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Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Resigns Amid Anti-Government Protests

Samizdat – 09.05.2022

Sri Lanka has been rocked by mass protests for weeks, with people outraged over the government’s policies amid the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.

Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has resigned, his spokesman Rohan Weliwita said.

The 76-year-old prime minister sent his letter of resignation to his younger brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, clearing the way for a “new unity government”, the spokesman said, quoted by AFP.

Earlier, news about the prime minister’s resignation was broken by local media.

On Monday, the government imposed a nationwide curfew and deployed the army in the capital Colombo amid violent clashes between anti-government protesters and government supporters outside President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s office. Dozens of people were injured in the clashes. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the protesters.

Sri Lankans have been facing the worst economic crisis since gaining independence from British rule in 1948. People have been suffering amid acute shortages of food, fuel, and medicines, as well as months of power outages. The crisis broke out after Sri Lanka lost the vital income it had traditionally received from tourism and remittances. This happened due to the coronavirus pandemic and tough COVID-related restrictions that affected the entire region. As a result of this, Sri Lanka was no longer able to pay off its $51 billion foreign debt and banned the import of some goods.

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Insights On Progressive Thinking From The Climate Action Council Public Hearing

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 6, 2022

My previous post on Tuesday contained some highlights from the May 3 public hearing of New York’s Climate Action Council. The CAC is the body that is charged with devising a “Scoping Plan” to inform all us New Yorkers how we will achieve “zero carbon” electricity by 2030 and a “zero carbon” economy by 2050. I attended the hearing for about two and a half hours, during which about 60 people spoke.

Reflecting on the hearing a few days later, I think there are a few more highlights that would interest the readers, and will give some more insights into the nature of progressive thinking.

As stated in my prior post, of the 60 or so speakers, all but myself and four others were vigorous supporters of the critical necessity of achieving the stated zero carbon goals by the given dates as an urgent matter of saving our planet and our children. This was so despite what appeared to me to be manifestly huge issues of physical feasibility and cost that are almost certain to cause these grand “net zero” energy schemes to fail. The CAC’s draft “Scoping Plan,” as it currently exists for public comment, does not consider these feasibility or cost issues in any remotely adequate fashion, if at all. That fact did not appear to bother the overwhelming majority of the speakers.

So what are the things that do drive the thinking of these other 55 or so speakers, who apparently represent the large majority of New York City’s citizenry? The previous post mentioned fear as a common theme — fear that use of fossil fuels by us New Yorkers will bring on storms, floods and other disasters to threaten our lives and livelihoods. But what I failed to mention was another emotion that was even more prevalent in the comments — anger.

Anger at what, you might ask? Good question. I admit that this doesn’t make any sense, but here it is. The anger is directed at the fossil fuel producers and distributors who the commenters, with near unanimity, seemed to believe were hell-bent on destroying the planet. A substantial majority of the 60 or so comments that I listened to expressed this anger in one form or another, and it was an implicit undercurrent in most of the rest.

But, you might say, all of these people are in fact the users of the fossil fuels. Essentially all of them use electricity, which in New York currently comes about 60% from fossil fuels. The large majority of them drive cars, of which some 99% in New York use gasoline. Most of them heat their homes with natural gas, and cook with natural gas. Aren’t they themselves the ones who are responsible for the problem, if there is a problem? They use fossil-fuel-burning cars and furnaces and stoves because those vehicles and appliances are cheaper and/or work better than the alternatives. And yet, somehow these people have convinced themselves that they have no responsibility at all, and the use of gasoline and natural gas by them and others is a fault of evil producers and utilities.

On this theme, two commenters in particular stand out in my mind. First was a youngish (probably in her 30s) woman from Brooklyn who described herself as having a toddler in the apartment. After relating her fears for the toddler’s future in a world of changing climate, she got to the crux of her personal testimony, which was much more about anger than fear. The gas company was putting a dangerous substance into her stove, which when burned to cook gave off toxic substances and fumes that were putting the toddler’s health at risk. Her intense rage was palpable. She urged the CAC in the strongest terms to impose legal prohibitions that would prevent this kind of conduct going forward.

Put aside for the moment that this woman apparently had no idea that there is nothing toxic about the combustion products of natural gas, which are CO2 and water. But even more bizarre was that she apparently hadn’t figured out that if she is concerned about this subject, however irrationally, she can just go out and buy an electric stove tomorrow. And why hadn’t she done that? She didn’t say. The only reasons I can think of are that natural gas stoves work better than electric ones and are cheaper. Those are perfectly good reasons. But I wouldn’t recommend that you try to argue with this woman about why she has a gas stove. She is completely convinced that it has been foisted upon her by the evil gas companies who are intent on destroying the health of her toddler, let alone the planet. I doubt that any amount of logic or reason could talk her out of that belief.

