The Washington Post (WP) published a story detailing how the efforts by a Malaysian “coral gardener,” Anuar Abdulla, to restore coral reefs near his home have resulted in him being consulted on coral restoration efforts globally. Unfortunately, rather than simply delivering well earned praise to Abdullah for his worthwhile efforts, the WP had to turn the story into another in its on-going “Climate Solutions” series, blaming coral decline on climate change. This is false. Some corals have declined in recent years, others have expanded, and new colonies have been discovered. Of those that have declined, there is little support for any link to climate change, and a great deal of evidence pointing to other factors being behind local coral declines.
In the story, titled “One man’s lonely quest to save the world’s corals draws a following,” reporter Rebecca Tan writes:
For nearly four decades, the coral gardener [Anuar Abdullah] worked alone.Abdullah has spent his entire adult life restoring coral reefs, until recently working in obscurity — and at times, in poverty.
In a world rapidly losing its reefs to climate change and to environmental damage, he is now emerging as an increasingly influential expert on how to revive them. Governments and resorts have come calling, asking whether he can help with reefs lost to natural disasters and overtourism.
Tan acknowledges factors besides climate change are contributing to coral decline. She should have explored those in greater detail and left off her misplaced climate change harangue because there is no data to support the claim that long term climate change is causing coral decline.
As discussed at Climate Realism, here, for example, corals are hardy and resilient. The first corals arose during the Cambrian Period about 535 million years ago and the number and type corals increased dramatically more than 400 million years ago, coming into existence when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher than at present. Coral have proved adaptable, expanding their range, evolving, and thriving through periods of higher and lower temperatures than the Earth is either currently experiencing or can be reasonably expected to experience in the foreseeable future.
As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Coral Reefs, coral thrive in warm water, not cold water, and recent warming has allowed coral to expand their range poleward, while still thriving near the equator. Despite bleaching events, coral have expanded their range, and new coral reefs are discovered all the time. Science also shows that scientists have woefully undercounted the number or coral reefs and colonies in existence.
Nor, climate alarmists claims to the contrary, is there any evidence rising carbon dioxide levels are making Earth’s oceans and seas acidic. Since the oceans and seas are not becoming acidic, it is impossible for “ocean acidification” to be harming coral colonies.
If not warmer waters or ocean acidification, what factors are likely to have driven coral bleaching events in recent years. Tan named two of the culprits: natural disasters and overtourism. As explained in multiple Climate Realism posts other factors that have caused temporary or permanent damage to some coral colonies in various locations include: fishing and coral harvesting; coastal development and associated siltation and pollution; agricultural runoff; and pollution tied to sun block used by swimmers. While rapid influxes of warmer waters from natural shifts in ocean currents have caused temporary bleaching events on occasion, experience shows most coral recover from such events and multiple studies show corals can and do adapt to the gradual long-term pace of global warming.
Coral reefs are critical to ocean biodiversity. The world should be grateful for Anuar Abdulla’s efforts to restore coral reefs. He deserves all the praise he receives for this work. However, looking at coral reefs more broadly, in order to help coral reefs recover or make them more resilient to harmful impacts, one must first accurately identify the causes of their decline. The Washington Post, for the most part failed here. Because climate change isn’t harming coral reefs, trying to protect coral health by fighting global warming is a misplaced effort. Resources spent there, could be better applied to reducing or mitigating the true causes of coral losses—which, of course, is precisely what Abdulla is doing on a case by case basis.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Washington Post |
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The Met Office has failed to quash the doubts that have arisen about its claimed 40.3°C UK record temperature produced on the afternoon of July 19th by the side of the main runway at RAF Coningsby. The military station is home to two squadrons of Typhoon jets and is extensively used for fighter pilot training. The U.K. record was set at 3.12pm during a mini-heatwave following a large jump of 1.3°C over the previous five minutes. Within a minute of the record being set, the temperature fell by 0.6°C. The Daily Sceptic has sought a response to three questions seeking further details about the events surrounding the record, but to date has had no reply.
The Met Office did however reply to the local publication Lincolnshire Live stating that the verifying of temperatures was a “rigorous process” and all records collected were accurate. This process was said to involve cross-checking between stations and an analysis of the weather on the day “and how it compared to the Office’s forecasts”. Lincolnshire Live asked about the sudden jump in the temperature at the time of the record, and was told there was some “thin cloud” around at the time.
Breaks in cloud cover was the reason advanced in July 2015 when two journalists queried a record temperature at Heathrow airport. Here it was noted that the temperature had jumped 0.9°C in two minutes. Dr. Mark McCarthy from the Met Office said solar radiation was “the most plausible and sufficient explanation” for the peak in temperature.
Last Monday, the Daily Sceptic published a satellite photograph of the British Isles showing no cloud over large areas of eastern England at 3pm on July 19th. Met Office observations for 2pm on the same day confirm the weather at Coningsby was sunny with visibility up to 40 kms. Given reasonable and continuing doubts, we asked the Met Office three follow-up questions.
- In its “rigorous process” inquiring into the validity of the Coningsby record, did the Met Office rule out all non-climatic causes such as jet aircraft operating near the measuring station located, according to your own latitude/longitude co-ordinates, near the main runway?
- Do Met Office scientists have any idea why the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C in just six minutes (0.6°C in two minutes), and then fell by 0.6°C in the next minute? A similar rise in the Homewood/Booker Heathrow story was blamed on a break in thick cloud. Is this the Met Office’s explanation this time?
