in the occupied West Bank which are considered illegal under international law.
American Tax Payers Spend At Least $23 Billion On Israel Every Year
By Eric Striker – National Justice – January 1, 2021
Last September, Donald Trump accidentally upended an entire generation of myths invented by the left and right that purport to explain America’s costly and unpopular military adventures in the Middle East:
“The fact is, we don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We’ve been very good to Israel. Other than that, we don’t have to be in the Middle East. You know there was a time we needed desperately oil, we don’t need that anymore.”
As Mondoweiss pointed out at the time, the explosive admission went completely unmentioned in the mainstream media, which traditionally hangs on every one of Trump’s words and reacts hysterically.
Categorizing America’s foreign policy catastrophes as done in the service to Israel has until the Trump era always been dismissed by media tastemakers and political gatekeepers as rank anti-Semitism driven by reductionist, simplistic and conspiratorial thinking, even when intelligence officials like Michael Scheuer and foreign policy experts affirm the view.
Trump’s lack of subtlety when remarking on using American blood and treasure to incrementally advance the interests of the Jewish state is one reason why the Israel lobby, which is perpetually paranoid about the public noticing their activities, is not keen on reciprocating his often suffocating love.
Their paranoia is justified. This year Congress made the mistake of combining its $900 billion dollar coronavirus stimulus bill, which suffering people are closely following the development of, with the yearly $1.4 trillion dollar fiscal budget, which is typically ignored.
A deluge of popular anger was provoked by news that we would only be receiving a $600 dollar check under the guise of budget austerity. At the same time, buried deep in the 5,600 monstrosity was a provision setting aside supposed budget constraints to give Israel the equivalent of $5,000 dollars for each of its citizens.
Jews in the media responded to the controversy by calling indignant American tax payers, including actress Alyssa Milano and various left-wing journalists, “fools” and “anti-Semites.” They doubled down by stating that the $500 million dollars provided to Israel was a drop in a $2.3 trillion dollar bucket. They pointed out that other countries, such as Jordan, were receiving foreign aid as well.
But even critics of Israel do not properly calculate the true price Americans pay for a state that — unlike South Korea or Germany — does not provide any economic or military benefits to the homeland. America does not have military bases in Israel, nor does Israel have anything to trade.
The general figure provided for annual US aid to Israel is $3.8 billion, but as former CIA intelligence officer Philip Giraldi has written, this figure excludes our completely artificial $9 billion dollar trade deficit with that country, as well as the $8 billion provided in “loan guarantees” that are basically giveaways since the US Treasury pays interest and principal on these loans.
The Black Budget
Covert “black budget” funding to the Jewish state is another topic shrouded in mystery.
In 2015 a public interest group, the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, sued the CIA for its refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding records on how much is spent in service of Israel, including in respect to intelligence gathering efforts on American citizens that is then sent to the Mossad.
The Department of Justice fought a ferocious, four year long legal battle to keep this information secret and ultimately won.
Based on publicly available pre-1990 black budget expenses, the CIA is dedicating between $13.2 billion to Israeli interests every year if spending has been tacked to inflation. The number may be even higher under the Trump administration, especially since it has escalated the conflict with Iran.
US Spending To Advance Israel
Rarely discussed is how US foreign aid to Muslim countries is, as Trump has constantly reminded us, nothing more than bribing them into cooperating with Israel. US aid to Israel, by contrast, is unconditional.
All of the nations that share a border with Israel (Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and even to certain players in Palestinians and Syria) receive payments from the United States. Were it not for the peculiar, thankless relationship America has with Israel, US tax dollars would not be bankrolling the entire Egyptian military, nor would we be propping up the basket case monarchy in Jordan by handing them 4% of their GDP every year.
The following is a list of expenses — financial, geopolitical, and human — that the American people must shoulder to guarantee the security, stability and geopolitical expansion of 9 million Israelis.
1) Egypt — $2.2 billion a year
The United States’ foreign aid to Egypt, about $1.3 billion which goes to its military and the rest to its economy, is entirely predicated on the country’s military dictators maintaining a close intelligence and diplomatic relationship with Israel. The country’s current leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, took power in 2014 in an Israeli-backed coup that deposed the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt, which was once a regional superpower that fought the Israelis during the Six Days War, restored diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 under a US brokered deal.
The single-issue relationship was put on display when Senator Rand Paul attempted to cut aid to Egypt during a 2017 Congressional fight. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), five US Senators and Benjamin Netanyahu himself all intervened to block Paul’s amendment, which was crushed in the Senate by a large majority after Jewish groups penned a letter demanding the aid continue as usual. According to both Netanyahu and AIPAC, America’s payoff to the Egyptian military establishment is the only thing keeping Israel’s formidable neighbor from attacking them.
2) Jordan — $1.5 billion a year
In 1994, Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to restore formal ties with Israel.
Prior to 1994, Jordan received a smaller sum of aid from the US, but the country retained relative geopolitical independence, including support for Saddam Hussein during the first Persian Gulf War.
As a state bordering Palestine that for years retained its claim to the West Bank, the Jordanian monarchs have been a useful asset for Israel. The country’s establishment is widely despised by Palestinians, even though the Jordanian public is broadly sympathetic to their plight.