And then there was the case of an equally irrational 60-something man, who said he was from Cedarhurst, Long Island. For those unfamiliar, Cedarhurst is a very wealthy suburb of large homes just outside the New York City limits. You may have seen Cedarhurst out the window of an airplane approaching JFK airport on a flight back from Europe. The guy in question styled his testimony as a confessional. He candidly admitted to his extreme climate guilt. But he claimed that he was unable to do anything about his large carbon footprint right now because the state had failed to compel the suppliers to provide him with zero emissions alternatives. He didn’t give us any details of what fuel he currently uses to heat his home, or to cook, but chose to focus on his driving. He stated that he wanted to buy an electric car, and was ready to do it, but was prevented from doing it. How was he prevented? Because there were no electric vehicle charging stations in his town! Needless to say, he was angry about that, and demanded that the state step up to order somebody to provide the charging stations, and provide funding to be sure that the charging stations got built.

Huh? Why didn’t this guy just get his own charging station at his own house? He didn’t mention that, so we are left to speculate. Again, the only thing I can think of is that he doesn’t want to spend his own money on this. Better to gin up some anger and demand that somebody else pay for it.

The thinking is that not only perfect fairness and justice, but also perfect climate, are easily within our reach if only our leaders summon the political will to order the evil people and companies to do the right thing, and perhaps provide some funding from the infinite free pile of government money. I guess, if you believe that, you are right to be angry that the leaders haven’t yet issued the necessary orders to get the job done. What’s wrong with them?

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing

By John Kline | The Libertarian Institute | April 27, 2022

This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.

There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.

FBI incitement is more topical than ever, of course. Reports of the FBI being involved in Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping plot and of FBI agents and assets being involved in the January 6th events has collapsed whatever level of trust the public had with federal law enforcement, not to mention the mainstream media whose related coverage rarely digs deeper than the government’s official line.

What other crimes have been committed or conspiracies planned, the public wonders, where the initial momentum was actually created the FBI? How much have FBI infiltrators pushed constitutionally protected “heated talk” into the unlawful planning and execution of deadly crimes? To what extent has the FBI been, as the saying goes, arsonists posing as firefighters? These are especially important questions when it comes to the OKC bombing.

Operation PATCON

As most know, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have conducted surveillance and infiltration operations against right-wing groups for decades. Chief among them being the “Patriotic Conspiracy” or “PATCON” operation. Despite its official ending in late 1993 (although some say it was carried forward in some form), PATCON only became public in 2007 thanks to a public records request.

Partly citing internal FBI documents, Painting in her explosive 2016 book about PATCON and McVeigh, describes how the former’s secret operatives and paid informers “were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their willingness to commit violence and advocate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”1 She quotes one informer who went public about the operation, John Matthews, saying he realized that although initially told “the objective was to infiltrate and monitor,” he would later come to understand that its real objective was to “to infiltrate and incite.”2 This, says Matthews, included providing “the ideas, detailed instructions, and even live C4 explosives and automatic weapons to targeted individuals as a way of entrapping them into terrorist plots, so the FBI could capitalize on foiled and actualized plots.”3 According to Trentadue, through PATCON, the FBI was actually trying to sow a full-on rebellion.

While the FBI has indeed infiltrated hard-left and Islamic groups in the past, the extent and complete failure of the FBI’s overreach when it comes to right-wing groups (which diversely included pro-gun, ultra-libertarian, survivalist, and white racist or advocacy groups) makes this area especially alarming. For instance, there was just one minor conviction over stolen military night-vision goggles that was ever made through PATCON, and it relied on army, not FBI, intelligence. As Oklahoma City journalist J.D. Cash said about PATCON and certain precursor programs of the 1980s, “there isn’t a neo-Nazi or racist group in the country that isn’t operationally controlled by the FBI.” This seems to concur with what a former young Aryan Nation-member told Painting for her book4:

It was well known that at any Aryan Nation event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants… It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD.

One of those assets was Vietnam War veteran John Matthews. Up until 1986, the government had been supporting U.S. civilian groups conducting operations in Nicaragua for anti-communist contra forces; a cause which Matthews chose to serve. When such efforts turned into a political scandal, however, the government broke-off ties with these groups and refused to help its members. This included people like Matthews’ fellow soldier Tom Posey who would later be indicted on weapons-smuggling charges.5 While he beat the rap, Posey felt cheated and shifted his efforts to anti-U.S. government organizing. When he revealed plans to break into a federal armory, however, Matthews contacted the FBI, establishing a relationship with law enforcement that led him to infiltrate over 20 militia, libertarian, gun-rights, and racist groups over a 20-year period.

Matthews, who has long been suffering from an Agent-Orange-related cancer, is key to what understanding we have about PATCON’s connection to the OKC bombing. In the early nineties, Matthews was assigned to attend a PATCON-infiltrated, militia-training camp in Texas. While there, he met Timothy McVeigh. After the bombing and when McVeigh was arrested, Matthews immediately recognized him and called his FBI handler, Don Jarrett, to tell him this was the same man he saw at the Texas training camp. Jarrett assured Matthews they knew this already and told him to “forget about it.”

In interviews with Painting, Matthews says he was disturbed by this for a few reasons, a major one being, she paraphrases, that “if they were watching McVeigh and friends back then, they had likely continued watching them throughout the bombing plot.”6 “I felt Don knew more about this,” he said elsewhere.

