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Israeli forces injure Palestinian school children in West Bank raid

Press TV | October 2, 2023

The Palestinian Ministry of Education has suspended classes in the village of Burqa due to the injury of a child in a raid by Israeli forces into a school.

Ghassan Daghlas, acting governor of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, said on Monday the decision to close the school was to maintain the safety of students.

Local media reported that Israeli forces also directly fired stun grenades and tear gas canisters toward the Palestinian students inside the school during the raid a day earlier. Dozens of children also suffered from smoke inhalation.

Israeli forces also denied teachers of 27 schools access to classes in Masafer Yatta area, located south of the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). The regime forces placed barriers to block the roads leading to the education centers.

In recent months, Israeli forces have also demolished a number of schools across the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Palestinian Ministry of Education in an earlier statement said the demolition of schools was “a heinous crime.”

“These practices have become a flagrant violation of students’ right to safe and free education.”

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

What’s behind the sudden US good will towards Iran?

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | October 2, 2023

In what proved to be a domestically controversial move, the US government approved the release of five prisoners held in Iran in return for releasing five Iranian detainees and billions of previously frozen assets. However, in the aftermath of the agreement between Tehran and Washington, the White House’s primary focus seems to be centered around securing a Saudi-Israeli deal rather than working on reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

As revealed by the anonymous diplomatic sources of The Cradle, in addition to other tidbits released in US media, the US-Iran prisoner swap appears to have been much more than meets the eye. The informal agreement, according to these anonymous sources, encompassed freezing Iranian uranium enrichment at 60% and permitting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to install cameras at several nuclear sites. On the other hand, the US’ concessions included disregarding Iranian oil sales – in essence, refraining from enforcing sanctions – and allowing all Iranian assets to be released, reportedly amounting to roughly $20 billion. This is well over the widely reported $6 billion touted in the international press.

What makes this agreement so intriguing is that it was non-formal, including no known signed documents, and was contrived over several months and under the auspices of Qatar and Oman as intermediaries. From leaked information, citing unnamed sources, what we can gather – regardless of what claims are true or false – is that the prisoner swap was more than a simple exchange of prisoners and $6 billion in frozen assets. According to a report released in May by Axios, secret indirect talks between the US and Iran had been conducted in Oman, which three sources close to the news outlet claimed Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kan, was part of. Later, in June, the New York Times released a report claiming that secret negotiations were going on, aimed at concluding an informal agreement to replace the need to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

To begin with, if we are to assume that the official US narrative on the agreement is correct, despite Iranian officials having contradicted it, then the most apparent objective in mind from Washington’s perspective would be to cause a thaw in America’s relationship with the Islamic Republic. As various analysts have suggested, this could have also signaled hope for a revival of the nuclear deal, which fell apart after the administration of former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018. Hope had largely faded that the administration of President Joe Biden could bring the deal back to life after Biden was revealed to have said that it was officially “dead” in November of 2022.

However, given the information we have at hand, what is most likely here is that this represents a massive de-escalation following ship seizures and the beefing up of America’s troop presence in the Persian Gulf back in August. Why a de-escalation now? Is it to revive nuclear deal talks? This appears highly unlikely. Instead, the prisoner exchange agreement comes simultaneously with, and is somewhat overshadowed by, developments in the ongoing discussions to reach an American-brokered normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The two nations, both powerful partners of the US in the Middle East, have never had formal diplomatic relations with each other. Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel as a sovereign country and has been at loggerheads with it over its treatment of Arabs in Palestine, which Riyadh ostensibly wants to see as an independent nation. Negotiations to finally normalize diplomatic relations have been ongoing for months now, with the US being a highly invested middleman, given that achieving such a deal would help consolidate its power base in the region. As for Iran, while Israel sees it as an existential enemy, Saudi Arabia has had a complicated relationship with it, only having re-established diplomatic ties earlier this year in a deal brokered by China.

When Biden met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)’s 78th session, they publicly discussed the high hopes of concluding Saudi-Israeli normalization. This was followed by two Fox News interviews, one with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and the other with the Israeli PM, during which both said that the deal grows closer by the day. At Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UNGA, he spoke at length on Iran; however, there was no mention of the recent US-Iranian prisoner exchange.

In fact, Israel has remained silent on the informal deal. This is especially interesting, considering that Tel Aviv routinely attacks the prospect of any agreement with Iran, let alone one that allows for tens of billions in funds to be transferred back into the hands of Tehran. In June, Netanyahu spoke over the phone with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during which he discussed Iran at length and proclaimed that he opposes and will not be bound by any agreement struck between Washington and Tehran.

On September 5, Antony Blinken spoke with the Israeli premier again, allegedly discussing Iran as the primary subject of the call. While the precise details of the calls are impossible to apprehend, there had to be a good chance that the prisoner swap agreement was mentioned, as reports had publicly been leaked to the press regarding Iran-US talks. With so much focus placed upon Iran by Israel, it makes no sense that Tel Aviv would remain silent on the prisoner exchange, especially given the release of Iran’s formerly frozen funds.

