Claims of dramatic loss of Great Barrier Reef corals are false
Corals expert hits out at media reports
GWPF | October 15, 2020
Claims that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost half of its coral cover between 1995 and 2017 have received global media coverage.
The stories were based on a new paper co-authored by controversial Australian researcher, Professor Terry Hughes of James Cook University.
But according to Professor Peter Ridd, a leading authority on the Great Barrier Reef, these claims are false.
According to Professor Ridd, the best data on coral cover is taken by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who have been measuring over 100 reefs every year since 1986:
“AIMS data shows that coral cover fluctuates dramatically with time but there is roughly the same amount of coral today as in 1995. There was a huge reduction in coral cover in 2011 which was caused by two major cyclones that halved coral cover. Cyclones have always been the major cause of temporary coral loss on the Reef.”
Coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef 1986-2019; AIMS/Peter Ridd 2020
This is not the first time that Professor Hughes has made such claims about coral loss. His previous study was strongly criticised by the AIMS scientists responsible for collecting and publishing the coral data.
Moreover, Professor Hughes has refused to make public the raw data upon which he made this claim, despite repeated requests.
“This latest work by Prof Hughes needs a thorough quality-audit to test its veracity”, says Ridd. “Prime-facie, there are excellent grounds to treat it with great scepticism.”
Contact
Professor Peter Ridd
e: peterridd@yahoo.com.au
New UN Climate Row: Alarming Report Contradicts Its Own Data
By Edwin Timmer, De Telegraaf, 14 October 2020
Amsterdam: The United Nations has become caught up in a new climate row over a recent UN report which claims to show an increase in climate disasters – but which seems to be contradicted by its own data.
The row was triggered by the new report on “Human Cost of Disasters”. The report announced a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years”. However, the same report contains a graph showing that the number of climate-related disasters has actually decreased by 15 percent since 2000.
It is not the only contentious element of the report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) in Geneva. Some of the data used is also said to be unreliable while the alarmist language of Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head of UNDRR, seems to have been inspired by activist groups like Extinction Rebellion.
Due to the fuss, there is now an international call for at least rectification. “This is a huge, embarrassing blunder,” said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, a British think tank. “The United Nations must immediately withdraw this report and apologise for misleading the public.”
Roger Pielke Jr, a renowned American scientist in the field of natural disasters – and anything but climate denier – also regrets the sharp position by the UNDRR. In an e-mail to De Telegraaf he says that the authors have drawn “flawed conclusions”.
It is not the first time that the UN is accused of climate exaggeration. UNICEF stated last year that hurricane disasters in the Caribbean is driving more and more children to flee. “Pure scare tactics,” said a hurricane expert at the time. And a report by the IPCC once predicted that the Himalayas would be glacier-free by 2035. That also turned out to be a scientific mistake.
However, the UNDRR report substantiates its statement about increasing climate disasters with data from the renowned Belgian Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). Between 1980 and 1999, the Leuven database counted 4,212 disasters and 7,348 from the turn of the century to 2020. Ergo: the climate has gone wild.
“This is clear evidence that in a world where the global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1˚C above the preindustrial period, the impacts are being felt in the increased frequency of extreme weather events including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires.”, according to the report, which also included CRED researcher Joris van Loenhout.
But here too, the report goes wrong, warns Pielke Jr. The data on disasters from the last century are, as the CRED has repeatedly acknowledged, flawed – and therefore unreliable. During the time before the internet existed, not every disaster was reported the way it is now.
British blogger Paul Homewood also discovered a “leap” in the number of disasters the Belgian institute listed which suddenly rose in 1998 — exactly the year the CRED began to receive US funding to start publishing statistics.
The datasets about the two different periods are therefore too different in quality, says Pielke Jr. “You should not draw any conclusions about a changing frequency in climatic extremes on the basis of this data set,” says the researcher at the University of Colorado.
Van Loenhout disputes this criticism. In an e-mail the researcher trained in Utrecht acknowledges that CRED has previously been critical of its own database, but claims that much of the data has been improved recently. Of the dataset dating back to 1900, only the first 60 years may not be reliable, he says. “Disasters will be missing.”
But that is not a problem for the current report, he claims. “From about 1960-1970 onward, the completeness of the data is much greater, and the share of missing disasters much smaller. We are constantly working to improve completeness, and this is also happening for previous years and decades. For this reason, statements made in 2004 and 2006 are now somewhat outdated, as the completeness of the database has since improved,” says Van Loenhout.
Pielke Jr is surprised that, to his knowledge, this is the first time that the Belgian institute is suddenly so convinced of its older data. The American also disagrees with Van Loenhout’s criticism that he should not deduce a downward trend in climate-related disasters over the past 20 years. “Nonsense. Of course you can – it’s the definition of a trend.”
The fierce clash can be explained by the significant deviation of the UNDRR findings with the research studies that Pielke Jr has published. Time and again he has shown that despite an increase in financial damage from natural disasters, there has not been a change in the intensity of most weather extremes. Increasing damage is due to the growth of population, real estate and properties in vulnerable areas.
The UN’s Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed these findings: the near future may bring an increase in floods or hurricanes. But until now this is barely detectable. “Everything I find is consistent with the IPCC,” says Pielke Jr.