What other items he knew may have been what came out later in Trentadue’s public records suit against the FBI. Dozens of witnesses to the bombing had apparently reported to police and the FBI they had seen someone in the passenger side of McVeigh’s truck while parked outside the Murrah building. Other witnesses reported seeing McVeigh with several people at his motel the night before, including someone sitting at some point behind the wheel of the truck—And Nichols himself (who was in Kansas when the bombing took place) told journalists in 2007 that FBI provocateurs had lent their support to McVeigh’s plans.7

Also disturbingly, using a fertilizer truck to blow up a federal building had been an idea Matthews had actually heard a few times before, including from suspected FBI infiltrators. For instance, he had heard it raised by two militia members he met who later became part of a busted plot to rob a bank, but who never got arrested, let alone jailed for it.

All of this would seem to point to the OKC bombing being something like 2010’s Operation Fast and Furious, in which the FBI intentionally put guns into the hands of criminals, but failed to close the loop leading to a border agent being killed by a Mexican cartel. Was OKC a similar ‘gunwalking case gone awry’? Only one, far, far deadlier? Someone who McVeigh contacted two weeks before the bombing, Andy Strassmeir, later told a journalist it is possible the FBI was “going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time.” “[M]aybe he changed the time”, he said, “you never know with people who are so unreliable.”8

Newsweek’s Complicity

In 2011, wishing to tell his story before he died, Matthews was put in touch with former Associated Press-writer and then-editor of Newsweek, John Solomon. At the time, Newsweek was still foremost in the U.S. media field, coming in second in circulation only to Time magazine. It was an important and respected news source. Over months, Solomon and article-author Ross Schneiderman worked with Matthews and other sources, including former FBI officials, to confirm everything he told them about the murky workings of PATCON, including the unanswered questions about its operatives’ possible involvement in the OKC bombing.

Enter Newsweek managing editor, Tina Brown. Above the heads of Solomon and Schneiderman, Brown (who left in 2013 and has been blamed for the periodical’s collapse) took what may have been a Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism and cut away virtually all detail that could directly or indirectly impugn the government for the fallout of its PATCON operations. In the process, she reduced the original 7,000-word draft (found here) down to a mere 4,000 words (found here). As the since-defunct Examiner detailed at the time, all of the aforementioned suspicions Matthews aired about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing were cut.

Brown’s puzzling decision had real consequences for Matthews. As Painting recounts in her book, the dying Matthews had taken a lot of risk by coming forward. He was now Newsweek’s cover story, but for reasons that had been omitted. Now, he was still a target but “for no good reason and he regretted coming forward.”9

More broadly, by keeping such information away from the public, Brown was confirming the existence of a state-media axis in America. While examples of such direct state-interventions into our otherwise free media system are rare (although certainly plentiful enough), media analysts like Noam Chomsky have long posited that, yes, news outlets do profit off the circulation of their stories and are thus incentivized to objectively report on events potentially embarrassing to the powerful elite. But, the big media houses still need government access and wish to maintain good relations with major power centers; hence, their occasional compliance with direct government demands—One might add the promise of future political jobs as an incentive for compliance or, in cases such as this where right-wing groups were clearly being mistreated, plain old liberal media bias (consider, for instance, the fairly wide–reporting on the FBI’s infiltration of Islamic extremist groups).

It seems without a doubt that the FBI did get to Brown. At the time Matthews approached Newsweek, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious-debacle was still in the news. How could the Obama Administration handle yet another and far bigger scandal involving the FBI helping dangerous people do harm against innocent Americans?

More Alarming Questions about FBI Conduct

Elsewhere, the FBI has demonstrated a serious interest in keeping any questions about the OKC bombing firmly under wraps. When Matthews was slated to testify in Trentadue’s 2014 public records case over the release of Murrah building surveillance footage, his fear of retaliation led to the judge allowing him to testify at a secret location by video—Trentadue thought what Matthews had witnessed while a PATCON operative would help provide a motive for what had become the FBI’s ongoing, unlawful refusal to provide the footage under public records law.

And despite the judge’s precautions, Matthews’s testimony still never took place. At the last minute, Matthews was supposedly threatened with having his VA medical benefits cut off and told to “stand down” by Jarrett and another FBI agent, Adam Quirk. Such a rank case of witness tampering, in fact, led to the judge ordering the FBI to reveal what exactly they had communicated to Matthews; an investigation that has been strangely ongoing since 2015.

At the heart of Trentadue’s marathon public records case certainly has the FBI worried. Someone who did manage to testify early on in the case was an Oklahoma police officer and first responder to the OKC bombing. He told the court he witnessed the FBI actually stop the beginning of the recovery process while victims were still under piles of rubble in order to remove a surveillance camera from the Murrah building. Some believe the camera would have recorded anyone else besides McVeigh who left the truck after it was parked and, in fact, did so.

Finally, there’s the questions about the FBI’s conduct vis-à-vis Trentadue himself. Why Trentadue got involved with the OKC case is because six weeks after the bombing, his brother Kenneth, another war vet, was taken into custody after a traffic incident triggered a parole violation relating to a minor event from years previous. Soon after, he was found hanging in a cell of a federal detention center.