Not silent on the unfreezing of Tehran’s billions were Republican politicians in the US Congress. If the Biden administration were to have accepted a renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal, one of its major hurdles would have been passing the deal in Congress, including the deeply opposed Republican-led House of Representatives. In fact, any attempt to try and pass a deal, at this point, could reflect negatively on the Biden White House, which matters more now as we head towards the 2024 presidential election.

Therefore, by striking an informal agreement with Tehran, the US de-escalates and addresses some of its worries surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. More importantly, however, the US government could be trying to create a fertile environment for the conclusion of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, both by calming Iran down to de-escalate regional tensions and, possibly, leveraging concessions to ease Tehran’s pushback against the normalization directly. Whether this strategy will work or not is yet to be seen. Still, it is clear that the key foreign policy goal for Joe Biden is securing the normalization agreement, which is why it makes sense that the most powerful nation that opposes it – Iran – should be addressed and taken seriously.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

British Defense Sec ‘Mad’ to Suggest ‘Catastrophic’ Military Mission to Ukraine

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 02.10.2023

The UK’s newly-appointed defense secretary was “mad” to suggest sending troops and ships to Ukraine, a military expert has said.

British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps told a newspaper over the weekend that UK soldiers could be sent to Ukraine to train conscripts to Volodymyr Zelenksy’s depleted army.

The defense secretary even hinted that Royal Navy ships could be sent to the Black Sea to escort Ukrainian merchant vessels following the breakdown of the grain export deal with Russia — in spite of Turkiye’s ban on military vessels of any other nation transiting the Bosphorpus straits to enter the land-bound sea.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak quickly slapped down Shapps in a TV interview on Sunday on the eve of his Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester, saying: “There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict.”

Since 2022, the British Army has put tens of thousands of Ukrainian recruits through three-week crash courses on training grounds in the UK before they are sent to the frontlines.

Similarly, documents leaked from the US Department of Defense in April this year estimated that there were up to 50 SAS special forces operating covertly in Ukraine, but did not indicate what their mission might be.

Former British MP Matthew Gordon-Banks, a senior research fellow at the Armed Forces Defense Academy in Oxfordshire and Conservative partymate of Shapps, said Shapps’ comments to the media were a “complete PR disaster.”

“Shapps gave an interview, possibly over-stating his intentions as a new defense secretary ahead of a speech to the Conservative Party conference. The Telegraph wrote it up as a certainty,” Gordon-Banks told Sputnik. “I suspect it horrified the prime minister, security and intelligence sources and the wider government.”

The military expert said Shapps’ suggestion of sending British troops into the warzone was simply unthinkable.

“His idea was absolutely mad. Only this week, Russian leaders like [State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav] Volodin, [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry] Medvedev have made it clear about how the conflict in Ukraine will end and what they would see as unnecessary escalation by NATO,” Gordon-Banks said.

He noted that the article had quickly been taken down from the newspaper’s website — possibly at the insistence of the intelligence services.

“Such a deployment would be catastrophic in both diplomatic and military terms,” Gordon-Banks warned.

In an article in the same newspaper on Sunday, Shapps’ predecessor at the Ministry of Defense Ben Wallace claimed Ukraine was winning its summer offensive — already written off by some US generals and even British state broadcaster the BBC — despite only capturing a handful of villages after four months of fighting.

He also urged Kiev to begin conscripting teenage boys into its army in an attempt to stop Russia from bringing overwhelming force to bear.

“The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40,” Wallace wrote. “I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilizing the whole country by stealth,” he claimed.

The defense analyst said Kiev was already press-ganging youths to make up for the terrible casualties its army has suffered over the past year and a half.

“Ukraine has already lost three armies,” Gordon-Banks stressed. “They are now pulling 16- to 18-year-olds off the streets. 500,000 Ukrainians have already died fighting a senseless, unnecessary war and it is time for the West to move more quickly to end this conflict.”

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Losing a Plane? Try Losing a Nuke

By Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute | October 2, 2023

Recently, the U.S. Marine Corps lost (and later found) an F-35 aircraft. The circumstances are mostly undisclosed or rumor based, though that is to be expected in regards to such a sensitive matter. While it has become a comical example of incompetence, it’s not the worst thing that the U.S. military has lost.

They’ve also lost nuclear weapons… on a few occasions.

The U.S. term for it is “Broken Arrow.” There have officially been 32 reported incidents involving Broken Arrows. Lost ‘nukes’ outside of the United States are unknown, given that not all national governments are as open with information. The U.S. has admitted that six nuclear weapons remain lost. During the reign of the Soviet Union, it is possible that such weapons also went missing, especially in the chaotic years following the break up when ownership and security of the strategic arms repeatedly changed hands or remained in limbo.

