Sorry, Google and World Bank, but Middle Eastern Crops Keep Thriving
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | November 4, 2020
Google News today is promoting articles (see the Google-promoted PhysOrg article here, for example) about a speculative World Bank “study” claiming climate change is threatening crop production in the Middle East. The World Bank study is full of speculation but short on facts. Real-world data show crop yields per acre and total crop production are consistently and dramatically rising in each of the Middle East countries examined by the World Bank study.
In its study, titled “Water in the Balance,” the World Bank says, “[w]hile information about water scarcity at present and in the future is available there is little knowledge of what this increasing scarcity means for Middle Eastern … food security. Agriculture will suffer because of climate change and water scarcity….”
In particular the World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. The available evidence strongly suggests that will not happen.
Had the study’s authors examined real-world data concerning crop production in the Middle Eastern countries, they would have found, even amidst substantial strife in the region, crop yields and overall production have increased dramatically. More food is being produced even as thousands of acres of agricultural lands have been abandoned during regional conflicts.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
- Cereal crop production in Iraq increased 91 percent, even as the acreage being harvested fell 5 percent.
- Cereal crop production in Iran increased 187 percent, while the acreage harvested increased by just 2.6 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Jordan increased 15 percent, even as the acreage harvested declined 30 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Lebanon increased 115 percent, while acreage harvested increased 30 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Syria increased 22 percent, even as acreage harvested declined 66 percent.
- Cereal Crop production in Turkey increased 46 percent, even though acreage harvested declined 19 percent.
It is clearly good news – and not a climate crisis – that Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production despite the fact that many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts. That good news is ignored in the World Bank’s doom-and-gloom report.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops also use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water to transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
The benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide and a modestly warming world have resulted in 17 percent more food being available per person today than there was 30 years ago, even as the number of people has grown by billions. Indeed, the last 20 years have seen the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Sorry, World Bank, Google, and PhysOrg, but that does not equate to a climate crisis.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.
Biden’s Electric Car Delusion
By Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris | America Out Loud | November 3, 2020
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s election promise to vastly increase electric cars in America makes no sense. It would leave people with unreliable vehicles, huge transportation costs and do nothing to protect the environment.
Beside aiming to ensure “100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be electrified,” The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice makes the following commitments:
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- Biden will work with our nation’s governors and mayors to support the deployment of more than 500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030.
- Biden will restore the full electric vehicle tax credit to incentivize the purchase of these vehicles.
- Biden will work to develop a new fuel economy standard that goes beyond what the Obama-Biden Administration put in place.
A Canadian engineer recently ran the numbers involved in the switchover to electric vehicles (EVs) and concluded that, in order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, the filling station would require six hundred, 50-kilowatt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million. The station would require a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid which would be enough to power 20,000 homes. Unlike home recharging stations, these would be operating at peak usage hours where the rates are the highest.
Where would all that power come from? As quoted on The Heartland Institute’s Web site, Dr. David Wojick, director of the Climate Change Debate Education Project said,
“There is almost no excess generating, distribution, or transmission capacity in the United States, or globally for that matter, so a lot of new, expensive power plants and power lines will be needed if EVs are ever to become popular. The EV grid simply does not exist.”
This means that, without the construction of vast new multi-billion-dollar electrical grids, Biden’s plan is simply a recipe for nationwide brownouts and blackouts and a lot of stranded motorists. No wonder one of the main worries car owners have with respect to EVs is ‘range anxiety.’ You need to plan any EV trip very carefully or you will be calling your friends who still own gasoline-powered cars to pick you up in the middle of nowhere.
Biden also seems to be ignoring the fact that it can take between 30 minutes and 8 hours to recharge a vehicle, depending on it being empty or just topping off. Charging stations will need lounge areas, holding areas for vehicles completed but waiting for owners to return from shopping or dining and so on. The scope of the plan is staggering.
As time goes by more owners will also come to understand the problems in charging and recharging EVs in very cold weather. All batteries use electrolytes which are liquids such as acids, bases and salts that conduct electricity by the movement of ions. Hence, battery performance worsens as it gets colder. A typical electrolyte conducts a fourth as much at minus 5 degrees C as it does at 55 C. Little by little EVs, in normal to cold climates, will experience this problem.
California plans to have over 25 million such vehicles in the not too distant future. In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plans to ban sales of new, gas-powered passenger cars and trucks in California by 2035.
The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections or the certain increased rates they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it, of course. Biden’s idea that they can is just another of his politically-correct illusions.
Also ignored is the direct cost to the consumer of buying EVs. A new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Initiative concluded that it will probably be more than a decade before EVs will be price-competitive with fossil fuel-powered cars.
The main reason for this is the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs, which account for about one-third of the cost of the vehicle, according to the MIT study. Just do the math: lithium-ion battery packs used in EVs cost anywhere from $175 to $300 per kilowatt-hour (KWh). A midrange EV typically has a 60 KWh battery pack. So, taking, say, a battery at the average cost per KWh ($237.5 per KWh), that would cost $14,250 just for the car’s batteries.
The hope is to get the battery price down to $100 per KWh by 2025. But the MIT study explains that even meeting that price target by 2030 would require material costs to remain constant for the next 10 years while global demand for these batteries is expected to skyrocket. How likely is that, Joe?
And talk about heavy! Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The lithium-ion battery in your cell phones weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds.
Biden is apparently also unconcerned that China controls most of the lithium and cobalt needed to produce batteries and they are often produced with child labor and near-slave labor, and with practically no health, safety or environmental safeguards. But then, the Biden family has been heavily invested in China, so perhaps they have a financial stake in this too.
Joe tells us that he will work to develop a new fuel economy standard that goes beyond what the Obama/Biden administration put in place. But the fuel economy standards brought on by Obama led to lighter weight and less safe vehicles. As we explained in our April 7th America Out Loud article, “Trump Administration Overturns Unsafe Obama Automobile Standards:”
“The Obama administration was effectively in partnership with overzealous environmental groups who never cared about public safety or economics. The long-term goal was simply to eliminate the use of fossil fuels at all costs.”
