Gavin Newsom’s Exceedingly Ignorant Climate Claim
By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | September 14, 2020
Scientific evidence reveals there has been no climate effect regards California’s wildfires! None! The data below proves it beyond all doubt. There is no denying that warmer temperatures can cause drier fuels and promote larger fires. But that fact is being misapplied to all wildfires. About 70% of California’s 2020 burnt areas have been in grasslands and dead grass is so dry by the end of California’s annual summer drought that dead grasses are totally insensitive to any added warmth from climate change. Dead grasses only require a few hours of warm dry conditions to become highly flammable. It’s fire weather not climate change that is critical. Furthermore, the century trends in local temperatures where California’s biggest fires have occurred reveal no connection to climate change. In most cases the local maximum temperatures have been cooler now than during the 1930s. Those cooler temperatures should reduce the fire danger. Newsom is either ignoring or distorting the scientific evidence, is totally stupid, or is a dishonest demagogue.
Maximum temperatures are typically used by fire indexes to issue red flag warnings because it is the heat of midday that has the greatest drying effect. Minimum temperatures are often low enough to drop below the dewpoint at which time fuel moisture increases. So averaging minimum and maximum temperatures is inappropriate. In addition, referencing a higher global average temperature is meaningless. Only local maximum temperatures determine the dryness of surface fuels during every fire. As in Park and Abatzoglou 2019, the months of March through October are averaged to determine maximum temperatures during California’s dry season.
Here are some relevant facts (from the Western Regional Climate Center). Trust the scientific evidence
1) The August 2013 Rim Fire centered around Yosemite National Park, was California’s 5th largest fire.
2) The November 2018 Camp Fire was California’s deadliest fire destroying the town of Paradise. It was also its 16th largest fire.
3) The 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire was California’s largest fire (since 1932 excluding 2020) .
4) In the October 2017 wine country fires, the Tubbs Fire was the 4th deadliest. It only burned 37,000 acres but high winds drove embers into the dwellings of the heavily populated outskirts of Santa Rosa.
Governor Newsom ignores the data to disgustingly hijacking the tragedy of California’s fires to push is climate change agenda. But he is not alone. There are climate scientists pushing catastrophes by ignoring the local maximum temperature trends. Bad analyses promote bad policies and obscure what needs to be done regards fuel management and creating defensible spaces in fire prone California. Newsom must focus on fuel management and fire suppression. As fire ecologist Thomas Swetnam echoed the experts’ growing consensus against fire suppression wrote, “The paradox of fire management in conifer forests is that, if in the short term we are effective at reducing fire occurrence below a certain level, then sooner or later catastrophically destructive wildfires will occur. Even the most efficient and technologically advanced firefighting efforts can only forestall this inevitable result.”
Further information about California’s wildfires are
Minimizing California Wildfires
Wildfires: Separating Demagoguery from the Science
How Bad Science & Horrific Journalism Misrepresent Wildfires and Climate
Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Berlin struggles to answer RT’s question on fate of Navalny’s mysterious associate who fled Russia for Germany
RT | September 15, 2020
When asked by RT, German government representatives failed to explain the mystery surrounding Alexey Navalny’s associate M. Pevchikh, who was with him at the time of the alleged poisoning and fled for Germany shortly.
German government spokespeople were grilled by RT Deutsch during a press conference on Monday. The officials, however, failed to provide any actual answer about the woman identified by Russian authorities as Marina Pevchikh.
“I can’t tell you anything about this. We must not forget that an attempt was made on the life of Mr. Navalny with the use of a poisonous substance. But I can’t tell you anything about the location of an individual,” Steffen Seibert stated.
The associate of the Kremlin critic was reportedly together with Navalny in Tomsk before his alleged poisoning. Unlike all other individuals who interacted with him on that day, she did not cooperate with Russian investigators and fled the country to Germany.
Pevchikh has spoken on the matter with Meduza, a Latvia-based Russian language news site, claiming she was never approached by the police. She also said her name is actually Maria, not ‘Marina’.
German officials have also failed to explain how a Russian citizen managed to obtain a permit for entering the country that fast. Still, little is actually known about Pevchikh, who is believed to hold a UK residence permit – or even citizenship. Moreover, only a few photos of her exist, despite her close association and repeated trips alongside Navalny, who is a very public figure.
The saga of the Navalny ‘poisoning’ kicked off on August 20, when he fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. After an emergency landing in Omsk, a Siberian city 2,000 km east of the Russian capital, he was taken to a local hospital in an unresponsive condition.