Another concerning reality is that Soviet era “suitcase sized” nukes may also be unaccounted for. Retired Russian General Alexander Lebed has claimed that as many as one hundred such devices are likely missing. These one kiloton ‘mini nukes’ assigned to Spetznaz special forces are not only the perfect weapon of terror, but are small enough that they could be misplaced in a storage facility somewhere slowly “cooking” until the moment of accidental detonation. That is the real concern for all of the missing nukes. If the safety mechanisms on them fail or erode, they may someday detonate with random carnage. Given that all seem lost in remote locations, there is still a risk of harming the innocent, not to mention the environmental impact such an event would cause.

The first Broken Arrow occurred in February 1950, when a B-36 bomber, while experiencing mechanical issues, dropped an atomic bomb over the Pacific Ocean near Princess Royal Island. The Mark 4, 30-kiloton (Fat Man) bomb is still missing to this day. Four more accidents in 1950 occurred with U.S. bombers carrying nuclear weapons over American soil. Thankfully none of the accidents resulted in nuclear detonation.

In March 1956, a B-47 bomber crashed in the Mediterranean sea with two nuclear cores onboard. The bomber, its crew, and their nuclear devices remain missing. During a training mission in February 1958 another USAF B-47 bomber carrying a Mk 15 atomic bomb collided with an F-86 Sabre fighter jet. The bomb was dropped over Wassaw Sound before the crew could attempt an emergency landing. The crew survived, though that bomb remains missing also.

Such accidents and the potential for further Broken Arrows increased during Operation Chrome Dome, an ambitious readiness routine that kept U.S. nuclear bombers airborne 24hrs a day. Armed and constantly flying, at least a dozen strategic bombers remained capable of hitting the Soviet Union in response to any attack around the clock. In 1961, early into Chrome Dome, a B-52 crashed shortly after take off in North Carolina. One of its 24-megaton nuclear bombs remains missing. Another bomb from this incident that was recovered showed that three out of the four arming mechanisms had been activated; fortunately, there was no nuclear explosion from this mishap. The other missing bomb’s safety mechanism status remains unknown, along with its whereabouts.

It was not only the Strategic Air Command that lost nukes. The U.S. Navy had a Broken Arrow in December 1965, when an A-4 Skyhawk armed with a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb fell off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier, USS Ticonderoga. The Skyhawk, its aviator, and bomb remain missing around 500-miles from land beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean. In the spring of 1968 the USS Scorpion sank 400 miles southwest of the Azores Islands, taking with it the lives of 99 crew members and a pair of nuclear tipped weapons. These nuclear weapons and their radioactive material remain deep under the ocean, and only time will tell what long term damage such weapons will cause.

An incident that was considered one of the worst nuclear accidents of its day occurred in January 1966 when a nuclear weapon splashed under the waves close to Spanish fishermen near the Alboran Sea, meanwhile three thermonuclear bombs crashed into the countryside outside the village of Palomares, spreading radioactive plutonium. The U.S. government conducted an extensive clean up, shipping thousands of tons of contaminated Spanish soil back to the United States. The area remains contaminated still to this day, and the missing bomb is somewhere under the water.

Other Broken Arrows are as follows: two bomber accidents in 1956, three in 1957, six in 1958, four in 1959, one in 1960, three in 1961, another in 1963, three more in 1964, up to three in 1965, another in 1966, three for 1968, one for 1969, one in 1975 and one in 1980. A further seven more accidents occurred up until 2000.

Each of these incidents involved American or Russian aircraft or submarines and some ended with a loss of life, but with the potential to cause a catastrophic mass death event. That’s not to mention the environmental damage that is likely being felt to this day. The safety protocols on these devices have been proven to be life saving, and clean up operations have been thorough or at least as best able to manage. That is when a clean up occurred at all or when any recovery was possible.

It is unknown what other nuclear armed governments have experienced and whether their weapons have undergone accidents and losses. Given the sheer number and regular movement of their arsenals, it stands to reason that the United States and Soviets would experience more accidents than other, smaller powers. We can assume these governments have better safety standards and training in regards to such weapons. It’s hard to imagine that Pakistan, North Korea, or even China would have the level of training and practice when it comes to handling such weapons compared to the United States. Then again, by having far less of them available, it stands to reason that they may be a little less reckless with the deployment of such weapons. Future accidents and losses involving nuclear weapons remains likely.

We are sliding into a world of frightened global environmental awareness, notably under the blanket of “climate action.” Governments across the planet are taking it upon themselves to tax and grow in the name of green policies. The truth of the matter is that government is not only wasteful and destructive (even when well meaning), but it’s also often incompetent and reckless. The placard of environmental protection is the fixture for future policies based on altruistic sloganeering. ‘Save the planet’ has become a mantra for public servants to spit out while they consume resources, blow the planet to pieces, and steer society into a path that in the years to come will be as dangerous to nature as current policies.