And Biden says he will go beyond the dangerous Obama-Biden standard.
And finally, Joe is either naïve or ignorant when it comes to electric vehicle tax credits. As we explained in our America Out Loud January 1, 2020 article, “A Rough Road Ahead For Electric Cars,”
“Up until now, the EV tax credit was granted on an honor system with no required affidavits to prove the credit was actually earned. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) recently reported that of 239,422 EV tax credits claimed between 2014 and 2018, it identified 16,510 as potentially erroneous. Some are outright frauds; others are to second owners who do not qualify or those leasing vehicles who also do not qualify. Worse yet a Congressional Research Service study showed that 80% of all EV tax credits go to households with incomes exceeding $100,000. Truly a wealth redistribution in the wrong direction that liberals should not like.”
Note: Dr. Lehr, the senior author of this article, discussed how Joe Biden’s energy and climate plan is “sheer insanity” on the Lars Larsen Show on October 23, 2020. You can listen to the 7-minute interview here.
Was It Really The Wettest Day?
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 5, 2020
Saturday 3 October was the wettest day for UK-wide rainfall since records began in 1891, Met Office researchers have said.
The downpour followed in the wake of Storm Alex and saw an average of 31.7mm (1.24ins) of rain across the entire UK.
The deluge was enough to exceed the capacity of Loch Ness – the largest lake in the UK by volume – the researchers added.
The previous record wettest day was 29 August 1986.
No doubt this will be wheeled out at the end of the year by the Met Office to bolster its “extreme weather” propaganda. But was it really the wettest day? How do we know?
Quite simply, we don’t, because the Met Office have never published a database of UK daily rainfall. Instead we are expected to take their word for it. Would you trust a company claiming that it had just made record profits, when it had never published any accounts? Of course not.
We also know that the Met Office has recently included several high altitude sites in its rainfall database, which have inevitably skewed upwards rainfall totals.
However, although they do not publish UK daily rainfall data, we do have daily data from the England & Wales Precipitation Series back to 1931. This series categorically shows that October 3rd was not a record, nor anywhere close.
Rainfall totalled 28.48mm on that day, well below the record of 43.23mm which fell in August 1986. Last month’s “record” was in fact only the tenth wettest day.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/daily/HadEWP_daily_qc.txt
Even the England & Wales series is of limited value, as it still only has 90 years of data. There will undoubtedly have been many other extremely wet days earlier.
In fact, as the Met Office admits, the rainfall on 3rd October was not particularly intense anywhere, simply widespread across the whole country.
For instance, Oxfordshire was one of the wettest spots in England, and they had about 60mm that day:
https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2020/10/16/rainfall-on-uks-wettest-day-on-record-could-have-more-than-filled-loch-ness/
However, even at Oxford, such a total was far from being unprecedented:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/bbcs-oxford-soggy-month-claims-undermined-by-the-actual-data/
To be fair, Scotland got a real drenching that day, which may have tilted the UK figures up from the England & Wales ones. However, as I have frequently pointed out, Scotland has become wetter in recent decades, but that does not mean that the rest of the UK has.
The Met Office’s Mark McCarthy gives us the usual weasel words:
“We can’t make any definitive statements specifically about the attribution of this particular event on October 3,” said Dr McCarthy.
“There’s a general expectation that under our warming climate, we would expect to see increases in some types of extreme rainfall and rainfall events and we’re expecting to have wetter winters overall, we could expect increases in these types of extremes.”
If what he says is true, we would expect to see a pattern of increasingly extreme wet weather in England & Wales, and not just Scotland. The fact is that there is no such pattern, either in these intense daily events, or for that matter monthly totals.
Clearly therefore his theory holds no water.
Global Cooling will kill us all!
By Andy May | Watts Up With That? | November 5, 2020
As Angus McFarlane shows in a 2018 well researched wattsupwiththat.com web post (McFarlane, 2018), some 65% of the peer-reviewed climate papers, that offered an opinion, published between 1965 and 1979 predicted that the global cooling seen at the time would continue. He references and is supported by a Notrickszone post by Kenneth Richard (Richard, 2016).
Attempts to erase the “global cooling scare” from the internet by the notorious William Connolley, who has rewritten 5,428 Wikipedia articles in a vain attempt to change history, failed. As James Delingpole explains in The Telegraph, Connolley systematically turned Wikipedia into a man-made global warming advocacy machine (Delingpole, 2009). He rewrote articles on global warming, the greenhouse effect, climate models and on global cooling. He tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In the Wikipedia pages he trashed famous climate scientists who were skeptical of man-made global warming like Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. He also blocked people from correcting his lies.
William Connolley is friends with Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, which includes Phil Jones and Raymond Bradley. He is also a cofounder of the alarmist website Realclimate.org. Obviously, Connolley made sure that Mann and Bradley received glowing praise on Wikipedia until he was fired in 2009 and removed as a Wikipedia administrator (Delingpole, 2009).
We are not surprised that Connolley shows up as a co-author on the peer-reviewed paper, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in BAMS, written by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008). The paper is nonsense and made no difference because facts are stubborn things. That the paper passed peer-review illustrates how corrupt climate science has become. The paper begins with this:
“There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.” (Peterson, Connolley, & Fleck, 2008)
Figure 1. The U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia global average temperature reconstruction since 1850. It shows, like other reconstructions, global cooling of about 0.09°C (0.16°F) from 1944 to 1977.
The global cooling scare of the 1960s and 1970s did exist, both climate scientists and the public were afraid that the global cooling trend, that began in the 1940s (see Figure 1), would continue and the world would turn very cold, maybe even return to a glacial period like the one that ended about 11,700 years ago at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch.
The Peterson, et al. paper carefully cherry picks 71 papers and claims that only seven papers between 1965 and 1979 disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future. They found 20 that took a neutral position and 44 that agreed with the global warming consensus. But the world was cooling then and had been since 1944. Kenneth Richard researched this and expanded the time frame to 1960 to 1989. Richard found 285 papers that disagreed with the “consensus” position that global warming would occur in the future (Richard, 2016).
