A confession by former German chancellor Angela Merkel regarding the true nature of the Minsk agreements – a roadmap for peace in Ukraine that was brokered by Berlin – could be used as evidence in a tribunal involving Western politicians responsible for provoking the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.
The former German leader admitted in an interview with Die Zeit on Wednesday that the actual purpose of the Minsk agreements was to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia.
“They talk a lot about legal assessments of what is happening around Ukraine, certain tribunals and so on in all sorts of ways,” Zakharova said during a media briefing on Thursday. “But this is a specific reason for a tribunal.”
She claimed that Merkel’s comments were nothing short of the testimony of a person who had openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kiev regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict,” Zakharova added.
She said Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation and all kinds of distortions of truth, law and rights imaginable.”
The spokeswoman claimed that the West had known well in 2015, when it spent hours negotiating the second part of the Minsk accords, that it would never even attempt to fulfill any part of the agreements and would instead pump weapons into Kiev.
“They did not feel sorry for anyone: women, children, the civilian population of Donbass or the whole of Ukraine. They needed a conflict and they were ready for it back then, in 2015,” Zakharova said.
Earlier this month, a number of Western officials called for the creation of a special UN-backed court to investigate alleged war crimes committed by Russia during its ongoing military campaign in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has said the West has no legal or moral right to set up any courts to investigate or prosecute Russia over the conflict, which Moscow claims was ultimately provoked by the US and its allies.
December 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Germany, Ukraine |
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The 2014 ceasefire brokered by Berlin and Paris in Minsk was an attempt to give Kiev time to strengthen its military and was successful in that regard, former German chancellor Angela Merkel argued in an interview published on Wednesday.
In an extensive interview about her 16 years in power, Merkel told Zeit magazine her policy towards Russia and Ukraine was correct, even if not successful.
“I thought the initiation of NATO accession for Ukraine and Georgia discussed in 2008 to be wrong,” Merkel said. “The countries neither had the necessary prerequisites for this, nor had the consequences of such a decision been fully considered, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine and to NATO and its rules of assistance.”
She described the September 2014 Minsk agreement as “an attempt to give Ukraine time.” France and Germany had brokered a ceasefire after the failure of Ukraine’s attempt to subdue the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk by force.
“[Ukraine] used this time to get stronger, as you can see today,” Merkel continued. “The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltsevo in early 2015, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”
The defeat at Debaltsevo resulted in the second Minsk protocol being signed in February 2015. Merkel said that it was “clear to all of us that the conflict was frozen, that the problem had not been solved, but that gave Ukraine valuable time.”
Meanwhile, she defended the decision to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for Russian gas, since refusing to do so would have “have dangerously worsened the climate” with Moscow given the situation in Ukraine. It just so happened that Germany couldn’t get gas elsewhere, she added.
Asked for any self-criticism, Merkel told Zeit that “the Cold War never really ended because Russia was basically not at peace,” and that NATO “should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness” in 2014.
Pyotr Poroshenko, who became president of Ukraine after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, told a domestic audience in August 2015 that Minsk was a ruse to buy time for a military build-up. He admitted as much to the West in July 2022, in an interview with German media.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, which have since voted to join Russia alongside with most of the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye, and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
December 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism | Germany, NATO, Ukraine |
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Eighty-one years ago today, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The attack killed 2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians. It also damaged or destroyed 19 U.S. Navy ships, including 8 battleships. December 7, 1941, was, President Franklin Roosevelt stated, a “date that would live in infamy.”
What will also live in infamy is that Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to attack the United States, so that he could achieve his objective of embroiling the United States in World War II.
Ever since the attack on Pearl Harbor, there has been a running controversy over whether Roosevelt knew that the attack on Pearl was imminent and turned a blind eye to it. Regardless of how one comes out on that controversy, it is beyond any reasonable doubt that Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to attack the United States. Why, even some Roosevelt apologists praise him for this, arguing that he was a far-sighted statesman who saved America and the world from a Nazi takeover.