In exchange for breaking solidarity with the Arab world’s boycott of Israel, the United States signed a generous free trade agreement with Jordan, where we prop up their economy by buying 25% of their exports and hand them $1.5 billion a year (close to 4% of their GDP) via USAID.
3) Iraq — $1.1 Billion (Excluding cost of the Iraq war)
The Iraq war, and our continued presence in the country 17 years later, is the product of Jews in Washington primarily loyal to the state of Israel.
This is the opinion of the man who went before the United Nations and went down in history as having sold the weapons of mass destruction lie, former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In Karen DeYoung’s 2007 biography of Powell, Soldier, he singles out Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz as the real architects of war. In one interview with DeYoung, Powell even refers to Donald Rumsfeld — the Gentile who is usually blamed alongside Dick Cheney for the Iraq debacle — as a man controlled by the “JINSA crowd” in the Defense Department. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is an Israel lobbying firm similar to AIPAC.
If JINSA and the “card-carrying Likud members,” as Powell is reported to have remarked once, were not making foreign policy calls in Washington the war would’ve never happened.
It could be argued that the trillions spent on perhaps the most wasteful military conflict in American history was a subsidy to Israel.
4) Saudi Arabia – $1.1 Billion a year
Saudi Arabia, the nation which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, also lobbies the United States government through AIPAC.
The Trump administration was able to secure public Saudi support for Israel by promising $100 billion dollars in modern weapons, including F-35s, to the Gulf state. AIPAC and the Israeli government are both considered to have been the kingmakers in the deal.
The Saudi government, along with another nation that recently established official ties to Israel the, United Arab Emirates, are both state-sponsors of terrorism, including sending American weapons to Al-Qaeda.
The official sect of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is Wahhabism, which is the puritanical and violent dogma that inspires both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda.
To understand how deep terrorist ideology is penetrated in Saudi society, a Saudi Royal Air Force pilot being trained in a $740 million dollar US-funded Pentagon program to learn how to fly the F-35s killed three American servicemen and injured eight others at the Pensacola Air Station in Florida in a quickly memory holed terrorist attack last year. A study from 2014 found that citizens of Saudi Arabia were the largest private donors to ISIS in Syria and beyond.
5) Afghanistan – $5.4 Billion a year
As with Iraq, the 2001 war in Afghanistan and our ongoing presence there, is part of a containment strategy of Iran done in the interest of Israel.
According to former National Security Agency analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, the Pentagon’s logic behind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was to create a military pincer that would surround Iran. In a 2009 interview, Kwiatkowski stressed that Iran was not a threat to the United States or its interests, but rather only to Israeli regional hegemony,
The Israelis have been using Afghanistan to spy on the Iranian military and engage in various black ops against their country. The Iranians appear to be fighting back, including by restoring ties for their historical nemesis, the Taliban. Israel fears that an unconditional US withdrawal could end up working to the advantage of Iran.
When earlier this year Donald Trump said he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — a move supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people — JINSA and AIPAC were the sole interest groups to vocalize opposition and began pressuring the Senate to ensure it didn’t happen. The Jewish lobby succeeded, and Rand Paul’s bill last July that would’ve brought our soldiers home was defeated by a bipartisan vote of 60 to 33.
6) Palestine, Lebanon, Syria — Fluctuates
The three nations bordering or occupied by Israel receive aid from the United States in an attempt to present carrots and sticks that prevent factions from fully uniting, but the spigot is turned off and on regularly at the behest of Israel.
Last year, the US State Department cut aid to Lebanon’s military in half after a direct appeal to do so by the Netanyahu government. The complaint was that the Lebanese military was not doing “enough” to undermine Shi’ite military and political power. The US typically funds the Lebanese military as a counter-force to Hezbollah, but after the Shi’ite militia successfully defended Lebanon’s territory from an Israeli invasion in the 2006 war, the group has enjoyed nationalist support across the diverse religious groups in the country.
Hezbollah’s work in defending Christians from ISIS in recent years has also been a political game changer, as traditionally grievances from Christian organizations have been exploited by Israel to leverage against the Palestinian cause.
In Palestine itself, the Palestinian Authority under Mohammad Abbas has enjoyed about half a billion US dollars in aid, both to politically divide him from Hamas controlled Gaza, as well as subsidize the humanitarian costs of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank.
Abbas’ strategy of “negotiating” with Israel through America is in retrospect an abject failure. Illegal settlements in the West Bank have continued uninhibited, and the Palestinians in the territory narrowly avoided the full annexation of their land by Israel. While the annexation project appears to have been put off, experts believe Israel will attempt to do so once Israel has a better foothold in the region.
In Syria, which Wikileaks of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed as nothing more than a regime change operation on behalf of Israel, the United States continues to spend close to a billion dollars every year in “humanitarian” relief.
While the coalition of the Syrian Army, Russia and Iran have largely defeated the ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels, the US is combining its humanitarian aid to anti-Assad areas while attempting to starve the country with crippling sanctions. By providing support to certain regions through USAID, Washington and Israel are artificially extending the conflict between Assad and the anti-government fighters, the latter which would’ve totally surrendered otherwise.
Future Expenses Under Trump’s “Israel-First” Agenda
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have been able to secure support from multiple Muslim nations for Israel by directly offering big payments and controversial favors as a trade.
Here is what this “diplomacy” will cost Americans.