One of the most telling trends the American scientist has highlighted is this: the number of fatalities from natural disasters in the past 100 years has fallen by 95 percent — despite a rapidly growing world population. This makes the UNDRR report much more dogmatic about climate trends than its sibling the IPCC, both under the same UN umbrella.
This does not stop UN envoy Mizutori from adopting an alarmist tone. She commends UN staff and volunteers who have saved countless lives in past natural disasters. “But it is being made more and more difficult for them, especially by industrialised countries that are terribly lacking in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to the level agreed in the Paris Agreement.”
GWPF director Benny Peiser is appalled by this political blame game. As if residents of industrial countries are guilty of future deaths from natural disasters in other countries. “This is no longer science, but a purely political report.”
Translation GWPF
FBI Informant Was ‘One Of The Most Active Leaders’ Pushing ‘Crackpot’ Whitmer Kidnapping Plot: Defense
By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | October 13, 2020
An FBI informant was “one of the most active leaders” in the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov Gretchen Whitmer, according to a defense attorney for one of the accused.
From the Detroit Free Press :
There was no real plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but only “military wannabes” who engaged in “big talk” and played with guns in the woods, defense lawyers argued in court Tuesday.
As one defense lawyer suggested, the case appears to be one of “big talk between crackpots,” or “people who talk a lot … but are never going to do anything.”
“Have you ever dealt with big talkers?” defense attorney Scott Graham asked an FBI agent on cross examination, adding: “There’s kind of a military-wanna-be theme that runs between the militias.”
[…] Defense lawyers contend that there was no probable cause to arrest and charge the suspect, arguing, among other things, that the suspects had no operational plan to do anything, were engaged in all legal activities — including talking in encrypted group chats and practicing military exercises with lawfully owned guns — and that it was the informants and undercover agents who “pushed” others to do illegal things.
“One of the most active leaders was your informant,” Graham said.
If this was another FBI frame-up job certainly it wouldn’t be the first and it won’t be the last.
The FBI’s affidavit revealed they had multiple informants and undercover agents involved in this operation going all the way back to June.
They could have arrested these saps months ago but likely chose to wait until right before the election for maximum political impact.
FBI used MEDIA REPORTS seeded by British spy to ‘corroborate’ Steele Dossier, declassified spreadsheet shows
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 13, 2020
The FBI sought to ‘verify’ information in the notorious dossier at the heart of Russiagate by using media articles seeded by the actual dossier author, British spy Christopher Steele, newly released evidence has shown.
The so-called Steele Dossier is the centerpiece of ‘Russiagate,’ the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump “colluded” with Moscow in the 2016 US presidential election. The dossier’s most bombastic claim was that Russia had “kompromat” on him in the form of sex tapes from a Moscow hotel involving urinating prostitutes.
Steele compiled the dossier for Fusion GPS, a DC-based firm paid by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the DNC. The FBI then used it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016, and extended it three times well into 2017.
A 94-page spreadsheet made public on Monday, however, shows the FBI relied heavily on media reports to corroborate Steele’s claims – in many cases, the very same reports Steele had planted himself.
According to analyst Stephen McIntyre, footnotes listed in the spreadsheet show that 39 percent of the footnotes lead to Washington, DC media outlets, another 29 percent are redacted, and Steele himself was cited on 18 occasions, somehow self-verifying his own work.
In one instance, McIntyre notes, the FBI triple counted an article from the Daily Beast as three separate sources. Other media outlets named in the document are CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News and Mother Jones.
The FBI had actually decided to fire Steele as a paid informant in September 2016 – before obtaining the Page warrant – because he leaked to the media, specifically Yahoo and Mother Jones, but that never raised any red flags either with the warrant or the corroboration, apparently.
Moreover, the Bureau knew in December 2016 that the “primary sub-source” (PSS) for the dossier was a Russian national they had investigated as a foreign agent in 2009, but the investigation was abandoned without explanation and this fact was never flagged. Even after interviewing the PSS in January 2017, and establishing that most of the dossier was fabricated outright, the FBI continued to use it at the FISA court to extend the Page warrant.
Another source the FBI used to corroborate Steele was Cody Shearer, a long-time Clinton operative who produced a memo alleging that Russian intelligence had a sex tape of Trump. That amounts to more circular reporting, however, as Steele was reportedly given the Shearer dossier by State Department official Jonathan Winer, and then handed it over to his FBI contacts in October 2016.
The spreadsheet is the first confirmation that the FBI actually used the ‘Shearer Dossier,’ whose existence was first reported by the Guardian in January 2018, as part of a push by Democrats to show that the Steele dossier wasn’t the sole grounds for the FISA warrants.
Just last week, however, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified notes from then-CIA chief John Brennan, who said he warned the Obama administration about a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Trump with allegations of ‘Russian collusion’ as a means of “distracting the public from her use of a private email server” before the 2016 election.
The two-year probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with zero evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, much less Trump himself – and while it argued that Moscow “meddled” in US elections, it offered no evidence beyond its own assertions contained in indictments that were subsequently dropped when challenged in court.
While all these revelations have amounted to an indictment of the entire ‘Russiagate’ affair, the media that gave each other awards for their coverage of ‘collusion’ has never apologized for any of it. To this day, millions of Americans continue to believe their president is a “Russian agent.”
