Doubts re Iran won’t deter neocon stampede
By Philip Weiss | January 18, 2010
Here are two reports of doubts re Iran’s nuclear program. First, in the Times online, Israeli general Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam says that Iran is not a nuclear threat:
A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”.
Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.
And here is an American general and chief of Pentagon intelligence saying that “Iran [is] Not Committed to Building Nuclear Bomb”, in an article that suggests that the Obama administration is getting ready to up the intelligence ante visavis Iran:
“The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate in 2007] still hold true,” [Lt.General Ronald] Burgess [chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency] said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”
As there was with Iraq, there is a highly organized movement afoot to pretend that none of this matters, that “the mullahs” have always intended to get their hands on a nuke, and that we should therefore prepare to bomb the hell out of Iran do what is necessary. We’ve already seen the beginning of an effort by some neocons to resurrect a “Team B” approach to hype the threat of Islamic extremism, ignoring the fact that such an approach, in all of its previous incarnations, generated nothing but staggeringly wrong conclusions about enemy capabilities, resulting is disastrously counterproductive policies.
Climate science: models vs. observations
By Richard K. Moore | Aletho News | January 16, 2010
This document continues to evolve, based on continuing research. The latest version is always maintained at this URL:
http://rkmdocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/climate-science-observations-vs-models.html
You can click on any graphic in this document to see a larger image.
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
— Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, 1918
Science and models
True science begins with observations. When patterns are recognized in these observations, that leads to theories and models, which then lead to predictions. The predictions can then be tested by further observations, which can validate or invalidate the theories and models, or be used to refine them.
This is the paradigm accepted by all scientists. But scientists being people, typically in an academic research community, within a political society, there can be many a slip between cup and lip in the practice of science. There are the problems of getting funding, of peer pressure and career considerations, of dominant political dogmas, etc.
In the case of models there is a special problem that frequently arises. Researchers tend to become attached to their models, both psychologically and professionally. When new observations contradict the model, there is a tendency for the researchers to distort their model to fit the new data, rather than abandoning their model and looking for a better one. Or they may even ignore the new observations, and simply declare that their model is right, and the observations must be in error. This problem is even worse with complex computer models, where it is difficult for reviewers to figure out how the model really works, and whether ’fudging’ might be going on.
A classic example of the ’attached to model’ problem can be found in models of the universe. The Ptolemaic model assumed that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that the universe revolves around that center. Intuitively, this model makes a lot of sense. On the Earth, it feels like we are stationary. And we see the Sun and stars moving across the sky. “Obviously” the universe revolves around the Earth.
However, in order for this model to work in the case of the planets, it was necessary to introduce the arbitrary mechanism of epicycles. When Galileo and Copernicus came along, a much cleaner model was presented, that explained all the motions with no need for arbitrary assumptions. But no longer would the Earth be the center.
In this case it was not so much scientists that were attached to the old model, but the Church, which liked the model because it fit their interpretation of scripture. We’ve all heard the story of the Bishop who refused to look through the telescope, so he could ignore the new observations and hold on to the old model. Galileo was forced to recant. Thus can political interference hold back the progress of science, and ruin careers.
Climate models and global warming
Over the past century there has been a strong correlation between rising temperatures, and rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, caused by the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels. And it is well known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Other things being equal, higher CO2 levels must cause an increase in temperature, due to trapping more heat from the sun. Many scientists, quite reasonably, began to explore the theory that continually rising CO2 emissions would lead to continually rising temperatures.
Intuitively, it seems that the theory is “obviously” true. Temperatures have been rising along with CO2 levels; CO2 is a greenhouse gas; what is there to prove? And if the theory is true, and we keep increasing our emissions, then temperatures will eventually reach dangerous levels, melting the Antarctic ice sheet, raising sea levels, and all the other disasters presented by Al Gore in his famous documentary. “Obviously” we are facing a human-generated crisis – and something has got to be done!
But for many years, before Gore’s film, governments didn’t seem to be listening. Environmentalists, however, were listening. Public concern began to grow about CO2 emissions, and the climate scientists investigating the theory shared these concerns. They had a strong motivation to present the scientific case convincingly, in order to force governments to pay attention and take effective action — the future of humanity was at stake!
The climate scientists began building computer models, based on the observed correlation between temperature and CO2 levels. The models looked solid, not only for the past century, but extending back in time. Research with ice-core data revealed a general correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, extending back for a million years and more. What had been “obvious” to begin with, now looked even more obvious, confirmed by seemingly solid science.
These are the very conditions that typically cause scientists to become attached to their models. The early success of the model confirms what the scientists suspected all along: the theory must be true. A subtle shift happens in the mind of the scientists involved. What began as a theory starts to become an assumption. If new data seems to contradict the theory, the response is not to discard the theory, but rather to figure out what the model is lacking.
In the case of the Ptolemaic model, they figured out that epicycles must be lacking, and so epicycles were added. They were certain the universe revolved around the Earth, and so epicycles had to exist. Similarly, the climate scientists have run into problems with their models, and they’ve needed to add more and more machinery to their models in order to overcome those problems. They are certain of their theory, and so their machinery must be valid.
Perhaps they are right. Or perhaps they’ve strayed into epicycle territory, where the theory needs to be abandoned and a better model needs to be identified. This is the conclusion that quite a few scientists have reached. Experts do differ on this question, despite the fact that Gore says emphatically that the “science is settled”. Which group of scientists is right? This is the issue we will be exploring in this article.
Question 1
Compared to the historical record, are we facing a threat of dangerous global warming?
Let’s look at the historical temperature record, beginning with the long-term view. For long-term temperatures, ice-cores provide the most reliable data. Let’s look first at the very-long-term record, using ice cores from Vostok, in the Antarctic.
Data source:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/deutnat.txt
Vostok Temperatures: 450,000 BC — Present
Here we see a very regular pattern of long-term temperature cycles. Most of the time the Earth is in an ice age, and about every 125,000 years there is a brief period of warm tempertures, called an inter-glacial period. Our current inter-glacial period has lasted a bit longer than most, indicating that the next ice age is somewhat overdue. These long-term cycles are probably related to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, which follows a cycle of about 100,000 years.
We also see other cycles of more closely-spaced peaks, and these are probably related to other cycles in the Earth’s orbit. There is an obliquity cycle of about 41,000 years, and a precession cycle, of about 20,000 years, and all of these cycles interfere with one another in complex ways. Here’s a tutorial from NASA that discusses the Earth’s orbital variations:
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sprecess.htm
Next let’s zoom-in on the current inter-glacial period, as seen in Vostok and Greenland, again using ice-core data. Temperatures here are relative to the value for 1900, which is shown as zero:
Vostok Temperatures: 12,000 BC — 1900
Data source:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-icecore-2475.html
Greenland Temperatures: 9,500 BC — 1900
Here we see that the Southern Hemisphere emerged from the last ice age about 1,000 years earlier than did the Northern Hemisphere. As of 1900, in comparison to the whole inter-glacial period, the temperature was 3°C below the maximum in Vostok, and 3°C below the maximum in Greenland. Thus, as of 1900, temperatures were rather cool for the period in both hemispheres, and in Greenland, temperatures were close to a minimum.
During this recent inter-glacial period, temperatures in both Vostok and Greenland have oscillated through a range of about 4°C, although the patterns of oscillation are quite different in each case. In order to see just how different the patterns are, let’s look at Greenland and Vostok together, for the period 500BC–1900. Vostok is shown with a feint line, actually a dotted line if you click to see the enlarged version.
The patterns are very different indeed. In many cases we see an extreme high in Greenland, while at the same time Vostok is experiencing an extreme low. And in the period 1500—1900, while Greenland temperatures were relatively stable, within a range of .5°C, Vostok went through a radical oscillation of 3°C, from an extreme high to an extreme low. These differences between the two hemispheres might be related to the Earth’s orbit (See NASA tutorial), or they might be related to the fact that the Southern Hemisphere is dominated by oceans, while most of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere. Whatever the reason, the difference is striking.