- The article also referred to the effect of urban heat corruption, particularly at airports. It noted, for instance, that recent research by two atmospheric scientists, including the Alabama State Climatologist, found significant corruption of data at U.S. airports. For instance, warming at Florida’s Orlando airport was barely a third after urban heat had been removed from the data. Does the Met Office intend to continue using raw data from airport and urban sites without making substantial recalculations to remove all non-climatic corruptions?
The Daily Sceptic made three attempts to elicit a response, but to no avail. This was a little surprising since prior to the publication of our first article the Met Office wrote: “Could you provide a summary of your likely piece so we can provide a relevant statement for inclusion?”
July 19th in the U.K. was an exceptionally hot day in a generally hot summer. Social media correspondents have asked why bother querying the 40.3°C record since similar records were set elsewhere. However, these were also at busy airports, along with a measuring devise set at Kew Gardens located yards from one of the largest tropical greenhouses in the world. But the Coningsby record is hugely valued by green activists because it is the first time – since records began – that 40°C had been broken in the U.K. Discussing the record, Dr. McCarthy noted that in a climate unaffected by human-induced climate change, it would be virtually impossible for temperatures in the UK to reach 40°C.
There is of course no scientific proof Dr. McCarthy can draw on to back up this speculative assertion, but it gives an insight into the totemic value the Coningsby record has already achieved. To this day, it is widely quoted in the mainstream media. However, it is important to investigate all these temperatures records that the Met Office has made a habit of declaring so we can gain an insight into the way the operation collates all its data.
The Met Office is all-in on anthropogenic climate change and over the last two decades it has become a big promoter of the green cause and Net Zero. In January this year, for instance, it funded climate catastrophe work from a group of academics and Cambridge Econometrics that forecast the English could revert to hunter-gathering and feudal warfare after 2040. But its main work, for which it receives considerable taxpayer funding, is to supply accurate meteorological records and reasonable forecasts based on this information.
This process is now under serious investigation by scientists concerned about the constant upward adjustments of all the major global surface temperature datasets. This occurs at a time when accurate satellite and meteorological balloon data suggests considerably less warming over the last two decades. Over the last 10 years, the Met Office has added 30% extra global warming to its recent HadCRUT record. In the process, it removed a temperature pause from 1998 to around 2012. The pause, which the Met Office wrote about at the time, is still visible in the satellite data.
The most pressing issue, however, is the corruption of data caused by the growth of urban centres around the world. The disconnect of all the major surface temperature databases from the satellite and balloon data is becoming obvious. As we noted in one of our questions to the Met Office, recent work by two American atmospheric scientists shows considerable urban corruption in the U.S. record. It was found that urban heat had added around 50% extra warming over the last 50 years to the eastern United States.
The Met Offices does valuable work and provides a vital community weather service in the U.K. But its feverish promotion of the green agenda would sometimes appear to be at odds with its duty to provide unbiased weather/climate information and uncorrupted temperature figures.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | UK |
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“PayPal seems to be moving in the direction of social credit and restricting transactions – that’s concerning,” PayPal co-founder, and now Tesla and Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, said in a recent Spaces.
Last month, Twitter filed registration paperwork to pave the way for it to process payments, according to a filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which was obtained by The New York Times.
Following that, Musk said that he envisioned users connecting their online bank accounts to the social media service, with the company moving later into “debit cards, checks, and whatnot.”
Following public backlash, PayPal recently abandoned a proposed update to its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that would have led to penalties of $2,500 for spreading “misinformation.” However, the company still maintains a policy carrying similar penalties for “intolerance.”
The AUP prohibits the “promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance.” Free speech advocates feel that the policy is vague and is left to the interpretation of PayPal staff.
Aaron Terr, a senior program officer of the rights group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said at the time that the policy “suffers from the same defect as a lot of the other proposed prohibitions on speech, in that it’s vague.”
Terr added: “And it’s left open to interpretation by PayPal employees, and because of its vagueness, that gives them a lot of discretion to essentially just enforce that provision against disfavored speakers, and to do so in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner.”
The revoked misinformation policy update was condemned by PayPal founders. Co-founder Elon Musk said the update “goes against everything I believe in.”
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, PayPal, Twitter |
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On Tuesday, a District of Columbia jury convicted Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs of seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol building. Three other defendants were acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of other felonies. Convictions of seditious conspiracy represent a political victory—not just a legal one—for those who have long insisted that the January 6 riot was no mere riot, but an organized armed rebellion of some sort. This claim has been key in the administration’s ongoing vague claim that “democracy”—however defined—is somehow “at risk.”
Yet, few of the legal proceedings arising out of the Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters have done much to forward this narrative. Out of the approximately 850 people charged with crimes of various sorts, only a small number have been charged with anything close to treason or violent insurrection. Specifically, the closest the Justice Department has come is the charge of “seditious conspiracy” applied to 11 defendants total. So far, only 2 have been convicted of the charge.
Seditious conspiracy must not be confused with the act of treason legally defined in the US Constitution, however. Generally speaking, while treason requires an overt act of some kind, seditious conspiracy is a charge that a person has said things designed to undermine government authority. In other words, it is a “crime” of intent as interpreted by state authorities. This is fundamentally different from picking up a weapon and using it against agents of a government.
Of course, as we’ve noted here at mises.org before, the very idea of treason is itself problematic since it assumes that violence against a government agent is somehow worse than a crime against a private citizen. Governments love this double standard because it reinforces the idea that the regime is more important than the voluntary private sector. Ultimately, however, violence against a person or property should be prosecuted as exactly that, and not as some separate category of crime against the “special” human beings who work for a regime.