1) Morocco –$3 Billion and the Western Sahara
Under Trump’s deal with Morocco, its king Mohammed VI will receive $3 billion dollars in investments courtesy of the US taxpayer through the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity created by Donald Trump, in exchange for recognizing Israel.
The more concerning aspect of the deal is Trump’s recognition of the disputed Western Sahara as Moroccan, as well as a deal to sell the Moroccan military billions in American arms to give them a strategic edge over Algeria and Western Saharan natives.
The interests of the Western Saharans are represented by the Polisario Front, a nationalist group seeking independence and self-governance. The Moroccans and Polisario Front have been engaging in intensifying armed battles since November, a month before Trump’s outreach to Mohammed VI. With American recognition of the Western Sahara, the Polisario Fronto will have lost diplomatic leverage and potentially have no choice but to fight the Moroccans — thus initiating a potential conflagration in North Africa if Algeria maintains its pro-Saharan position.
2) Indonesia — $2 Billion
Trump’s DFC is reaching out to Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim nation — to provide $2 billion in US aid in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel.
The offer appears to have been rejected, with Jakarta announcing that it stands firmly behind the Palestinian cause.
Unlike Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Indonesia is a parliamentary democracy. Supporting Israel remains highly taboo among the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, so it remains to be seen if the Indonesian state will end up accepting America’s money.
3) Sudan — $1 Billion and Taken Off State-Supporter of Terrorism List
Sudan is an important flashpoint in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Iran uses Sudan as a transit point for smuggling arms to the Palestinian resistance.
The Israelis and the United States have exploited racial strife between blacks and Arabs in Sudan — funding the black side in Darfur (South Sudan) — during the country’s bloody civil war. The conflict has been winding down, but the Sudanese state and economy remains in dire straits largely due to sanctions over being a state-sponsor of terrorism.
During the 1990s, Sudan was blamed for housing Osama Bin Laden following the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Under Trump’s deal, Sudan will be absolved of all blame after paying a fine and receive a billion dollars in debt forgiveness and economic aid in exchange for establishing formal relations with Israel.
4) Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, etc — Unknown
The Saudis have been sinking billions of dollars into fellow Gulf States to encourage them to support Israel since 2018, according to leaks to Arab media.
According to the documents, the Saudis were working on behalf of the US government in this endeavor, promising their neighbors a “generous aid package” from America just for collaborating with the Jewish state.
As written before, the Saudis and UAE are receiving over $120 billion in US weapons — an idea that previously would’ve been a non-starter in Washington due to potentially undermining Israel’s qualitative military edge over Arabs.
By showing loyalty to Israel, Saudi Arabia has been able to secure support in Washington for its barbaric war in Yemen. When the US Congress passed a resolution to end US support for the Saudi war effort, Donald Trump vetoed the bill and, unlike the NDAA, no attempt was made to override this decision.
The full extent of what the US plans to provide Gulf States for their internally unpopular backing for Israel is not yet possible to know.
The Real Cost of Israel
While previous packages of US foreign aid to Muslim countries on behalf of Israel were presented as an objective pursuit for “peace in the Middle East,” the Trump administration’s efforts have directly led to new and bloody conflicts (the Yemen war), and opened up the floodgates for new ones around the world.
All that is certain is that Trump’s concessions and arm’s deals pursuit of recognition for Israel is objectively making the world more dangerous and unstable.
A perfect dollar estimate of how much Israel is costing our country is impossible due to the opaque nature of Washington’s servility to the Zionist state.
In spite of this, we can arrive at a range. The on paper cost of Israel, when we include the “loan guarantee” scam and payments to neighboring countries to advance Israel’s interests, is at least $23.1 billion a year.
This figure excludes speculative figures on the black budget in service to Israel, which if correct, would bring that number to $36.3 billion. It also excludes aid to Palestine and Lebanon (which may return next year), as well as costs related to the proxy conflict with Iran, which almost all foreign policy experts agree is entirely motivated by Israeli — not American — interests.
This number will balloon under Donald Trump’s plan, which is expected to be continued uninhibited under a Joe Biden presidency. Trump’s outreach to the Arab world will put us on the hook for at least an extra $6 billion, which again, is an extremely conservative estimate since we are excluding the shady deals with the Saudis and other Gulf States.
Thus, the $3.8 billion figure that already outrages much of the American public is at the bare minimum about $23 billion per year, but could potentially be closer to $50 billion.
This price of this luxury item in the Middle East is almost half of all American foreign aid, and does not serve any humanitarian purpose (often times, the other way around), much less the interests of the American people. Understanding the outrage this sum would provoke among US voters and taxpayers, groups like JINSA and AIPAC, along with the disproportionately Jewish owned media, ensure that it is never accurately reported.
Police Keep Secret List of Kids with Bad Grades Labeling Them “Potential Criminals”
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | January 2, 2021
Pasco County, FL — In the ostensible land of the free, we are told that all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty by their peers. To those who’ve been paying attention, however, we know that “innocent until proven guilty” is a farce into today’s police state. If you doubt this assertion, you need only look at the data to see that a whopping 74% of people in jails across the country — have not been convicted of a crime.
While it is true that many of these folks are awaiting trial for crimes they did commit, there are innocent people behind bars for the sole reason that they cannot afford bail. A free country — who claims to protect the rights of citizens — should not be keeping hundreds of thousands of presumed innocent people in cages, yet this is the status quo.