There may be some value in trying to average these different records, to obtain a ’global average’, but it is important to understand that a global average is not the same as a global temperature. For example, consider temperatures 2,000 years ago. Greenland was experiencing a very wram period, 2°C above the baseline, while Vostok was experiencing a cold spell, nearly 1°C below the baseline. While the average for year 1000 might be near the baseline, that average does not represent the real temperature in either location.
This distinction between a global average, and real temperatures, is very important to keep in mind. Consider for example the concern that warming might lead to melting of the tundra in the Arctic, leading to the runaway release of methane. If that happens, it must happen in the Arctic. So it is the temperature in the Arctic that is relevant, not any kind of global average. In Greenland, temperatures 2,000 years ago were a full 2°C higher than 1900 temperatures, and there was no runaway release of methane.
The fact that the global average 2,000 years ago was dragged down by Antarctic cooling is completely irrelevant to the issue of melting tundra. Temperatures in the Arctic must rise by more than 2°C above 1900 levels before tundra-melting might be a problem, and this fact is obscured when we look at the global-average-derived hockey stick put out by the IPCC:
This graph gives the impression that temperatures 2,000 years ago were relatively low, and that in 1900 temperatures were higher than that. This may have some kind of abstract meaning, but it has nothing to do with what’s been going on in the Arctic, and it is very misleading as regards the likelihood of tundra-melting, or Arctic-melting in general. The graph is a gross misrepresentation of what’s been happening in the real world. It obscures the actual temperature record in both hemispheres, by presenting an artifical average that has existed nowhere.
Let’s now look at some other records from the Northern Hemisphere, to find out how typical the Greenland record is of its hemisphere. This first record is from Spain, based on the mercury content in a peat bog, as published in Science, 1999, vol. 284, for the most recent 4,000 years. Note that this graph is backwards, with present day on the left:
This next record is from the Central Alps, based on stalagmite isotopes, as published in Earth and Planteary Science Letters, 2005, vol. 235, for the most recent 2,000 years:
And finally, let’s include our Greenland record for the most recent 4,000 years:
While the three records are clearly different, they do share certain important characteristics. In each case we see a staggered rise, followed by a staggered decline — a long-term up-and-down cycle over the period. In each case we see that during the past few thousand years, temperatures have been 3°C higher than 1900 temperatures. And in each case we see a gradual descent towards the overdue next ice age. The Antarctic, on the other hand, shares none of these characteristics.
If we want to understand warming-related issues, such as tundra-melting and glacier-melting, we must consider the two hemispheres separately. If glaciers melt, they do so either because of high northern termperatures, or high southern temperatures. Whether or not glaciers are likely to melt cannot be determined by global averages. In this article we will concern ourselves with the Northern Hemisphere.
In the Northern Hemisphere, based on the shared characteristics we have observed, temperatures would need to rise at least 3°C above 1900 levels before we would need to worry about things like the extinction of polar bears, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or runaway methane release. We know this because none of these things have happened in the past 4,000 years, and temperatures have been3°C higher during that period.
However such a 3°C rise seems very unlikely to happen, given that all three of our Nothern Hemisphere samples show a gradual but definite decline toward the overdue next ice age. Let’s now zoom in the temperature record since 1900, and see what kind of rise has actually occurred. Let’s turn to Jim Hansen’s latest article, published on realclimate.org, 2009 temperatures by Jim Hansen. The article includes the following two graphs.
Jim Hansen is of course one of the primary proponents of the CO2-dangerous-warming theory, and there is considerable reason to believe these graphs show an exaggerated picture as regards to warming. Here is one article relevant to that point, and it is typical of other reports I’ve seen:
Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data
Nonetheless, let’s accept these graphs as a valid representation of recent temperature changes, so as to be as fair as possible to the warming alarmists. We’ll be using the red line, which is from GISS, and which does not use the various extrapolations that are included in the green line. We’ll return to this topic later, but for now suffice it to say that these extrapolations make little sense from a scientific perspective.
The red line shows a temperature rise of .7°C from 1900 to the 1998 maximum, a leveling off beginning in 2001, and then a brief but sharp decline starting in 2005. Let’s enter that data into our charting program, using values for each 5-year period that represent the center of the oscillations for that period. Here’s what we get for 1900-2008:
Consider the downward trend at the right end of the graph. Hansen tells us this is very temporary, and that temperatures will soon start rising again. Perhaps he is right. However, as we shall see, his arguments for this prediction are seriously flawed. What we know for sure is that a downward trend has begun. How far that trend will continue is not yet known.
Next, let’s append that latest graph to the Greenland data, to get a reasonable characterization of Northern Hemisphere temperatures from 2000 BC to 2008:
This graph shows us that the temperature rise in the Northern Hemipshpere from 1800 to 2005 was not at all unnatural. That rise follows precisely the long-term pattern, where such rises have been occurring approximately every 1,000 years, with no help from human-caused CO2. Based on the long-term pattern of diminishing peaks, we would expect the recent down-trend to continue, and not turn upward again as Hansen predicts. If the natural pattern continues, then the recent warming has reached its maximum, and we will soon experience about two centuries of rapid cooling, as we continue our descent to the overdue next ice age.
So everything depends on the next decade or so. If temperatures turn upwards again, then the IPCC may be right, and human-caused CO2 emissions may have taken control of climate. However, if temperatures continue downward, then climate has been following natural patterns all along in the Northern Hemisphere. In this case there has been no evidence of any noticeable influence on climate from human-caused CO2, and we are now facing an era of rapid cooling. Within two centuries we could expect temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere to be consideralby lower than they were in the recent Little Ice Age.
We don’t know for sure which way temperatures will go, rapidly up or rapidly down. But I can make this statement:
As of this moment, based on the long-term temperature patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, there is no evidence that human-caused CO2 has had any effect on climate. The rise since 1800, as well as the downward dip starting in 2005, are entirely in line with the natural long-term pattern. If temperatures turn sharply upwards in the next decade or so, that will be the first-ever evidence for human-caused warming in the Northern Hemisphere.
As regards the the recent downturn, here are two other records, both of which show an even more dramatic downturn than the one shown in the GISS data:
University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH)
Dr. John Christy
UAH Monthly Means of Lower Troposphere LT5-2
2004 – 2008
Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA (RSS)
RSS MSU Monthly Anomaly – 70S to 82.5N (essentially Global)
2004 – 2008
Based on the data we have looked at, all from mainstream scientific sources, we are now in a position to answer our first question with a reasonable level of confidence:
Answer 1
Temperatures, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, have been continuing to follow natural, long-term patterns — despite the unusually high levels of CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels. There have indeed been two centuries of global warming, and that is exactly what we would expect based on the natural pattern. Temperatures now are more than 2°C cooler than they were only 2,000 years ago, which means we have not been experiencing dangerously high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere.
The illusion of global warming arises from a failure to recognize that global averages are are a very poor indicator of actual conditions in either hemisphere.
Within the next decade, or perhaps sooner, we are likely to learn which way the climate is going. If it turns again sharply upwards, as Hansen predicts, that will be counter to the long-term pattern, and evidence for human-caused warming. If it levels off, and continues downwards, that is consistent with long-term patterns, and we are likely to experience about two centuries of rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, as we continue our descent toward the overdue next ice age.
Question 2
Why haven’t unsually high levels of CO2 significantly affected temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere?