There was a time when the wider public and most conscientious activists were concerned by nuclear war and the catastrophic effects of just one bomb detonating, let alone numerous. It seems that with the climb into yet another cold war and the irrational desire for jingoism that the potential for nuclear Armageddon has been forgotten, or is at best a distant nightmare of a prior generation. The energy to save the planet is alive and well, but it has become hijacked by awareness advocates and big government careerists who wish to just paint the status quo green. Heightened tensions between powers capable of destroying the planet with nuclear weapons is dangerous, for both the obvious, direct implications of war but also because we may see a return to the Broken Arrows of the past. Losing an F-35 shows that there could again be the loss of a cheaper nuclear tipped system that may fall from or be lost with another aircraft. We know it’s possible because it’s already happened.

To imagine that the biggest government in the world has time and time again not only poisoned the planet with chemical defoliants, plumes of death from burn pits, scattered bombs over civilians, sprayed herbicides in the hopes of curbing drug production, pumped depleted uranium into each war zone it’s created, dropped mega litres of jet fuel into the ocean, ruined sea life with naval activities, and dropped numerous atom bombs all over the place… but as it turns out, has lost some too.

While it’s unlikely a third party will find them first, those unaccounted weapons of mass destruction linger as a potential danger that in time may leak or explode with catastrophe. No amount of benevolent prayers for a big government solution will every fix the culture of government itself.

Humanity and our planet deserve better than to be constantly left in the hands of central planners who rule with both cynicism and incompetence. Even well meaning reformers drown in such a work place. If another world war is not a bad enough prospect, losing the weapons intended to wage it certainly won’t save the world.

The missing F-35 was found after a few days. The nukes, if anyone in the government is even still looking, may turn up when we least expect it. Life on Earth is too precious to constantly be put at risk with such contemporary and political stupidity. How many of these regimes and administrations can the planet survive? The only green government is the one that does not exist. If you want to fix the planet then we need to get out of its way and let nature heal. And there is no tax for that; for the destroyers of the world, that’s precisely the problem.

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

American Meddling Failed To Prevent Robert Fico’s Victory In The Latest Slovak Elections

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | OCTOBER 1, 2023

The “Direction-Social Democracy” (SMER) party of former Prime Minister Robert Fico emerged victorious after Slovakia’s latest elections on Saturday in spite of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) warning before the vote that the US will go to any lengths to prevent that outcome. Nobody should have been surprised by that since CNN’s reporting made it obvious that Washington wanted him to lose. Here are three of their articles fearmongering about his democratically driven return to office:

* “A NATO country could soon have a pro-Russian leader”

* “With Kremlin apologist leading the polls, Slovakia vote threatens country’s support for Ukraine”

* “Pro-Russian politician wins Slovakia’s parliamentary election”

The reason why America meddled in this election is because it fears both the substance and symbolism of a hitherto stalwart NATO vassal defecting from the bloc’s anti-Russian proxy war coalition. Fico previously condemned the West’s role in provoking and perpetuating this conflict exactly as neighboring Hungarian leader Viktor Orban has done since the get-go. Just like him, Fico is also against arming Ukraine and could prevent others’ weapons from transiting across his country as well.

He’ll still need to form a governing coalition in order to make good on his promises, but few doubt that he’ll be able to. Assuming that’ll happen, then Slovakia will join Hungary in creating a center of anti-war gravity in the heart of both the EU and NATO, which complements Poland’s newly cautious stance towards this proxy conflict brought about by its dispute with Ukraine. These three could then form an influential force if the latter’s ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS) party wins re-election on 15 October.

Poland remains much more committed to this conflict than Hungary and post-election Slovakia, but there’s also no denying that the Polish people are incredibly offended at Ukraine’s ungratefulness. A critical mass of them might therefore vote for the anti-establishment Confederation party to protest PiS’ prior appeasement of Kiev up until recently despite that regime’s glorification of those who genocided Poles. If enough do so, then PiS might be compelled to form a coalition government with Confederation.

In that case, Poland might move closer towards Hungary and Slovakia’s position, which could inspire average Europeans to follow these countries’ lead during their own upcoming elections. The demonstration effect that was set into motion by Slovakia and which might soon manifest itself in Poland is therefore regarded by the US as a strategic challenge for good reason. That doesn’t justify its failed meddling in the latest Slovak elections, but simply places its motives into the appropriate context.

The fact that the CIA still failed to prevent Fico’s re-election dispels three popular myths, first and foremost that agency’s omnipotence. The second is foreign voters’ alleged inability to defy the American government’s will, the false perception of which has been exploited to suppress anti-establishment turnout. And finally, the Ukrainian Conflict is truly unpopular in some countries despite the media’s claims to the contrary and its crazed efforts to artificially manufacture support for this proxy war there.

With these symbolic outcomes in mind as well as the substantive changes to Slovak policy that are likely to follow its latest election, not to mention their possible impact on Poland in the coming future and the rest of Europe after that, the failure of America’s meddling campaign is a major development. It’s premature to describe it as a game-changer, but it still suggests a potentially impending inflection point in the Ukrainian Conflict, provided of course that the CIA doesn’t successfully sabotage related trends.