Seditious conspiracy suffers from this same problem but is even more problematic because it relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to “prove” that a person was saying things in favor of obstructing or overthrowing a government. Indeed, the supposed necessity of such a “crime” is belied by the fact that no such crime even existed in federal law between the repeal of the hated Alien and Sedition Acts, and the advent of the Civil War. Nor did seditious conspiracy laws play an important role in the U.S. regime’s military success against the secessionists in the Southern Confederacy.
Instead, what we find is that seditious conspiracy is a crime that is both prone to abuse by state authorities and is unnecessary in terms of preventing violence to life and property. In cases such as the January 6 riot, crimes against persons and property ought to simply be considered violent crimes and property crimes of the usual sort. Contrary to absurd romantic notions that the January 6 rioters struck some sort of blow against “democracy” the fact is that any disruptions against Congressional proceedings can be addressed as assault, trespassing, and other related crimes. Seditious conspiracy, in contrast is merely a type of “thoughtcrime.”
The Origins of Seditious Conspiracy
When the framers of the United States constitution wrote the document’s text, they defined treason in very specific and limiting terms:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Note the use of the word “only” to specify that the definition of treason shall not be construed as something more broad than what is in the text. As with much of what we now find in the Bill of Rights, this text stems from fears that the US federal government would indulge in some of the same abuses that had occurred under the English crown, especially in the days of the Stuart monarchs. Kings had often construed “treason” to mean acts, thoughts, and “conspiracies” far beyond the act of actually taking up arms against the state. Instead, in the US constitution, the only flexibility given to congress is in determining the punishment for treason.
Naturally, those who favored greater federal power chafed at these limitations and sought more federal laws that would punish alleged crimes against the state. It only took the Federalists ten years to come up with the Alien and Sedition Acts which stated:
That if any persons shall unlawfully combine or conspire together, with intent to oppose any measure or measures of the government of the United States, which are or shall be directed by proper authority, or to impede the operation of any law of the United States, or to intimidate or prevent any person holding a place or office in or under the government of the United States, from undertaking, performing or executing his trust or duty, and if any person or persons, with intent as aforesaid, shall counsel, advise or attempt to procure any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination, whether such conspiracy, threatening, counsel, advice, or attempt shall have the proposed effect or not, he or they shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor.
Note the references to “intent,” “counsel,” and “advise” as criminal acts so long as these types of speech are employed in a presumed effort to obstruct government officials. This part of the Act however, was never used by the regime. Those prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts were charged under the section on seditious libel which were heartily opposed for being obviously and blatantly against basic rights of free expression. Nonetheless, the Sedition Act was allowed to expire thanks to the election of Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans (later known as Democrats).
For sixty years, the United States government had no laws addressing sedition on the books. But the heart of the 1798 Sedition Act would be revived. As passed on July 1861, the new Seditious Conspiracy statute stated
That if two or more persons within any State or Territory of the United States shall conspire together to overthrow, or to put down, or to destroy by force, the Government of the United States, or to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States; or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States; or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States against the will or contrary to the authority of the United States; or by force, or intimidation, or threat to prevent any person from accepting or holding any office, or trust, or place of confidence, under the United States . . . shall be guilty of a high crime
Given the timing of the legislation—i.e., in 1861 following the secession of several southern states—it is assumed the origins of the legislation at the time was in addressing alleged Confederate treason. This is not quite the case. Indeed, the legislation enjoyed considerable support from those who were especially militant in their opposition to the confederacy. For example, Rep. Clement Vallandigham of Ohio—who would later be exiled to the Confederacy for opposing the war—supported the bill precisely because he thought it would help in punishing those engaged in “conspiracies to resist the fugitive slave law.” Indeed, the Congress had initially become serious about punishing “conspiracies” not in response to southern secession, but in response to John Brown’s 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry.
Southern secession and fears of rebellion helped enlarge the coalition in favor of a new sedition law. The new sedition law represented a significant expansion of the idea of “crimes against the state” in that the sedition law did not require overt acts against the government, but merely “conspiring” vaguely defined. Douglas understood this perfectly well, explaining the benefits of his bill as such:
You must punish the conspiracy, the combination with intent to do the act, and then you will suppress it in advance. There is no principle more familiar to the legal profession than that whenever it is proper to declare an act to be a crime, it is proper to punish a conspiracy or combination with intent to perpetrate the act. . . . If it be unlawful and illegal to invade a State, and run off fugitive slaves [for example] why not make it unlawful to form conspiracies and combinations several States with intent to do the act?
Others were more suspicious of expanding federal power in this way, however. Sen. Lazarus Powell and eight other Democrats presented a statement opposing the passage of the bill. Specifically, Powell and his allies believed the new seditious conspiracy law would be a de facto move in the direction of allowing the federal government to effectively expand the definition of treason offered by the federal constitution. The statement read:
the creation of an offense, resting in intention alone, without overt act, would render nugatory the provision last quoted, [i.e. the treason definition in the Constitution] and the door would be opened for those similar oppressions and cruelties which, under the excitement of political struggles, have so often disgraced the past history of the world.
Even worse, the new legislation would provide to the federal government “the utmost latitude to prosecutions founded on personal enmity and political animosity and the suspicions as to intention which they inevitably engender.”
Seditious conspiracy legislation gives the federal government far greater leeway to punish political opponents. Certainly, such legislation could have indeed been used against opponents of the fugitive slave acts, as well as against opponents of federal conscription. After all, opponents of both the Civil War draft and the Vietnam War draft—as with the heroic draft-card burnings of the Catonsville Nine, for example — ”conspired” to destroy government property. It would be far harder to prove in court that such acts constituted treason. Unfortunately, the new legislation was ultimately approved in 1861, and the United States government had its first permanent laws against seditious conspiracy.