The opposition figure was flown to Berlin’s Charite clinic two days later, where he is currently being treated. While Russian doctors have found no traces of toxic substances in samples collected from Navalny, their German counterparts have claimed he was poisoned with a variant of the infamous nerve agent family ‘Novichok’. Creators of that family of toxic substances have already said his symptoms did not correspond with the exposure to the agent, however.
Exhaustive Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence For NYTimes’ “Russian Bounties” Story
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 09/14/2020
There’s been huge efforts to validate The New York Times “bombshell” that wasn’t — concerning its summer reporting that Russia secretly offered bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
Two months ago the Pentagon vowed to get to the bottom of it, launching a review of all intelligence and sources which might provide corroboration. And now at the end of that investigation Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command overseeing the war in Afghanistan, says the detailed investigation found no corroboration of the story.
Recall that from the start the whole thing smelled like a dramatic and desperate last ditch effort to revive the failed Russiagate narrative but in a different form. Multiple intelligence agency heads voiced their immediate skepticism in the wake of the claims linked to unnamed intelligence sources in the CIA.
The new NBC report, published Monday, finds further:
A U.S. military official familiar with the intelligence added that after a review of the intelligence around each attack against Americans going back several years, none have been tied to any Russian incentive payments.
The suggestion of a Russian bounty program began, another source directly familiar with the matter said, with a raid by CIA paramilitary officers that captured Taliban documents describing Russian payments.
So there it is: the Pentagon did a detailed examination of each and every attack on American troops going back several years and found nothing.
Tehran slams as ‘baseless’ UN report of Iran’s arms shipments to Yemen
Press TV – September 11, 2020
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has slammed as “baseless” a report published by the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) alleging Tehran has been sending arms to war-torn Yemen.
“Placing Iran’s name next to those supplying weapons to the Saudi coalition against Yemen is completely wrong,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement on Thursday.
The spokesperson said while Iran’s name has only been mentioned once in the report, “it also neglects Iran’s pivotal role and assistance in seeking to achieve a political solution to the conflict in Yemen”.
Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has been waging a war on Yemen with the help of its regional allies and largely assisted by Western-supplied weapons which have been indiscriminately used against Yemeni civilians.
Despite numerous bids to stop arms sales, top Western arms suppliers such as the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Germany have pushed through with lethal weapons shipments to the oil-rich kingdom.
Khatibzadeh said that the OHCHR’s claim of Iran supplying weapons to Yemen amid the Saudi war comes as Western states are openly conducting their sales, “with related figures being published and available”.
“While some of these countries have periodically halted or limited arms to Riyadh due to pressure from human rights groups, the bitter reality is that the lucrative arms trade has persuaded them to ignore their international and moral obligations,” he said.
“They have forgotten that their weapons have been used to kill the Yemenis and destroy the country’s infrastructure. We are consequently seeing the largest humanitarian crisis due to the actions of the Saudi coalition and its arms suppliers,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman added.
Khatibzadeh stressed that while there is no clear evidence about Iranian arms shipments to Yemen, a Saudi-imposed blockade has even stopped Iranian humanitarian aid from reaching the country.
An estimated 100,000 people have so far lost their lives in the Saudi war.
The Saudi war has had a large impact on Yemen’s infrastructure, impairing the impoverished Arab country’s weak industrial, agricultural and medical sectors.
Iran rejects claim of meddling in US elections, blasts US’ own intl. election meddling
Press TV – September 11, 2020
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has rejected allegations by US technology company Microsoft that Tehran seeks to meddle in Washington’s 2020 presidential elections, blasting US’ own history of interfering in other countries’ affairs.
“The United States is leading active disinformation campaigns against other countries. The US is not in a position to make such a woeful claim,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement on Friday.
“The US has interfered for decades in the elections of other countries – including Iran – and orchestrated a coup d’état which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minster Mohammad Mossadeq,” he said.
The remarks come a day after Microsoft claimed that it had detected Russian, Chinese and Iranian efforts to target “people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election”.
The statement claimed that the attempts had sought to attack campaigns associated with both US President Donald Trump and his rival Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.
It claimed that most of the attacks had been “detected and stopped by security tools built into our products”.
Speaking on Friday, Khatibzadeh said that Tehran has no interest in the outcome of US elections.
“As we have reiterated over and over, it does not matter who is the president in the White House for Tehran. What matters is that Washington abides by international law, regulations and norms and stops interfering in other countries and honors its commitments,” he said.