Photos released to Trentadue following a subsequent lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, showed his brother’s throat having been cut and his body covered in bruises—authorities had apparently tried to cover his wounds with make-up before releasing it to Kenneth’s family. The theory behind his death is, having shared a close resemblance with someone called Richard Guthrie, a white supremacist who the FBI thought had information about the OKC bombing, Kenneth was mistaken as Guthrie and taken in by the FBI for interrogation. McVeigh himself called and advised Trentadue of this, telling him he heard that the FBI had indeed mistaken Kenneth for Guthrie and that his death was the result of a botched interrogation session.

Adding to suspicions, the DOJ formed a special team to handle media inquiries and the Trentadue family’s immediate requests for information. It apparently obstructed and delayed the Trentadue’s right to know what happened to Kenneth in every way it could, even when it came to releasing his corpse. Who happened to be the head of this operation (dubbed internally as “the Trentadue Mission”)?10 Then-Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Finally, there are the other related and mysterious deaths. After Guthrie himself was arrested, he told the LA Times he had “a couple grand juries to talk to” about what really happened with the OKC bombing, and was also later found hanging in his cell.11

And later in 1999, a supposed inmate and witness to Kenneth’s murder, Alden Gillis Baker, threatened to come forward about what he saw. He too was later found hanging in his cell.12

Conclusion

The details surrounding the OKC bombing show it to have all the elements of a “perfect,” post-war American tragedy: Vietnam vets disrespected by the liberal-media class and tossed aside by a government they loyally served; an unhinged federal bureaucracy using its sprawling resources to violate the civil rights of poor and ignored Americans; and, a state-liberal media-axis willing to cover up for government when the “cause” was right.

And consider the following. Even if we ignore the aforementioned evidence about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing, remember that the twin motivations for McVeigh’s crimes were Waco and Ruby Ridge—McVeigh chose April 19 as his bombing date because it was the same day as the Waco massacre two years previous. Matthews has actually expressed the view that both massacres had PATCON fingerprints all over them. That’s certainly the case with Ruby Ridge. There, a federal agent/infiltrator pushed former Green Beret Randy Weaver into selling him an illegal sawed-off shotgun. This led to his attempted arrest and an eventual standoff, which then led to the shooting deaths of his 14-year-son by federal marshals and his unarmed wife (baby in hand) by an FBI sniper.

In public and in private correspondence, McVeigh tore into the federal government over these events, expressing fear of a state that was at war with its own citizens. Without federal law enforcement acting so heinously in these events, it’s likely McVeigh would not have carried out the crime that he did.

Further, these rank FBI abuses ironically pushed “right-wing terror groups” to become the threat we were warned about all along. As the original Newsweek article rightly said about Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s conduct “quickly galvanized the radical right like never before” with talks between “various white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and anti-government groups… about joining forces… quickly turn[ing] to action.”

And as Painting writes, even more absurd perhaps, Ruby Ridge was used by federal law enforcement as a justification for increased PATCON resources and investigatory powers.13

So, we have FBI abuses leading to organized rage and resistance, which is then given even more momentum by FBI infiltration and incitement. And with the help of a media sphere that refuses to do its job, all of this works to amp up yet more fear, anxiety and division among the public. It’s a spinning wheel which loyal, patriotic Americans never asked for and certainly want off of.

While we should certainly hope these allegations can be explained away, it’s high-time the OKC victims and the American people generally get the transparency they deserve about what really happened that fateful day.

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Climate Colonialists Disrupt African Pipeline, Perpetuate Poverty

Vanessa Nakate
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | April 28, 2022

Climate activists’ ill-founded opposition to fossil fuels threatens to stop a major pipeline project in East Africa and stymie economic growth in Uganda and Tanzania — home to some of the world’s poorest people.

Uganda is betting big on its fossil fuel reserves. In February, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and France’s TotalEnergies agreed to invest $10 billion to develop two Ugandan oil reserves. But the landlocked country needs the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project (EACOP) to transport  its product to a port in Tanzania.

The 895-mile-long pipeline from Uganda’s Lake Alberta region to the seaport of Tanga will be the longest electrically heated crude oil pipeline in the world and will carry 216,000 barrels per day. The project received a green light for construction after the completion of an  Environment and Social Impact Assessment.

The Africa Report says that the investment will be huge: “(A)bout $10 billion will be invested in the sector (oil and gas) before first oil is produced in 2025, mainly on the pipeline, refinery, and infrastructure. The government has been commissioning road construction in the region where oil will be produced, in Buliisa and Hoima districts, and an airport is also being constructed in the region.” The project is expected to generate around 10,000 jobs even after the construction phase.

The Government of Uganda expects massive employment of its citizens during construction: “This will be through direct employment of about 14,000 people by the companies, indirect employment of about 45,000 people by the contractors, and induced employment of about 105,000 people as a result of utilization of other services by the oil and gas sector. Of the direct employment, 57 percent are expected to be Ugandans, which is expected to result in an estimated $48.5 million annual payment to Ugandan employees.”