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Georgia Awaits USAID’s Explanations on Funds for Training in Organizing Unrest

Sputnik – 02.10.2023

TBILISI – Georgia is waiting for clarifications from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) regarding information about the funding of training in organizing unrest in the country, Georgian parliamentary speaker Shalva Papuashvili stated on Monday.

Earlier in the day, the State Security Service of Georgia (SSSG) said on social media that three Serbian citizens from the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), allegedly funded by USAID, arrived at the end of September in Georgia to teach tactics for overthrowing the government to young people and members of influential non-governmental organizations. According to the SSSG, the coup was planned for October-December, just when the European Commission is set to publish its decision on Georgia’s EU membership application.

“It was a dark day in the history of American aid to Georgia… We see that money of the American nation is used for planning revolutionary processes, to deliberately train people to riot and incite violence. That is why it is important to receive a corresponding explanation on behalf of the USAID, which has been involved in such a scandal for the second time already,” Papuashvili told reporters.

Georgia’s former deputy interior minister, Giorgi Lortkipanidze, and the commander of Georgian Legion in Ukraine. Mamuka Mamulashvili, who used to be a bodyguard of Georgia’s jailed ex-President Mikhail Saakashvili, were accused of plotting the coup.

An independent online news platform reported that this is at least the seventh time since the ruling Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012 that officials have accused various entities of plotting a coup against the government.

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

IS THE COVID VACCINE CAUSING TURBO CANCERS?

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | September 22, 2023

Oncologist and cancer researcher, Dr William Makis, is sounding the alarm on the sudden rise in “turbo cancers”, a recent term coined for the incredibly fast growing cancers found in COVID vaccinated individuals. Hear what the early data is showing in the causal relationship with the vaccine and the struggles doctors are having treating these patients.

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

An Impersonal Bureaucratic God

By Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D. | NewZealandDoc | October 1, 2023

I am, admittedly, no expert in artificial intelligence, quantum entanglement, computer programming or computation.

In fact, my enemies would say I am no expert in anything, and they would be mostly right. My domain of self-proclaimed expertise resides in the world of fantasy, illusion and unfathomable mental processes, whose signature and traces I have spent a lifetime teasing out in the intense one-on-one work of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and also in the creative work of poetry and theatre.

No doubt I may be deluding myself even with this allusion to personal talent, but to sum it all up I’d say that my professional training and career, my abiding creative interests, and my own art all meet at a common interface — that border between fantasy and reality, deception and truth, notwithstanding the inherent ambiguities.

Looking back over the Coronavirus Epoch, now in its fourth year, I am struck not only by the savage and slavish devotion of many to the pompous dictates of States, but also by the craven renunciation, by once-honored institutions of health and governance, of accepted foundational principles. Thus Medicine conveniently forgot about natural immunity, treatment and the dangers of new untested interventions, and Medical Institutions, global and national, embarked on a jihad against practitioners who remained faithful to such principles. In New Zealand, I am disheartened to say, the authorities are still harassing doctors who had the temerity to try to help patients by prescribing Ivermectin or suggesting Vitamin D, Zinc, and Vitamin C as promising protective and ameliorating agents.

Governments, empowered by the populations they purport to represent, conveniently seized upon drastic measures to control, while neglecting truly beneficent and sensible measures to mitigate fear and address a threat of illness.

Sacrosanct boundaries have been serially violated throughout, borders have been transgressed, and privacy has been desecrated — all, ostensibly, in the name of our good common cause of safety.

Under the shadow of fear we allowed ourselves to be masked, contained, and inoculated. At times we were prevented from visiting our elderly and sick and beloved, or paying respects to our loved ones’ mortal remains when they died. Coincidentally the line between genders began to be blurred, and the barriers between impulse and action taken down. All because of the putative emergency that ‘necessitated’ a suspension of ordinary safeguards and customs in favor of hastily adopted and inadequately debated dictates and untested procedures that engulfed most of our known world.

The monies we earned and banked, and banked upon — they too became prey to the grasping and lawlessly invasive arm of governmental entities. And those who dared to opine against the prevailing dogma on the ‘commons’ offered by social media found themselves disappeared.

We learned over these past years that our freedoms, our monies, our bodies and our souls were all now ‘fair game’ in this manufactured emergency.  It was quite the trick to convince so many to go so fully along with these sacrifices. And the neatest part of this trick was for the Organizers and Rulers to have created a vast bureaucratic interface that not only did their bidding but also absorbed responsibility for anything that went awry — like sudden deaths and excess deaths and horrific adverse effects of the unnecessary Jabs.

And as for censorship, well, this too could be relegated to AI-mediated algorithms, as if the hand of Man had given way to this novel and peculiar Deity of impersonal computational complexity. It is a marvel of moral sanitizing.

Many of my friends and colleagues continue to be puzzled by these developments as aberrations of rationality, while others have long concluded that these actions have been purposefully deceptive and malevolent.