Of these 285 papers, 156 discussed the cooling since 1940 and predicted future cooling. Seven tried to show that CO2 might be causing the cooling. A complete list of papers can be downloaded from Kenneth Richard’s post. The alarmists fudged the numbers to show a 97% consensus that man caused global warming, then they fudged the global cooling consensus in the same way.
Angus McFarlane took the databases created by Kenneth Richard and Peterson, et al., merged them (there were 16 duplicates) and then did an independent search of his own. He found two additional relevant papers that were not already in one of the two databases. Then he eliminated the papers that were outside the original Peterson et al. period of 1965-1979.
McFarlane’s database is smaller than Richard’s and only has 190 relevant papers, but this is 119 more than Peterson, et al. found and it covers the same period. McFarlane’s review of the papers found that 86 predicted future cooling, 58 were neutral, and 46 predicted warming. Of the 86 cooling papers, 30 predicted a possible new “ice age.” Strictly speaking, we are in an ice age, what they mean is a new glacial period where ice advances to a major new maximum extent like 19,000 years ago in the last major glacial maximum. The 86 cooling papers are 45% of the total. If we ignore the neutral papers, like John Cook, et al. did (Cook, et al., 2013) in his 97% consensus study, then cooling papers are 65% of the papers that offered an opinion. Using Cook’s rules, we can comfortably claim there was a global cooling consensus in 1979.
However, once the mid-twentieth century cooling trend reversed and became a warming trend, it did not take long for the “consensus” to reverse as well. The global surface temperature trend changed to warming (about 0.017°C/year as shown in the graph) around 1977, and the peer-reviewed climate papers from 1977-1979 changed to a ratio of 52% warming to 48% cooling, a bare majority of warming papers, ignoring the neutral papers. During the 1980s the papers quickly changed to pro-warming.
The press in the mid-seventies reported that a consensus of climate scientists believed the world was cooling and the cooling would continue (Struck, 2014). Articles on the cooling consensus appeared in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and National Geographic. A landmark story by Peter Gwynne in Newsweek April 28, 1975 was typical (Gwynne, 1975). It was entitled “The Cooling World.” In the overheated style of Newsweek, the article begins, “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically.” Later in the article Gwynne breathlessly explains “… the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. … and the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Gwynne’s cited sources include the National Academy of Sciences, Murray Mitchell (NOAA), George Kukla (Columbia University), James McQuigg (NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment) (Gwynne, 1975).
George Kukla of Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory did not change his view of a long-term global cooling trend, like many of his colleagues did. When he sadly passed away May 31, 2014, he still believed that a new massive glacial period would begin in the future, perhaps 5,000 years from now. Javier Vinós, in his blog post on “The next glaciation,” (Vinós, 2018) predicts that the next major glaciation will begin in 1500 to 2500 years. It is fortunate that both predictions are far in the future.
When the next global cooling period begins, as it inevitably will, will climate scientists write more global cooling papers? Why should we believe climate scientists who say the world is warming dangerously now, when just 50 or 60 years ago they were saying it was dangerously cooling? A reasonable question. What direct evidence has arisen that convinced them to reverse course? We had a consensus for cooling when the world was cooling, now we have a consensus for warming and the world is warming. Is that all there is to it? Both are hypotheses, what makes them become facts or theories?
Hypotheses are speculative ideas. A real scientist asks, “Is that so? Tell me why you think that.” A rigorous scientific process must be used to demonstrate why observed events, such as global warming or global cooling, are occurring. To show they are potentially dangerous takes even more work.
Consensus is a political thing. The public forms a consensus opinion, then vote and make laws or rules that reflect the opinion. In science, we first form a hypothesis or idea that explains an observed natural phenomenon, such as warming or cooling. The next step is to attempt to disprove it. If we fail the idea survives. We publish what we did, and others attempt to disprove the idea, if they fail to disprove it, it survives. Once this has gone on long enough, the idea becomes a theory. A scientific theory simply survives, it is never proven, it must always be subject to testing.
We mentioned above that seven of the papers examined by Angus McFarlane and Kenneth Richard suggested that CO2 might be causing global cooling. A good example is Sherwood Idso’s, 1984 paper in the Journal of Climatology. The paper is entitled “What if Increases in Atmospheric CO2 Have an inverse Greenhouse Effect?” (Idso, 1984). Idso speculates that additional CO2 will encourage plants to move into more arid areas, because additional CO2 causes plants to use less water per pound of growth. Idso thinks that this might change Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) in such a way as to lower temperatures. In a similar way, Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi speculated that additional CO2 would increase humidity in the tropics and thus cloud cover (Lindzen & Choi, 2011). Extremely small changes in average cloud cover can have a large cooling effect during the daytime.
Peter Webster presents an interesting discussion of Sherwood Idso’s work in his Climatic Change paper, “The Carbon Dioxide/Climate Controversy: Some Personal Comments on Two Recent Publications” (Webster, 1984). Besides an interesting discussion of the emotions involved in the human-caused climate change debate, we can see from Webster’s discussion, and Idso’s paper, how little we really know about the impact of additional CO2 in the real world. Tiny changes in Earth’s albedo, whether due to cloud cover or the distribution of plants can make a huge difference.
Empirical estimates of ECS (the change in air temperature due to doubling the CO2 concentration) have never matched theoretical calculations from climate models. The empirical values (like Idso’s or Lindzen and Choi’s) are normally about half of model estimates, and can be negative, like Idso’s. This is likely because the models are missing something and possible future changes in albedo due to changing cloud and plant cover are likely candidates.
This post is condensed and modified from my new book, Politics and Climate Change: A History.
To download the post bibliography click here.