Washington, which has sought to impose an overt campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran ever since withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, has also sought to stifle Iranian media operating across different social media platforms in recent years.
Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have consequently cracked down on pages belonging to credible Iranian figures and media outlets, closing them or limiting their access to international audiences.
Mueller’s team WIPED over 30 cell phones before turning them over to inspector general
Obstruction of justice?
RT | September 10, 2020
Over a dozen members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate-investigating team “accidentally” wiped their phones before they could be inspected and “lost” the phone of disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page with anti-Trump texts.
Mueller and his team were tasked with investigating accusations of President Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia during the 2016 election, but found no evidence of it. In their final report they tried to insinuate that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice, but stopped short of outright saying so.
An 87-page document, released by the Justice Department on Thursday under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals that Mueller’s investigators “accidentally” or deliberately wiped their devices when the DOJ inspector-general asked for them.
At least 12 officials, whose names are redacted, claimed to have accidentally erased all data from their phones. Five officials are mentioned by name: Andrew Weissman, James Quarles, Greg Andre, Kyle Freeny and Rush Atkinson. Their phones allegedly wiped themselves or reset after too many wrong password entries.
As many as 31 phones may have been affected, including the devices that had been “reassigned.”
Weissman was Mueller’s principal deputy. He is generally considered to have actually been in charge of the ‘Russiagate’ probe, especially after the former FBI director couldn’t recall much of anything during his July 2019 testimony before Congress.
Another discovery in the document was that the phone belonging to FBI lawyer Lisa Page got “lost” by the Mueller team, and the name of the official who had custody of it: Christopher Greer. It was eventually retrieved, but the IG report found that it had been wiped two weeks after Page had left the special counsel team.
Page was involved both in the early stages of the special counsel investigation and the original ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ probe of the Trump campaign – alongside Agent Peter Strzok, with whom she had an extramarital romantic relationship. Both were quietly removed from Mueller’s team after the discovery of text messages that disparaged Trump voters and even referred to “stopping” his election via an “insurance policy.”
Canadian Troops in Saudi Arabia a Legacy of Support for Iraq War
By Yves Engler | Dissident Voice | September 9, 2020
The revelation that Canadian soldiers have been in Saudi Arabia for 17 years highlights Canada’s ties to the repressive monarchy, contribution to the Iraq war and hollowness of Canadian foreign policy mythology.
Recently researcher Anthony Fenton tweeted, “raise your hand if you knew that there was a ‘Detachment’ of Canadian soldiers serving under US auspices operating AWACS spy planes out of a Saudi Arabian air base since the war on Iraq began in 2003 to THE PRESENT DAY.”
The Canadian soldiers stationed at Prince Sultan Air base near Riyadh represent another example of Canada’s military ties to the authoritarian, belligerent monarchy. Canadian naval vessels are engaged in multinational patrols with their Saudi counterparts in the region; Saudi Air Force pilots have trained in Alberta and Saskatchewan; Montreal-based flight simulator company CAE has trained Saudi pilots in numerous locales; Canadian-made rifles and armoured vehicles have been shipped to the monarchy, etc.
According to DND, Canada’s deployment to Saudi Arabia began on February 27, 2003. That’s four weeks before the massive US-led invasion of Iraq. The Canadians stationed in Riyadh were almost certainly dispatched to support the US invasion and occupation.
In another example of Canadian complicity in a war Ottawa ostensibly opposed, it was recently reported that Canadian intelligence agencies hid their disagreement with politicized US intelligence reports on Iraq. According to “Getting it Right: Canadian Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, 2002-2003”, Canada’s intelligence agencies mostly concluded that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, which was the justification Washington gave for invading Iraq. While CSIS delivered a report to their US counterparts claiming Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons capabilities, more serious analyses, reported the Canadian Press, were “classified ‘Canadian Eyes Only’ in order to avoid uncomfortable disagreements with the U.S. intelligence community which would exacerbate the sensitivities affecting relations at the political level.”
As Richard Sanders has detailed, Canada supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in many ways: Dozens of Canadian troops were integrated in US units fighting in Iraq; US warplanes en route to that country refueled in Newfoundland; Canadian fighter pilots participated in “training” missions in Iraq; Three different Canadian generals oversaw tens of thousands of international troops there; Canadian aid flowed to the country in support of US policy; With Canadian naval vessels leading maritime interdiction efforts off the coast of Iraq, Ottawa had legal opinion suggesting it was technically at war with that country.