I believe we have entered a new phase, a phase facilitated by astonishing advances in physics and mathematics, a phase that has given birth to a transcendent technological web that is as vast as it is impersonal, as cold as it is efficient. It is, nonetheless, a tool that has been devised and is wielded by the relatively Few in their ceaseless war against the Many.

Perhaps some of the Few believe and worship at the altar of the False Idol they have created, while others are content simply to profit from their sleight of hand. But both camps are united, I suspect, by the thought that they are cheating Death. Whether it is a transhumanist future and/or the imaginary protection of boundless wealth and power, both parties are vying for an illusionary immortality.

Which brings us back full circle to the sad Achilles heel the propagandists knew to strike so well when they launched their Operation: the universal fear of death. How many of my neighbors accepted the destruction of their rights to save their skins? How many became ogres of apartheid and accused the unjabbed of reckless endangerment?

I’m tired of repeating myself, but repeat I must because the danger — the real one, not the feigned — hasn’t gone away. And it is this: the danger that we refuse to accept our deaths and cling to the wildly absurd quest for living our physical lives forever and ever.

In Plato’s Phaedo, the philosopher and gadfly Socrates, who has been condemned to death by the Athenian democracy, confronts his fate with equanimity. The demise of the physical self becomes the portal to the greater life of the Soul.

The Soul, in our times, resides in a Machine, a gigantic faceless and bureaucratically impartial one — or so would the overlords like us to believe. Perhaps that is why they are so frantically despotic in censoring, quashing, silencing, harassing and persecuting any shreds thereof.

But the harder they try the less they will succeed. They, in their smug sadistic ignorance, don’t truly know what they are really up against.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

‘Outrageous’ Approval of New Moderna Shots for Kids Could Spark School Mandates, Doctor Warns

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 29, 2023

Parents should be concerned that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this month granted full approval to Moderna’s “Spikevax” COVID-19 vaccine for children 12 years old and older — because now that the vaccine for school-age kids is no longer an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) product, states and schools may be more likely to mandate the shots, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.

Nass, an internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory board, called the FDA’s decision “outrageous and illegitimate.”

“The ACIP [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] actually voted to add the COVID vaccines to the childhood schedule in October 2022, Nass said. “So states may begin adding them to their state’s vaccine schedule.”

“That could, in turn, result in public school vaccine mandates for this vaccine,” she added.

The FDA on Sept. 11 fully licensed the Spikevax vaccine for the younger age group. Previously, it was licensed only for ages 18 and up.

The FDA also on Sept. 11 also amended the EUA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to include its updated monovalent formula, for infants and children ages 6 months through 11 years, that targets the Omicron variant XBB.1.5

Moderna’s updated EUA shot is a monovalent vaccine that targets the Omnicron XBB.1.5 variant.

New shots ‘risk injuring millions of Americans’

Nass and other doctors, including Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Pierre Kory, told The Defender the newly licensed “Spikevax” vaccine for kids as young as 12 and the updated shot for infants risk injuring millions of Americans, including children.

“It is reprehensible that the CDC recommends this booster for 12-year-olds when the FDA has no data on how these children might be affected,” Kory said.

“The government’s recommendation on the COVID-19 vaccine goes against everything we are trained to do as physicians and, thus, can only be rationally understood as being crafted in the service of the pharmaceutical industry and its interests rather than in the best health interests of U.S. citizens.”

McCullough said he does not recommend the new boosters, including Moderna’s shots, in his clinical practices.

“The Omicron variant XBB.1.5 that Moderna’s booster is designed for is “long gone,” he said, and the outbreak of the most recent circulating COVID-19 strains, EG.5 and FL.1.5, is “very mild in Americans, most of whom have natural immunity.”

Kory said the dangers of the mRNA shots — for people of all ages — are well-documented. “In my practice alone, we have over 900 patients, most disabled from the mRNA vaccines.”

He added:

“Although not an exhaustive list, the most important physiologic dysfunctions I see in clinical practice are increased autoantibodies to numerous tissues, macrophage activation, immune suppression, antigen tolerance to Covid variants via IgG4 production, micro-clotting leading to sluggish micro-circulatory flow and tissue hypoxia, mast cell activation, decreased nitric oxide synthesis, and impaired energy production from mitochondrial dysfunction.”

Dr. Fred Wagshul, an Ohio pulmonologist and a founder of the FLCCC, said the entire list of catastrophic diseases and conditions aggravated by the mRNA spike protein applies to children as well.

Wagshul said he was alarmed by recent research, presented in testimony to the South Carolina legislature by a molecular biologist and cancer geneticist Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., that the Pfizer vaccine contains DNA fragments that would “disrupt the genomic stability” of the human race and wreak havoc on children.

Kory said he has lost faith in U.S. health authorities’ willingness “to consider the scientific evidence objectively, rationally and independently” when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.

