Russia will step up development of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic, which are sufficient to last the country centuries, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.
“The potential of the Arctic zone is huge. Speaking about offshore resources only, those are 15 billion tons of oil and around 100 trillion cubic meters of gas. That will suffice for decades, hundreds of years if they are required and it is economically reasonable,” Novak said during the educational marathon ‘New Knowledge’ earlier this week, as cited by TASS.
These resources are too costly to extract so far, but Novak says the government is optimistic and has already taken steps to develop the means for it.
“Those are rather expensive projects, which require provision, certain subsidies, including on taxes, return on investment. The government has provided such incentives for projects like that. Certain taxes have been slashed to zero for offshore projects,” Novak stated, noting, however, that Russia will only dip into its Arctic resources in the case that other regions fail to provide them.
At the Eastern Economic Forum that took place in Russia’s Vladivostok this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country bears a “huge responsibility” to have a “prudent” attitude toward natural resources of the Arctic.
“For Russia, this is of tremendous importance – the development of the region… The Arctic accounts for 18% of our territory and [its] reserves of raw materials are necessary not only to our country, but to the whole world,” the head of state said at the plenary session of the EEF.
“In this sense, we have a huge responsibility to treat this wealth prudently and thoughtfully,” Putin stressed.
September 5, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Timeless or most popular | Russia |
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Climate-related deaths have fallen over 99 percent since 1920
Hurricane Ida has devastated the Gulf Coast. CNBC reports that “Ida made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour, one of the strongest storms to hit the region since Hurricane Katrina.” The property damage will be significant. Nineteen deaths have been confirmed, and more will likely follow. Those deaths are tragic, but thanks to enhanced preparation and flood defenses, they are a small fraction of the 1,833 deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Compare Ida to the Great Galveston Hurricane that made landfall on September 9th, 1900. The storm killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people. In 1915, another storm similar in strength struck Galveston. The 1915 storm resulted in only 53 deaths. How did Galveston reduce hurricane fatalities by 99 percent in 15 years? In a word, adaptation. In 1902, the residents of Galveston funded a 10-mile-long seawall, dredged sand from the shipping channel, and raised many buildings, some by as much as 17 feet.
Thankfully, the rest of the world is following Galveston’s example. Even the most dangerous storms kill fewer people than in the past. The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed between 22,000 and 27,000 people, making it the deadliest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The second deadliest hurricane (Mitch) occurred in 1998 and killed just over 11,000.
Average deaths are declining as well. The Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has reported that climate-related deaths averaged 485,000 a year in the 1920s. Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 18,362 annual climate-related deaths. In 2020, the death rate dropped to 14,893. Based on what has been reported, there have been 5,569 climate-related deaths in 2021 so far.
So, adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease. In other words, for every climate-related death in 2020, we had 133.6 deaths in 1920.
The above numbers suggest that between 1920 and 2020, the world has become 13,260 percent safer from climate-related death (i.e., around 5 percent safer a year). Lomborg notes:
This is clearly the opposite of what you hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events are increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds, and better accessibility (the CNN effect).
To avoid falling for the CNN effect, look at the number of dead per year as reported by the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database (https://public.emdat.be/). You can also read more from Lomborg’s peer-reviewed article here.
Will there continue to be dangerous weather and climate-related deaths? Yes, but we must put these catastrophes into context. Over the last 100 years, humanity has shown that we can adapt and thrive under varying climate conditions. Let facts, rather than advertising dollars, inform your thinking.
Professor Gale L. Pooley teaches economics at Brigham Young University, Hawaii. He is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member of HumanProgress.org
September 5, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular |
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The developed world doesn’t just have to cope with a Covid pandemic – we also have a pandemic of chronic disease (defined as a condition which is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects and for which there is no cure). A rough rule of thumb is to treat a condition as chronic if it lasts longer than three months; in 2012 this amounted to around 15 million sufferers in the U.K. and will be higher now. Examples of chronic conditions include Type 2 diabetes (T2D), obesity, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, dementia, lung disease, cancer… the list is endless.