Opaque, Unaccountable: Dangers of the New COVID Bio-Security Complex
By Patrick Henningsen | 21st Century Wire | October 13, 2020
Seven months into this crisis, it can’t be any clearer. Just as they did following 9/11, western governments are using the COVID ‘pandemic’ crisis as a pretext to usher in whole new layer of security state bureaucracy, and one which has the power to penetrate more deeply into our lives.
For those who are old enough to remember, prior to September 11, 2001, there was no such thing as a Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and yet in a matter of a few years, this federal department quickly grew into one of the largest federal agencies taking in tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year ever since. In fact, the term Homeland didn’t even exist in America before that. But it was the perceived threat which provided it’s raison d’etre – buttressed by an incessant barrage of propaganda by the state and its media adjuncts, which made this new paradigm a reality. Soon, all of these new state apparatuses and security initiatives were all nestled neatly under the new banner of the Global War on Terror.
In 2020, this exact process has been repeated, only this time the threat isn’t the spectre of radical Islamist terror coming from foreign lands, but something much closer to home.
According to our governments, the new threat is your neighbour, your teacher, the shopkeeper, and even your family members.
And you are a threat to each of them.
And everyone is a threat to each other.
I described this dialectic in the recent special edition of New Dawn Magazine. Here’s a brief passage from my article entitled, “THE GREAT RESET: A Global Flu d’Etat”:
From the onset, computer-modeled predictions wildly overestimated death tolls in key countries. This was not by accident as the initial political and mass media campaign of shock and awe placed populations in an applied cognitive framework of helplessness and dependency.
The same psychological levers were activated in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Psychologically traumatised western electorates not only accepted any level of state and corporate security, infringement of civil liberties and invasion of privacy, many even demanded their governments prosecute overseas wars to eliminate the perceived threat, at that time, of al Qaeda and international terrorism. Subsequently, a new normal was rolled-out globally, a series of endless wars and a leviathan of ‘anti-terror’ measures and digital surveillance at home.
Despite efforts to try and convince the public that everyone is a potential terrorist, the climate of fear was difficult to maintain. The genius of the COVID crisis is that the Establishment has now managed to convince us that everyone is a potential carrier of a deadly pathogen and that anyone who so much as sneezes in the vicinity of any- one else could not only kill them but also trigger a deadly ‘second wave’ of the pandemic.
Phase one of The Great Reset.
This week, the UK Government announced its latest round of emergency measure and regional lockdowns, supposedly for fighting the coronavirus.
Their new “Tier Three” lockdown system will determine whether towns or cities will be allowed to keep pubs, gyms and other leisure facilities open, for up to a further six months. But who knows when it will end. This has prompted concerned members of public, along with a few brave officials, to ask who exactly is setting this new Three-Tier system?
According to government officials, the new system will classify regions as either ‘medium’, ‘high’ or ‘very high’ levels, with high and above triggering new local lockdowns.
Welcome to thin end of the state’s bio-surveillance wedge. Similar protocols are being rolled out in Five Eyes Alliance nations the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Just as with the global war on terror, governments have now erected an entirely new level within the ever-expanding national security state. In the UK, it’s called the Joint Bio Security Centre (JBC), formed in July, and already a £9 billion operation. Expect that number to grow substantially as the security complex discovers new and more complex systems required to keep pace with a new global bio surveillance and biological arms race.
“Led by a senior spy, the JBC does not publish details of its deliberations, the sources of its evidence or its key personnel. Nevertheless, its advice to ministers is understood to have guided recent decisions on where to enforce the local lockdowns affecting millions of people across the country,” said The Telegraph.
Is COVID really so deadly that the state needs to reconfigure all of its public health agencies under a new command and control hierarchy? Indeed, many asked the same question about al-Qaeda 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, few officials are demanding any answers or calling for accountability. There is only one such inquisitive public servant so far, Dr Greg Clark MP, Chairman of Science and Technology Committee, who believes that the British public are owed some answers as to who is in this opaque group, and which person(s) is making the final decisions for these rather arbitrary ‘alert levels’ being issued by the government.
Exactly what is the remit of this new JBC? According to the Institute for Government:
The centre will have two main jobs. The first is as an independent analytical function to provide real-time analysis about infection outbreaks. It will look in detail to identify and respond to outbreaks of Covid-19 as they arise. The centre will collect data about the prevalence of the disease and analyse that data to understand infection rates across the country.
Its second job is to advise on how the government should respond to spikes in infections – for example by closing schools or workplaces in local areas where infection levels have risen. Should UK government ministers decide to impose different restrictions in different areas and regions across England, it will be on the advice of the JBC.
And just as we suspected, here’s the salient point:
The JBC looks to be based on the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC). JTAC analyses intelligence related to terrorism and sets threat levels, which in turn inform ministers’ decisions on protecting the public and operational deployments by the police and other agencies.
The current Three-Tier alert system was based on the following framework devised for the JBC in determining new Covid-19 alert levels:
- Level 1: Covid-19 is not known to be present in the UK
- Level 2: Covid-19 is present in the UK, but the number of cases and transmission is low
- Level 3: a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation
- Level 4: a Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially
- Level 5: as level 4 and there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed.
If it looks and sounds like a military operation, that’s because it is. This is the first time that the science of epidemiology has been brushed aside in favour of a one-size-fits-all, military-style approach to mitigating a viral pandemic.