FDR was a crafty politician, one who was a master of political intrigue and manipulation. When he was running for an unprecedented third term in 1940, he said, “And while I am talking to you, mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Roosevelt was lying. In fact, he was doing everything he could to embroil the United States in the European war.
When Roosevelt made that statement, he knew that he was playing to the overwhelming sentiment of the American people. Having experienced the disaster of World War I, Americans wanted no part of a second world war. Roosevelt knew that. He also knew that if he disclosed that he wanted the United States to get embroiled in the war, he stood a good chance of losing the election. To guarantee his reelection, he felt he had to lie.
Why didn’t Roosevelt simply send his army to attack Nazi Germany? After all, that’s what American presidents do today when they perceive a foreign threat. The answer is that this was still a period of time when U.S. presidents complied with the declaration-of-war requirement in the Constitution. It prohibits the president from waging war without first securing a declaration of war from Congress.
Given the overwhelming anti-interventionist sentiment among the American people, FDR knew that he would never be able to get Congress to issue a declaration of war against Nazi Germany, unless Germany were to attack first. In that case, he knew that a congressional declaration of war would come easily.
FDR began his machinations by doing everything he could to provoke the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. In that way, he could exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! Now, give me my declaration of war!” But the Nazi regime knew what FDR was up to and refused to take the bait.
That was when Roosevelt turned to the Pacific, in the hope that a Japanese attack on the United States would give him a “back door” to the war against Germany.
That’s what FDR’s oil embargo against Japan was all about. Japan had invaded China and was occupying the country. Its war machine necessarily depended on a continuous supply of oil. The purpose of FDR’s embargo was to prevent Japan from acquiring that badly needed oil.
FDR’s oil embargo was remarkably successful. It maneuvered Japan into a position of having to make a choice: Either invade the Dutch East Indies to secure its oil supplies or meekly withdraw its military forces from China. (As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that more recently, U.S. officials, operating through NATO, maneuvered Russia into having to make a similar choice: Either accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles and troops along Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening.)
Not surprisingly, Japan decided to invade the Dutch East Indies rather than withdraw from China. But Japan knew that the invasion stood the risk of the U.S. Navy interfering with its operations in the Dutch East Indies. That was what the attack on Pearl Harbor was for — to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet so that Japan would have a free hand in securing those oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
In other words, Japan never planned or intended to invade the United States, either at Pearl Harbor or at the U.S. West coast. They knew that they lacked the personnel, the logistics, and the supply lines necessary to undertake such a monumental endeavor. They knew that if they invaded the West coast, they would end up getting massacred.
Thus, their aim in attacking Pearl Harbor was very limited. They just wanted to knock out the Pacific fleet so that it couldn’t interfere with their invasion and occupation of the Dutch East Indies. While they knocked out several battleships and other vessels at Pearl, what they didn’t know was that the wily Roosevelt had cannily removed his aircraft carriers before the attack. That action, along with having broken Japanese military codes, enabled U.S. Naval forces to later defeat the Japanese in the Pacific.
Immediately after the Japanese attack at Pearl, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. The U.S. Congress naturally responded with a declaration of war against both Germany and Japan. The wily Roosevelt had gotten what he wanted — U.S. entry into World War II.
December 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Germany, Japan, United States |
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Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.
The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).
On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.
Crawford asked O’Boyle if she could enroll in the portal with her personal Twitter account and on May 27, 2021, O’Boyle confirmed that Crawford had been enrolled in the portal.
In other emails, Crawford asked O’Boyle whether the federal government could flag “COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access” and questioned how to flag “misinformation” via the portal.
June 2021 emails (pages 359-360) also show another CDC employee attempting to enroll in a Facebook portal but getting error messages. While these emails don’t describe the portal, it appears to be Facebook’s content takedown portal which is similar to the Twitter portal and allows government agencies to flag content for censorship.