USPS whistleblower tells Project Veritas he was ordered to backdate late mail-in ballots in Michigan
RT | November 4, 2020
An anonymous tipster with the Postal Service in Michigan has alleged his supervisor ordered mail carriers to backdate ballots mailed too late to be counted, Project Veritas revealed – and the service is reportedly investigating.
The self-professed mail carrier – whose voice and identity have been disguised by the conservative muckraking operation – claimed he and his colleagues were “issued a directive” to “collect any ballots we find in mailboxes,” collection boxes, and “outgoing mail in general” on Wednesday and “separate them at the end of the day so that they could hand stamp them with the previous day’s date” in an interview with Project Veritas posted on Wednesday night.
The ballots retrieved from general mail circulation were then put in “express bags” to be sent “wherever they needed to go” after being stamped, the tipster alleged. Under Michigan law, mail-in ballots must be postmarked by 8pm on Election Day – this past Tuesday – in order to be counted in the 2020 election.
The tipster claimed he worked for the Barlow branch of the Traverse City post office and that he had also spoken with a carrier at another branch who “watched the postmaster [stamping ballots with the previous day’s date].” Normally, “it would be clerks that would do it up at the distribution center,” he added.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keeffe allegedly called the tipster’s supervisor, Jonathon Clarke – the man who supposedly told employees to separate out the ballots – to inquire about the order, only to be hung up on. However, it’s not clear the other party was actually Clarke.
O’Keeffe later claimed a “Special Agent within the Office of Inspector General for the USPS” had contacted his organization after seeing his interview with the whistleblower and was “assessing whether an investigation is appropriate.” While the carrier told PV he had had whistleblower policies “backfire” on him in the past, he said the directive was “sketchy” and “scream[ed] corruption.”
“Knowing the post office’s leaning politically, it didn’t seem quite right,” he told O’Keeffe.
President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit against Michigan over alleged electoral malfeasance on Wednesday, charging Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was allowing absentee ballots to be counted without a team of bipartisan observers. The campaign has filed several lawsuits as the vote count has piled up in apparent favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Georgia was ordered to separate late-arriving mail-in votes on Wednesday night after a Republican poll-watcher claimed to have seen 53 late-marked votes mixed in with legitimate ballots.
Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was among the president’s supporters who quickly picked up the story, retweeting it while asking why the Department of Justice wasn’t looking into the issue. President Trump has been denouncing mail-in voting as fraudulent for months.
New study shows low-carb diets would save BILLIONS currently wasted on drugs. But will Big Pharma allow it?
By Dr Malcomb Kendrick | November 3, 2020
If you want to avoid dying of COVID19, one of the most important things you can do, if you are overweight, is to shed the pounds
‘…. in the first meta-analysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.’ 1
Why? Well, the ‘why’ centres around the damaging effect of raised blood glucose on endothelial cells and… it gets complicated.
For now, though, the most important thing is not to understand the complex metabolic and physiological pathways involved, it is simply to help people to lose weight, and this is where Dr David Unwin comes in.
For years now he has believed, as I do, that the main driver of weight gain, leading on to type 2 (T2) diabetes, is a high carbohydrate diet.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what we have been told for decades by the ‘experts’ who demonise fat and promote carbohydrates. We have the ‘eat-well’ plate, and the ‘food pyramid’, and hundreds of thousands of dieticians around the world, all promoting carbohydrates as the ‘healthy’ option.
Dutifully following this advice, the entire population of the western world has become fatter, and fatter… and fatter. By the way, this is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect.
Getting back to Dr Unwin, years ago he despaired of ever getting any of his patients to lose weight. It was so disheartening that he furtively studied his pension plan, and dreamed of retirement, so fed up was he becoming. Then one day a patient came in who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off.
At first this woman was reluctant to say how she had done it, as she feared the inevitable criticism. In the end, she told Dr Unwin that she had lost weight, and kept it off, by eating a low carbohydrate diet. In Dr Unwin’s own words:
‘A few years ago, I was interested to find out how a patient had improved her diabetic control. She confessed she had ignored my advice and learnt a much better way to look after herself, from the internet. I suppressed my wounded pride and looked at the Low Carb Forum on Diabetes.co.uk There were thousands of type two diabetics on there ignoring their doctors – and getting great results (now that is just not allowed).’ 2
Yes, Dr Unwin did not criticize, instead he was intrigued. Could this possibly be true? It went against everything he had been told about healthy eating, and weight loss, and T2 diabetes. Fat has twice the calories, per gram, as carbohydrates and suchlike. Eating fat, he believed, makes you fat, and then you develop diabetes, and heart disease.
Dr Unwin did more research, then he made the decision to work with patients, mainly those with diabetes, to see if a low carbohydrate diet could be beneficial. Lo and behold, it was … very beneficial. It was like a miracle cure.
In 2014 he published a paper on his results on a small number of patients.
‘Low carbohydrate diet to achieve weight loss and improve HbA1c in type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes: experience from one general practice.’
‘It was observed that a low carbohydrate diet achieved substantial weight loss in all patients and brought about normalisation of blood glucose control in 16 out of 18 patients. At the same time, plasma lipid profiles improved, and BP fell allowing discontinuation of antihypertensive therapy in some individuals…
Conclusions Based on our work so far, we can understand the reasons for the internet enthusiasm for a low carbohydrate diet; the majority of patients lose weight rapidly and fairly easily; predictably the HbA1c levels are not far behind. Cholesterol levels, liver enzymes and BP levels all improved. This approach is simple to implement and much appreciated by people with diabetes.’ 3
Now, he has published results of a much larger study, on nearly two hundred patients over a six-year period. It is called. ‘Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes’ Published in BMJ nutrition 4.
Here are the main findings, which I nicked directly from the press release:
- 46% drug-free T2 diabetes remission
- Significant improvements in weight, blood pressure and lipid profiles
- 93% remission of prediabetes
- £50,885 annual saving on the Norwood GP practice NHS diabetes drug budget
- If every GP practice in England spent the same on drugs for diabetes per patient as Norwood the NHS could save £277 million!
- Older patients can do as well as younger ones with a low carb approach.