One place to look for answers to this question is in the long-term patterns that we see in the temperature record of the past few thousand years, such as the peaks separated by about 1,000 years in the Greenland data, and other more closely-spaced patterns that are also visible. Some forces are causing those patterns, and whatever those forces are, they have nothing to do with human-caused CO2 emissions. Perhaps the forces have to do with cycles in solar radiation and solar magnetism, or perhaps they have something to do with cosmic radiation on a galactic scale, or something we haven’t yet identified. Until we understand what those forces are, how they intefere with one another, and how they effect climate, we can’t really build useful climate models, except on very short time scales.
We can also look for answers in the regulatory mechanisms that exist within the Earth’s own climate system. If an increment of warming happens on the surface, for example, then there is more evaporation from the oceans and more precipitation. While an increment of warming may melt glaciers, it may also cause increased snowfall in the arctic regions. Do these balance each other or not? Increased warming of the ocean’s surface may gradually heat the ocean, but the increased evaporation acts to cool the ocean. Do these balance each other?
Vegetation also acts as a regulatory system. Plants and trees gobble up CO2; that is where their substance comes from. Greater CO2 concentration leads to faster growth, taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Until we understand quantitively how these various regulatory systems function and interact, we can’t even build useful models on a short time scale.
In fact a lot of research is going on, investigating both lines of inquiry. However, in the current public-opinion and media climate, any research not related to CO2 causation is dismissed as the activity of contrarians, deniers, and oil-company hacks. Just as the Bishop refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, so today we have a whole society that refuses to look at many of the climate studies that are available.
I’d like to draw attention to one example of a scientist who has been looking at one aspect of the Earth’s regulatory system. Roy Spencer has been conducting research using the satellite systems that are in place for climate studies. Here are his relevant qualifications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)
Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
He describes his research in a presentation available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos49g1sdzo&feature=channel
In the talk he gives a lot of details, which are quite interesting, but one does need to concentrate and listen carefully to keep up with the pace and depth of the presentation. He certainly sounds like someone who knows what he’s talking about. Permit me to summarize the main points of his research:
When greenhouse gases cause surface warming, a response occurs, a ‘feedback response’, in the form of changes in cloud and precipitation patterns. The CRU-related climate models all assume the feedback response is a positive one: any increment of greenhouse warming will be amplified by knock-on effects in the weather system. This assumption then leads to the predictions of ‘runaway global warming’.
Spencer set out to see what the feedback response actually is, by observing what happens in the cloud-precipitation system when surface warming is occurring. What he found, by targeting satellite sensors appropriately, is that the feedback response is negative rather than positive. In particular, he found that the formation of storm-related cirrus clouds is inhibited when surface temperatures are high. Cirrus clouds are themselves a powerful greenhouse gas, and this reduction in cirrus cloud formation compensates for the increase in the CO2 greenhouse effect.
This is the kind of research we need to look at if we want to build useful climate models. Certainly Spencer’s results need to be confirmed by other researchers before we accept them as fact, but to simply dismiss his work out of hand is very bad for the progress of climate science. Consider what the popular website SourceWatch says about Spencer.
We don’t find there any reference to rebuttals to his research, but we are told that Spencer writes columns for a free-market website funded by Exxon. They also mention that he spoke at conference organized by the Heartland Institute, that promotes lots of reactionary, free-market principles. They are trying to discredit Spencer’s work on irrelevant grounds, what the Greeks referred to as an ad hominem argument. Sort of like, “If he beats his wife, his science must be faulty”.
And it’s true about ‘beating his wife’ — Spencer does seem to have a pro-industry philosophy that shows little concern for sustainability. That might even be part of his motivation for undertaking his recent research, hoping to give ammunition to pro-industry lobbyists. But that doesn’t prove his research is flawed or that his conclusions are invalid. His work should be challenged scientifically, by carrying out independent studies of the feedback process. If the challenges are restricted to irrelevant attacks, that becomes almost an admission that his results, which are threatening to the climate establishment, cannot be refuted. He does not hide his data, or his code, or his sentiments. The same cannot be said for the warming-alarmist camp.
Question 3
What are we to make of Jim Hansen’s prediction that rapid warming will soon resume?
Once again, I refer you to Dr. Hansen’s recent article, 2009 temperatures by Jim Hansen.
Jim begins with the following paragraph:
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
The Southern Hemisphere may be experiencing warming, but it has 2°C to go before that might become a problem there, and it has nothing to do with the Northern Hemisphere, where temperatures have been declining recently, not setting records for warming. This mathematical abstraction, the global average, is characteristic of nowhere. It creates the illusion of a warming crisis, when in fact no evidence for such a crisis exists. In the context of IPCC warnings about glacers melting, runaway warming, etc., this global-average argument serves as deceptive and effective propaganda, but not as science.
Jim continues with this paragraph, emphasis added:
The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below. There is a high degree of interannual (year‐to‐ year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long‐term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long‐term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. The 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures are shown in Figure 2 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Niño – La Niña cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐ year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.
As I’ve emphasized in bold, Jim is assuming that there is a strong and persistent warming trend, which he of course attributes to human-caused CO2 emissions. And then that assumption becomes the justification for the 5 and 11-year running averages. Those running averages then give us phantom ’temperatures’ that don’t match actual observations. In particular, if a downard decline is beginning, the running averages will tend to ‘hide the decline’.
It seems we are looking at a classic case of over-attachment to model. What began as a theory has now become an assumption, and actual observations are being dismissed as “confusion” because they don’t agree with the model. The climate models have definitely strayed into the land of imaginary epicycles. The assumption of CO2 causation, plus the preoccupation with an abstract global average, creates a warming illusion that has no connection with reality in either hemisphere, as we see in these two graphs from Jim’s article:
As with the Ptolemaic model, there is a much simpler explantation for our recent era of warming , at least in the Northern Hemisphere: long term patterns are continuing, for whatever reasons, and human-caused CO2 has so far had no noticeable effect. This simpler explanation is based on actual observations, and requires no abstract mathematical epicycles or averages, but it removes CO2 from the center of the climate debate. And just as powerful forces in Galileo’s day wanted the Earth to remain the center of the universe, powerful forces today want CO2 to remain at the center of climate debate, and global warming to be seen as a threat.
Question 4
What is the real agenda of the politically powerful factions who are promoting global-warming alarmism?
One thing we always need to keep in mind is that the people at the top of the power pyramid in our society have access to the very best scientific information. They control dozens, probably hundreds, of high-level think tanks, able to hire the best minds, and carrying out all kinds of research we don’t hear about. They have access to all the secret military and CIA research, and a great deal of influence over what research is carried out in think tanks, the military, and in universities.
Just because they might be promoting fake science for its propaganda value, that doesn’t mean they believe it themselves. They undoubtedly know that global cooling is the real problem, and the actions they are promoting are completely in line with such an understanding.
Cap-and-trade, for example, won’t reduce carbon emissions. Rather it is a mechanism that allows emissions to continue, while pretending they are declining — by means of a phony market model. You know what a phony market model looks like. It looks like Reagan and Thatcher telling us that lower taxes will lead to higher government revenues due to increased business activity. It looks like globalization, telling us that opening up free markets will “raise all boats” and make us all prosperous. It looks like Wall Street, telling us that mortgage derivatives are a good deal, and we should buy them. And it looks like Wall Street telling us the bailouts will restore the economy, and that the recession is over. In short, it’s a con. It’s a fake theory about what the consequences of a policy will be, when the real consequences are known from the beginning.
Cap-and-trade has nothing to do with climate. It is part of a scheme to micromanage the allocation of global resources, and to maximize profits from the use of those resources. Think about it. Our ‘powerful factions’ decide who gets the initial free cap-and-trade credits. They run the exchange market itself, and can manipulate the market, create derivative products, sell futures, etc. They can cause deflation or inflation of carbon credits, just as they can cause deflation or inflation of currencies. They decide which corporations get advance insider tips, so they can maximize their emissions while minimizing their offset costs. They decide who gets loans to buy offsets, and at what interest rate. They decide what fraction of petroleum will go to the global North and the global South. They have ‘their man’ in the regulation agencies that certify the validity of offset projects. And they make money every which way as they carry out this micromanagement.