He said:

“As much as there is no medical justification for the vaccine, there is absolutely no need for any mandates for anything related to COVID-19. The government’s true motivation appears to be to continue pushing a vaccine the public doesn’t want or need in an attempt to not admit that the vaccine campaign has failed in every respect regarding safety and efficacy.”

‘Myocarditis is overwhelmingly found in children’

McCullough, a board-certified internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist with more than 1000 publications and over 685 citations, has written extensively on the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccination.

He cited recent research showing that six months after being vaccinated, 80% of teens who were diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis still had not recovered.

McCullough said there have been “record rates of injury, disability and death after vaccination with the government-provided COVID-19 genetic products. He said he particularly has concerns about Spikevax:

“The safety profile reported by Moderna on Spikevax, which is known to load the body with the long-lasting, disease-promoting SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, appears to be the same or worse than the original mRNA vaccines.

“Injection site pain, headache, fatigue, myalgia and chills, are consistent with previous formulations of Spikevax which led to 7.7% of recipients making emergency trips to hospitals as reported in the CDC V-safe data.”

Nass, too, called out the FDA for putting U.S. children and teens at risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis by approving Moderna’s shots. She said:

“The precautionary principle and common sense clearly indicate that no further shots should be given to anyone until the rates of myocarditis, both subclinical, and clinical, and the rates of all other side effects have been established.”

The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

According to data retrieved Sept. 27 from VAERS, there have been roughly 473,769 injuries and more than 9,500 deaths reported following vaccination with a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

Kory noted, “In 2022, with many fewer vaccines administered compared to 2021, the rate of myocarditis reports to VAERS is averaging 245% higher than last year — [and] the myocarditis is overwhelmingly found in children.”

Kory said the latest research on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis is “horrifying.”

The authors, including McCullough, analyzed VAERS data which showed that myocarditis reports since 2021 are 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines in the past 30 years, Kory said.

FDA ‘silent’ on data showing increased death following COVID-19 vaccination

Commenting on the FDA’s recent decision, Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said, “No child should be given these newly updated vaccines until there is compelling data on clinical efficacy and all-cause mortality. There is neither.”

Kirsch said, “All world governments are keeping the record-level public health data on these vaccines a secret. If they work so well, why the secrecy?”

He continued:

“From U.S. nursing home data released by the CDC, we now know that the COVID vaccines have increased risk of death from COVID for the very population they were designed to protect.

“The FDA is silent on this data. If the vaccines really saved lives, it would show up in this dataset. It doesn’t.”

Kirsch added that he has publicly challenged any qualified scientist to an open debate on this data. “No takers. That should tell you everything you need to know,” he said.

Nass said that with “approximately 800 million vaccinations in the U.S. over the past three years, there is no excuse to withhold or fail to obtain this information.”

Nass added:

“Federal agencies have not seen fit to provide the public with this information, nor have they done or directed that careful, active surveillance be performed, which involves checking troponin levels, pre-and post-vaccination.

“Until we have this information, no risk-benefit calculation for different age groups and risk groups can be calculated. Without this information normally you cannot roll out any public health program.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Horrendous Number of Eagle Deaths From Wind Farms

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 1, 2023

Further devastating evidence of the toll that onshore wind turbines take on local eagle populations has emerged in Tasmania. The local Wedge-tailed eagle is thought to be down to just 1,000 individuals, but over the last 12 years at least 270 birds have been killed or injured in the vicinity of wind farms. According to a recent paper in Australian Field Ornithology, a further 49 vulnerable White-bellied sea eagles have also been killed in this period.

The scale of depredation is shocking but it could be much worse than reported. According to author Gregory Pullen, information about eagle deaths is not readily available, “nor readily made available”. His calculations arise from a number of primary sources including annual reports. He suggests that unrecorded casualties are higher since most are recorded anecdotally and are not the result of systematic survey. The Tasmanian sub-species of the Wedge-tailed eagle is listed as endangered under both federal and state threatened species legislation.

Large birds of prey such as eagles are at particular risk from giant wind turbine blades revolving at speed since they rely on air currents for sustained flight. The Daily Sceptic has covered this developing story, noting that few activists, bird conservation groups and writers seem able to rouse themselves to complain when the natural flight path of raptors stands in the way of green progress. The Australian climate journalist Jo Nova has stood out from the unquestioning crowd, noting that in Tasmania the greens are destroying nature – again. “It’s not about the environment is it,” she said. She went on to add that there are plans to build up to 10 wind turbine parks across Tasmania – “and if one tower misses, the next will get them”.

It’s not really about the environment over in California either, where America’s national bird, the bald eagle, and many other raptors face mass slaughter in the local wind farm avian graveyards. This follows the state Democrat-controlled legislature’s recent decision to relax controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable energy and infrastructure projects. However, evidence continues to emerge that the slaughter has been going on for years. Last year, NextEra, one of America’s largest utility companies, was fined $8 million after 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms across eight states. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, a wind farm complex in Altamont has been killing 75-100 golden eagles every year since the 1980s.