- The participants who started with the worst blood sugars saw the greatest improvements in diabetic control
- Four individuals came off insulin altogether
- Total weight loss for the 199 participants was 1.6 metric tons!
This paper will be attacked, of course. There are massive financial interests involved here. As stated, if every GP practice in the UK used the low carb approach, the NHS could save £277 million (~$350m) in drug costs. Scaled up to the US, with much higher drugs costs, one could be looking at around $2Bn/year. Around the world, who knows, but vast sums of money.
So, you can imagine the joy that this paper will be met with in pharmaceutical company boardrooms around the world. The words ‘lead’ and ‘balloon’, spring to mind. Equally the massive low-fat, high carb food manufacturers will be throwing their hands up in horror – ‘my bonus, my bonus… nooooo.’ You can take your low carb yoghurts and….
As for the rest of us. I can assure you that Dr David Unwin has only ever been interested in one thing. Working out how to help people lose weight and control their diabetes. He has achieved this.
Will his research now be taken up by the authorities around the world? Will we move away from promoting a high carbohydrate diet? You have to be joking. There is far too much money to be lost by companies who exert tight control over the world of medical research, and whose lobbyists swarm around the politicians in rich countries.
Which is a damn shame, because more than ever in this endless COVID19 pandemic, obesity represents a health crisis. This paper, and the tireless work by Dr David Unwin, clearly tells us what we need to do, now, urgently. His approach won’t work instantly, and it won’t work for everyone – nothing ever does. However, it represents hope. It could save hundreds and thousands of lives. Better than any vaccine?
Thank you, once again, Dr Unwin. A man who I think of as a friend. Your research should be shouted from the rooftops. I can only do my bit.
1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young
4: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-2020-000072
Russian PR executive outed as ‘source’ of ‘Russiagate’ Steele Dossier claims it was made up by British spy’s employee
By Jonny Tickle | RT | November 3, 2020
After being accused of being behind the controversial Steele Dossier, a discredited report detailing alleged misconduct by President Trump and the catalyst for ‘Russiagate,’ Olga Galkina claims she had nothing to do with it.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal pointed the finger at Galkina as the source of information for former British spy Christopher Steele’s report, which was publicly released by Buzzfeed, in 2017. Initially funded by the US Democratic Party, the information was meant to discredit Trump by showing him as being compromised by Russians.
It suggested that the President used Moscow’s help to win the 2016 US Presidential election. It led to years of political chaos in the US, and the protracted ‘Mueller Investigation,’ which failed to find evidence to support the assertions.
According to Galkina, the dossier was likely entirely invented by her former classmate Igor Danchenko, who added her name to improve its credibility. Danchenko is a Russian emigre in the US, who has worked for Washington think tank industry.
“Danchenko and I have known each other since school,” Galkina told Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK). She explained that they weren’t close contacts, but she once recommended him for a job at servers.com in 2016, a Cyprus-based company where she worked.
“What happened next is not known to me, as I left the company in the middle of 2016,” Galkina explained. “I believe that Christopher Steele entrusted most of the work to Igor Danchenko, and that a huge layer of the information, most likely, was just made up.”
Danchenko was first named in connection with the Steele Dossier earlier this summer, when documents revealed that he had been interviewed by the FBI in 2017 and had cooperated. According to the Wall Street Journal, Danchenko had been working for Steele when he was tasked with finding information connecting Trump to Russia. In his research, Danchenko repeatedly referred to a ‘Source 3,’ who has now been unmasked as Galkina.
According to Galkina, Danchenko added her name to make his fiction appear more believable.
“For the sake of plausibility, he cited, as sources, his Russian acquaintances who are publicly recognized as experts in their field,” Galkina claims.
In particular, Galkina is named as a source on Alexey Gubarev, her former employer at servers.com, who is said to have hacked the Democratic National Committee. Galkina says that the accusations are entirely false.
“Neither Alexey Gubarev personally nor his employees are computer security specialists. They are not qualified to conduct computer hacking,” Galkina told MK. “By this logic, normal Russians who sit down at a computer are ‘diabolical Russian hackers.’ It is kompromat wholly made up by Igor Danchenko.”
Galkina also rubbished more of the Wall Street Journal’s claims, rejecting the suggestion that she was sacked for being late and drunk, but instead resigned due to “unbearable working conditions” and a messy divorce.
“I won’t rule out lawsuits against citizens, both in Russian and American courts, who tried to use and defame my name.”
Don’t Forget LBJ’s Election Theft
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | November 2, 2020
The mainstream pro-Biden media is poking fun at Donald Trump’s suggestion that there could be fraud involved in the post-election receipt of mail-in ballots. Apparently they’re not familiar with the election-theft case of Lyndon Johnson, who would go on to become president of the United States.
The entire matter is detailed in Robert Caro’s second book in his biographical series on Johnson. The book is entitled Means of Ascent.
Johnson election theft took place in 1948, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate against Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, one of the most admired and respected governors in the history of the state.
In the primary election, Stevenson led Johnson by 70,000 votes, but because he didn’t have a majority of the votes, he was forced into a run-off. The run-off was held on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning after the run-off, Stevenson was leading by 854 votes.
As a New York Times review of Caro’s account stated, the day after the run-off election it was “discovered” that the returns of a particular county had not yet been counted. The newly discovered votes were overwhelmingly in favor of Johnson. Then, on Monday more returns came in from the Rio Grande Valley.
Nonetheless, on Tuesday, the State Election Bureau announced that Stevenson had won by 349 votes. Nothing changed on Wednesday and Thursday after the election. On Friday, precincts in the Rio Grande Valley made “corrections” to their tallies, which narrowed Stevenson’s lead to 157.
But also on Friday, Jim Wells County, which was governed as a personal fiefdom by a powerful South Texas rancher named George Parr, filed “amended” returns for what has become famous as “Box 13” that gave Johnson another 200 votes. When all was said and done, Johnson had “won” the election by 87 votes.