In the face of global cooling, this profiteering and micromanagenent of energy resources becomes particularly significant. Just when more energy is needed to heat our homes, we’ll find that the price has gone way up. Oil companies are actually strong supporters of the global-warming bandwagon, which is very ironic, given that they are funding some of the useful contrary research that is going on. Perhaps the oil barrons are counting on the fact that we are suspicious of them, and asssume we will discount the research they are funding, as most people are in fact doing. And the recent onset of global cooling explains all the urgency to implement the carbon-management regime: they need to get it in place before everyone realizes that warming alarmism is a scam.
And then there’s the carbon taxes. Just as with income taxes, you and I will pay our full share for our daily commute and for heating our homes, while the big corporate CO2 emitters will have all kinds of loopholes, and offshore havens, set up for them. Just as Federal Reserve theory hasn’t left us with a prosperous Main Street, despite its promises, so theories of carbon trading and taxation won’t give us a happy transition to a sustainable world.
Instead of building the energy-efficient transport systems we need, for example, they’ll sell us biofuels and electric cars, while most of society’s overall energy will continue to come from fossil fuels, and the economy continues to deteriorate. The North will continue to operate unsustainably, and the South will pay the price in the form of mass die-offs, which are already ticking along at the rate of six million children a year from malnutrition and disease.
While collapse, suffering, and die-offs of ‘marginal’ populations will be unpleasant for us, it will give our ‘powerful factions’ a blank canvas on which to construct their new world order, whatever that might be. And we’ll be desperate to go along with any scheme that looks like it might put food back on our tables and warm up our houses.
Author contact – rkm@quaylargo.com
Obama’s Latest Ruse: the Bank Tax
The Big Lies Just Keep Coming
By Alan Nasser | January 15, 2010
When president Obama was awarded Advertising Age’s 2009 Marketer of the Year award, we were alerted to expect carefully crafted public relations posturing in defense of the reputation of Brand Obama. We have not been disappointed. The president has regularly taken verbal pot shots at the financial oligarchy in a cynical effort to convey the impression that he shares the public’s outrage at the behavior of the plutocrats. But he has thrown no sticks and stones at the banksters, who know as well as you and I that mere words can never hurt them.
None of Obama’s faux outrage has been as disingenuous as his Wednesday announcement that he will finally respond sympathetically to the public’s deep resentment of the administration’s tolerance -and therefore encouragement- of the bad guys’ looting of the public treasury.
Obama assured his constituents that he would “recoup every last penny for American taxpayers” by taking back, in the form of taxes on the banks, the wealth that households have been forced to transfer to the coffers of the instigators of the financial crisis.
The announcement was timed to offset what will surely be another surge of public anger at the expected announcement this week of the banks’ year-end bonus payments.
The proposed taxes would apply to financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets and would extract about $90 billion from them over ten years. Obama’s central claim is that this would cover all losses incurred by the government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). We are supposed to be relieved that households will in the end be repaid all that has been transferred from them by TARP. “We want our money back, and we’re going to get it,” said Obama.
Obama is perpetrating a massive ruse. The tax-the-banks proposal rests on conspicuously false empirical assumptions and appalling math.
A key premise of the tax proposal is that TARP is the government’s sole gift to the financial elite. This is of course false: TARP is in fact a relatively small fraction of the State’s total rescue effort. Financial institutions have also been treated to no-cost and virtually unlimited access to credit, broad guarantees against losses and lax regulation, to mention only the most conspicuous gifts. Even if TARP did represent the administration’s total commitment to financial institutions, Obama’s claim would still be nonsense. TARP handed $700 billion to the banks. How does $90 billion “recoup every last penny” of $700 billion? The president thinks, with good reason so far, that he can get away with anything. Anything. Hence the screamingly counterfactual premise and the slapstick math.
That’s not the worst of it. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General charged with overseeing the bailout plan, reports that the bailout could end up costing $23.7 trillion. Critics of Barofsky accuse him of exaggeration. Let’s suppose they are right. Say Barofsky doubled the true cost of the government’s commitment. So what? Bloomberg reports, with no challengers, that the cumulative commitment to financial rescue initiatives amount so far to more than $8.5 trillion. $90 billion is a small drop in a big bucket.
How do these figures compare to what working people have lost? Households have so far lost $12 trillion in wealth in the wake of the crisis. By the end of the third quarter of 2008, shortly after the announcement of an impending collapse of the entire financial system, households had already lost $647 billion in real estate, $922 billion in stocks, $523 billion in mutual funds and $653 billion in life insurance and pension funds reserves. Total destruction of household wealth in Q3 2008 came to $2.8 trillion, the worst decline on record. That comes to four times TARP’s $700 billion. If “[w]e want our money back,” we’re dead out of luck. Obama knows this, but the man is an instrument of his financial masters, and the ad campaign functioning to obscure this reality requires big lies. The president has these coming out of his ears.
Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu
The United States, Israel and the retreat of freedom
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 14 January 2010
The world is suffering from a “freedom recession” according to a new report from the American think tank Freedom House (“Freedom in the World 2010,” 12 January 2010).
Established in 1941, Freedom House markets itself as “an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.” Its board of directors, chaired by a former US deputy secretary of defense, is a who’s who of Democratic and Republican former US government officials, prominent neoconservatives and Israel lobby stalwarts such as Tom Dine, former executive director of AIPAC. In 2007, more than two-thirds of its $16 million budget came directly from the United States government.
Not surprisingly then, Freedom House’s report reveals more about the groupthink of the US establishment — especially with respect to its continued efforts to dominate the Middle East and ensure Israel’s supremacy — than it does about the countries surveyed.
Focusing on two categories of “freedom” — “civil liberties” and “political rights” — the report divides the world’s 194 countries into three groups: “free” (89), “partly free” (58), and “not free” (47).
Interestingly, Freedom House records “declines in freedom” in “countries that had registered positive trends in previous years, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan.” Jordan was one of only six countries to move from the “partly free” category to “not free.” What does it say about US “democracy promotion” that Jordan, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan — major political and military operating bases for the “war on terror” and US-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan — have become less free as their dependence on the US has increased?
Sadly, while the report frets that “the most powerful authoritarian regimes [such as Russia and China] have become more repressive, more influential in the international arena, and more uncompromising,” it has nothing at all to say about the US role in restricting freedom and spreading mayhem around the world. Sometimes this is truly absurd as the report points to “continued terrorist and insurgent violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen,” but fails to note that two of these countries are under direct US military occupation (Afghanistan and Iraq) while the US is intervening militarily in the other three. (The report presents a mixed picture for the US-occupied countries; both are “Not Free” but Iraq allegedly became more free during 2009 and Afghanistan less free.)
Rather than offer any introspection on the inverse relationship between US efforts at global domination on the one hand, and the spread of freedom on the other, the report’s overview essay concludes with a call for more vigorous intervention: “The United States and other democracies should take the initiative to meet the authoritarian challenge …”
Freedom House’s approach to Israel provides the starkest example of the abyss into which liberal thinking has fallen on the relationship between colonialism and freedom. Israel, we are told, “remains the only country in the [Middle East] region to hold a Freedom in the World designation of Free.” We are informed euphemistically that “The beginning of the year [2009] was marred by fierce fighting between the Israeli military and the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.”
There is no mention of the deliberate targeting by Israel of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and the resulting massive destruction, and death and injury to thousands of Palestinian civilians. Nothing is said of the denial of fundamental political, civil and human rights, or freedom of movement, association and education to four million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no mention of the systematic discrimination, and social and political exclusion faced by 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor of the denial of the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees.