As such, some have concluded Canada was the fifth or sixth biggest contributor to the US-led war. But the Jean Chrétien government didn’t do what the Bush administration wanted above all else, which was to publicly endorse the invasion by joining the “coalition of the willing”. This wasn’t because he distrusted pre-war US intelligence or because of any moral principle. Rather, the Liberal government refused to join the “coalition of the willing” because hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets against the war, particularly in Quebec. With the biggest demonstrations taking place in Montréal and Quebecers strongly opposed to the war, the federal government feared that openly endorsing the invasion would boost the sovereignist Parti Québecois vote in the next provincial election.
Over the past 17 years this important, if partial, victory won by antiwar activists has been widely distorted and mythologized. The recent National Film Board documentary High Wire continues the pattern. It purportedly “examines the reasons that Canada declined to take part in the 2003 US-led military mission in Iraq.” But, High Wire all but ignores Canada’s military contribution to the war and the central role popular protest played in the “coalition of the willing” decision, focusing instead on an enlightened leader who simply chose to do the right thing.
The revelation that Canadian troops have been stationed in Saudi Arabia for 17 years highlights our military ties to the Saudi monarchy and warfare in the Middle East. It also contradicts benevolent Canada foreign policy mythology.
Yves Engler is the author of 10 books, including A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation.
Plot meant to smear pro-Palestinian group exposed in Scotland
By Robert Carter | Press TV | September 9, 2020
A major scandal has come to light in Scotland. A fake anti-Semitic plot spearheaded by pro-Israel individuals aiming to smear a prominent pro-Palestine activists group, the “Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.”
The story turned on its head after the Law Society of Scotland fined a pro-Israel lawyer, Matthew Berlow, £500 for playing a key part in faking a graffiti attack on his own home and then placing full blame on the SPSC.
Luckily for the pro-Palestine activists, an investigation found that Berlow knew that an associate of his, pro-Israel former teacher Ed Sutherland, had created a fake Facebook identity under the name “Stevie Harrison” to infiltrate the SPSC in January last year.
And it was the imaginary “Stevie Harrison” who highlighted the vandalism on Berlow’s home in a Facebook post with the comments: A certain “Jewish lawyer” — referring to Barlow — woke up this morning to find ‘Free Palestine’ spray-painted on his home.
Berlow, knowing this to be a false attack, played the victim, claiming it was “typical SPSC behaviour.”
Speaking to members of the pro-Palestine group, they explain how these deceitful tactics are nothing new. These actions don’t sit too well given that allegations of Israeli activists weaponizing anti-Semitism against the Palestinian cause has been expressed many times, including in Britain’s biggest opposition party, the Labour Party, under former pro-Palestine leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Navalny False-Flag Authors Invent New Twist to Cover Lies
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 8, 2020
So now the Navalny poison episode takes on a new twist with German military intelligence subsequently claiming they found traces of Novichok on a bottle of water the Russian dissident had purportedly been drinking from. Rather, it sounds more like the authors of this false-flag operation have “bottled” – meaning became unnerved by the absurdities inherent in their own narrative.
Last week the German government announced that a Bundeswehr military laboratory had detected Novichok in the body fluids of Sergei Navalny. That promptly led to charges that the Kremlin was responsible for the attempted murder of Navalny using the Soviet-era nerve poison.
The trouble for the German side was that their narrative soon ran into contradictions from the Russian toxicologists who first treated Navalny when he apparently fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. The Russian medics said they had tested Navalny for a whole range of poisons, including organophosphate-type chemicals which attack the nervous system. The Russian doctors affirmed they found no poison traces. They concluded Navalny’s coma was induced by an existing medical condition, presumably diabetes. Furthermore, the doctors at the hospital in Omsk where Navalny was taken to on August 20, said they have original samples of his body fluids.
It’s the latter detail which seems to have obliged the Germans to elaborate their narrative with the new element of a poisoned bottle of water. If indeed the Russians have Navalny’s biological samples showing no presence of toxins then the German version falls apart as a fabrication. That could only mean that the claimed detection of Novichok by the Germans was the result of deliberate contamination of his body fluids while he was being treated in the hospital in Berlin where he was airlifted to on August 22 from Russia.
It is reported by Der Spiegel that Navalny’s family relatives kept the alleged bottle after he fell sick on the flight from the Siberian city Tomsk. They purportedly did not hand the bottle over to the Russian toxicologists in Omsk, but rather provided the bottle instead to the Germans when Navalny arrived in Berlin two days later.