We now have the same reasons to fear seditious conspiracy laws as Powell did in 1861. Such measures allow the federal government to construct laws addressing intent, thoughts, and words, rather than overt acts. This greatly expands federal power and allows for prosecution of mere inflammatory rhetoric against the federal government. Indeed, prior to his conviction this week, Rhodes’s attorneys reminded jurors that Rhodes never even entered the capital on January 6. They also noted that Rhodes had expressed verbal opposition to entering the capital. Yet, he was apparently convicted because “conspiracy” can encompass so many acts, especially in the minds of jurors.
A common-sense foundation for addressing violence in the Capitol building, however, would be to simply prosecute those who engage in actual violence and trespass. It is clear, however, that gaining convictions for seditious conspiracy has been an important goal for the administration because it assists in the narrative that Donald Trump’s supporters attempted some sort of coup. Unfortunately, These sorts of political prosecutions are just the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from the Justice Deptrtment. While the FBI can’t be bothered with investigating sex criminals such as Larry Nassar, they’ll pull out all the stops to prosecute hundreds of those who entered the Capitol on January 6, many of whom simply stood around gawking at the scenery. But when Congress gives the FBI a near carte blanche as it has done with seditious conspiracy laws, we should expect as much.
Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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Israeli historian Shay Hazkani has said that the Israel State Archive’s refusal to release written material looted from the Palestinians on the pretext that this would “undermine national security” is actually “cover for a completely different fear”. He believes that the tens of thousands of documents looted by Israel during the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population in 1947/48 will, if made available, completely undermine the Zionist narrative about the founding of the occupation state.
Writing in Haaretz, the associate professor of Jewish Studies also described the impossible hurdles he has had to jump through to obtain access to tens of thousands of pages of yet to be declassified Arabic documents looted by Israel.
One of the many false claims spread by Israel’s founders was that the Palestinians wanted to “throw the Jews into the sea.” Hazkani has found no calls for murdering Jews just because they were Jews in either Arab propaganda or the educational material aimed at Palestinians and Arab fighters in 1948.
“Judging by the documents I collected for my latest book, the claims about an Arab plan to ‘throw the Jews into the sea’ are actually rooted in official Zionist propaganda,” he explained. “This propaganda began during the [Nakba], perhaps to encourage Jewish fighters to leave as few Palestinians as possible in the areas that would become part of Israel.” A comparison of Arab and Jewish propaganda issued in 1948 revealed that the propaganda of the Israeli army and its precursor, the Haganah, was much more violent.
Hazkani was only granted permission to view documents five years after he had sought permission to examine several files that were looted from Palestinian institutions during the fighting that took place in the wake of Israel’s creation and whose existence had been concealed. Nevertheless, full details of the information that would reveal what Palestinian intentions were, including those of the much-maligned Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini, remain classified until 2040. While Al-Husseini’s correspondence with senior Nazi officials was made available, the official policy and motives of the leader of the Palestinian national movement during World War Two will remain classified for another two decades.
“There are not and cannot be any state secrets in Arabic documents written by Palestinians, such as their plans for an independent Palestinian state or documents from an orphanage in Jaffa,” argued Hazkani. Indeed, he said that the biggest secret is the very existence of these documents, which are a memorial to a destroyed Palestinian civilisation. The reason why they remain a “secret” and why Israeli officials responsible for declassifying the documents want to keep them locked away is because they might undermine the official Zionist narrative and raise doubts among people willing to examine history with a critical eye.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Samizdat – 05.12.2022
Canada intends to send more warships to pass through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that the waters claimed by China are international, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said on Monday.
“We will continue to enforce the international rules-based order when it comes to the Taiwan Strait. And that’s why also we had a frigate going through the Taiwan Strait this summer, along with the Americans, [and] we’re looking to have more frigates going through it,” Joly said in an interview with Financial Times.
According to the minister, Canada will increase the number of frigates stationed in the Indo-Pacific region to three, as well as deploy an additional number of diplomats and military attaches. In total, 400 million Canadian dollars ($298 million) will be invested in the region’s security.
Chinese officials repeatedly told their US counterparts that Beijing did not recognize the strait between the east coast of the mainland and Taiwan as international waters. In addition, Canada recently unveiled its Indo-Pacific Strategy, which called Beijing an “increasingly disruptive global power.”
Official relations between Beijing and Taipei broke down in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the two sides maintain contacts through nongovernmental organizations.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Canada, China |
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By Uriel Araujo | December 5, 2022
While the United States’ European allies are now fighting aggressive American subsidies (a crisis that risks dividing the political West), Taiwan, another US ally, also faces Washington’s protectionism. This fits into the US pattern of hurting close allies in many different ways.
Biden and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook are visiting Arizona on December 6 to launch the $12 billion American plant of chip giant TSMC – it is the company’s first advanced chip in the US. The US $52 billion chip subsidy bill (passed in July) has been described as vital to the construction of the TSMC plant in Arizona. This will basically transfer Taiwan’s productivity and its most advanced technology to the US and such news has not been well received in Taiwan.
Journalist Zhang Zhouxiang has described this new development as TSMC draining itself. According to him, Taiwan is moving “high-end jobs” away, which hurts the Taiwanese economy.
Semiconductors play a key role in cybersecurity and military applications. Since the pandemic, there has been a shortage of chips (semiconductors) and earlier this year the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo described this situation as a “national security” issue.