There is an acknowledgment that “Hundreds of people were arrested during demonstrations against the Gaza conflict, and the parliamentary elections committee passed a measure banning two political parties from national elections, though the ban was quickly overturned by the Supreme Court.”
Despite this, on the tables accompanying the report, “Israel” receives the highest score of “1” for political rights, and a very respectable “2” for civil liberties — on a par with Italy and Japan. The overall impression is of minor glitches that could occur in any exemplary “Western” democracy.
Then on a separate table of “Disputed Territories” we find “Israeli-occupied territories” and “Palestinian Authority-administered territories” both listed. Both are given the designation “Not Free” and nearly the lowest scores for political rights and civil liberties. There is no narrative to explain who is responsible for this dire state of affairs. This convenient separation allows for all the ugly realities of what “free” Israel does in the occupied territories to be pushed out of sight and ignored.
But in what scheme can Israel be awarded freest of the free status when for two-thirds of its existence, since 1967, it has ruled directly over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians through violence and repression? The idea that the political regime in Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries can be looked at as a “democracy” even while the situation in the occupied territories can be criticized as undemocratic is very widespread among Israelis and American liberals.
Former US President Jimmy Carter has been excoriated (and recently forced to apologize) by the Israel lobby for calling the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “apartheid.” Yet even he had simultaneously claimed that within its pre-1967 boundaries, “Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew.” True, Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and are accorded civil rights far wider than their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But even Israeli Jews commonly concede that Palestinian citizens suffer systematic and severe disadvantage and total exclusion from key political decisions about the country.
Israeli Jewish leftists (a rapidly dwindling group) and Western liberal sympathizers tend to view Israel within its 1967 boundaries as a flawed democracy — perfectible with a reallocation of resources and less discrimination against non-Jews, even as they remain fully invested in maintaining Israel as a “Jewish state” with a Jewish demographic majority.
They view the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the original sin that corrupted a purer Zionist vision, and thus remain fixated on the chimera of “ending the occupation” through a “two-state solution.” Once this nirvana is reached, so they believe, Israel can resume its destiny as a liberal democratic state among others.
But it is not just the discrimination and limited rights of Palestinian citizens and other non-Jews that undermine the claim that Israel — considered separately from the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is a democracy. Nor is it even that Israeli settler-citizens in the West Bank have full voting rights for the Israeli parliament while Palestinians in the same territory have none. It is that “Israel” and the “occupied territories” are two sides of the same coin.
Israel’s 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and ongoing repressive rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not exceptional or temporary conditions. They are constitutive of the situation that allows Israeli Jews to currently claim they live in a (flawed) liberal democracy.
To be clear, the argument is not that conditions in Israel and the occupied territories are indistinguishable; rather it is that they form a single interdependent system. Israeli Jews can “freely” elect a Jewish government in Israel only because most Palestinians have already been ethnically cleansed. Thus the maintenance of this “liberal democratic” Jewish space depends directly on the permanent denial of fundamental rights to Palestinians.
Palestinian citizens of Israel — who form 20 percent of the population within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries — are, as noted, accorded limited liberal rights. This helps boost Israel’s external image as a “wonderful democracy,” but if the exercise of these rights ever threatens Jewish domination, they are curtailed. Examples include the constant legal harassment of Palestinian members of the Knesset, and various legislative projects for loyalty oaths or to ban commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians. Overwhelming Israeli Jewish opposition to calls by Palestinians in Israel for the country to be a “state of all its citizens” is an indication that Israeli Jews value their own supremacy over democracy.
Israel has sometimes been described as an “ethnocracy” — a state where one ethnic group dominates and enjoys a wide range of liberal rights which are denied to others. But these liberal rights depend directly on the successful repression of the non-privileged ethnic group(s). As rebellions by the disenfranchised require ever greater levels of repression and violence to control, the repression must also be turned inwards.
In recent days, Israel extended for six months a ban on Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli citizen, and leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, from traveling to Jerusalem, Israel’s ostensible capital, where he had been exercising his civil rights to campaign against Israeli efforts to “Judaize” the city. (Separately Salah was also sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a 2007 demonstration; a conviction condemned as political persecution by other Palestinian leaders inside Israel.)
Such repression does not only affect non-Jews. The United Nations-commissioned Goldstone report noted “that actions of the Israeli government” within Israel, during and after Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, “including interrogation of political activists, repression of criticism and sources of potential criticism of Israeli military actions, in particular nongovernmental organizations, have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions in the Occupied Territories is not tolerated.”
These means of “internal” repression resemble the movement bans, censorship and other forms of harassment that the South African apartheid regime began to deploy in its late stages against dissenting whites, eroding the “liberal democratic” space they had for so long enjoyed at the expense of the country’s black majority.
Maintaining a Jewish-controlled “liberal democratic” regime in Palestine/Israel is incompatible with the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians. It emphatically depends on their permanent violation, especially the right of return. But the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians — an end to discrimination against Palestinian citizens, dismantling the 1967 occupation regime, and the right of return for refugees — is fully compatible with Israeli Jews exercising the human, civil, political and cultural rights to which they are unquestionably entitled.
As a first step toward imagining and creating such a framework, we have to ditch the absurd idea reproduced by Freedom House, that Israeli Jews can epitomize perfect freedom while imposing perfect tyranny and dispossession on a greater number of human beings who belong to the same country.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Thoughts on “terrorism” and security theater
By Joaquin Bustelo | Excerpt | January 10, 2010
The attempted blowing up of Delta Flight 253 shows extremely limited operational capacity by Al-Qaeda. Compared to the earlier actions like 9/11, the sending of a lone passenger, who bought his ticket with cash and traveled without luggage, and was unable to detonate the explosive he had, is quite feeble. It also seems to indicate that what is left of Al-Qaeda has either a monomaniacal fixation on aviation or no confidence in its own people being able to operate in the United States once they get off the plane.
But perhaps more revealing was the U.S. handling of this individual: a man who paid cash for his ticket and had no luggage –two circumstances that supposedly should set off alarm bells calling for extra screening– provoked no such response. Nor did his father’s turning him in as a potential terrorist weeks before the attack trigger any effective action. The ostensible reason –the “consular” (read: CIA) official in Nigeria who took the information misspelled the man’s name only shows the pervasive culture of incompetence that has settled over the country. Complemented with the complacency that allowed the designers of the terrorist and visa matching software to not even offer what Google does to the average internet user — a list of alternative spellings if there are no or few hits.
Worse was the response after the fact — no one allowed to go to the bathroom or handle in-cabin possessions in the last 90 minutes of international flights. The U.S. government INSISTS that planes be blown up, if at all, well ahead of their scheduled arrival. It’s a sensible measure that displays the modern version of hard-headed Yankee practicality: sparing people a fruitless trip to the airport and keeping grieving relatives out of TV camera viewfinders, which is the sort of thing that can drive a president’s popularity down in a hurry.
Further measures are in the works: a billion dollar’s worth of peep show scanners. Sure, there are all kinds of substances they wouldn’t pick up but hey, at least it reminds the public to be VERY SCARED and –or so it is hoped– that the government is trying to protect them. The machines are being configured so they DON’T store a record of each scan. This because even though the software has been written to produce a photographic negative of the nude body, storing the image of minors would still run afoul of child pornography laws.
And, of course, we have the designation of more than a dozen countries for heightened harassment of its citizens. How much “thought” went into this measure is shown by the inclusion of Cuba, simply because US propaganda puts the island on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, to justify the blockade, which fools absolutely no one, judging by the well-nigh unanimous yearly condemnations of the blockade by the UN General Assembly. But they wanted some sort of “objective” criteria for the
profiling, so they highlighted that it applied to people from “state sponsors of terrorism.” Yet then tying the “countries of interest” like Afghanistan and Nigeria to the terrorist one has only intensified the hornets nest of diplomatic complications for the state department, as US pet and puppet regimes say, in essence: “we’ve spent years brown-nosing and THIS is the thanks we get?”