This “bottle twist” is a convenient and necessary foil to avoid the potentially damning contradiction from the Russian side. The Germans can now claim to have evidence that was not available to the Russians.
But such a ploy creates more questions that still make the German narrative implausible, if not absurd.
If Novichok was used in poisoning Navalny, the 44-year-old dissident would most likely be dead by now. Also, the aides and flight attendants who came into close contact with him during his flight would have shown symptoms of poisoning. It is inconceivable that a bottle contaminated with the deadly nerve agent could have been transported by Navalny’s family to Germany without them being stricken.
The strange Navalny affair has an unerring resemblance to the equally outlandish Skripal affair. Yet the latter is cited as a precedent for the former in order to “substantiate” incrimination of Russia. The alleged Novichok weapon seems to have an amazing ability to lose its deadly potency on bystanders. The immediate victims apparently go into mysterious comas and are not seen or heard of again in public, detained in secret by the British and now German government. There is also the curious introduction of bottles in both cases: the perfume bottle which allegedly conveyed the Novichok weapon in the Skripal incident in England in March 2018, and now the water bottle in the Navalny incident.
As with the alleged assassination attempt on MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal, the latest incident involving Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny is undoubtedly a false-flag provocation to foment Western sanctions and hostility against Moscow.
Immediately following reports of alleged German detection of Novichok in Navalny’s body, there were predictable calls for the cancellation of the Nord Stream-2 gas project between Russia and Germany. It is no secret that pro-Washington German politicians have long been opposed to the ambitious energy trade with Russia.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has up to now been resolute in wanting Nord Stream-2 completed in spite of immense pressure from the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress to abandon it. The American agenda is transparently to replace Russian gas energy supplies with American exports.
Navalny’s apparent poison-assassination fits neatly with this strategic American agenda. Given the allegiance of German military intelligence and certain politicians to the transatlantic axis it is not difficult to conceive of how a false-flag provocation against Moscow could be orchestrated.
The problem is that in their haste to set up Navalny as a victim in order to sabotage Nord Stream-2, the authors overlooked the unfortunate anomaly of Russian doctors potentially disproving the claim of detecting Novichok in Navalny’s body. Realizing their clumsy mistake, the authors are obliged to invent another twist in the story involving a contaminated water bottle. In terms of credibility, however, their invention doesn’t hold water.
This has grave implications for the survivability of Navalny. As an opposition figure long lionized and exaggerated by the West as the nemesis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Navalny is more valuable dead than alive as a propaganda weapon. With its false-flag narrative failing, the temptation may be to up the ante dramatically by amending the script to Navalny “succumbing” to Novichok.
XR’s stupid stunts are masking the fact that the establishment agrees with its ridiculous aims
Ocean Rebellion group members march during an Extinction Rebellion protest in London, Britain, September 6, 2020. © REUTERS/Henry Nicholls
By Rob Lyons | RT | September 8, 2020
The bizarre exploits of Extinction Rebellion are diverting attention from the alarming reality that many in power agree with the group’s bonkers agenda. And that is resulting in a hands-off approach to XR’s disruptive tactics.
While Extinction Rebellion (XR) has been getting lots of attention for its bizarre and disruptive protests, the real madness is the fact that the political and media establishment agrees with its aims. The only quibbles are over timing and methods.
Over the past week or so, XR has reignited its protests after being in abeyance during the Covid-19 pandemic. As is the usual routine, roads have been blocked and institutions targeted. On one day, XR harassed a group of British think tanks based in a shared building in Westminster. Another group of protesters glued themselves to the ground in front of a doorway into Parliament, perhaps symbolic of XR’s disdain for democracy.
Most controversially, XR protesters blocked printing plants for The Times, The Sun and The Telegraph, preventing delivery of the newspapers. XR accuses these publications of promoting lies about climate change. Here was an attack on the free press, and the backlash was substantial. Rather than debating the arguments for a rapid reduction in UK greenhouse gas emissions, the protesters seemed to believe that these media outlets were responsible for brainwashing the public and should simply be shut down.
The newspapers were, rightly, outraged. But the irony is that these publications all broadly agree that climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Saturday’s edition of The Sun even included an article by David Attenborough, the veteran voice of BBC wildlife programmes, demanding stronger action on the environment. At most, The Telegraph has included a handful of sceptical voices in its opinion pages, but the editorial line is right behind the government’s ‘drastic carbon emission plans’.