Regarding chips, national interests and national security concerns are thus often intertwined. The British government has basically imposed a semiconductor blockade on China, by having taken actions to retrospectively block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab (one of the country’s largest semiconductors plants) to Nexperia, a Dutch company owned by China’s Wingtech. Just days before, the German government had blocked the sale of Elmos Semiconductor’s factory to Silex, a Swedish subsidiary of China’s Sai Microelectronics. In both Germany and Britain concerns about security and economic as well as technological sovereignty have been voiced. There are also concerns about the possible outflow of technical know-how.
Likewise, as part of the ongoing New Cold War, the US government, in early October, banned Chinese companies from purchasing (without a license) both chip-making equipment and advanced chips. Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan went so far as to describe the American ban as “all but a declaration of a technology war”. Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has also described the American chip restrictions as a “de facto declaration of economic war” (against China), and added that it is a “disproportionate response”.
Chipmaking has been a new front in American-Chinese tensions, and now, with the aforementioned German and British decision, tensions are also escalating in Europe. Such European decisions are also the result of Washington’s pressure, according to Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo‑technology at Eurasia Group.
In February, amid the escalation of tensions between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, I wrote on how Taiwan stands between the two superpowers in their technological competition. Amid the ongoing chip race, many different countries have introduced incentives to foster the semiconductors’ industry. Taiwan is the planet’s largest chip manufacturer and is also the center of Chinese-US tensions today. This is the ironic context of TSMC’s Arizona move.
It is increasingly difficult today to insulate industries from geopolitical disputes. Beijing aspires to become a tech superpower, something which American political elites will not tolerate. Although the Chinese semiconductor industry has been growing quite quickly, it still remains behind the cutting edge in chips, largely due to American efforts to block Chinese endeavors to acquire the necessary equipment and know-how.
However, the American economic war on Beijing in fact endangers the global microchip industry itself and increases the risk of butterfly effects, China being a key part of the globalized world. Moreover, while the US never had an intensive economic relationship with its Soviet rival during the old Cold War, China today remains the United States’ third largest market for exports. In addition, as historian and foreign-policy analyst Max Boot has remarked, a single factory in China, Foxconn, is reported to produce about half the world’s iPhones, for example. This being so, according to Boot, while Washington does not want to see any Western technology being “transferred” to the Chinese military, it can’t, on the other hand, endanger supply chains for chips and other vital parts.
Moreover, the so-called American “chip war” and its export curbs can in fact bring record losses for Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean makers (all of these nations being US allies).
Washington’s aggressive subsidies and protectionism have arguably stopped the country from rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement among 12 Asia-Pacific nations). Its Inflation Reduction Act in turn has alienated important allies such as Germany and France – the very states Washington counts on in its plans to counter China.
Harvard professor William Overholt has stated that today the US “wants everybody to join economic alliances” with them, while not giving anything in return. Meanwhile, ironically, Communist-Party ruled China, according to him, has promoted freer trade and investment around the world.
With the Belt and Road Initiative, among others, geoeconomics has been the very core of Beijing’s geostrategic approaches. Washington, in turn, has been dangerously weaponizing its economic and financial policies to “counter” China and Russia, also hurting close allies in the process. The irony is that the more the US employs economic leverage to aggressively coerce other states, the greater the incentive to come up with alternatives against Washington.
To sum it up, currently, the US is overextended and overburdened, trying to simultaneously encircle and contain both Moscow and Beijing. Its aggressive protectionism in turn has been enraging and alienating important allies, such as the EU and Taiwan. All of this signals the decline of the American superpower and of the US-led global order.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | China, European Union, United States |
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The lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 was published in 2015
One of the most striking features of the corrupt pandemic response is that its innumerable elements of fraud, deception, malfeasance, unconstitutionality, and negligent homicide are NOT concealed. Because these criminal elements are not reported by the mainstream media, they remain unknown to most people. Like pebbles tossed onto a recently mown lawn, they are not immediately visible, but would be to anyone who looks a little closer.
This is not actual concealment; it’s just a matter of not drawing attention to something. Nevertheless, such systematic omissions result in ignorance for those accustomed to obtaining their information from the mainstream media. This ignorance is reinforced by the consumption of daily mainstream news, which diminishes awareness of any particular story that develops over a period of time.
A stunning form of this deception by omission is when public officials, scientists, and the media pretend not to notice extremely harmful and even criminal conduct that is detectable for anyone who bothers to look. Public officials and news reporters have no excuse for not looking because it’s their job to look. Their omissions are analogous to a police investigator choosing not to look at a video surveillance recording of a bank that has just been robbed by a man not wearing a mask. Those who have committed dangerous and even criminal acts are, in this way, allowed to hide in plain sight
A striking example is the histrionic debate over whether NIH grant recipients conducted Gain-of-Function research on bat coronaviruses. The pinnacle of such theater were the jousting matches between Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci at Senate Health Committee hearings, at which Dr. Fauci vehemently insisted his agency did NOT fund Gain-of-Function research on bat coronaviruses. Apart from Senator Paul, few in the Senate, and few if any in the mainstream media, questioned Dr. Fauci’s assertions.
And yet, to see that the NIH was, in fact, funding Gain-of-Function research of bat coronaviruses, one need only to read the 2015 paper titled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence by Veneet Menachery, Zhengli-Li Shi, Ralph Baric, et al. This study plainly states that the authors conducted Gain-of-Function research on bat coronaviruses in order to make them infectious to primary human airway epithelial cells.
Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi, AKA “Bat Woman” and collaborator with Dr. Ralph Baric
Towards the end of the paper, the reader comes to the following section:
Biosafety and Biosecurity
Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.