Not only have many of these patients been effectively abandoned during the Covid crisis, with appointments cancelled, scans postponed and patients dying at home because they are discouraged from going to hospital, but if they do contract Covid they are likely to fare worse. All the chronic conditions listed above are Covid risk factors, making patients more susceptible to severe Covid and death. Furthermore, many of them are risk factors for other chronic conditions: T2D for cardiovascular disease, obesity for T2D, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, musculoskeletal disorders, mental health disorders and many more.
Why is there still no cure for chronic diseases? By ‘cure’, I am not referring to medical management through drugs that have to be taken for the remainder of life, I mean a complete reversal of the disease, so that the patient can say, for example, that they no longer have Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes. With the trillions poured into medical research over the last several decades, we can be forgiven for asking what scientists have been doing all this time, as there seems to be very little to show for it in terms of reducing chronic disease. Furthermore, part of the definition of chronic disease includes the damning fact that it has no cure. So according to the current medical model, we apparently cannot prevent chronic disease and nor can we cure it; instead we must take ever-increasing numbers of drugs for the rest of our lives. In 2021, after decades of highly funded research, this is truly shocking. Not only is conventional medicine failing to cure chronic disease but the incidence of all chronic diseases is increasing dramatically.
Let me provide some examples:
Obesity
In the U.K., 2019 figures show that 28% of adults are obese and a further 36.2% are overweight. Obesity incidence is now occurring at considerably younger ages, with 2019 data showing that 10% of children aged 4-10 are obese and 21% at age 10-11. The incidence of obesity is rising rapidly: there were four times as many hospital admissions with a diagnosis of obesity in 2016/17 compared with 2009/10.
Diabetes
Ten per cent of all people aged over 40 in the UK are now living with a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes; this amounts to 4.7 million of us, expected to reach 5.5 million by 2030. This compares to 1.4 million in 1996. The problem is global; the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that the number of people with diabetes rose from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 5% increase in premature mortality from diabetes.
Autoimmune conditions
Many autoimmune conditions are becoming more common, with some increasing in incidence by as much as 9% each year. In the U.K., four million people are known to be living with at least one autoimmune condition, and many with several autoimmune conditions at the same time. Rheumatoid arthritis is increasing at 7% per year, Type 1 diabetes by 6.3%, coeliac disease by up to 9% per year.
Cancer
According to Cancer Research U.K., there are over 164,000 cancer deaths in the U.K. each year, which is about 450 each day. One in two people in the U.K. born after 1960 will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during their lifetime. In the U.S., cancer incidence increased by 12% between 1994 and 2016; in the 1940s, one in sixteen had a cancer diagnosis; this had increased to one in three by 2018.
Dementia
There are currently around 850,000 people with dementia in the U.K. but this is projected to reach 1.6 million people in the U.K. by 2040. The global number of people living with dementia more than doubled from 1990 to 2016, while in the U.S., deaths from AD have risen 145% between 2000 and 2017. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that the number of people living with the disease doubles every five years beyond the age of 65. Most worryingly, those with early onset dementia have increased by 200% since 2013.
Cardiovascular disease
For some years cardiovascular disease mortality has been declining, despite increasing incidence of disease. However, in recent years, the rate of decline in CVD mortality has slowed in most developed countries, particularly at ages 35-74 years, and is now rising in 12 out of the 23 nations studied in 2017, including the U.K., the U.S. and Germany.
Autism
In the U.K., there was a sharp increase in the prevalence rates of autism in U.K. schools between 2010 and 2019. Autism currently affects 1–2% of the UK population – that is one per 100 children and two per 100 adults. According to the U.S. CDC, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the fastest growing developmental disability, affecting one in 59 children (1970s: one in 5000). Prevalence has increased 10-17% each year over the last several years. It has been described as an ‘autism tsunami’.
Prior to COVID-19, according to the Kings Fund, people with long-term conditions accounted for about 50% of all GP appointments, 64% of all outpatient appointments and over 70% of all inpatient bed days. Of course, we have far fewer GP appointments now as a result, so this figure for the last couple of years will be artificially lowered and will not represent the true needs of patients with chronic conditions.