The JBC insists that they are only providing recommendations “informed by the data collected and analysed by the JBC.” It is therefore up to Downing Street and its chief medical officer to issue the final alert level. Presumably they will be processing testing data, along with NHS Track and Trace, as well as data from the Office of National Statistics, and Public Health England (if it still exists).
We’re told that the JBC is being headed by an intelligence chief from GCHQ, cybersecurity director Dr Clare Gardiner. According to her biography, she’s a “qualified epidemiologist, medical researcher, and cybersecurity director.”
The Telegraph adds, “She reports to Baroness Dido Harding, the chief of NHS Test and Trace, while the entire JBC organisation falls under the control of the Department of Health, which answers to the Mr Hancock. Government sources insisted the body was largely staffed by civil servants meaning it was “not appropriate” to release their identities.”
Lockdowns are no trivial matter and deeply impact the lives of millions of people, and carry with them the most grave economic and social consequences. They also cost lives. Hence, the concern here is one of transparency, and it is unknown if this new ‘bio-intelligence’ agency will be engaging with independent scientists, or will it merely collate data and liase with government-appoint science advisors. It seems odd to be blending the civil service and signals intelligence with the science departments. From a political and bureaucratic point of view, it’s certainly convenient for politicians to have yet another compartment to whom they can ‘pass the buck’ and use plausible deniability for obfuscation purposes. If nothing else, it gives Ministers yet another panel of ‘experts’ to defer to – the familiar illusion of impressive depth and deep considerations supposedly informing the Ministers’ final assessments – when in reality, it just becomes more convoluted. Drowning in unaccountable bureaucracy. That’s where the epic mistakes are usual made.
Just as with the disastrous War on Terror, there is a serious danger that an entirely new division of security state technocracy will inevitably become a money sink, operating in its own bubble within an already knotted civil service, and propelled by endless feedback loops – creating more problems than were there to begin with.
It’s important to point out that such historic and sweeping changes in government can only be achieved amid a climate of fear. Since the beginning of this crisis, the mainstream media have been dedicated to delivering that fear. During the War on Terror, the media scooped up whatever government and the intelligence community were serving, and just ran with it. Without them, the government could never have realised any of its newfound powers. It’s the same now with COVID. You need only to replace the anti-terror mavens in intelligence community with The Science committees. This is precisely ‘the intellectual artillery’ of government joined-up with the media, which Spengler warned about almost a century ago in his treatise, The Decline of the West.
Make no mistake about it – freedom and democracy are under attack from a new and revitalised, COVID-inspired security industrial complex.
Judging by the lack of tenacity by media in being willing to hold any of the Five Eyes government to account for their horrendous performances thus far, it seems unlikely that the media will challenge this new bio-security arm that much.
One can only hope the penny drops much sooner with this leviathan, than it has with previous security state paradigm shifts.
***
Footnotes:
1 Decline of The West, Volumes I & II: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283129/page/n471/mode/2up
***
Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq. See his archive here.
How to kill a thriving metropolis in 7 months: NYC’s Covid-19 failure is a vicious spiral directed by sadists
By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 12, 2020
Seven months into the pandemic, as many US states inch back toward ‘normal’, New York is in the grips of a crime wave, reinvigorated lockdowns, and widespread fear of pretty much everything. Thank local government.
New York City has lost billions of dollars in tax revenues on tourism, music, art, theatre, restaurant dining, and everything else that once fueled its mammoth economy over the seven-month Covid-19 pandemic shutdown. It’s in worse shape than most US states, and unlike many others, its continued misfortunes are largely of its own making.
The shuttering of the city’s iconic Broadway theaters alone has sent hundreds of thousands out of work and signaled to both wealthy city inhabitants and out-of-town visitors that their cash is better spent elsewhere. Theaters announced just weeks ago that performances would be cancelled through March 2021, and the Metropolitan Opera House canceled its entire season through 2021.
New York’s famed restaurant scene isn’t faring any better. The ‘lucky’ establishments are finally – as of two weeks ago – allowed to operate at 1/4 capacity indoors, which given the amount of money they’ve lost over the last 6 months is a band-aid on a cannonball wound. The unlucky ones in New York Governor Cuomo’s newly-invoked ‘red zones’ must continue to seat patrons outdoors in the freezing cold as summer gives way to a damp, chilly autumn. To make matters worse, there’s no Thanksgiving parade, no Black Friday shopping, no fun allowed.
Perhaps pandemic-fearing wealthy New Yorkers would have left anyway, taking their tax dollars with them. But tourism might have filled some of the gap. What city in its right mind would turn up its nose at $11.5 billion, the estimated total spent by out-of-town visitors to the city’s famed theatrical productions alone? Why leave that money on the table, especially when the virus that had held the industry hostage for months has been steadily on the wane? With Governor Cuomo demanding billions in relief from the federal government to make up an economic shortfall that stems from his own policies, surely he can’t afford to keep the state (and its largest city)’s biggest draws closed down indefinitely?
Pleas to cancel rent have fallen on deaf ears, and starving artists’ efforts at workarounds have been squashed. Cuomo even passed an executive order in August – with the coronavirus “peak” safely receding in the rearview mirror – to ban ticketed live performances, and has revoked liquor licenses from bars that failed to serve food with their takeaway drinks. Is it any wonder the city is hemorrhaging cash, as well as the creative and interesting people who put it on the map?