A recent report from the Tampa Bay Times shows just how determined the American police state is to guarantee an assembly line of otherwise entirely innocent people to continue this process. Police in Florida are targeting children in an attempt to label them as criminals at a young age — despite the children being entirely innocent.
The Pasco sheriff’s office has a secret list of students it believes could “fall into a life of crime” based on ridiculous standards like their grades.
By these standards, people like Thomas Edison, one of the most successful inventors in human history, could’ve been labeled a criminal after he was kicked out of school at age 12 for being poor at math and unable to concentrate.
Steven Spielberg, the famous movie producer, may have been labeled a criminal as well after he temporarily dropped out of high school only to return to be put in a “special ed” class.
Kids often make poor choices when they are younger and these choices should never put them on some police watch list or criminal database. This is nothing short of “pre-crime” tactics that ultimately lead to segregation of dystopian societies based on ratings from the state.
Nevertheless, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office uses data from the Pasco County Schools district and the state Department of Children and Families to compile this very list from middle and high schools who they think will turn out to be criminals.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff’s office defended the tactics and said its data-sharing practices with the school district goes back 20 years and are intended to keeping school campuses safe. Only a juvenile intelligence analyst and the school resource officers have access to the information, it said.
The department says they use this information to help troubled kids, but the parents of these kids have no idea that police are surveilling their children to potentially label them as future criminals.
“These programs, in conjunction with the School District’s Early Warning System, provides recommendations to community or school based programs or resources, and mentorship to those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, something academically proven to lead the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects,” a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.
School officials explained that they didn’t even realize this child surveillance was happening.
School District Superintendent Kurt Browning and the principals of two high schools told the newspaper they were unaware the sheriff’s office was using school data to identify kids who might become criminals.
“We have an agreement with the Sheriff’s Office,” Browning said in a statement. “That relationship has been strengthened in the wake of the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and that includes processes for a two-way sharing of information that could save lives and result in timely interventions with students who are at risk.”
The program, called the Early Warning System tracks students’ grades, attendance and behavior. If a student was a victim of abuse or witnessed abuse, this increases their chances of police labeling them a criminal.
What qualifies for an “at risk” designation could be anything from getting a “D” on a report card to missing school more than three times in a quarter, according to the program’s manual. Other factors include witnessing domestic violence, having a parent in prison and being the victim of abuse or neglect.
The sheriff’s office then compiles this information — combined with grades and other data sets — and puts it into a system that scores children in 16 categories. The unwitting children are then each assigned a label: On Track, At Risk, Off-Track or Critical.
Hundreds of children are on this list.
The sheriff’s office denies that the list is used to label kids as criminals, and claims it is instead used to identify kids at risk for victimization, truancy, self-harm and substance abuse. As the Times reports, however, future criminal behavior is the only designation on the list and the office had a hard time proving anything else:
But the intelligence manual — an 82-page document that school resource officers and other deputies are required to read — doesn’t mention those other risks. Instead, in five separate places, it describes efforts to pinpoint kids who are likely to become criminals.
The office could not provide any documents instructing school resource officers to interpret the list another way.
The idea of cops spying on children in an effort to predict future criminal behavior is chilling. Thankfully, the Tampa Bay Times’ report has shed some much-needed light on the practice.
“Can you imagine having your kid in that county and they might be on a list that says they may become a criminal?’ Linnette Attai, a consultant works with student privacy laws,” told the Times. “And you have no way of finding out if they are on that list? This is a district that is sending millions of dollars to the sheriff of Pasco County to target its students as criminals.”
Indeed, this is worse than Minority Report.
To Promote Climate Alarm, Good News Is Regularly Portrayed as a Disaster
By H. Sterling Burnett | Watts Up With that? | January 1, 2021
Dishonesty has seemingly become the hallmark of reporting on climate research. In 2020, the dishonesty reached new heights as multiple studies which actually presented (or that could have presented) good news, were portrayed by the researchers involved and media hacks covering them as if they showed purported human-caused climate change was causing various disasters. The truth is, time and again, the data—often including data provided by the studies—refutes the claimed climate disaster, instead showing the environment getting better. Below I’ll deconstruct a few examples of this fearmongering habit.
Recently, The Guardian and other media outlets have claimed an updated atlas of bird habitats shows global warming is “pushing” birds further north. The Guardian’s story would lead one to believe birds en masse are being forced out of shrinking natural habitats into unsuitable locations by climate change. This is not true. As The Heartland Institute’s President James Taylor wrote in a Climate Realism post responding to The Guardian’s article, the atlas itself tells a completely different story.
“Rather than ‘pushing’ birds out of their normal ranges and forcing them north, birds are benefiting from a warming climate by expanding their overall ranges—thriving in new, northern regions while still flourishing in southern regions as well. The result of climate change is not a negative ‘pushing’ of birds out of their habitat, but rather birds enjoying larger habitat ranges, while adding to biological diversity in their new ranges.”
Indeed, despite the misleading, alarm-raising, title of the story, “Atlas reveals birds pushed further north amid climate crisis,” if you dig deeper into the story, The Guardian admitted the atlas records: “Overall, 35 percent of birds increased their breeding range, 25 percent contracted their breeding range and the rest did not show any change, or the trend is unknown.” This is good news since, as the newspaper acknowledged, according to the atlas, “Generally, if a species is present in more areas it is less likely to go extinct.”