Note that the reason for pausing Gain-of-Function research was the determination that its risks outweighed its potential benefit. The legalistic assertion that this particular Gain-of-Function research was authorized to continue flies in the face of the risk assessment. Such research was, in 2014, deemed to be too dangerous for mankind, and in fact (as we now know) it was too dangerous. That Professor Baric’s research was approved before this negative risk assessment was made is immaterial.
The 2015 paper and other documents show that Ralph Baric and his Chinese colleague, Zhengli-Li Shi, were indeed engineering SARS-like bat coronaviruses in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to make them highly infectious to humans. Today we learn that Dr. Andrew Huff, former EcoHealth Alliance vice president and scientist, has just published a book titled The Truth about Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History.
We welcome Dr. Huff’s report, though we suspect that he won’t reveal anything we don’t already know.
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | China, Covid-19, United States |
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Over the past weeks a coordinated all-out assault on our agriculture—the ability to produce food for human existence—has begun. The recent G20 governmental meeting in Bali, the UN Agenda 2030 Cop27 meeting in Egypt, the Davos World Economic Forum and Bill Gates are all complicit. Typically, they are using dystopian linguistic framing to give the illusion they are up to good when they are actually advancing an agenda that will lead to famine and death for hundreds of millions if not billions if allowed to proceed. It’s driven by a coalition of money.
From G20 to Cop27 to WEF
On November 13 the G20–representatives of the 20 most influential nations including the USA, the UK, the European Union (though it’s no nation), Germany, Italy, France, Japan, South Korea, and several developing countries including China, India, Indonesia and Brazil,– agreed on a final declaration.
The first major item is a “call for an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains.”
Further, “working together to sustainably produce and distribute food, ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change, and halting and reversing biodiversity loss, diversify food sources…”
In addition they called for “inclusive, predictable, and non-discriminatory, rules-based agricultural trade based on WTO rules.”
As well, “We are committed to supporting the adoption of innovative practices and technologies, including digital innovation in agriculture and food systems to enhance productivity and sustainability in harmony with nature…”
Then comes the revealing statement: “We reiterate our commitment to achieve global net zero greenhouse gas emissions/carbon neutrality by or around mid-century.” [i](emphasis mine)
“Sustainable agriculture” with “net zero greenhouse gas emissions” is Orwellian doublespeak. For an outsider to UN linguistics, the words sound too good. What in fact is being promoted is the most radical destruction of farming and agriculture globally under the name “sustainable agriculture.”
Following the Bali G20 confab by only days was the United Nations’ COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit meeting in Egypt. There, the participants from most UN countries along with NGOs such as Greenpeace and hundreds of other green NGOs drafted a second call. COP27 launched something they revealingly call FAST– UN’s new Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) initiative. Fast, as in “to abstain from food…”
According to Forbes, FAST will promote a “shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets, would help reduce health and climate change costs by up to US$ 1.3 trillion while supporting food security in the face of climate change.” We are talking big numbers. $1.3 trillion by transition to “sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets” that would reduce cost of climate change by $1.3 trillion. [ii] What’s really going on behind all these words?
Big Money Behind
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization speaking to Reuters during COP27, within a year the FAO will launch a “gold standard” blueprint for reduction of so-called Greenhouse gases from agriculture.
The impulse for this war on agriculture comes not surprisingly from big money, FAIRR Initiative, a UK-based coalition of international investment managers which focuses on “material ESG risks and opportunities caused by intensive livestock production.”
Their members include the most influential players in global finance including BlackRock, JP Morgan Asset Management, Allianz AG of Germany, Swiss Re, HSBC Bank, Fidelity Investments, Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management, Credit Suisse, Rockefeller Asset Management, UBS Bank and numerous other banks and pension funds with total assets under management of $25 trillion.[iii] They are now opening the war on agriculture much as they have on energy. The UN FAO Deputy Director for Climate Change policies, Zitouni Ould-Dada said during the COP27 that, “There has never been this much attention to food and agriculture anytime before. This COP is definitely the one.” [iv]
The FAIRR claims, without proof, that:
“food production accounts for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the main threat to 86% of the world’s species at risk of extinction, while cattle ranching is responsible for three quarters of Amazon rainforest loss.” [v]
The FAO plans to propose drastic reduction in global livestock production, especially cattle, which FAIRR claims is responsible for:
“nearly a third of the global methane emissions linked to human activity, released in the form of cattle burps, manure and the cultivation of feed crops.”
For them, the best way to stop cow burps and cow manure is to eliminate cattle. [vi]
Unsustainable Sustainable Agriculture
The fact that the UN FAO is about to release a roadmap to drastically reduce so-called greenhouse gases from global agriculture, under the false claim of “sustainable agriculture” that is being driven by the world’s largest wealth managers including BlackRock, JP Morgan, AXA and such, tells volumes about the true agenda. These are some of the most corrupt financial institutions on the planet. They never put a penny where they are not guaranteed huge profits. The war on farming is their next target.
The term “sustainable” was created by David Rockefeller’s Malthusian Club of Rome. In their 1974 report, Mankind at the Turning Point, The Club of Rome argued:
“Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system. [vii](emphasis mine)
That was the early formulation of the UN Agenda 21, Agenda2030 and the 2020 Davos Great Reset. In 2015 UN member nations adopted what is called the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs: 17 Goals to Transform our World. Goal 2 is “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.”
But if we read in detail into proposals of COP27, G20 and Davos WEF of Klaus Schwab we find what is meant by these nice sounding words. Now we are being inundated with claims, unverified, by numerous government and privately-funded think tank models that our agriculture systems are a major cause of, yes, global warming. Not only CO2 but methane and nitrogen. Yet the entire global greenhouse gas argument that our planet is on the brink of irreversible disaster if we do not radically change our emissions by 2030 is unverifiable nonsense from opaque computer models. Based on these models the UN IPCC insists that if we do not stop a global temperature rise of 1.5 C above the level of 1850, by 2050 the world will essentially end.