MURDER, SHE COUGHED
To understand the motivation someone like Cuomo could have for destroying the city whose economy once kept his state alive, it helps to grasp the concept of the “self-licking ice-cream cone,” a phrase that has been attributed to NASA scientists but can in general describe any system that exists for little reason other than to continually justify its own existence.
Every politician who’s ever harbored dreams of becoming a totalitarian dictator has embraced the directive “never let a crisis go to waste,” and both Cuomo and NYC mayor Bill de Blasio are true believers. After attaining unprecedented powers through the emergency measures passed under cover of Covid-19, they aren’t about to let them go quietly, and have seemingly set up a perpetual motion machine of crisis that – accidentally or otherwise – ensures NYC will remain forever financially in the hole. The type of cash lifelines that might get the city back on its feet – as a post-9/11 tourism blitz did – are blocked (no one’s going to visit a New York where dancing, drinking, and taking in a show are off-limits). Average New Yorkers, too, are paralyzed by the thought of the scary virus lurking just outside their door, ultimately learning to love their captors, Stockholm-Syndrome-style – if this month’s fawning New Yorker profile of Cuomo is any indication.
With the virus no longer nearly as much of a danger as it was back in April, the would-be dictators have put together what looks for all the world like a diabolical plan to empty out the city and take advantage of artificially-lowered property values.
First, the criminals are unleashed. Bogged down with a directive to enforce the ever-growing range of social-distancing and mask-related offenses, New York’s police are no match for the flood of actual criminals released into the streets under statewide “bail reform” that all but guarantees the “catch and release” of muggers, rioters, and other criminals whose offenses stop short of rape and murder. Even more miscreants have been paroled early due to Covid-19-related overcrowding excuses.
Next, the threats are broadcast 24/7 over every media outlet. CCTV videos of horrific, unprovoked attacks on old women, small children, everyday middle-aged types, a jazz pianist, a would-be rape victim on a subway platform – the point is made that everyone is a potential victim. The solution is presented as a paradox: do New Yorkers who’ve just spent months demanding the city rein in its police want more cops patrolling the streets? Surely that’s not very “woke” of them. While they hem and haw, the rampage continues, and the debate ends with helpless, fear-crazed city dwellers throwing up their hands and begging Cuomo and de Blasio to Do Something, Anything, to Make the Bad Men Stop. Both men play dumb – there’s nothing they can do! Better get used to crime, or flee!
TERROR IN THE TUNNELS
The plight of the subway is instructive. The city’s legendary 24-hour train system was ordered to close down service from 1am to 5am back in May, ostensibly for “cleaning” because of the virus. The homeless people who’d taken to sleeping on the cars in the wee hours were a health risk, New Yorkers were told, and the city promised free transit alternatives for those whose jobs required them to be able to move around during those times (promises which in many cases did not materialize). Ridership, already severely curtailed due to pandemic fears, was down 90 percent at one point, sending the already cash-strapped system deep into the red.
Now, we’re told, the lack of people (and cops) on the subway has made it a predator’s playground. The lack of witnesses makes it easy for unscrupulous crooks to nab a wallet, attack an innocent commuter, and otherwise strike fear into the hearts of those New Yorkers who still think there’s a future for their city. “We need more cops!” the law and order types cry, only to find the MTA is deeper in the financial hole than ever and de Blasio is leery of upping the police budget. Presumably, the next move will be to decrease operating hours still further, guaranteeing the downward spiral continues indefinitely.
A tourism and entertainment-based city without so much as a public transit system is, quite simply, doomed. The only question, then, is why are de Blasio and Cuomo so determined to run New York into the ground?
Cuomo’s “economic reopening council” is guided by private equity partners who actually make their profits off the carcasses of dead and dying businesses, so it’s no mystery why he’s eager to see restaurants and theaters crash and burn. Private equity stands to make billions on all the vacant office space and abandoned properties from city institutions forced to pull up stakes. If Cuomo does what his deep-pocketed donors tell him – he’s not called “Governor 1 Percent” by progressives for nothing – he might even get that rumored Attorney General spot he’s being reportedly considered for in a Democratic Joe Biden administration. And perhaps de Blasio – despite never polling above 0.1 percent during the 2020 primaries – actually thinks he has a shot at the governor role.
Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, as the saying goes.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXVII
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | October 5, 2020
It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite link.
There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work. Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past officially-reported government climate data to create an impression of warming that did not exist in the data as originally reported. Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points. However, in the past I have sometimes been frustrated with Heller’s work for not including sufficient links to enable a reader to verify that his assertions about data alteration are correct. Thankfully, in the current piece, Heller has corrected that issue, and provides the links so that you can see for yourself that the government has changed the data it previously reported in order to artificially enhance the apparent warming trend.
The second reason for a new post at this time is that President Trump has — finally! — hired two climate skeptics into positions of authority over the bureaucracy that compiles, and later alters, the climate data. On September 12, Trump named David Legates to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Observation and Prediction. And on September 21, Trump named Ryan Maue as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is the main bureaucracy where the principal climate data are compiled, and is a part of the Department of Commerce. (Another agency, NASA, is also involved in these efforts.). Both Legates and Maue have been known as people who refuse to accept much of official climate orthodoxy. It is completely bizarre that these appointments would only occur less than two months before the election that could turn Trump out of office, but there you go.