The animal slaughter does not stop at large birds of course. A number of scientific studies have point to the destruction of millions of bats and smaller birds every year by turbine blades capable of travelling at the tip at speeds approaching 150mph.

Alas, it is not as if the deaths of these wildlife green martyrs are helping to produce much worthwhile economic activity. In the U.K., the small number of jobs being produced by green technologies is starting to be noticed. Gary Smith, the leader of Britain’s largest trade union, recently said that communities along the North Sea can see wind farms, “but they can’t point to the jobs”. Possibly exaggerating to make his point, he added that much of the green work seems to be either London-based lobbying or clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.

Green activists are increasingly being caught between a rock and a hard place on these impact issues. It is becoming obvious that many of the green technology solutions proposed to replace fossil fuels come with heavy environmental costs. Whether it be open cobalt mining with child labour, or digging up vast quantities of the Earth’s crust to help construct second-rate solutions such as windmills, the terrible impact is all too obvious. At the moment the typical stance seems to be that voiced by Audubon California Policy Director Mark Lynas, who said we need renewable energy resources, and he did not want to see the eagle deaths “being used to push against clean energy”.

Another area where ecology fights are breaking out is on the east coast of America, where whales are beaching on the shores of New Jersey and New York in alarming numbers. In the first half of this year over 40 whales have died in this way. Large areas of the local ocean are being turned into industrial wind parks, with particular concern arising over 24-hour sonar soundings. The veteran environment campaigner Michael Shellenberger has said the massive offshore works are wreaking environmental damage in previously pristine waters. “It’s the biggest environmental scandal in the world,” he charges.

The waters off the U.S. east coast are important feeding and breeding grounds for large mammals such as whales and dolphins, including the rare North Atlantic right whale. Shellenberger has recently produced a documentary called Thrown to the Wind which presents evidence of whales hit by ships, and high decibel sonar that is said to separate mothers from their calves, sending them into harm’s way. The film shows environmentalists checking the sonar which is said to measure 150 dBs at sea – equivalent to about 90 dBs on land. The noise is a relentless drum beat that is said to pound across the ocean throughout the day and night. On land, the sonar noise would be equivalent to a hairdryer. For humans, prolonged noise much above 70 dBs may start to damage hearing.

The film makes the point that serious pile-driving to secure the giant turbines to the sea floor has yet to start in earnest. Once built there is a danger that the huge back wash created by the giant blades will disturb and kill off plankton, destroying the food supply for the whales.

It must be noted that many interested parties dispute the claims currently being made about wildlife in the new oceanic industrial parks springing up with generous subsidies from the Biden Administration. Both sides can marshal their arguments and evidence. But at the moment, the deck is rigged in favour of the green lobby. Fracking for oil and gas was banned in the U.K. with Friends of the Earth presenting evidence of local earthquakes similar in force to someone falling off a chair. It is more than likely that multiple eagle deaths would be enough to stop the operation of any oil and gas installation. Seemingly, it will take more than a mere rowing boat full of protected but very dead birds to stop the new Green Barons.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | September 28, 2023

If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.

Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.

But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”

Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.

On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.

But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.

But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:

Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.

Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.

Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:

The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):

Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.

As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.

Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.

I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:

This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.

But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?

  • How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?

  • How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.

  • They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.

  • And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?

The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Britain is Leading the World in Committing Economic Suicide

BY DAVID CRAIG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

As our leaders bicker over how fast Britain should get to Net Zero, you’ll hear politicians, eco-zealots and media pundits claiming that Britain is leading the world in reducing our country’s CO2 emissions. This is one of the few statements about climate made by our ruling elites which does actually appear to be true. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below five tons per capita:

While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’, our politicians, media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how this reduction in CO2 emissions was achieved.

Here’s another chart. It shows the share of the U.K.’s GDP made up by manufacturing:

Since 1990, the year U.K. CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of U.K. GDP from manufacturing has also halved from just over 16% to around 8%.
Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in U.K. manufacturing has dropped from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.

For years the U.K. has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to our replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’. In 2022, in the U.K., which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of its electricity comes from cheap, reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the U.K. price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the U.K.’s cost. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs are only $0.08/kWh – a quarter of the U.K.’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels, of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs only $0.07/kWh – a sixth of the U.K. cost.

So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the U.K.’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to our major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the U.K.’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany and a massive 28% for China.

A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by manufacturing.

Economist Richard Salsman wrote: “The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science.”

As we in Britain enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of our Net Zero goals, we seem to be wrecking U.K. manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as U.K. manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that not a single one of our politicians and media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the U.K. is committing an extraordinary act of self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.

If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as I try to explain in my most recent book There is No Climate Crisis, there is no emergency that warrants such extreme actions. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when many experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age, which experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting, in spite of the Guardian and the New York Times regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.

It’s a pity that those dragging us towards their Net Zero nirvana aren’t a bit more forthcoming about the economic devastation that their deluded policies are inflicting upon us.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.

October 1, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

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