However, the global war against fossil fuel has now reached Ugandan soil and extremists are determined to stop this lifesaving, economically critical project.

Vanessa Nakate of StopEACOP rants against the pipeline in a recent column in the New York Times, saying the project would bring poverty and destruction to the people of Africa. She also references extreme weather in implying the pipeline will worsen the climate.

During a visit to the ultra-rich Vatican, Vanessa says: “It is evident that there is no future in the fossil fuel industry…. we know the impacts on our food. We know the impacts on our water. We know the impacts on our livelihood…… the climate crisis is already affecting so many people not only in Uganda, but the African continent.”

But her reasons for opposing the pipeline are scientifically inaccurate and logically senseless.

She points to a forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicts African droughts. But IPCC, by its own admission, has indicated that extreme weather events have no significant correlation with rising global average temperatures. Neither has there been any significant increase in the frequency of extreme cyclones, droughts, rainfall, and fires. Even if droughts and cyclones were to increase, a better socio-economic condition would enable people to adapt more effectively.

Contrary to Vanessa’s hyperbole, the world is experiencing near optimum temperatures for global food production and the advancement of human society, much as it did 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period and 2,000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period. Globally, we now have better access to clean water, better access to nutritious food, people with higher income, and a very rapid increase in life expectancy rates. How are we in a crisis if climate is aiding the improvement of every metric used to measure the quality of people’s lives?

It is shocking how Vanessa ignores the plight of millions of her own people dwelling in persistent poverty and in need of affordable, dependable energy sources like coal, oil, and gas. It is less shocking if we understand the DNA of climate extremists, which has them deny the reality of energy needs and promote unreliable, primitive, and expensive wind turbines that even economic giants like Germany and the U.S. hesitate to adopt completely.

Climate extremists like Vanessa are fostering the continuation of abject poverty in Africa — a continent with the lowest level of electrification and highest rates of poverty in the world. Vanessa claims that the pipeline is another colonial project subjecting Africans to slavery. But, it is Vanessa and her ilk who are the colonialists and would-be slave masters.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Mass Starvation Could Save Us from Climate Change!

By Richard W. Fulmer | Master Resource | May 5, 2022

“World will ‘run out of food’ in 27 years, according to chilling doomsday prediction,” reads the headline in the Daily Star (UK). The article’s subtitle:

EXCLUSIVE: Scientists have issued a terrifying warning and have said the world could be left starving without any food in just over two decades, according to a chilling doomsday countdown

If the world doesn’t run out of food next year, as Sara Menker with Gro Intelligence warned back in 2017, scientists predict that we’ll run out in “exactly 27 years and 251 days left as of Sunday.”

In 2050? The author of the Daily Star article, Sian Hewitt, quotes sociobiologist Edward Wilson:

By then, there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet and the food demand will have increased by 70% compared to what we needed in 2017. The limit to how many people Earth can feed is set at 10 billion at the absolute maximum. The constraints of the biosphere are fixed, there’s no wiggle room here.

The amazing specificity of Wilson’s prediction is testimony to the advances that science and scientific predictions have made in just the last few years…. And, as if further evidence were necessary, Wilson is not alone:

Professor Julian Cribb, who has written books on the catastrophic prophecy, said: “This is a global food crisis and I don’t think I can see a way out of it.

It is arriving even faster than climate change.

Shortages of water, land, and energy combined with the increased demand from population and economic growth, will create a global food shortage around 2050.

World wars could become about food and water in years to come.

Jason Clay, World Wildlife Fund Senior Vice President, concurs:

To meet the increasing demand from a growing population, we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than has been produced in the previous 8,000 years.

As does Paul Ehrlich:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

And Peter Gunter:

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.

And, of course, Thomas Malthus:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

So, there you have it. The science is settled. We have nothing to fear from climate change.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Increased deaths in England for the age-range given the spring booster dose of Covid vaccine

Bartram’s Folly | May 5, 2022

I’ve mentioned previously that the roll out of a dose of vaccine has been associated with an increase in excess deaths (eg, here), and we seem to have seen the same effect in March.

At around the 21st March (week 12) England started to roll out the spring booster doses for those aged over 75 (and other vulnerable individuals). By the 7th April (week 14) the NHS had congratulated itself with the announcement that over 1 million doses had been given.

Here’s the data (from Euromomo) for excess deaths in England for those aged 75-85 since the start of the year:

I’ve highlighted the period where the million booster doses were delivered.

I note that we managed to get through the Omicron wave in the UK with normal levels of excess deaths in those aged 75-85, but as soon as the booster doses were rolled out we rapidly hit the threshold for a ‘substantial increase’.

Of course, it might be a coincidence — we have had rather a lot of coincidences over the last 15 months.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Life Expectancy Continues To Fall In The EU

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | MAY 7, 2022

Life expectancy has taken a rare hit in the European Union during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below (using Eurostat data), despite a blip in 2015, life expectancy in the EU had been growing every year since at least 2003.