Another scary, but demonstrably untrue, climate-alarm narrative pushed this year came in the form of dozens, if not hundreds, of stories asserting climate change (supposedly of human origin) is responsible for an increase in the number and severity of both hurricanes and wildfires. An example of this flawed analysis/bad-reporting combo can be seen in a story published by Bloomberg titled, “Climate Change Led to Record Insurance Payouts in 2020.”
Bloomberg writes, “Christian Aid, the relief arm of 41 churches in the U.K. and Ireland, ranked the 15 most destructive climate disasters of the year based on insurance losses.” Christian Aid’s study, which The Guardian also covered as if it were divinely inspired revealed truth, claims the world’s 10 costliest weather disasters of 2020 alone accrued $150 billion in damages, with the total figure for all climate change related disasters setting new records in 2020. In particular, Christian Aid’s study blamed climate-change-exacerbated wildfires and hurricanes for the increased damages and higher insurance payouts. Lo and behold, once again, real-world data on wildfires and hurricanes tells a different story, but the good news was ignored.
Concerning wildfires, long-term data show the number of and acreage consumed by wildfires has declined dramatically over the past century. Just looking at 2020, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reports “that 2020 was one of the lowest years for active fires globally.”
Indeed, NASA reports on a recent study in Science which found, “[g]lobally, the total acreage burned by fires each year declined by 24 percent between 1998 and 2015. In total, the global amount of area burned annually has declined by more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of last century to 1.4 million square miles today.”
Wildfires have declined sharply over the course of the past century in the United States, as well. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, long-term data from the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) show wildfires have declined in number and severity since the early 1900s. Assessing data on U.S. wildfires from as far back as 1926, NIFC reports the numbers of acres burned is far less now than it was throughout the early 20th century, with the current acres burned running just one-fourth to one-fifth of the amount of land that typically burned in the 1930s.
Data on hurricanes is equally clear and compelling: Despite 2020’s busy hurricane season, contrary to The Guardian’s claims—and as reported in an earlier Climate Realism article—it is quite possible 2020 did not set a record for Atlantic hurricanes. Before 1950, hurricane tracking was relatively primitive and sparse and it was uncommon to name a storm unless it made landfall somewhere.
In addition, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports there is, “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” And data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), as Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes notes, show that “The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, which is the longest such period in recorded history. The United States also recently experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history.”
The Christian Aid study focuses on the possibly record-breaking costs of 2020’s weather related natural disasters. But in doing so it ignores what Bjorn Lomborg refers to in his book, False Alarm, as the “expanding bulls-eye effect.” The increased costs of natural disasters in recent decades is due to communities increasingly expanding into areas historically prone to natural disasters—such as flood plains, forests, and coastal areas, erecting increasingly expensive structures and infrastructure there. As a result, when extreme weather events strike, more and more expensive property is destroyed. Accordingly, the increasing costs of natural disasters stem not from human-caused climate change, but is rather a directly measurable anthropogenic factor: the rise in the number and value of assets placed in the bullseye as a result of demographic shifts in where people live and the lifestyles they pursue.
Another important “good news” story, climate alarmists tried to portray as a tragedy in 2020 can be found in the numerous news stories covering a World Bank report which claims water scarcity in the Middle East—caused by human induced climate change—threatens crop production. Once again, the authors of the World Bank report and the leftist media outlets publicizing it couldn’t be bothered to check the actual data. If they had done so, they would have found crop production in the Middle Eastern countries discussed in the report was booming, in large part due to the carbon dioxide fertilization effect.
The World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, in particular. In point of fact, data show that, despite considerable political turmoil and ongoing conflicts in the region, the naturally arid Middle East has seen its crop production grow as the earth has modestly warmed.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
· Cereal crop production in Iraq increased 91 percent, even as the acreage being harvested fell 5 percent.
· Cereal crop production in Iran increased 187 percent, while the acreage harvested increased by just 2.6 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Jordan increased 15 percent, even as the acreage harvested declined 30 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Lebanon increased 115 percent, while acreage harvested increased 30 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Syria increased 22 percent, even as acreage harvested declined 66 percent.
· Cereal Crop production in Turkey increased 46 percent, even though acreage harvested declined 19 percent.
That Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production—even as many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts—is clearly good news. It is not evidence of a climate crisis.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water through transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change-induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
Sadly, for claim after claim, power hungry bureaucrats and leftist mainstream media organizations embrace unsubstantiated speculations that various climate disasters are occurring—while ignoring facts indicating no such climate catastrophes are in the offing. I can only speculate they do this because good news does not encourage a stampede towards authoritarian climate change policies giving elites control over businesses and peoples’ lives.
SOURCES: Climate Realism; The Guardian; Phys.org; Climate Realism; World Bank; Bloomberg; Food and Agriculture Organization
What is left to say?
By Dr Malcolm Kendrick | December 30, 2020
I have not written much about COVID19 recently. What can be said? In my opinion the world has simply gone bonkers. The best description can be found in Dante’s Inferno, written many hundreds of years ago.
In it, Dante describes the outcasts, who took no side in the rebellion of angels. They live in the vestibule. Not in heaven, not in hell, forever unclassified. They reside on the shores of the Acheron. Naked and futile, they race around through a hellish mist in eternal pursuit of an elusive, wavering banner, symbolic of their pursuit of ever-shifting self-interest.