The War Is Just Beginning
The UN and Davos WEF teamed up in 2019 to jointly advance the SDG UN Agenda 2030. On the WEF website this is openly admitted to mean getting rid of meat protein sources, introducing promoting unproven fake meat, advocating alternative protein such as salted ants or ground crickets or worms to replace chicken or beef or lamb. At COP27, discussion was about “diets that can remain within planetary boundaries, including lowering meat consumption, developing alternatives, and spurring the shift towards more native plants, crops and grains (thus reducing the current reliance on wheat, maize, rice, potatoes).” [viii]
The WEF is promoting a shift from meat protein diets to vegan arguing it would be more “sustainable”. [ix] They also promote lab-grown or plant-based lab meat alternatives such as the Bill Gates-funded Impossible Burgers, whose own FDA tests indicate it is a likely carcinogen as it is produced with GMO soy and other products saturated with glyphosate. The CEO of Air Protein, another fake meat company, Lisa Lyons, is a special WEF adviser. WEF also promotes insect protein alternatives to meat. Note also Al Gore is a Trustee of WEF. [x]
The war on animal raising for meat is just getting deadly serious. The government of the Netherlands whose Prime Minister Mark Rutte, formerly of Unilever, is a WEF Agenda Contributor, has created a special Minister for the Environment and Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal. Using a never-invoked and outdated EU Natura 2000 nature protection guidelines designed allegedly to “protect moss and clover,” and based on fraudulent test data, the Government just announced it will forcibly close 2,500 cattle farms across Holland. Their goal is to force fully 30% of cattle farms to close or face expropriation.
In Germany the German Meat Industry Association (VDF), says that within the next four to six months Germany will face a meat shortage, and prices will skyrocket. Hubert Kelliger, a VDF board member said, “In four, five, six months we will have gaps on the shelves.” Pork is expected to experience the worst shortages. The issues in meat supply are due to Berlin insisting on reducing the numbers of livestock by 50% to reduce global warming emissions. [xi] In Canada, the Trudeau government, another Davos WEF product, according to the Financial Post of July 27, plans to cut emissions from fertilizer 30 per cent by 2030 as part of a plan to get to net zero in the next three decades. But growers are saying that to achieve that, they may have to shrink grain output significantly.
When the autocratic President of Sri Lanka banned all import of nitrogen fertilizers in April 2021 in a brutal effort to return to a past of “sustainable” agriculture, harvests collapsed in seven months and famine and farmer ruin and mass protests forced him to flee the country. He ordered that the entire country would immediately switch to organic farming but provided farmers with no such training.
Combine all this with the catastrophic EU political decision to ban Russian natural gas used to make nitrogen-based fertilizers, forcing shutdowns of fertilizer plants across the EU, that will cause a global reduction in crop yields, and as well the fake Bird Flu wave that is falsely ordering farmers across North America and the EU to kill off tens of millions of chickens and turkeys to cite just a few more cases, and it becomes clear that our world faces a food crisis that is unprecedented. All for climate change?
*
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[i] G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration, Bali, Indonesia, 15-16 November 2022, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/60201/2022-11-16-g20-declaration-data.pdf
[ii] Kit Knightly, COP27 reignites the war on food, https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/11/13/lab-grown-meat-nuclear-yeast-vats-cop27-reignites-the-war-on-food/
[iii] https://www.fairr.org/about-fairr/network-members/page/14
[iv] Sarah El Safty, Simon Jessop, COP27: UN food agency plan on farming emissions to launch by next year after investor push, November 10, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/cop27-un-food-agency-plan-farming-emissions-launch-by-next-year-after-investor-2022-11-10/
[v] FAIRR Initiative, Where’s The Beef, https://www.fairr.org/wheres-the-beef/
[vi] Simon Jessop, Gloria Dickie, Global investors write to U N to urge global plan on farming emissions, June 9, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclusive-global-investors-write-un-urge-global-plan-farming-emissions-2022-06-08/
[vii] Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, https://web.archive.org/web/20080316192242/http:/www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=154
[viii] THE SHARM EL SHEIKH CLIMATE IMPLEMENTATION SUMMIT, cop27.eg 1, Round table on “Food Security” 7th November 2022, https://cop27.eg/assets/files/days/COP27%20FOOD%20SECURITY-DOC-01-EGY-10-22-EN.pdf
[ix] Vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian? 3 ways to eat more sustainably, October 28, 2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/vegan-plant-based-diets-sustainable-food/
[x] WEF, Have we reached the end of meat?, https://www.weforum.org/podcasts/house-on-fire/episodes/have-we-reached-the-end-of-meat
[xi] J. Shaw, Germany cutting back meat production to fight global warming, November 21, 2022, https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/11/21/germany-cutting-back-meat-production-to-fight-global-warming-n512518
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Canada, European Union, Germany, United Nations, WEF |
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In a report on wind farms on Wednesday, the Times wrote: ‘Labour argues that the ban on onshore sites has raised energy bills by £150. Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, said Tories were “dinosaurs” for opposing them.’
It is a claim that has often been bandied around recently. So what is the truth of the matter?
The first point to make is that onshore wind was never banned. What did happen was that in 2016, subsidies were withdrawn from any new construction, while wind farms had to obtain local planning permission. It is quite extraordinary that Labour don’t want communities to make these decisions themselves.