In 2020, however, the average years of life somebody born in the 27 countries dropped from 81.3 to 80.4. In 2021, this fell again by another 0.3 years.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As reported by Eurostat,“life expectancy has risen, on average, by more than two years per decade since the 1960s. However, the latest available data suggest that life expectancy (has) stalled or even declined in several EU Member States.”adding:

“The Covid-19 pandemic has had a negative effect with life expectancy at birth declining in almost half the EU Member States in 2021. The largest decreases have been estimated in Slovakia and Bulgaria (-2.2 years compared with 2020), followed by Latvia (-2.1) and Estonia (-2.0). Compared with the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the overall effect on life expectancies is still negative in all EU Member States except Luxembourg (+0.1), Malta and Sweden (same level).”

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

WHO Estimates of India’s Covid Deaths Are Highly Suspect

By Ramesh Thakur | The Daily Sceptic | May 8, 2022

On May 5th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a new report estimating global excess deaths at 14.9m for two years of the pandemic 2020-21 as the true COVID-19 mortality toll, nearly triple the official toll of 5.44m. “Excess mortality” is the difference between the number of deaths that would be expected in any time period based on data from earlier years and the number of deaths that have occurred. For countries with robust data surveillance, reporting and recording systems, this poses no real difficulty. Unfortunately, these conditions are not met in many countries. Therefore their excess mortality can only be estimated and the accuracy is a function of the reliability of the methodology and modelling used in the exercise. Given the overwhelming evidence about the flaws and deficiencies of Covid-related modelling over the last two years, and the damage caused by governments trusting modelling projections over real-world data, this should immediately throw up a forest of red flags about the WHO report.

A second reason to be sceptical is the less than stellar role of the WHO in its well-known Covid-related deference to China, the abandonment of its own summary of the state of the art science on managing pandemics from October 2019, its willingness to manipulate definitions of ‘herd immunity’ in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that came to dominate Covid policy around the world, and its self-interest in expanding its budget, authority and role in steering global health policies and management by means of a new international treaty.

A third ground for scepticism is they ascribe the total death count to the direct effects of Covid “due to the disease” and indirect effects “due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society”. The first part is questionable because it fails to distinguish between deaths with and from Covid. The second is disingenuous because the indirect toll of the NPIs (lockdowns, masks, induced fear, lost schooling, lost jobs, cancelled screenings and operations, aborted immunisation programs, disruptions to global food production and distribution, etc.) and vaccine-related adverse events will prove to be significantly higher than the indirect effects of the disease per se. Any study that fails to disaggregate deaths caused by the disease and by policy interventions to mitigate it lacks credibility.

Figure 1: India’s COVID-19 Deaths, Jan. 1st 2020-Mar. 27th 2022. Source: World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022

Like many others including Will Jones on this site, I was especially struck by the new figures for India. The report pushes India up to the very top of the Covid mortality toll with 4.74m deaths, nearly 10 times more than the count of 481,486 (as of December 31st 2021), almost one-third of the world total. Sorry, but that is simply not credible.

India’s geographic diversity, population size and economic conditions make data collection especially challenging. In public lectures in Australia and Canada, to drive home the point about the scale, I usually comment that the entire Australian population is a rounding error in 1.3bn-strong India. It suffers from persistent and widespread mass poverty – India is a country of a few mega-billionaires amidst the world’s biggest pool of poor, illiterate and sick people bar none. It might be nuclear-armed, but state capacity when it comes to administration and public and social services is easily the worst of all major economies. The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible and high quality healthcare is neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary Indians. The best doctors work in the public sector, in medium to large clinics and hospitals in metropolitan centres and as individual practitioners in most towns and villages. Consequently, health statistics are not all that reliable. But this is a general pathology, not one unique to COVID-19.

From everything I know about India, the WHO estimate does not align with overall death data, historical trends and Covid death compensation claims on the Indian Government from states. Indian experts believe that official statistics capture over 90% of all deaths. But this also means that about 10% of deaths would have been missed in previous years, yet the WHO’s ‘excess deaths’ count uses the official numbers as the baseline against which to estimate the impact of Covid. In a related vein, why would under-reporting be limited to Covid-related deaths and not, say, to suicides with its heavy social stigma and traffic accidents where the operators of overloaded buses and vans would try to drastically reduce actual numbers in order to hide the illegal loads (Figure 2)? The WHO estimates are flawed also in relying on 2019 deaths instead of using a five year average 2015-19 to wrinkle out anomalies in any given year.

Figure 2: India’s Top Dozen Killer Diseases (March 1st 2020-May 7th 2022). Top six cancers in order: oral, lung, breast, cervical, stomach, colon. Source: Chart constructed by author drawing on data from World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022

Estimates of India’s total annual death rate range from 738 per 100,000 people by the World Bank to 1,030 per 100,000 people by World Life Expectancy. The total annual death toll therefore would be somewhere in the 10-13 million range: a very wide range. The WHO estimate of the death rate for 2021 is within the higher range from World Life Expectancy. Simply put, the WHO estimate of all-cause deaths is within any realistic estimate of the margin of error in India’s unique circumstances of scale and state capacity.