I find this description of the desperate pursuit of an elusive wavering banner rings rather true. This, it seems, is pretty much the place we have arrived at. Which banner have you decided to follow?
The ‘COVID19 s the most terrible infection ever, and we must do everything in our power to stop it, whatever the cost’ banner.
Or the ‘What on earth are we doing? This is no worse than a bad flu, and we are destroying the world economy, stripping away basic human rights and killing more people than we are saving’ banner.
There may be others.
Between these two, main, completely incompatible positions, lies the truth. It is in pretty poor shape. It has been crushed, and bent out of shape, smashed, and left as a broken heap in the corner. I search where I can, to find the fragments, in an attempt to bring together a picture that makes some kind of sense.
But what to believe? Who to believe?
I feel somewhat like Rene Descartes. In order to find the ineluctable truth he scraped everything away until he was left with ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. ‘I think, therefore I am.’
I have stripped away at the accuracy of PCR COVID19 testing. I found myself left with nothing I could make any sense of. I hacked down to establish the way that COVID19 deaths are recorded. All I found were assumptions and difficulties.
Did someone die with COVID19, of COVID19 – or did it have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with COVID19? Who knows? I certainly don’t, and I wrote some of the death certificates myself.
Have we overestimated deaths, or underestimated deaths? I do not know … and so it goes on.
So, what do I know? I know that COVID19 exists – or I am as certain of this as I can be. Was it a natural mutation from a bat, or was it created in a laboratory? Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s here, and there is no chance that any Government, anywhere, would ever admit responsibility for creating the damned thing. So, we will never know. If you asked me to bet, I would say it was created in a lab, then escaped by accident.
Is it deadlier than influenza? Well, it is certainly deadlier than some strains of influenza. Indeed, most strains. However, Spanish flu was estimated to have killed fifty million, when the world’s population was about a fifth of what it is now. So, COVID19 is definitely less deadly than that one. About as deadly as the influenzas of 1957 and 1967. Probably.
Will it mutate into something worse? Who knows.
Will the current vaccines work on mutated strains? Who knows.
Can it be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers? Who knows.
How effective are the current vaccines going to be? Who knows.
What are we left with?
At the beginning, I kept relatively quiet on how deadly COVID19 would prove to be. Because I didn’t know. The figures raged up and down. The infection fatality rate become a battle scene, with warriors lined up on either side to defend their positions.
I even got attacked by factcheckers, the self-appointed know-it-alls who are, it seems, capable of judging on all matters of scientific dispute. Truly, the Gods have descended to live amongst us. Those who can determine what is true, and what is not. No need for any further clinical trials, or any more scientific studies of any sort, ever. We just need to ask the Fact Checkers for the answer, to any given question.
Anyway, it appeared that tens of thousands died in some countries, almost none in others. What I was waiting to see, was the impact on the one outcome that you cannot alter, or fudge. The outcome that is overall mortality i.e. the chances of dying, of anything.
I did this because, when it comes to recording deaths from a specific illness, things can go in and out of fashion. A couple of years ago I looked at deaths from sepsis. At one time this was a condition of far lower priority. Doctors didn’t routinely search for it, or routinely record it, on death certificates.
Sepsis is an infection that gets into the blood, toxins are released, and people die. Everyone knew it happened. Or at least I hope they did.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a gigantic push to look for it more diligently, diagnose it more, treat it better. I think this was generally a good thing. Sepsis is eminently treatable, if you think to look for it, and lives can be saved. We now have initiatives like ‘Sepsis six’ and warnings that pop up on computers. ‘Have you considered sepsis,’ and suchlike. I love it … not. Because I do not love being told how to think, and do my job, by a computer algorithm programmed with ‘zero risk’ as their touchstone. But, hey ho.
In 2013, in the UK, a report was published by the health ombudsman ‘Time to Act – severe sepsis, rapid diagnosis and treatment saves lives.’ As the report stated.
‘Sepsis is a more common reason for hospital admission than heart attack – and has a higher mortality.’ The UK Sepsis Trust 1
That last statement is somewhat disingenuous, as many people with sepsis are very elderly, often with multiple morbidities, and suchlike. They were probably going to die, shortly, from something else.
Anyway. With all this activity, with all this increased sepsis recognition and treatment, you would expect the rate of deaths from sepsis to fall. It did not. The rate has gone up, by around 30% since 2013. Does this mean there is far more sepsis going about? Or, that it is just more often written on death certificates? I suggest the latter. I use this example, simply to make it clear that even the cause of death written on a death certificate is far from rock solid evidence.
With COVID19, this is a massive problem. In the UK, and several other countries if you have had a COVID19 positive test (which may, or may not, be accurate) and you die within twenty-eight days of that positive test, you will be recorded as a COVID19 death. I do not know much for sure about COVID19, but I do know that is just complete nonsense.
There are so many cases where – even if the COVID19 test was accurate – COVID19 would have had nothing whatsoever to do with the death. Another thing known, or at least we probably know, is that the vast majority of people who die had many other things wrong with them.
In the US, the Centre of Disease Control (CDC) found that ninety-four per cent of people who died of COVID19 ‘related deaths’ had other significant diseases (co-morbidities) 2. This ninety-four per-cent figures would only be the co-morbidities that were known about – who knows what lurked beneath? Especially as people stopped doing post-mortems (i.e., autopsies in the US).