As for the effectiveness of the measure, it can be mathematically PROVEN that this kind of targeted screening is even less effective than merely random screening. Ditto for “no fly” lists. The reason is that, assuming a certain minimum level of resources and resourcefulness on the part of the attackers, what is ACTUALLY being done is provide a road map to accessing the less-scrutinized passenger cue. If you have been barred from flying under a certain name with an Afghani passport, choose a different name with, say, Sri Lankan documents.
This means that the chances of detection are less than if the intensive screening resources were randomly distributed among all travelers.
This is largely what is known as “security theater,” alleged precautions that in reality afford little or no additional security, like the posting of national guard troops in airports right after September 11 — with the soldiers barred from carrying live ammo for their rifles.
The Bogus Flight 253 ‘One-Way Ticket’ Meme: Anatomy Of A Myth
By Justin Elliott | TPM | January 11, 2010
In a remarkable example of how bad information can travel far and wide, dozens of media outlets around the world have said Umar Abdulmutallab was traveling on a one-way ticket to Detroit when he allegedly tried to blow up Flight 253, even though that has never been substantiated and appears to be flat wrong.
Abdulmutallab’s “one-way ticket” has been cited in recent days by the AP, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, even though the Nigerian government said Dec. 28 that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, and provided details to back it up.
The “one-way ticket” meme was originally sourced to anonymous U.S. officials and has since been recited as an undisputed fact.
It has been referenced repeatedly by commentators attacking the U.S. government for missing red flags about Abdulmutallab. See for example this Michael Gerson column in the Jan. 6 Post (“Airline attack shows Obama’s listless approach to terrorism”) and this Michael Mukasey Wall Street Journal effort (“The president’s job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.”)
In a typical case on Dec. 28 — when the accurate information was already available — CNN anchor Erica Hill asked: “So, just how did a guy on a terror watch list with a one-way ticket paid for in cash, with no luggage … manage to board a U.S. airliner and allegedly try to blow it to pieces? Simply put tonight, who screwed up?”
And here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “When a 20-something Muslim male buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage, that’s not a dot. That’s a fire alarm! He may as well have “I’m a terrorist” taped on his T-shirt.”
But published reports on Dec. 28 cited the conclusion of the Nigerian government that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket to Detroit. It had been purchased in Ghana on Dec. 16 for $2,831, according to the AP, citing Civil Aviation Authority director Harold Demuren. His return date was found by the Nigerians to be Jan. 8. (A Dutch government report described by the International Herald Tribune on Dec. 31 also said Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, but it’s not clear whether the Dutch were simply relying on the Nigerians’ conclusion.) A full account of Demuren’s comments can be found in the Nigerian newspaper The Nation here.
While the New York Times published a correction on Dec. 30 saying it had erroneously reported Abdulmutallab’s ticket was one-way, many outlets that have mentioned the one-way ticket haven’t run corrections.
So where did the false meme come from? Anonymous U.S. government sources. And unless there’s classified information suggesting otherwise, those sources were clearly mistaken.
The first citation of a “one-way ticket” we could find is a report on Christmas day by MSNBC (cached version here): “Federal officials identified the man as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, of Nigeria, who was traveling one way, without a return ticket.”
Another early reference is in the Dec. 26 edition of the New York Daily News: “Officials said Abdulmutallab was traveling one way, without a return ticket.”
MSNBC’s Pete Williams tells TPMmuckraker: “Though there were federal officials who initially said it was one-way, we’ve [been] saying since that it was round trip, which it clearly was.”
But there are a whole lot of media consumers out there who believe Abdulmutallab came to Detroit on a one-way ticket.
The “one-way ticket” has been cited by CNN, Fox, Time, Newsweek, the AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Gannett News Service, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the Sacramento Bee, the Globe and Mail, the Washington Times, Congressional Quarterly and many other outlets, according to a review by TPMmuckraker.
The Today Show’s Matt Lauer even asked about the one-way ticket in a question to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (who did not address the matter in her answer).
The only substantiated reference to a one-way ticket we could find is the statement by a Ghanaian official last week that Abdulmutallab purchased a one-way ticket in cash from Accra, Ghana, to Lagos, Nigeria. That was in addition to the purchase of the ticket from Lagos to Detroit via Amsterdam, according to Deputy Information Minister Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, quoted in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal says Abdulmutallab took Virgin Nigeria flight 804 from Accra to Lagos on Dec. 24, before getting on a plane en route to Amsterdam.
There are few signs that the “one-way” meme will die any time soon.
The AP, which two weeks ago reported the correct information from Nigeria, ran a story Friday (“Experts say terror watch lists have limited uses”) stating that Abdulmutallab purchased a one-way fare.
The BBC’s ‘Conspiracy Files’
By Paul Holme | January 12, 2010
At 16:15 local time Hong Kong and the Philippines, on Saturday, 9 Jan., the BBC World News service broadcast “The Conspiracy Files,” concerning lingering suspicions about 9/11 — specifically the anomalous, sudden, and complete collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by a plane.
This documentary was, as you might expect, as complete a snow job as the weather presently smothering the UK.
It left me with two lasting impressions:
1. That the relatively unprepared viewer — such as I would take the majority to be — would accept its conclusions as ‘the truth.’ The BBC, like CNN and I suppose Fox News, is the modern-day equivalent of the Bible for many who watch it regularly. It is their Authority, an esteemed organ of “objective” reporting, and so they approach it with their critical defenses down — especially in matters where they can’t claim expertise, and the more so when the BBC solemnly quotes such other purveyors of mainstream truth as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (whose graphic simulation of a beam buckling in Building 7 was deemed sufficient to convince us that every real beam and column gave way likewise, and simultaneously).
2. That it is — and has always been — the inevitable, primary function of the mainstream news outlets to create consensus, rather than division, around a core set of values that have evolved over the years, and which represent the status quo. You can’t broadcast everything, so from the start there’s inevitably a massive selection process. What guides the selection process? “Objectivity”? The very nature of the task logically excludes that possibility! What we actually end up seeing and hearing equally inevitably dominates our thinking. How can you think about what never reaches your senses? You can’t. And thus the status quo rolls effortlessly on.
Those of us who find ourselves uncomfortably outside the mainstream on the 9/11 issue believe that we see things “more objectively,” because, from our different perspective, we are acutely aware of the cherry-picking of “facts” that goes on in support of the Official Version. This cherry-picking is (for the most part) an entirely unconscious selection process. What we are probably less aware of is that we cherry-pick our “facts” too, and this selection is as glaring to the gatekeepers of acceptable knowledge as theirs is to us.
What this in turn betrays is our near-universal misunderstanding of what “facts” are and how we arrive at them. It is not that one group is more “objective” than another. That’s prideful, self-serving nonsense. We do not plug into an objective world that some see and others (for some reason) do not. It simply doesn’t work like that. Each person creates (as he must) his own reality from sensory data which he alone experiences, and then — with more or less vigor and conviction, and with whatever tools are currently fashionable — sets about convincing others to his point of view. This social component of reality is inescapable. Without it we would be living in something like the tower of Babel. Communication would not exist, and neither would society.
Insofar as humans are social beings, truth is a popularity contest (and, yes guys, we are social beings!). This conclusion seems like an outright denial of supposed scientific objectivity; but that is actually the way it is, and there’s no escaping it.
Thus it is that islands of popularity grow, like bacteria in a petri dish, around attractive beliefs, while those which cannot sustain interest wither and die. That, in a nutshell, is what the “factual” world is all about, always has been, and always will be. Facts are not hard and fast things “out there.” Facts are agreements, and like all agreements they can change.