It was later discovered that one of Parr’s men had changed the total tally for Johnson from 765 to 965 by simply curling the 7 into a 9.
Where did the extra 200 votes come from? The last 202 names on on the election roll in Box 13 were in a different color ink from the rest of the names, the names were in alphabetical order, and they were all in the same handwriting. When Caro was researching his book, he secured a statement from Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County, who acknowledged the fraud and confessing his role in it.
As the Washington Post reported, to investigate what obviously appeared quite suspicious Stevenson employed the assistance of Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who had trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde. It was to no avail. Johnson got a friendly state judge to issue an injunction preserving the status quo, after which the Democratic executive committee, by one vote, declared Johnson to be the winner.
Stevenson took the matter to federal court but the Supreme Court punted, declaring that it had no right to interfere with a state election.
So, Lyndon Johnson stole the election and ended up going to Washington as Texas’ U.S. Senator. Ironically, if Stevenson had become the state’s senator instead, Johnson would never have been selected to be John Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate and, consequently, would never have been president.
No wonder Donald Trump is worried about those Democrats!
Why Canada Must Release Meng Wan Zhou
By K.J. Noh | Dissident Voice | October 30, 2020
Few things are as dangerous as a poorly thought-out kidnapping. Kidnappings are serious business, often with unintended consequences. History is replete with dim-witted criminals who engaged in them on a whim, only to discover adverse outcomes far beyond their imagining. One dramatic example happened 90 years ago this week:
On October 24th, a mother with young children is kidnapped. She is the cherished wife of an important man whom the kidnapper’s group is in competition with. The plan of the kidnapper is that by kidnapping her, this will create unbearable psychological pressure on her husband, force him to capitulate, or at least damage his resolve.
The woman is first humiliated, then tortured, then killed. But the leader does not capitulate, break, or weaken. Instead, over the next nineteen years, he wages war without quarter on his enemies and eventually drives them into the sea. Decades later, he will write this poem for her:
The lonely goddess in the moon spreads her ample sleeves
To dance for these faithful souls in the endless sky.
Of a sudden comes word of the tiger’s defeat on earth,
And they break into tears of torrential rain
The poet, is of course, Mao Zedong. The kidnapped woman was the beloved wife of Chairman Mao, Yang Kai Hui, the mother of his three children. In the winter of 1930, the Kuomintang Fascists kidnapped her and her son, in order to demoralize Mao and put pressure on him to capitulate. She was executed in Changsha, on November 14th, in front of her children, at the ripe age of 29.
Though utterly helpless at the moment she was hostage, Mao never forgave the kidnappers for their depravity, cowardice, and misogyny—victimizing women and children as weapons in a war—and he ground his enemies into the dust, and then built a state where such atrocities could never occur or go unpunished again.
The State-directed, extraterritorial kidnapping of Huawei CFO Meng Wan Zhou is widely seen as a similar act of infamy, misogyny, and thuggery, by a similar class of disreputable individuals. “Lawless, reasonless, ruthless,… vicious” is the extraordinary official pronouncement of the Chinese government. It is certainly a violation of international law. How this will play out ultimately, and what retribution will be meted out remains to be seen, but retribution there will surely be for this “extremely vicious” act.
George Koo has pointed out the “rotten underpinnings of the case” in this article. Most people understand that Meng is not guilty of anything other than being the daughter of Ren Zeng Fei, the founder of Huawei. Huawei, as a global technological powerhouse, represents Chinese power and Chinese technical prowess, which the United States is hell-bent on destroying. Meng has been kidnapped as a pawn, as a hostage to exert pressure on Huawei and the Chinese government, and to curb China’s development. In a maneuver reminiscent of medieval or colonial warfare, the US has explicitly offered to release her if China capitulates on a trade deal—making clear that she is being held hostage. This constitutes a violation of the UN Convention on Hostages.
The outcome of this judicial kidnapping will determine US and Canada-Chinese policy for decades to come: whether a rapprochement is possible in the future, or whether relations will spiral into a cycle of acrimony, vengeance, and ultimately catastrophe.
What is on trial, of course, is not Meng, or Huawei, but the judicial system of Canada and the conscience, good sense, and ethics of its ruling class: whether it will uphold or undermine international notions of justice.
If the Canadian judiciary and its ruling classes fail this test, Canada risks being driven, metaphorically, into the sea by a determined Chinese leadership. The global community that upholds international justice could only concur.
Key Facts about the Meng Wan Zhou Case
The Canadian government arrested Meng Wan Zhou, the CFO of Huawei, on December 1st of 2018, as she was transiting Vancouver on a flight to Mexico. The arrest was made on the demand of the US government’s US District Court’s Eastern District of NY. The initial charge was “fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud to circumvent US sanctions on Iran”.
Of course, the US government knew rapidly that these allegations could not constitute an extraditable charge. The Canadians do not subscribe to US sanctions against Iran—they actively encourage trade with Iran–and therefore business dealings with Iran could hardly be a crime in Canada. In fact, the unilateral US sanction are actually a violation of international law. Furthermore, like most jurisdictions in the world, Canada also has a requirement of “double criminality”: unless the alleged crime is a crime in both jurisdictions, you cannot extradite.
So an alternate case had to be constructed. The case was that was concocted alleged that because Meng had lied to a bank, she must be extradited for fraud. Of course, the bank was British (HSBC), the “crime” happened in Hong Kong, the accused was a Chinese national, and the arrest was in Canada. Hence, she must be extradited to the US for “fraud”. As a set up for a lame joke this would not pass, and as legal argument it is beyond farce. The US court claimed standing to charge her because transactions with HSBC had, or would have transited US servers in New York for a few milliseconds.
Here are some key things to remember about this case:
1) Even if the allegations of so-called “fraud” were true, without the political pressures, such an issue would largely be a private matter between HSBC and Meng.
2) None of the transactions between HSBC and Meng occurred in the US. The funds only transited through the US system because of the way of the global banking system is set up for dollar clearance—this was the pretextual technicality used for jurisdiction and charging. (The funds could equally have been set up to transit through an alternate system, bypassing US servers and risk).