Heller’s October 1 piece, titled “Alterations To The US Temperature Record,” is one of the most thorough and careful that he has done on this subject. Note that the piece only deals with the temperature records of the US, not the entire world. The temperature records of the US and of the rest of the world present very different issues for researchers trying to assess the accuracy of government-reported warming trends. For the rest of the world, no contemporaneously-generated data exist for most of the surface area and for most of the time period between the late nineteenth century and now. Before the recent years, there just were no (or very few) measurement stations or instruments for vast regions like the oceans, the Southern Hemisphere, Africa, Siberia, and so forth. Therefore, for those and other areas, much of what passes for historical temperature data, particularly from about 1880 to 1960, has actually been created or interpolated after the fact by computer algorithms, which then just so happen to show the trend that the programmers and their bosses would like to see. But for the US, the situation is different. For the entire period back to the late nineteenth century, there has existed a dense network of ground thermometers to record temperatures throughout this country. Therefore, if prior reported data showed cooling trends, and now you want to report a warming trend, that necessarily requires changing prior reported data. Heller:
The US temperature is very important, because the vast majority of stations which NOAA has long-term daily temperature data for are located in the US.
So, have prior officially-reported US temperatures been altered to create and enhance warming trends? The answer is absolutely, clearly, yes. If you haven’t followed this series prior to now, you may be surprised to learn that fact. Remarkably, as Heller points out, NOAA, and its co-bureaucracy NASA, do not deny that they have altered the data, and don’t even make serious efforts to hide the fact. Heller:
Reality is that the data alterations are no secret, and that NOAA and NASA acknowledge that they do it.
It’s not that the alterations are secret, but rather that the bureaucrats make it as difficult as possible to track the alterations, to learn the basis for the alterations, and to figure out what has changed and by how much. Periodically, new versions of data sets are issued, with no detailed documentation of what has changed or on what basis. When NOAA and NASA come out with their latest breathless press release about the “hottest year ever,” and so forth, there is no mention of prior officially-reported data that would contradict the claim. Often earlier data have simply been written over as new, altered data are substituted, making it impossible to track the changes unless you happen to be fortunate enough to have captured a screenshot of the old data before it got modified.
Nevertheless, there are notable examples where the prior data continue to be accessible, and Heller has done some yeoman’s work to compile a number of damning instances. I urge you to read his whole piece, but I’ll give you here what is undoubtedly the most notable and shocking example. In 1999, then NASA/GISS head James Hansen, a noted climate alarmist, came out with a big research paper titled “GISS analysis of surface temperature change.” Heller links to this paper in his piece, and you can see from the url that it is an official NASA document. The paper was part of the then growing climate alarm movement at the time, and contained a collection of claims designed to scare you out of your wits about impending climate change apocalypse. Examples from the abstract:
The rate of temperature change was higher in the past 25 years than at any previous time in the period of instrumental data. The warmth of 1998 was too large and pervasive to be fully accounted for by the recent El Nino. . . .
And so on and on. But Hansen made the mistake of including in the paper a graph of the official NASA temperature data for the US from 1880 to 1999, as it existed at that time. You can find that graph as Exhibit 6 to the 1999 paper. Here it is:
What jumps off the page — and what Heller drives home with his red circles — is that 1934 is the warmest year, approximately 0.6 deg C (or one full degree F) warmer than 1998, which in fact is only the fifth warmest year on this chart, also trailing 1921, 1931, and 1953.
But today NASA has a new chart up on its website, with data through 2019, supposedly generated out of the same data base, but just a new and improved “version” of same. You can go to that link to see NASA’s full chart through 2019, and to verify that this is in fact an official NASA chart. But Heller takes the step of truncating this 2019 chart at 2000 to emphasize the comparison to NASA’s prior chart that went to 1999. Here is the 2019 NASA chart truncated to 2000:
Now 1998 is notably warmer than 1934, and for that matter, also warmer than 1921, 1931 and 1953. The earlier years in the chart have all gotten cooler and the later years all warmer. A declining trend in temperatures from the 1930s to the 1990s has been turned into a warming trend.
How did that happen? What is the basis for the alterations? You will never get that answer out of NOAA or NASA.
Go through Heller’s post to see other examples of earlier and later NASA and NOAA temperature charts, for instance for the state of Texas, or for average daily high temperatures for the full US. Somehow, in each case, cooling trends have been turned into strong warming trends, particularly from the 1930s to 1990s.
And finally, Heller’s pièce de résistance: He calculates the quantitative alterations in the data for each year, and demonstrates that the effect of the alterations is to make the temperature graph match near-perfectly to the changing level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The data have been altered to fit the hypothesis. Heller:
The implication of this is that the huge adjustments being made to the US temperature record are being made to match global warming theory, which is the exact opposite of how science should be done. The unadjusted data shows essentially no correlation between CO2 and temperature.
So, Messrs. Legates and Maue, you now have at least a few months to blow the lid off this scandal. Really, that is all the time it should take. The American people deserve to have an honest accounting of what is going on. Now is our chance.