The caveats to official data notwithstanding, the WHO estimate would mean almost one-quarter additional deaths than normal. In fact it’s worse. Looking at the detailed tables, the 4.74m excess deaths is calculated from a combined excess death rate for 2020–21 of 171 per 100,00 people. This is disaggregated into 60 and 280 per 100,000 people for 2020 and 2021, respectively. That would imply a 38% jump in all cause deaths in 2021. Despite all the horror scenes we saw on TV of corpses lying in the streets and washed ashore on riverbanks, that’s just not possible. Perhaps the clue to the error lies in the title of the actual document: “Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)” (emphasis added).

Some Daily Sceptic readers had fun with this aspect of the WHO announcement. My favourite exchange was this:

India’s own estimates of excess deaths for 2020 compared to 2019 is 480,000, of which Covid-related deaths were just under 150,000. So over 300,000 excess deaths were due to non-Covid causes, which in itself is far more believable because of the impact of the lockdown measures on exacerbating most of the conditions underlying India’s leading causes of deaths. By contrast, in 2021 the Covid-related death toll was much higher at 332,492.

Much as I have been critical in the past of official dismissals of international reports on India including weakening democratic practices, in this instance the Government is right to reject the WHO methodology of mathematical modelling based on data on 17 Indian states collected from websites and media reports: “This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in the case of India.” As well as defective data collection methodology, the report is marred also by three critically flawed assumptions: that uncounted excess deaths occurred only in 2020-21 and not before; they occurred only for COVID-19 and not other diseases; and Covid-related deaths were due solely to the disease and not caused by policy interventions to control and eradicate it.

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

UK pledges more military aid for Ukraine

Samizdat | May 8, 2022

The UK pledged a further £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in military support and aid to Ukraine on Saturday. London said the move nearly doubles London’s previous spending commitments to Kiev, and is the country’s highest rate of spending on a conflict since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The extra money will come from a reserve used by the government for emergencies. Like other NATO member states, the UK has been increasingly supplying Kiev with weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems and armored vehicles.

This week, London said it was sending 13 armored vehicles to Ukrainian police and the National Guard. The UK government has also been delivering tanks to Poland in order to replace those Warsaw has donated to Kiev.

Similarly, the US pledged an additional $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine on Friday. The package includes 25,000 155mm artillery rounds, as well as radars and electronic jamming equipment.

Russia has repeatedly criticized the West for “flooding” Ukraine with weapons, and warned in April that foreign arms become legitimate targets once they reach Ukrainian soil.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

FDA limits use of J&J vaccine over blood clotting disorder, but experts say Pfizer, Moderna shots pose similar risk

By Julie Comber, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 6, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday put strict limits on the use of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine, citing the risk of a blood-clotting condition the agency described as “rare and potentially life-threatening.”

In a statement Thursday, the FDA said the risk of vaccine recipients developing thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) after receiving the vaccine “warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine.”

The FDA said it has identified 60 cases of vaccine-induced thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, including nine deaths, out of about 18 million doses administered — although the condition is likely underreported.

Women 30 to 49 years old are at the highest risk of TTS from the J&J vaccine, with about eight cases per 1 million doses of vaccine administered, according to the FDA.

According to the latest data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 29, 2022, there were 13,873 reports of blood-clotting disorders following COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S.

Of those, 6,227 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 4,943 reports to Moderna and 2,662 reports to J&J.

In the U.S., 575 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered as of April 29, including 339 million doses of Pfizer, 217 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of J&J.

The agency said the “known and potential benefits” of the J&J vaccine for preventing COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks for individuals 18 and older “for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate,” or “who elect to receive the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.”

The agency described TTS as “a syndrome of rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets with onset of symptoms approximately one to two weeks following administration of the Janssen [J&J] COVID-19 vaccine.”

The updated restrictions to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the vaccine, marketed under the Janssen brand, also apply to booster doses, CNN reported.

People who can still get the Janssen vaccine include:

  • Those who had a severe allergic reaction to the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccine.
  • Those with personal concerns about the mRNA vaccines who would remain unvaccinated unless they can choose the Janssen vaccine.
  • Those with limited access to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Symptoms of TTS include shortness of breath, chest pain, leg swelling, persistent abdominal pain, neurological symptoms (like headaches or blurred vision) or red spots just under the skin called “petechiae” found beyond the site of injection.

Experts question timing, and why just J&J?

Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said limiting the authorized use of the Janssen vaccine “demonstrates the robustness of our safety surveillance systems and our commitment to ensuring that science and data guide our decisions.”

Marks said:

“We’ve been closely monitoring the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and occurrence of TTS following its administration and have used updated information from our safety surveillance systems to revise the EUA.

“The agency will continue to monitor the safety of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine and all other vaccines, and as has been the case throughout the pandemic, will thoroughly evaluate new safety information.”

However, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer and professor of biology at Simpson University, had a different take on the news.

“It seems like the FDA pays lip service to the fact that the spike protein can cause clotting, and to the widespread reports of clotting, by punishing Janssen, who has become the ‘whipping boy’ of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers through the pandemic,” Hooker said.