The most recent wind farms built under the subsidy mechanism are paid an index-linked, guaranteed price of £100.31/MWh. For many years until last year the market price for electricity has hovered between £40 and £50/MWh most of the time. In other words, those onshore wind farms were heavily subsidised until last year, when market prices rose. The cost of subsidies is of course passed on to energy bills.
There is no evidence that the construction costs for wind farms have fallen since then. It is therefore evident that if more wind farms had been built since 2016, we would have been paying double the wholesale price until last year when prices began rising.
Of course since then wholesale electricity prices have rocketed because of the rising cost of natural gas. But nobody forecast that this would happen in 2016, and clearly the right decision was made by the government, given the facts at the time.
Over this year, wholesale prices of electricity have averaged £177/MWh. As the guaranteed price under the Contracts for Difference scheme is £100.31, the difference is refunded by generators and subsequently knocked off our bills.
Miliband’s claims of a £150 saving are based on an analysis by Carbon Brief, a lobby group for renewable energy. According to them, based on previous trends, an extra 5.4 GW of onshore wind would have been built if subsidies had not been withdrawn. The lost output works out at 11.8 TWh, and consequently the saving would have amounted to about £900million, which would only have knocked about £10 off household bills, which account for about a quarter of total UK electricity consumption.
In reality, you cannot directly compare the cost of intermittent wind power with other dependable sources. Our bills are much higher because of the costs incurred in grid balancing costs and other items, which directly result from the intermittency of wind and solar power.
But what Ed Miliband conveniently forgot to tell us was the cost of all the renewable subsidies which we have already paid out, and will continue to for years to come. In the last ten years, these have totalled £78billion, and in the next six years will cost a further £56billion, according to data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
All of these costs lie at the door of Ed Miliband, who pushed through the Climate Change Act in 2008. If he really cares about our electricity bills, he would immediately campaign to abolish all subsidies and suspend the carbon tax, which is also responsible for energy bills being much higher than they need be.
He won’t, because of his obsession with climate change.
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | UK |
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Evidence grows by the day that the Net Zero fantasy is a societal and economic disaster waiting to happen. Not only is it based on the giant propaganda lie of ‘settled’ science, but it is almost laughably unaffordable. On just one level around the storage of ‘green’ energy, a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is scathing. Noting a “heads-in-the sand” approach by politicians, it says that “one would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent”.
For just one country alone, Germany, fully replacing natural gas back-up with battery storage “is a multi-trillion dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country’s GDP, and thus completely infeasible”. Across the globe, existing plans to store energy, vital since wind and solar are highly intermittent, are producing only a “tiny fraction” of the capacity that will be required to avoid electricity blackouts. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the people planning the Net Zero transition “have no idea what they are doing”, states the report.
Political pressure to resist the imposition of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda is being increasingly targeted in the UK and elsewhere at the unrealistic costs involved. In the U.K. Parliament, a Net Zero Scrutiny Committee was recently formed and led by the Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay. For its part, the GWPF has started a Net Zero Watch unit. The GWPF’s battery storage report is the latest in a string of publications asking serious questions about the finances behind Net Zero. It is written by the American lawyer and mathematician Francis Menton, who also runs the Manhattan Contrarian site.
Menton writes that the push to Net Zero without a fully demonstrated and costed solution to the energy storage conundrum “is analogous to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, and assuming that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid-air in time to save you before you hit the ground”. He continues:
“Now, before our advanced economies are destroyed, it is time to demand from our politicians and energy planners that they level with the public about the huge costs and the likely impossible technical requirements of the goals to which they have committed us.”
In a detailed report, the arithmetic behind Net Zero battery costings is laid out in detail. It is explained that no grid based on wind and solar is viable unless it has full back-up from another source. That source needs to provide 100% of power when the wind and sun stop blowing and shining. During calm periods in a cold winter, that could be a week or more. Remarkably, notes the author, none of the jurisdictions implementing crash Net Zero have paid much attention to storage programmes.
Storage demands for Net Zero are enormous. Five days without wind and solar require at least 120 Mega Watt hours (MWh) for each megawatt of average demand. But some calculations based on historical weekly and annual spikes suggest a requirement as high as 1,000 MWh to ensure reliability of a grid over a long time.
Truly scary is the work done by Ken Gregory who calculated that the United States would need an annual energy storage requirement of around 233,000 GWh. It is noted that a current lithium-ion battery installation is currently under construction in Australia for grid back-up with a storage capacity of 150MWh. Menton writes that 150MWh is 15% of one gigawatt hour, and 233,000GWh of storage would require some 1.55 million of these facilities.
Back in the real world, Menton reveals the planned battery storage capacity that will be delivered in many countries is “trivial” – typically from around 0.1% to at most 0.2% of the amount that’s necessary if Net Zero is to be achieved.
The figure is hardly surprising when the costs in battery storage are considered. Menton reviewed recent official cost reports and found that “even on the most optimistic assumptions” the cost could be as high as a country’s GDP. This was said to render the entire Net Zero project “an impossibility”. On less optimistic assumptions, the capital cost alone could be 15 times annual GDP. Even more impractical, it is noted that such batteries provide about four hours of discharge at maximum capacity, but weather patterns mean that grids need batteries that can store as much as a month’s demand, and then discharge that energy over the course of six months or more.
“Such ‘long duration’ batteries have not yet been invented,” he observes.
Last October, the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings of Associate Professor Simon Michaux who told the Finnish Government in no uncertain terms that there were not enough minerals in the world to supply all the batteries required for Net Zero. And this doesn’t even take into account that lithium-ion batteries need replacing every eight to 10 years. Michaux observed that the Net Zero project may not go fully “as planned”.
Those, less charitable, might ask: “what plan?”
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity |
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