In the BBC’s “The Conspiracy Files” architect Richard Gage, the founder and chief spokesman of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, asserts that the smoke observed on the south side of Building 7 before its sudden collapse was probably sucked there from Buildings 5 and 6. This theory of his is challenged by video evidence of fires burning on the same side, and other experts insisting that fires such as these could have “spread” and “engulfed” the building, destroying the integrity of the structural steel, and leading to “global collapse.”
The combined psychological force of the BBC, and the video footage, and the experts, and the even, reasonable tone of the commentator all pitted against bald Mr. Gage expostulating in his little office, is overwhelming. The unsurprising conclusion is reached by the Beeb that Building 7 collapsed without explosive assistance, as advertised. The gatekeepers are delighted, their worldview is vindicated, the enemy is brought low, and the status quo lumbers on, unshaken.
Facts? The merest suggestion of them is all that’s needed for those in authority (whatever authority that may be) to secure the hearts and minds of the faithful. “The Conspiracy Files” is the necessary force of social cohesion at work, operating through one of the organs which have evolved for this purpose. Strength resides in numbers. Might is right. To turn the tide requires tremendous perseverance, and the constant reintroduction of evidence which refutes the official version of events. This is subversion, and must be undertaken, of course, without the slightest help from where it counts — the mainstream media.
My own view (for what it’s worth) disagrees with that of Mr. Gage, as his naturally does with others. It is that it’s perfectly possible for the south face of Building 7 to have been blanketed in smoke without our jumping to the conclusion either that the smoke all came from elsewhere (Building 7 was on fire!), or that the six or seven windows (out of hundreds) on one floor (out of 47) at which fire could be seen were evidence that the building was about to collapse straight down at freefall speed into its own footprint. In fact this last assertion, seized on by the BBC and its chosen experts alike, strikes me as equally absurd after watching “The Conspiracy Files” as it did before. But then the BBC World News is not my authority, so I am free to question its selection of facts in a way which a gatekeeper to the official version is not.
Related articles
- New Poll Finds a Majority of Canadians Side with Ads Questioning 9/11 (rethink911.org)
- Still Trying to Talk To People About Building 7 (12160.info)
- New Poll Finds Most Americans Open to Alternative 9/11 Theories (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
Shadow Boxing at Sharm al-Sheikh
By Iqbal Jassat | January 11, 2010
As the media focus fades away from Egypt and the unprecedented brawl that occurred in the streets of Cairo, it is likely that the world will yet again be treated to Mubarak’s routine antics at Sharm al-Sheikh.
The Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh often serves as the setting for Mubarak to distract global attention from his political failures. It is here that he usually appears in a fake mask to don the appearance of a “peace-maker”, ostensibly to pursue “peace” on behalf of the Occupied Palestinians.
To add further mockery he usually has Mahmoud Abbas in tow to keep nodding his head in approval. Of course the seat on his right is usually reserved for whichever butcher in Israel may have been elected leader of the colonial-settler state.
And peeping over his shoulder will be the incumbent US Secretary of State, ensuring that the American puppet does not stray from the carefully worded pro-Israeli script. After all, the script would be prepared by a bunch of neo-conners or their hangers-on who share the view most recently expressed by New York’s Ed Koch, that Muslims are terrorists.
Thus room only for pliant betrayers such as the PA’s American-backed Fatah elite – not for movements such as Hamas listed by the US as terrorists! They and the rest of Palestine’s freedom fighters who are not exiled or are in the dungeons of Israel and the West Bank, courtesy of Abu Mazen, are in fact the target of proceedings at Sharm al-Sheikh!
Five years ago during February 2005, Mubarak hosted Ariel Sharon who on the eve of the summit at Sharm el-Sheikh even announced a willingness to declare that Israel would cease military activities against all Palestinians. There was optimism all round as well as the hollow rhetoric of Abu Mazen along the line of “… A new opportunity for peace is born today in the city of peace”.
What utter rubbish! Hoodwinking public opinion and raising false expectations has been a favorite pastime of the Palestinian Authority.
Mainstream western media was as usual quick to applaud this false dawn.
What they chose to ignore was Sharon’s public instruction to Abu Mazen to act against the resistance: “…To dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, to disarm and subdue it once and for all”.
The so-called “breakthrough” and the promise of “calm and hope” was no more than the artful trick of deception of which past and current Israeli leaders are known for.
It didn’t take long for Sharon to display his fraud. A day after the summit a twenty-year-old Palestinian in Gaza was shot dead from an Israeli army post near the settlement of Atzmona. A day later, another Palestinian was shot and killed as he was driving through the neighbourhood of Wadi al-Haramiya near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Not surprising, mainstream western media ignored these two routine shootings. What attracted their attention and grabbed headlines was when Hamas fired mortars and Qassam rockets at an Israeli settlement in Gaza in response to the shootings.
The international media led by US media blamed Palestinians for “breaking the ceasefire” only two days after the Mubarak brokered agreement as Sharm el-Sheikh – without any reference to the shootings!
Gaza’s suffering prior to the December 2008 bloodbath and following it with the on-going siege is reflective of a tragic narrative that sadly has been compounded by unfair and irresponsible media reports.
Mubarak’s role as Israel’s gatekeeper is similarly unaccounted by US media organizations. That many hundreds of American activists mobilized in Cairo against his high-handed approach in keeping the Rafah border gate sealed, did not warrant US media attention. It’s a tendency that says to the Occupied Palestinians that while we will apply pressure on you, we will retain absolute silence on Israeli brutality.
Meanwhile Mubarak will hand out gold-etched invitations to the paparazzi of western media as soon as he decides to sponsor another round of shadow boxing at Sharm al-Sheikh.
– Iqbal Jassat is chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN), an advocacy group based in Pretoria, South Africa.
Where’s the Beef, Mr. Murdoch?
By Philip Giraldi | Anti-war.com | January 07, 2010
Regarding policy towards Iran, the American national interest would be best served by avoiding any involvement, if only because comments from the White House will be seen as outside interference, strengthening the hands of the conservatives. But there are many in the United States who do not see it quite that way, hoping to tighten the screws on the rulers in Tehran. They have been exploiting the so-called deadline of the year’s end for Iran and the US to enter into meaningful negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program. To be sure, many of those who are pushing hardest for sanctions are really only interested in war and regime change with sanctions as a first step establishing an irreversible course of action based on conflict rather than diplomacy.
Parallel with developments in the political arena, attempts to demonize Iran in the media appear to constitute a growth industry. False articles about Iran poison the foreign policy discourse because they create a dangerous narrative, that Tehran’s rulers are irredeemably evil and completely unwilling to compromise. In intelligence circles this is called disinformation. Nowhere is this barrage of disinformation more evident than in the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch, which includes the Wall Street Journal, the Times newspapers in Britain, and Fox television. Murdoch’s media marched in lockstep as a virtual propaganda mill in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Murdoch himself is much esteemed by Israel and by Jewish organizations and he has been outspoken in his approval of Israeli policies, including the devastation of Gaza one year ago. He has received numerous awards in Israel and the US for his support of Israel, most recently in November when he was given the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Laureate Award. In March 2009 he received the National Human Relations award from the American Jewish Committee. Murdoch is generally believed to be extremely close to Tel Aviv’s intelligence service Mossad and some of the stories featured in the media he controls would appear to be disinformation supporting Israeli government positions.
Over the past month there has been a spate of stories demonizing Iran, often based on evidence that most would regard as dubious. A December 14th article in the Times of London called “Secret document exposes Iran’s nuclear trigger” detailed how “confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.” The article was attacked by Gareth Porter and myself based on informed sources suggesting that the document the article relied on was a forgery. The document in question, alleged to be “from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project,” was of unknown provenance and US intelligence agencies do not believe it to be genuine. Times leader writer and columnist Oliver Kamm in turn unloaded on Porter and me as “Lindberghians,” sleazily insinuating in my case that I was an anti-Semite, while failing to address our legitimate suspicions about the document. In passing he also trashed Antiwar.com, inaccurately calling it isolationist, and described Ron Paul somewhat bizarrely as “Republican presidential nominee of insanitary political lineage and, ahem, highly imaginative schemes for monetary policy.” Kamm is a former merchant banker whose understanding of foreign policy apparently derives from his ability to make money in the bizarre financial services world that prevailed prior to the 2008 meltdown. His neoconish credentials and somewhat bizarre worldview have been examined by Justin Raimondo.