“I believe this is partially because of the limited use of the Janssen vaccine in the U.S. as compared to Pfizer and Moderna,” he added.

Hooker said the FDA can limit the use of the J&J vaccine without significantly impacting vaccine distribution overall, “while having the appearance of addressing the myriad vaccine adverse events caused by all the types of COVID-19 vaccines.”

As of Thursday, CNN reported only 7.7% of those considered fully vaccinated received the J&J vaccine.

Dr. Pierre Kory, founder and president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, told The Defender :

“My only hypothesis is this action is some attempt for the FDA to be able to claim that they took at least some action to protect the safety of the public, akin to ‘virtue signaling.’

“Having been a keen observer of their actions throughout the pandemic, I find this action to be completely insufficient and demonstrates a calculated attempt to ensure vaccinations with similarly dangerous vaccines continue.”

Dr. Meryl Nass questioned the timing of the FDA’s restriction of the EUA.

“Why did the FDA just throw the kill switch on the Janssen vaccine, when it knew of the thrombosis problems since the rollout?” Nass asked.

Nass told The Defender the FDA may have known about the thrombosis problem even before the Janssen vaccine rollout, “since the adenovirus vector platform is known to be associated with thrombosis” for “more than 15 years.”

Kory, who noted that all COVID-19 vaccines have had a high rate of adverse events, also questioned the timing of the new restrictions.

“I find the timing of this action to be both irrational and alarming given there is extensive data from around the world, much of it being censored from media and medical journals, that all the COVID-19 vaccines, not just Janssen, have long had unacceptable and diverse toxicity signals — beyond just clotting disorders from numerous pharmacovigilance databases and epidemiological and public health data reports,” Kory said.

As far back as April 2021, U.S. and European health officials were investigating whether the J&J COVID-19 vaccines were causing blood clots.

However, there was already mounting evidence the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could cause similar adverse reactions. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to this risk as far back as December 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2021 recommended the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID vaccines over the J&J vaccine due to the risk of blood clots, despite data showing the Pfizer and Moderna shots also cause blood-clotting disorders.

In January 2021, shortly after the rollout of Pfizer’s vaccine in the U.S., The Defender reported on the death of a 56-year-old Florida doctor who developed a blood-clotting disorder after the Pfizer vaccine and died 12 days later.

The Defender also reported on numerous other deaths related to blood-clotting disorders that developed after the Moderna and J&J vaccines.

The J&J vaccine received EUA on Feb. 27, 2021.

On April 13, 2021, the FDA and CDC paused use of the vaccine to investigate six reported cases of TTS.

The agencies lifted the pause only 10 days later, after confirming a total of 15 cases of TTS had been reported to VAERS, including the original six reported cases, out of approximately 8 million doses administered.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine lied to its encircled troops – commander

Samizdat | May 8, 2022

Ukraine told troops besieged by Russian forces in Mariupol that help was on its way, while making no actual attempts to end the blockade of the city, the commander of the country’s 36th Naval Infantry Brigade has told RT.

Colonel Vladimir Baranyuk and his unit were tasked with guarding the northern outskirts of Mariupol, a strategic port city in the southeast of Ukraine, amid the Russian military operation in the country.

He was even awarded the Hero of Ukraine honor for his “courage and effective actions in repelling enemy attacks,” with Kiev asserting that the colonel and the other defenders of Mariupol would never surrender.

But as the Russian forces kept gaining ground, Baranyuk ended up surrendering peacefully after being captured during a failed attempt to flee the city.

He was apprehended hiding in the fields together with a number of his men a few kilometers north of Mariupol.

The commander of the marines now says the Ukrainian government lied to him and his troops in order to keep them fighting.

“Kiev told us to hold on, [saying] that the units that will lift the blockade are coming, they’ll soon be here,” Baranyuk told RT.

The promise was made despite President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser, Alexey Arestovich, openly acknowledging in interviews that Kiev “won’t be able to save” its forces in Mariupol.

“We were promised certain help. Naturally, this help didn’t arrive. And this pushed us to come out,” the colonel said, explaining his decision to flee.

It was “painful” for the troops when they realized that they had been left for dead, but “everybody, including myself, understood it,” Baranyuk added.

Mariupol has seen the heaviest fighting during the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The city, which suffered immense destruction, is now almost entirely controlled by Russian forces, with the Azovstal steel plant remaining the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance.

Kiev’s servicemen and nationalist fighters of the notorious Azov Battalion, who are holed up at the massive site, had been given numerous opportunities to lay down their arms by Russia, but rejected all of them. Moscow has said that those inside the plant want to surrender, but cannot do so due to Kiev’s reluctance to give the relevant order.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

THE VANDEN BOSSCHE WARNING

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 5, 2022

Acclaimed vaccinologist, Geert Vanden Bossche, sits down for his second groundbreaking interview with Del to explain why the intense pressure mass vaccination is putting on the Covid-19 virus will likely drive it to become catastrophically deadly.

May 8, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

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