Additionally, a February 4, 2021 email (pages 354-355) shows Facebook’s US Head of Public Policy, Payton Iheme, asking Crawford whether she’s aware of the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) misinformation work.
“I saw that DHS/CISA is planning /possibly working on COVID-19 misinfo concerns?” Iheme wrote to Crawford. “Are you aware of that aspect?”
This email was sent more than a year before the DHS announced its controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” in April 2022.
Another revelation from this email is that Iheme acknowledges the focus on misinformation “growing among members of Congress.”
These emails provide more evidence of the Big Tech-Biden administration censorship collusion that’s currently facing a legal challenge over potential First Amendment violations.
“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel, said. “Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people. We are proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people.”
We obtained a copy of the emails for you here.
The emails also shine a light on the government departments that have access to these direct Big Tech censorship portals. Previous reports and document releases have shown that the California Secretary of State’s Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC) has access to the Twitter portal while the DHS and the New Zealand government have access to the Facebook portal.
Related: Former Twitter exec, Vijaya Gadde, who was appointed adviser to President Biden’s DHS in 2021, played a key role in suppressing Hunter Biden story a year earlier
December 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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One Health is being embedded into the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHRs) and Pandemic Treaty/Accord
First, what is One Health? It is essentially a meaningless concept that is important to the WHO, CDC and the new pandemic regulations being negotiated, as I heard it mentioned several times by country representatives discussing the new IHR amendments. My best guess is that One Health will be invoked as the justification to move people off the land in certain rural communities. The authors of a June 2019 article titled “The One Health Approach—Why Is It So Important?” provide 3 definitions and a graphic to try and explain the term:
The most commonly used definition shared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the One Health Commission is: ‘One Health is defined as a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment’. A definition suggested by the One Health Global Network is: ‘One Health recognizes that the health of humans, animals and ecosystems are interconnected. It involves applying a coordinated, collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to address potential or existing risks that originate at the animal-human-ecosystems interface’. A much simpler version of these two definitions is provided by the One Health Institute of the University of California at Davis: ‘One Health is an approach to ensure the well-being of people, animals and the environment through collaborative problem solving—locally, nationally, and globally’. Others have a much broader view, as encapsulated in Figure 1.
I hope you agree that these definitions shed no light on the meaningfulness of this concept, nor how it might be relevant to public health. However, the definitions seem to rope a lot of other things into a consideration of “health” which I fear is its main objective—eventually to justify social engineering under the rubric of health, or rather ‘One Health.’
The authors of the piece cited above note that they have not gotten buy-in from the medical community:
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of the One Health concept, but while the veterinarian community has embraced the One Health concept, the medical community has been much slower to fully engage, despite support for One Health from bodies such as the American Medical Association, Public Health England, and WHO. Engaging the medical community more fully in the future may require the incorporation of the One Health concept into the medical school curricula so that medical students see it as an essential component in the context of public health and infectious diseases.”
And so cheap fixes are being applied. November 3 has been designated “One Health Day” since 2016 by the One Health Commission, the One Health Platform Foundation, and the One Health Initiative. One Health Day is celebrated through One Health educational and awareness events held around the world. Students are especially encouraged to envision and implement One Health projects, and to enter them into an annual competition for the best student-led initiatives in each of four global regions.
After titling their article as if it was going to explain why One Health is important, in the end all we get is a spurious sentence asserting that it is so:
Today’s health problems are frequently complex, transboundary, multifactorial, and across species, and if approached from a purely medical, veterinary, or ecological standpoint, it is unlikely that sustainable mitigation strategies will be produced.
I went to the WHO website to see if I could get a more satisfying explanation of this concept, but was left with the same sense—that it was simply an attempt to throw every living thing, plus every ‘ecosystem’ on the planet into the One Health basket, where pretty much everything might in future be manipulated under the guise of public health. See if you get a different take:
https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health#tab=tab_1
One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.
It recognizes that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.