3) No non-US person has ever been charged for “causing” a non-US bank to violate US sanctions in the past. In similar cases, it’s usually a small fine to a corporation.
4) It’s been shown that the US attempted the abduction of Meng in 6 European and Latin American countries—all of which rejected US demands. The US decided on Meng’s momentary transit through Canada, because they considered the Trudeau government to be the most pliable and sycophantic to their cause.
5) Trump has made statements that Meng could be used as a bargaining chip in the US-China trade deal, showing the clearly political nature of the arrest. Confidential RCMP documents also note that the arrest was “highly political”. It’s widely suspected that the law-breaking John Bolton was the instigator behind the action.
6) HSBC was already under prosecution by the US government for prior unrelated violations; rather than doing due diligence in their loan or clearance processes or the law, it decided to collaborate with the US government to entrap Huawei and Meng.
7) The arrest itself involved massive abuses of process: irregularities in detention, notification, search, seizure, constituting themselves violations of international law and bilateral agreements.
8) The court case has been also full of abuses, including the hiding of key exculpatory documents (slides 6 & 16) by the prosecution; and denial of access to key documents to the defense (on the basis of national security and “damage to China-Canada relations”). Given the damage that has already happened to China-Canada relations by the abduction of Meng, one can only imagine what additional “damage” Canada’s Intelligence service is trying to prevent with a claim of National Secrets exemption.
9) The Trudeau government is going on with charade that it is a hapless damsel obliged to follow US strong-arm demands. But Section 23 of the Canadian Extradition Act gives the government the authority to terminate this case at any time. Extradition is made on the discretion of the government, and by refusing to act, the Trudeau administration is abdicating its responsibilities to the Canadian people and the cause of justice.
The Fraudulent Charge of Fraud
Meng Wan Zhou’s lawyer has argued, “It is a fiction, that the US has any interest in policing interactions between a private bank and a private citizen halfway around the world…It’s all about sanctions.”
The jurisprudence upholds this: for a fraud charge against Meng to stick, it would have to show 1) deliberate misrepresentation/deception to HSBC as well as 2) harm or risk of harm to HSBC. In other words, Meng’s lies would have put HSBC at risk for fines and penalities for sanctions busting.
Note, however, that the bank could not have been held liable, if it could be shown that they had been “deceived” into breaching US sanctions by Meng as alleged. If Meng had “lied” to the bank, no harm could have occurred to the bank. The bank would have needed to act deliberately to face any risk of liability.
On the other hand, documents, slides, and emails released later actually show that HSBC had been informed of the relationship between Skycom and Huawei before Meng’s testimony as well as during the meeting, so the allegation of deception doesn’t hold up. (Slides 6 & 16 used in Meng’s presentation to HSBC were omitted to make it seem as if Meng had deceived them, but in full context, show there was no deception).
The conclusion is simple: there was either no lie, or no harm. Regardless, there was no fraud.
In other words, the Canadian government had no case.
The Double Criminality of Heather Holmes
Canadian Justice Heather Holmes, presided over the interrogation. Like the fascist KMT warlord who had kidnapped and tortured Yang Kai Hui, she interrogated Meng Wan Zhou and her lawyer in sibilant tones. Tell me, about “double criminality”, she entreated gently, as if their arguments would be weighed in her judgement.
Meng’s lawyer, Richard Peck, answered with common sense: Because Canada doesn’t have sanctions against Iran, there would be no liability to the bank, hence, no risk to the bank, hence, no criminal “fraud”.
It also couldn’t constitute fraud in the US, since if what the government argued was true–that Meng had misrepresented facts to the bank–HSBC would not be liable because the bank would be an “innocent victim,” hence not liable for any sanctions.
“All risk is driven by sanctions risk in the US,” Peck stated.
Astonishingly, Justice Holmes ruled against Meng, claiming that one should not look for correspondence or equivalence between the statutes to determine “double criminality” in fraud. Instead, she claimed that one had to transpose the context and the coherence of the statues of the demanding country to render a decision. Even though Canada didn’t have sanctions against Iran (thus no illegality or risk of harm, and hence no fraud), she stated that she still had to interpret the demand for extradition by “transposing the environment” that led the US to make the demand. In other words, Canada had no sanctions on Iran, but she had to imagine “the environment”–i.e., “as if Canada had sanctions on Iran”–to render the decision. In so doing, she was able to smuggle in illegal US sanctions by installing a legal backdoor–into a country that had lifted sanctions.
In other words, the dubious, illegal “environment” of US sanctions overruled the clear, plain letter of Canadian law. At the same time, no consideration was given to the odious political “environment” driving the abduction.
Why did the good justice see fit to make a mockery of Canada’s own laws and sovereignty, and subjugate Canada to US extraterritoriality? Why did she contort herself to support the blatant illegality of US sanctions? Does she realize she has set the country barreling down the wrong lane of history?
It’s not known if Justice Holmes asked for the clerk to bring her a basin of Maple syrup to wash her hands after she passed judgement. But it would have been understandable for such a corrupt, consequential, and deeply catastrophic judgement.
Rogue State Canada
Canadian politicians and press like to intone robotically, that Meng’s kidnapping is strictly a by-the-books, “rule-of-law” procedure with Meng’s detention. They like to repeat the catechism, in that tiresome, hypocritical, Maple-washing fashion, that they are “a nation of laws” (insinuating the others are not). But the fact is, Canadians have an atrocious history of kidnapping innocents in general, and assisting the US with kidnappings in particular. There are many examples, but the best known is the story of Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer who was kidnapped and rendered as terrorist, and tortured unspeakably in Syria, where”the pain was so great, it makes you forget the taste of your mother’s milk” Of course, he was innocent of all charges.
It’s also well established that Canadian Police have an ugly habit of kidnapping Indigenous people who are drunk or homeless, and driving them far away from city and abandoning them where they are sure to die of hypothermia and exposure in the winter. These are called Saskatoon “Starlight tours”.