It is those plans that should alarm us far more than XR, who are a bunch of oddballs engaged in staging stunts that are annoying and disruptive, but which are also bizarre. It seems that XR supporters believe that they can bring down The System through the medium of interpretative dance, staging ‘die-ins’, meditating outside leading banks or dressing up in costumes that offer alarming echoes of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
For the environmentalist mainstream, XR is utterly embarrassing. Moreover, while demanding that we listen to the scientists, its own claims of imminent global destruction are utterly unscientific.
Meanwhile, every significant UK political party has fallen in line with the idea that we should aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net zero’ – that is, zero emissions once the effect of counteracting policies like planting trees is taken into account. That is exactly the same aim as XR. The only question is over what the target date should be. XR wants to get to net zero in five years, the government wants to do it in 30. But that aim itself is bonkers.
To achieve such a goal would mean a very rapid decarbonisation of society. Without the technology to replace fossil-fuelled transport, energy production, cement, food production and much more, this could only be achieved by a drastic reduction in living standards that would make the post-lockdown recessions look luxurious in comparison. ‘Net zero’ doesn’t just mean turning down the thermostat a bit and recycling your plastic – it means a wholesale transformation into a shivering, stay-local, lentil-munching society.
As a new report by the Institute of Government, a British think tank, notes that ‘there is still little evidence that the government, and the politicians who waved the new target through with little debate, have confronted the enormous scale of the task ahead’.
Moreover, it isn’t clear if imported goods would count in this target. If they do count, then somehow the UK would need to go into negative emissions, since it would have to make up for the emissions created abroad during the production and transportation of those goods. If they don’t count, the net zero target itself becomes rather meaningless – we would just import stuff instead of producing it in the UK.
This places the government in a quandary. It shares XR’s basic aim, while hating the disruption that XR’s protests cause. For example, one Conservative MP, Tobias Ellwood, has come out in support of XR’s original ‘noble cause’, but says he thinks the protesters have gone too far. The result has been a hands-off approach. While protesters against the Covid lockdowns have faced arrest and heavy fines simply for assembling in large numbers, the police have been slow to break up XR’s protests.
Some ministers recognise that this is untenable for the normal functioning of society, but their response has bordered on the irrational. There are now rumours from within the government that XR might be designated an ‘organised crime group’, based on the definition that such a group is ‘characterised by violence or the threat of violence and by the use of bribery and corruption’. This is as bizarre as one of XR’s protests. Whatever it is, XR is not akin to the mafia or a drugs cartel.
There are easier and less illiberal ways of dealing with the problem. XR should not be stopped from peaceful protest. If XR supporters block a road or attack a building, there are perfectly ordinary laws that can be used to arrest them without undermining the right to assembly and protest.
While XR’s antics mostly attract derision, the truly crazy thing is the policy of ‘net zero’. And because every major political party agrees with it, voters have simply been given no choice in the matter. It’s not the lunatics dressing up and blocking the roads we should worry about; it’s the lunatics in Parliament who keep voting for these irrational and reactionary policies.
Rob Lyons is a UK journalist specialising in science, environmental and health issues. He is the author of ‘Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder’.
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$1.5bn up in smoke: US THAAD missile stockpile dries up defending Israel against Iran
By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | July 2, 2025
According to American media, defense news outlets, and independent analysts, the 12-day Israeli military aggression against Iran significantly depleted the US stockpile of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptor missiles.
Citing official sources, American magazine Newsweek reported on Friday that the US transferred a substantial portion of its advanced missile defense capabilities to support the Israeli regime, an effort with questionable results and a critical impact on US strategic reserves.
THAAD, developed by Lockheed Martin arms manufacturing company, is a key component of Israel’s multi-layered air defense architecture. It is designed to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles, including those launched from Iran and Yemen.
The US-made system is capable of targeting short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, whether inside or outside Earth’s atmosphere.
THAAD uses a “hit-to-kill” method, relying on kinetic energy rather than explosive warheads to destroy incoming threats, intercepting at altitudes of up to 150 km and ranges between 150-200 km.
Operated exclusively by American personnel, the US military maintains eight THAAD batteries with an estimated 350–400 interceptors in total. The eighth battery was activated during the June 20 Israeli aggression against Iran and is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles. … continue
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- If Americans Knew
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- Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Publish Letter to the American People
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- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
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- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