While health, food, water, energy and environment are all wider topics with sector-specific concerns, the collaboration across sectors and disciplines contributes to protect health, address health challenges such as the emergence of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and food safety and promote the health and integrity of our ecosystems.
By linking humans, animals and the environment, One Health can help to address the full spectrum of disease control – from prevention to detection, preparedness, response and management – and contribute to global health security.
The approach can be applied at the community, subnational, national, regional and global levels, and relies on shared and effective governance, communication, collaboration and coordination. Having the One Health approach in place makes it easier for people to better understand the co-benefits, risks, trade-offs and opportunities to advance equitable and holistic solutions.
It matters because One Health appears to be a necessary part of the globalist, WEF plan to corral the earth’s people, akin to vaccine passports. Please help educate those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. This needs to be stopped. The best way is by exiting the WHO. Trump started the process, which was immediately reversed by the Biden administration. We can do it again. Or they will keep coming up with cockamamie programs designed to control us under the guise of health.
December 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | CDC, Human rights, WHO |
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“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.
It has been 13 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.
And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.” Whitewash exonerations by the educational institutions involved and scientific organizations – were a blow to scholarship and standards as well. The standard of fair, objective, transparent research was sacrificed to a politically correct narrative about the qualitative connection between CO2 forcing and temperature (see Wiki).
Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) was a rare mainstream-of-sorts look at the scandal. Michael Mann is the bad actor, despite his I-am-the-victim take in his account, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012).[1]
Background:
On November 19, 2009, a whistle-blower or hacker downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University (United Kingdom). Posted on a Russian server, these documents were soon accessed by websites around the world to trigger the exposé.
These e-mails were part of confidential communications between top climate scientists in the UK, the United States, and other nations over a 15-year period. The scientists involved had developed surface temperature data sets and promoted the “Hockey Stick” global temperature curve, as well as having wrtten/edited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical-science assessment reports.
Branded “Climategate” by British columnist James Delingpole, the emails provided insight into practices that range from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered.
Some of the more salient quotations follow.
Man-Made Warming Controversy
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”
—Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“Keith’s [Briffa] series… differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“… it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
—Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009.
Manipulating Temperature Data
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999.
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….”
—Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006.
“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….”
—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008.
“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”
—Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011.
Data Suppression; Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance
“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004.
“I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005.
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008.
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009.
Subverting the Peer-Review Process
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004.
Appendix: Implications
Climate scientist Judith Curry reassessed her thinking about the state of climate science in response to the scandal. “Climategate was a turning point,” she remembered, where “pronouncements from the IPCC were no longer sufficient.” Curry explained:
Institutionally, Climategate triggered the formation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which has become quite influential in UK climate policy and to some extent internationally.
She added:
The skeptical climate blogosphere has thrived and expanded, largely triggered by Climategate (Climate Etc. was triggered largely by Climategate). Whereas the ‘warm’ blogosphere for the most part has waned (notably RealClimate), with the exception of Skeptical Science. It seems that most of the ‘action’ on the warm side has switched to twitter, whereas skeptics prefer the blogosphere.
The growth of the technical skeptical blogosphere (pioneered by Steve McIntyre) has challenged traditional notions of expertise, i.e. credentials and sanctity of journal publications, through Climate Audit’s blogospheric deconstruction of many publications, particularly related to paleo proxies. While the technical skeptical blogosphere seems to have provided the motive for the Climategate ‘hack’, the technical skeptical blogosphere has thrived, and many of these sites are followed by the media and decision makers of various stripes.
Today, the Internet is the primary check on the excesses of the politicized UN/IPCC process. Cancel and ignore as they might, the blogosphere is driving the climate-science debate in real time against the Malthusian establishment.
————–
[1] “Words and phrases had been cherry picked from the thousands of e-mail messages, removed from their original context, and strung together in ways designed to malign me, my colleagues, and climate research itself,” Mann states on the opening page.
December 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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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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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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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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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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