So yes, they had COVID19 (or at least they had a positive test – which may not be the same thing), but they were often very old, and already severely ill. Using an extreme example, someone with terminal cancer who is a week from death, catches COVID19 in hospital, and dies. What killed them? The statistics say COVID19. I say, bollocks.
When I started in medicine, ‘bronchopneumonia’ (a bad chest infection) used to be known as the ‘old man’s friend.’ For those who were very old, and frail, often demented, lying in care homes, often incontinent, a chest infection represented a reasonably painless way to die.
Very often we would not actively treat it, instead we allowed for a peaceful death. Indeed, this still happens. Less so now, as someone, somewhere, often a relative from a country far, far, away – who has not visited for years – is far more likely to sue you.
Did they really die of bronchopneumonia? You could argue yes, you could argue no. Yes, it was the thing that finally pushed them over the edge. No, they were already slowly dying as their body gave out. In the end, what does anyone actually die of? My Scottish grannie, who lived to one hundred and two, used to say ‘they die frae want of breath.’ Entirely accurate, but, alas, also completely useless.
So, what you need to do, is look beyond what is written on death certificates. You need to look at what is happening to the overall mortality. Whilst you can argue endlessly, pointlessly, about specific causes of death. What you cannot argue about is whether or not someone is alive, or dead. Even I usually get this one right. No pulse, no breathing, no reaction of the pupils to light, no response to pain… and suchlike. Yup, dead. Now… what they die of? Um… let me think.
Thus, I have tended to look to EuroMOMO. The European Mortality Monitoring project. As they say, of themselves:
‘The overall objective of the original European Mortality Monitoring Project was to design a routine public health mortality monitoring system aimed at detecting and measuring, on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries.
Mortality is a basic indicator of health. Therefore, understanding its epidemiology is fundamental for effective public health planning and action.
Mortality monitoring becomes pivotal during influenza or other pandemics for several reasons. In a severe pandemic, mortality monitoring can be a robust way to monitor the pandemics progression and its public health impact when other systems are failing, due to an overburdened health care sector. Decision makers will require data on the pandemics impact and on deaths by age and geographical area in various stages of the pandemic. Mortality monitoring can provide such estimates, which will be important to guide and prioritize health service response and decision-making, i.e. use of antivirals and vaccines.’ 3
Here are the data that you can therefore, pretty much, fully rely on. It is where I go to see what is really happening across Europe. Not all of Europe, as some countries do not participate. However, there are more than enough, to get a good picture. It encompasses key countries such as Spain, Italy, the UK (split into four separate countries), Sweden and suchlike.
Here is the graph of overall mortality for all ages, in all countries. The graph starts at the beginning of 2017 and carries on to almost the end of 2020.
As you can see, in each winter there is an increase in deaths. In 2020, nothing much happened at the start of the year, then we had – what must have been – the COVID19 spike. The tall pointy bit around week 15.
It started in late March and was pretty much finished by mid-May. Now, we are in winter, and the usual winter spike appears. It seems to be around the same size as winter 2017/18. It also seems to have passed the peak and is now falling. But it could jump up again. [The figures in the most recent weeks can always be a bit inaccurate, as it can take some time for all the data to arrive]
Two things stand out. First, there was an obvious ‘COVID19 spike’. Second, what we are seeing at present does not differ greatly from previous years. The normal winter spike in deaths.
If we split this down into individual countries, this reasonably clear pattern falls apart.
Here are the figures from England
Unlike the first graph, the scale on the left is not absolute numbers. It is a thing called the Z-score. Which means standard deviation from the mean. Sorry, maths. If the Z-score goes above five, this means something significant is happening. The red, upper, dotted line is Z > 5. As you can see, despite the howls of anguish from England about COVID19 overwhelming the country, we are really not seeing much at all.
What of Sweden, that pariah country? They did not fully lock-down, the irresponsible fools (all they did was follow WHO guidance – by the way), and we are now told they are suffering terribly, they should have enforced far more rigid lockdown, their ‘experiment’ failed etc. etc. COVID19 shall have its vengeance. Or to quote Arnie – I’ll be back.
As you can see, nothing much happening in Sweden either.
Then, if you look further, there are anomalies all over the place. Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and did exactly the same things as the rest of the UK with regard to lockdown, masks etc. At least it did in the earlier part of the year. However, it shows a completely different pattern to England. Or, to be fully accurate, it shows no pattern at all. No waves, and nobody drowning.
What of Slovenia?
As you can see absolutely nothing happened earlier in the year in Slovenia. Now, it has the biggest spike of all – apart from, maybe, Switzerland. Earlier in the year it was held up as a great example of how brilliantly effective masks were. Now… you don’t hear so much about masks. Maybe masks only work in months beginning with M. [Maybe, whisper it, they don’t work at all].
So, what have I learned from euroMOMO? First that it appears to have made absolutely no difference if a country locked down hard, and early, or did not. Everyone points at Norway and Finland as examples of great and early government action, and how wonderful everything would have been if we had done the same.
Well, look up at Northern Ireland. Then look at Finland
Spot the difference. There is none.
Of course, much of the most heated debate surrounded what happened during the so-called first wave. Who dealt with it well, or badly. Now, everyone in Europe is doing much the same things. Lockdown, restrictions on travel, restrictions on meeting other people, everyone wearing masks, etc. etc. Yet some countries are having a new wave, and others are not.