‘Poisoning the Pacific’ details US military’s secret dumping of poison into Far East
Press TV – October 11, 2020
A new book has revealed that the US military has contaminated the Pacific Ocean with radioactive waste and weapons-grade chemicals for decades.
The new book titled Poisoning the Pacific, written by British journalist Jon Mitchell, details how the US military has been disposing toxic substances, including plutonium, dioxin, and VX nerve agent at the Pacific.
Based on more than 12,000 pages of US government documents, Poisoning the Pacific narrates the story of soldiers, their families, and residents who have been exposed to poisonous substances.
The documents have been obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and through interviews with local residents, military veterans and researchers.
The US government, however, has covered up the extent of the damage and refused to help the victims.
In one case, Leroy Foster – a US Air Force master sergeant who was assigned to the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam in 1968 – was ordered to mix “diesel fuel with Agent Orange” and spray “it by truck all over the base to kill the jungle overgrowth.”
Soon after, Foster suffered serious skin complaints and eventually fell sick with Parkinson’s and ischemic heart disease. Later, his teenage daughter had cancer, and his grandchild was born with 12 fingers, 12 toes, and a heart murmur. Foster died in 2018.
“My reporting has helped these sick men and women to receive compensation from the US government. Investigative journalism is ultimately a job that ought to help people suffering from mistreatment to receive the justice they deserve,” Mitchell says in his book.
The voices of the suffering indigenous groups in the Pacific region, however, consistently go unheard, said Mitchell, who in 2015 was awarded Japan’s Freedom of the Press Lifetime Achievement Award for his work about the environmental impact and damage caused by US military presence in Okinawa.
Researchers report that villages where herbicides were believed to have been sprayed by the US suffered higher rates of infant deaths from birth defects.
The US government was split over claims of herbicide use on Guam following an investigation in 2017. The Department of Defense reported that tests on soil did not contain herbicides, but the Environmental Protection Agency reported the opposite.
The health and environmental impacts on Guam mirror those that have happened to local residents and US soldiers based in Okinawa, Japan, where the US has maintained a base for decades.
When Will the Truth About the Bidens’ Ukraine Deals & Financial Bonanza Come Out?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 10.10.2020
Despite the US mainstream media and the FBI appearing uninterested in the latest GOP study concerning Hunter Biden’s financial transactions and occupations during his father’s vice presidency, the investigation may go full throttle if Joe Biden is defeated in the 2020 campaign, suggests US investigative journalist George Eliason.
The FBI has refused to either confirm or deny the existence of any ongoing investigations concerning Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, The Federalist reported on 8 October, citing an exclusively obtained bureau letter written in response to a 24 September request by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.
Why FBI Unlikely to React Before the Election
On 24 September, Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking what investigative steps – if any – the intelligence agency had taken in response to the GOP report detailing misconduct and suspicious financial transactions involving Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates.
Nevertheless, the FBI has yet to respond to Jordan’s questions concerning potential inquiries into:
· Hunter Biden receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable background and funding individuals “involved in human trafficking and organised prostitution”;
· Hunter’s Chinese transactions “involv[ing] potential criminal activity”;
· a bribe allegedly paid by Ukrainian gas firm Burisma’s owner to the country’s officials to stop investigations against him while Hunter served on the company’s board.
Although Republican congressmen are urging the FBI to look into the Bidens’ potential misconduct, there is little if any chance of the Senate pressuring Wray into launching a formal investigation before the November election, believes George Eliason, a Donbass-based American investigative journalist.
“The last thing the Senate will do is make any move that looks partisan or trying to influence the election”, Eliason stresses. “After the election it is possible, if Biden loses. On the chance of a Biden win, the investigation will be mute”.GOP Report Sheds Light on Hunter Biden’s Gains
The GOP report indicates that Hunter Biden’s financial gains from foreign sources substantially increased during his father’s tenure as US vice president and after, citing a potential conflict of interest.
Referring to Treasury records, the document also alleges “potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals”.
Several days before the release of the committee’s findings, Just the News reported that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury Department, had “flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as ‘suspicious’ during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration”. These findings were highlighted in the agency’s Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) which, according to the media outlet, “is [per se] not evidence of wrongdoing, but it is usually a starting point for investigation”.
In addition to receiving $4 million in “questionable financial transactions” with foreign financiers, Hunter Biden was spotted sending funds to individuals “linked to what ‘appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring'”, the GOP report reads.
Republican investigators specifically turned the spotlight on Hunter Biden’s role in the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma when his father served as the Obama administration’s “public face” of its policy towards the Eastern European state. In May 2014, Hunter joined the firm’s board of directors, despite having no experience in energy, and was paid as much as $50,000 per month.
“The Bidens were in the front seat [of the Obama administration’s Ukraine politics] the entire time”, Eliason recollects. “Joe Biden’s support for the Ukrainian diaspora and fulfilling their wants in Ukraine has been unwavering. The fact that Ukraine became a cash cow for his family that early makes it very clear”.
Thus, in December 2014, the owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, reportedly gave a $7 million bribe to Ukrainian officials to have the case against him closed and his $23-million assets in the UK unfrozen while Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board. According to the GOP document, the case was reported to the FBI by a DOJ official at the US Embassy in Kiev in 2015, but no action seemingly followed. While US State Department officials considered Zlochevsky “corrupt” at the time, then Vice President Biden avoided denouncing the Ukrainian oligarch, the document says.