It’s equally well known that the Canadian government also kidnapped tens of thousands of Indigenous children, sometimes at gun point, and forced them into concentration camps (“residential schools”) where they were abused, tortured, raped, enslaved, and killed. Children kidnapped in these schools had a greater chance of dying than soldiers doing battle in WWII–some studies show a mortality rate of 40-60%. In other words, it committed genocide, through rule of law, of course.
In 2018, the UN Committee on Human Rights published a long series of incriminating findings on Canada, related to the torture, mistreatment, imprisonment, death and refoulement of immigrants, refugees, indigenous peoples, and other political prisoners.
On the other hand, the Canadian government has been known to fight tooth and nail to harbor war criminals and torturers–people who legitimately should be extradited. For example, it harbored several El Salvadoran death squad leaders in the 1980’s. These people were so toxic that the Salvadoran government could no longer have them in their country–so they gave them diplomatic postings to Canada. The Canadians, instead of doing the reasonable thing and extraditing them–as was demanded by human rights community around the world, bent over backwards to give them safe harbor and immunity.
Any hope that the settler-colonial Canadian justice system can play an even hand or follow basic human ethics in this case is belied by this atrocious history.
But Why is the US going after Huawei?
China has been designated the official enemy (“revisionist power”) of the US, because it poses a threat to US dominance. As such, the US is engaged in “multi-domain” hybrid warfare against China to attack and bring China down. The domains of warfare that involve the US assaults against Huawei are the domains of: tech war, trade war, economic war, lawfare, and cyber war. Huawei is one of the key pillars of China’s technological and economic strength. It is the world’s largest and most advanced telecom corporation, and in 5G it owns 1/5 of the base patents in the field.
Huawei is also building the digital infrastructure to accompany the Belt and Road Initiative (the “digital silk road”). This not only allows China’s economy to grow, but also prevents the effects of military blockade at the South China Sea. Its hardware makes it harder for US surveillance to tap.
These are the key reasons why it is being attacked and taken down. Aside from kidnappings, the US has been waging this warfare by trying to prevent other countries from signing deals for Huawei 5G infrastructure. It is alleging that Huawei would render these networks insecure: Huawei would spy on them for the Chinese government, or even open them for Chinese cyberwarfare.
Actually, the truth is exactly the inverse. A world-wide Huawei system could create problems for the US global panopticon upon which US “unipolar” dominance relies on: its ability to eavesdrop on individuals, corporations, the leaders of countries, as well as military communications. With non-Huawei routers, due to the subservience and mandated cooperation of US companies, cyberspace as a domain of warfare is always guaranteed to be permeable and amenable to US surveillance and attack.
In other words, the US taps routers globally to spy on individuals, companies, governments, and nations: “Routers, switches, and servers made by Cisco are booby-trapped with surveillance equipment that intercepts traffic handled by those devices and copies it to the NSA’s network”
Regarding specific allegations of Huawei’s “spying”, Huawei has been completely transparent and has handed over its source code to relevant Intelligence agencies for detailed analysis, year upon year. No spying or intentional backdoors have been found: For example, German Intelligence found no spying, and no potential for spying, and British Intelligence also found none.
On the other hand, the US NSA, in a program called Shotgiant, spied extensively on Huawei to look for links between Huawei and the PLA, evidence of backdoors and spying, and vulnerabilities that they could exploit. This extraordinary spying (revealed by Wikileaks) showed no evidence of backdoors, spying or connections with the PLA. The Shotgiant disclosures showed that US allegations were projection: NSA actions “actually mirror what the US has been accusing Huawei of potentially doing”. The NSA did, however, steal Huawei’s proprietary source code at the time, and had plans to spy on other countries by using this information and had sought to compromise security in general. Of course, these kinds of unethical exploits create dangers for everyone.
Theft and exploits notwithstanding, using Huawei hardware could still make it harder for the US to surveil networks–Huawei has declared it refuses to plant backdoors.
Guo Ping, the chairman of Huawei, was quoted in The Verge: “If the NSA wants to modify routers or switches in order to eavesdrop, a Chinese company will be unlikely to cooperate,”…Guo argues that his company “hampers US efforts to spy on whomever it wants,” reiterating its position that “Huawei has not and will never plant backdoors.”
Wired Magazine has also confirmed that Huawei is an obstacle to NSA surveillance: Telecom-equipment makers who sell products to carriers in the US “are required by law to build into their hardware ways for authorities to access the networks for lawful purposes”.
The only allegation of “Huawei vulnerabilities” with any backing evidence shown to date have been Bloomberg‘s “gotcha” article that alleged that in 2009, 2011 some telnet connections in Huawei equipment for Vodaphone in Italy were insecure. Vodaphone, however, refuted these allegations. Further technical analysis showed these allegations were completely implausible. The hardware (Baseboard Management Controller) that Bloomberg alleges is “insecure” cannot access any data in any normal configuration Furthermore, built-in Telnet access CLI connections are unexceptional, and did not pose meaningful risk.
Since then further allegations have been made by the US government (leaked to the WSJ ), but always without proof. These allegations may be recycled and refuted old allegations, or they may just be pure invention, which why they cannot issue the proof.
Of course, Huawei refutes these allegations and always demands proof. The proof is never forthcoming, because there is none.
Here is a solution that allows everyone to step back from the brink. Back off on the unsubstantiated, unverifiable “backdoor spying” canards. Stop the spying and harassment of Huawei, and stop the projection. Stop the interference with its global contracts: let each country evaluate them on their own merits. Stop the fraudulent prosecutions that recycle settled matters.
Above all, stop taking hostages: this is a violation of international law. Canada must release Meng Wan Zhou, immediately. And it must find ways to repair relations and find ways cooperate anew with China. The benefits of success will be tangible and immense. The consequences of failure, immeasurable.
K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer, and teacher. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works on global justice issues. He can be reached at: k.j.noh48@gmail.com.
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Villains of Judea
Samuel Zemurray
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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