There is a special prize for anyone who can match up the severity of restrictions in various countries, to the Z-score. I say this, because no correlation exists.
So, again, what have I learned about COVID19? I learned that all Governments are floundering about, all claiming to have exerted some sort of control over this disease and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In truth, they have achieved nothing. As restrictions and lockdowns have become more severe, in many cases the number of infections has simply risen and risen, completely unaffected by anything that has been done.
The official solution is, of course, more restrictions. ‘We just haven’t restricted people enough!’ Sigh. When something doesn’t work, the answer is not to keep doing it with even greater fervour. The real answer is to stop doing it and try something else instead.
I have also learned that, in most countries, COVID19 appears to be seasonal. It went away – everywhere – in the summer. It came back in the autumn/winter, as various viruses do.
On its return it has been, generally, far less deadly. Much as you would expect. The most vulnerable died on first exposure, and far fewer people had any resistance to it, at all. Now, a number of people do have some immunity, and many of the vulnerable are already dead.
Which means that, in this so-called second wave, COVID19 is no greater an issue than a moderately bad flu season.
If I were to recommend actions. I would recommend that we stop testing – unless someone is admitted to hospital and is seriously ill. Mass testing is simply causing mass panic and achieves absolutely nothing. At great cost. We should also just get on with our lives as before. We should just vaccinate those at greatest risk of dying, the elderly and vulnerable, and put this rather embarrassing episode of mad banner waving behind us.
Hopefully, in time, we will learn something. Which is that we should not, ever, run about panicking, following the madly waved banners… ever again. However, I suspect that we will. This pandemic is going to be a model for all mass panicking stupidity in the future. Because to do otherwise, would be to admit that we made a pig’s ear of it this time. Far too many powerful reputations at stake to allow that.
1: https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/Time_to_act_report.pdf
Featured Video
My would-be assassins are still in office – former Pakistani PM
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Nine Covid Facts: A Pandemic of Fearmongering and Ignorance
By Jeff Harris | Ron Paul Institute | October 28, 2020
Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry. But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land.
Yes we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact. Here are nine facts backed up with data, in many cases from the CDC itself that paints a very different picture from the fear and dread being relentlessly drummed into the brains of unsuspecting citizens. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Aletho News- The Cult of the Climate Apocalypse March 26, 2023
- The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels March 26, 2023
- Climate-Neutral Already By 2030?… Berliners To Vote On Climate-Neutrality Referendum Today! March 26, 2023
- Guardian Pushes Alarmist Claim That Climate Change Threatens Coffee Production as Yields Soar March 26, 2023
- My would-be assassins are still in office – former Pakistani PM March 26, 2023
- Twenty Times the CDC Exaggerated the Threat From Covid With False Data March 26, 2023
- Russia Foreign Ministry calls for prosecuting Israelis responsible for Church of Gethsemane attack March 25, 2023
- Putin: West’s Weapons Supply to Ukraine Won’t Be Enough to Outgun Russia March 25, 2023
- Fake News Alert: Chinese “Patriots” Don’t Want To Retake Russia’s Far East March 25, 2023
- Zelensky Admitted That Ukraine Already Ran Out Of Ammo March 25, 2023
- Hungary comments on Ukraine’s NATO and EU bids March 25, 2023
- ‘Bring Our Troops Home’: Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul Repeat Call for Syria Pullout Amid New Attacks March 25, 2023
- TOP GERMAN HEALTH OFFICIAL LAUTERBACH FOLDS ON VACCINE INJURIES March 25, 2023
- Hospital admissions double – and it’s got to be down to the vaccines March 25, 2023
- Senate Committee Handles Bancel with Kid Gloves March 25, 2023
- Covid, imaginary pandemic of the brainwashed March 25, 2023
- US asks Serbs to ‘set aside’ grievances over bombings March 24, 2023
- No Guilt, No Shame: Western Leaders’ Excuses for NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia March 24, 2023
- If Americans Knew
- Brownstone Institute
- My Testimony on Texas State Senate HHS Bills March 26, 2023
- FDA Is Wrong Again: Mailed Abortion Drugs are Not Safe March 25, 2023
- The DOD Plays Hardball with Covid Vaccinations March 24, 2023
- Madness in the Law Schools March 24, 2023
- How They Convinced Trump to Lock Down March 23, 2023
- The Lab Leak and the Counter Measures: What Really Happened March 23, 2023
- Richie Allen
- Bordeaux Town Hall Burnt Down By Pension Reform Protesters March 24, 2023
- Scottish Schools Tell Kids There Are THREE Biological Sexes March 24, 2023
- Greta Thunberg To Sue Sweden For Climate Change Inaction March 23, 2023
- USA Today Names BLOKE In WOMEN Of The Year List March 23, 2023
- Not A Lot Of People Know That
- Climate Change Is “Bigger Existential Threat Than Nuclear War” , Says Nutty Sustainability Advisor March 26, 2023
- Will Offshore Wind Lower Energy Bills? March 25, 2023
- Germany Rebels Against EU Ban On Petrol Cars March 24, 2023
- Dutch farmers on collision course with Brussels over compulsory farm buyouts March 24, 2023
- No Tricks Zone
- Consent Factory
- The Censorship Industrial Complex March 10, 2023
Aletho News 