More Facts May Emerge After 2020 Campaign
While the FBI keeps silent, the US left-leaning mainstream media have downplayed the study, saying that it does not show whether Hunter Biden’s actions influenced US government policy in any way.
CBS News, in particular, has drawn attention to the fact that “the report does not assert that the former vice president pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect Burisma, a central claim made by President Trump and his allies”. For its part, the Biden campaign denounced the GOP research as a political attack amid the 2020 presidential campaign.
“The MSM has been firmly behind Biden and has to step back further than is now possible with credibility”, says Eliason referring to the mainstream media’s previous efforts to bury the anti-Biden sexual harassment allegations put forward by Tara Reade, a former staff assistant in Biden’s US Senate office. “As far as not affecting US policy, it’s a fogging ploy to relieve Biden from any culpability in crimes the evidence is very strong pointing to his involvement”.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian probe into the alleged Biden-Poroshenko tapes, concerning the ouster of then Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin – who was investigating Burisma Holdings – in exchange for a $1 billion loan, is still ongoing, the journalist emphasises.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova confirmed in mid-September that the tapes are being examined: “We are waiting for the results of the research. We will react only where it is prescribed by law … Ukraine does not interfere in the affairs of other states. We remain in the field of criminal justice”, she stated on Savik Shuster’s YouTube podcast on 12 September.
Eliason believes that more facts concerning the Bidens may surface when the presidential campaign is over, as it will no longer be seen as an attempt to interfere in the elections. Furthermore, in case Biden loses and Trump retains office, the situation “would be cut and dry”, which would help US investigators to eventually sort things out.
Pelosi & husband invest up to $1 million in CrowdStrike, tech firm that launched Russiagate – report
RT | October 10, 2020
Newly-filed financial disclosures show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have invested up to $1 million in CrowdStrike, American cybersecurity technology company and the originator of ‘Russian hacking’ claims.
Financial disclosures show Pelosi (D-California) and her husband Paul buying CrowdStrike shares on September 3, according to a RealClearInvestigations report by journalist Aaron Mate. Since then, the stock went from $129.25 a share to $142.97.
Reached for comment, Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill insisted she was “not involved” in her husband’s investments and “not aware of the investment until the required filing was made.” Pelosi invests in publicly traded companies all the time and “fully complies with House Rules and the relevant statutory requirements,” Hammill added.
CrowdStrike seems like a lucrative investment prospect, according to Mate’s report. The company’s valuation went from $1 billion in 2017 to $6.7 billion in 2019, when they went public – and then almost doubled to $11.4 billion. Its revenue rose from $52.75 million in 2017 to $481.41 million in 2020, Mate reports.
The company was hired by the DNC to address the breach of its email system in 2016. It blamed “Russia” for the alleged hack, but never provided the actual servers to the FBI, offering instead images and redacted reports.
CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that the company never had “concrete evidence” the data was actually “exfiltrated” from the servers. Instead, he said, they “saw activity that we believed was consistent with activity we’d seen previously and had associated with the Russian Government.”
This testimony was kept classified until May this year, when it was released to the public under pressure from Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell. In the intervening years, the claim that ‘Russia hacked the DNC’ became an article of faith in Washington, underlying the investigation into President Donald Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin led by Robert Mueller.
Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Henry worked under Mueller at the FBI. The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Dmitry Alperovitch, used to be a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the pro-NATO think tank which thrives on hostility towards Russia.
In addition to feeding the Russiagate frenzy and profiting from it, CrowdStrike also donated to Democrats – about $100,000 to the Democratic Governors Association in 2016 and 2017, according to Mate.
Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes
By James Taylor – Climate Realism – October 5, 2020
Prominent scientist and climate activist Michael Mann appealed to an asserted scientific consensus to chastise President Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes program last night. Ironically, Mann himself ignored clear scientific consensus in order to promote his own, out-of-the-mainstream climate change theories.
While interviewing Mann, CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “There have always been fires in the West. There have always been hurricanes in the East. How do we know that climate change is involved in this?” Pelley followed up with, “The president says about climate change, ‘Science doesn’t know.’”
Replied Mann, “The president doesn’t know, and he should know better. He should know that the world’s leading scientific organizations, our own U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and national academies of every major industrial nation, every scientific society in the United States that’s weighed in on the matter. This is a scientific consensus. There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”
Mann’s description of the conclusions of the “scientific consensus” however, is exactly the opposite of what scientific bodies report.
As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses “low confidence” in any connection between climate change and changes in hurricane activity.
Similarly, as documented in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, U.S. wildfires are much less frequent and severe than they were in the first half of the 20th century – 100 years of global warming ago. Moreover, the IPCC reports a decrease in drought conditions – which is the primary climate factor regarding wildfires – in the global region including the U.S. West. Moreover, the IPCC finds no evidence of an increase in drought globally, either.
Ultimately, data, evidence, and scientific facts are far more indicative of scientific truth than a real or imagined consensus of scientists. Yet, to the extent Michael Mann wishes to invoke consensus as a scientific argument, the clear consensus of scientists is that Mann is promoting extreme climate theories that have no basis in reality.
James Taylor is Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
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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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