Other stories relating to the alleged threat posed by Iran have appeared recently in the Times. On December 21st appeared “North Korea weapons aircraft ‘was heading to Iran.’” The Times conceded that the destination of the flight was a mystery but relied on its sister paper the Wall Street Journal as the source for the story. The Times then adds its own analysis, “From Iran the weapons could have been passed on to militants in Lebanon or Gaza.” So the story about a plane that turned out to be registered in Georgia and carrying North Korean weapons becomes a story about Iran with no real hard evidence of Tehran’s involvement. Since the account of the arms shipment first surfaced it has vanished without a trace, suggesting that many other media outlets did not find it credible. But some readers were convinced by it. The story attracted a comment by one Daniel Evans who wrote “North Korea and Iran are targeting Israeli civilians to be killed by Hamas and Hezbollah. All in order to facilitate Iran’s nuclear annihilation of Israel and USA. Full scale war is the appropriate response.”
On December 31st, the Times featured an article “Peter Moore freed after US hands over Iraqi insurgent.” The story was about a British contractor who had been held by an Iraqi group for 31 months. So what does it have to do with Iran? According to the Times the extremist Shia group that allegedly held Moore is “allied to Iran,” adding “there were unconfirmed reports that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was involved in the kidnapping operation and that the hostages were smuggled into Iran…held in two prisons run by al-Quds, which specializes in foreign operations.” But both the British Foreign office and no less than General David Petraeus have both said that the alleged Iranian involvement is only speculation. Unfortunately, true or false the story resonates, convincing some that Iran is outside the pale. In a comment on the article posted on Times Online, one Daniel Case wrote “I think it is time to go into Iran and change the regime. I would love to see the religious nutters at The Hague charged with crimes against humanity. Let them all rot in jail.”
Also on New Year’s Eve, another Murdoch paper, the New York Post, featured an editorial by Ralph Peters, “O’s day of reckoning,” calling on President Obama to take action against Iran over the expiry of the end-of-year negotiating deadline. He cites, inter alia, the Iranian “…attempt to import more than 1,300 tons of make-a-nuke uranium ore from Kazakhstan” and refers to the government in Tehran as “turbaned tyrants” and “authentic fanatics.” The uranium ore story had surfaced the day before based on an intelligence report that was prepared by a country that “could not be identified because of the confidential nature of the information.” Both Iran and Kazakhstan have denied that any sale was being discussed and the media outrage is again derived from one anonymous report of unknown reliability. Is it a coincidence that the story should surface at a time when there are increasing demands for Obama to do something about Iran?
Bogus stories about Iran have a long history in the Murdoch media empire, most particularly in the Times. In April 2009, the newspaper reported that Israel was planning a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear sites “within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.” The article, light on content and heavy on innuendo, undoubtedly was intended to alarm new president Obama to force him to panic and take action against Iran to forestall an Israeli strike. A month earlier, the Times reported that Iran was supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan with surface to air missiles that could destroy helicopters. The story was denied by the US and British defense departments and turned out to be untrue, but it left behind the impression that Iran was assisting attacks on allied forces in Afghanistan. Such a highly emotional story line, which might be reduced to “they are killing our soldiers,” was used subsequently by Senator Joseph Lieberman and others in the US Congress to justify harsh sanctions against Iran.
In July 2008, the Times claimed that Iran might be developing germ warfare agents because of the reported purchase of 215 wild monkeys from a Tanzanian dealer for drug testing at the Razi Vaccine and Serum Institute in Tehran. It is unfortunately true that many countries continue to test drugs on primates but testing drugs does not necessarily equate to germ warfare. The story was never corroborated.
A September 2007 story on the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor included a somewhat implausible account of how Israeli commandoes had seized nuclear material from the site before it was bombed. The story was unique to the Times and appears to be untrue, almost certainly coming from an Israeli government source. If Israel had actually seized any compromising material, it would have show it to the world’s media to bolster its case against Damascus. The story also provided the opportunity to throw punches at Iran, claiming that Iran, Syria, and North Korea constitute a new “axis of evil” and quoting a source at the neocon Washington Institute of Near East Policy who described Syria as a “client” of Iran.
In April 2007, the Times featured a shocking article claiming that Iran was assisting al-Qaeda in Iraq to enable it to stage a “Nagasaki or Hiroshima size attack” against a western target, possibly using a dirty bomb. Most intelligence sources considered the story to be highly implausible, bordering on ridiculous. A month earlier the Times described the defection of Iranian former Revolutionary Guard General Ali Reza Asgari. Per the Times, Azgari was the “father of Hezbollah” and was carrying documents proving Iran’s links to terrorists. In reality, Azgari was a 43-year-old businessman snatched off an Istanbul street in a joint CIA Turkish operation. He had been out of the Iranian government for several years, had no documents, and had not been in Lebanon since 1989.
Two Times articles in August and September 2006 described how Iran was seeking to buy uranium from the Congo and also attempting to obtain ballistic missiles from criminal members of the security services in the Ukraine that would be capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Neither article was ever independently corroborated. The original source of the uranium story appears to have been a memo leaked from the Pentagon’s Office of the Undersecretary for Defense Policy headed by Eric Edelman, who succeeded Doug Feith.
I am not suggesting for a moment that the Times and other Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers don’t do some good reporting, and I would note in particular their exemplary coverage of the Sibel Edmonds story [editor’s comment – Hmmm I wonder why that might be?]. But I would warn that the conjunction of Middle East issues, most particularly the “Iranian threat,” and the newspaper’s editorial slant in favor of Israel and interventionism invite caution. If a breaking story relates to Iran and appears first in the Times it is probably not completely true and might be completely false, a shaky foundation for building a case for war.
Featured Video
Russia Helping Build a New Middle East /Trita Parsi
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Russia Helping Build a New Middle East /Trita Parsi
- Barghouti: ‘Netanyahu has fallen,’ era of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir over
- China slams US policy on Iran as Russia rejects legality of nuclear meeting at UN
- The Mecca Pact Courts Iran: Containment Comes Full Circle
- Oman FM: Persian Gulf states, Iran, Iraq should form security pact excluding US
- Trump peddles fresh falsehoods, claims Iran ‘started the war’ as US aggression drags on
- Ukraine quagmire? Yes, but it’s for NATO, not Russia
- US intelligence hypes Chinese, Russian space threats while accelerating its own military buildup in orbit
- Iran FM Araghchi: “Hormuz Will No Longer Be the Same”
- EU facing trillion-euro debt hole while seeking more cash for Kiev
- If Americans Knew
- Israel blocks international visitors from West Bank – what is it trying to hide?
- ‘There are no dreams here’: How Israel’s outgoing gov’t remade the West Bank
- Netanyahu, Katz Blocked IDF Plan to End Hebron Raids, Allow Locals to Return
- Mamdani’s NYPD is poised to sign a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm
- Israel Votes Today: What the Election Means for Americans and How Netanyahu’s Rivals Differ
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Israeli media analysis: 2 Paths to War With Iran Loom Over Israel’s Election
- Diaspora Jewish leaders stress Israel ties — no matter the outcome of tomorrow’s elections
- Israeli forces kill 14 in Gaza as UN commission says genocide continues
- The Israeli elections have become a fight over October 7, but only Zionist opinions are allowed
- No Tricks Zone
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