The U.S. is so concerned about the ‘pandemic of chronic disease’ that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has recently undertaken a new initiative focusing on the increasing number of patients with multiple chronic conditions, estimated to affect more than 25% of Americans and consume 66% of US healthcare costs. The objective is to use evidence-based research to improve the care offered to these patients. It is notable that there is no objective to prevent or cure these multiple chronic diseases.
So what is going on? Even allowing for improved diagnostic techniques possibly increasing incidence rates, it is perfectly clear that there is no decline in incidence of these chronic diseases through provision of improved prevention and treatment. Chronic disease used to be something one accepted in old age, but this summer saw the publication of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which periodically tracks the lives of about 17,000 people. This showed that around one in three people in their late 40s has multiple chronic health issues.
Yet during the Second World War, we were apparently extremely healthy, despite rigorous food rationing. So what has changed over the last 70 years? Certainly not our genes, because although genes do evolve, they do not evolve to this extent in such a short period of time. Instead, we have introduced many more highly toxic chemicals into our food, our water and our air. We eat more, we eat more unhealthy foods and we have become ‘couch potatoes’.
Surely it is time for our Government and National Health Service to address the elephant in the room and acknowledge the extent to which our health is being damaged? Introducing a sugar tax and similar measures is just fiddling on the margins, playing lip service to improving health without actually tackling the issue head on. It is also time for the U.K. population to demand better from their government and healthcare providers? Without a complete reset of the medical model, we do not have ‘health care’, we have ‘disease care’.
Maybe it is also time to accept that the vast majority of medical research has not provided, and is not going to provide, a cure for chronic diseases. All it has achieved is improved patient ‘management’, usually drug-induced symptom suppression. This is a far cry from Sir William Osler’s precept: “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”
While it is true that most of the medical research is carried out in the U.S., nevertheless, the U.K. does undertake some research of its own. Expenditure on research in 2018/19 amounted to just over £1.6 billion, while overall healthcare spending in 2019 was £225 billion. In 2011, 70% of the U.K. healthcare budget was spent on chronic disease; it is likely that by 2019 that percentage would have increased but even if it has not this means that around £160 billion is devoted to ‘managing’ chronic disease. So using the most recent figures available before distortion by Covid, we spend £1.6 billion on medical research, only a proportion of which relates to chronic disease, compared to the current chronic disease care costs of £160 billion, i.e., just 1%. Furthermore, evidence suggests that less than 1% of high quality medical research is translated into clinical practice, meaning that only 0.01% of the £1.6 billion spent on medical research could actually be impacting clinical practice (i.e., £160,000). Surely our research budget could be better spent?
As I was writing this article, a timely email arrived informing me about Public Health Collaboration, a group of doctors and other health professionals, headed by Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who have launched a rival to Public Health England (PHE) and its successor, the U.K. Health Security Agency, to help combat obesity, poor diet and medical misinformation. The founders claim that PHE has failed in its responsibilities to the public, while the NHS can no longer cope with the demands placed on it by chronic disease. They point out that the two major industries, food and pharmaceuticals, mislead for profit and are the major root of our healthcare crisis. Unhealthy food and toxic chemicals – I rest my case!
Rachel Nicoll PhD is a Medical Researcher.
September 5, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | UK |
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Philosophers-stone.info, 2020
Looking at the last year and a half, it seems people have forgotten that evil is a significant and real force in our world. The term has religious connotations which secular societies would like to avoid, but we might do well to remember the old story of good versus evil. Evil people are not stupid. They know very well how to lie while appearing to be the soul of virtue. How could we doubt that the homely philanthropist Bill Gates, or the smiling Justin Trudeau, or Anthony Fauci with his Brooklyn accent, or the fatherly Joe Biden, could have anything but the best of intentions for us? Well, that’s how the game works. These people were chosen for their job because they are effective liars — one of the perks of selling one’s soul.
The “pandemic” is an attack on human freedom being conducted in increments. We started out with a three week quarantine to relieve supposedly overwhelmed hospitals and health care workers. Now, 18 months later, “there will be consequences” for people who refuse to get “vaccinated” says Trudeau in Canada. In Australia, people who have been under strict lockdown for months are now being told not to talk to each other or bring their children to playgrounds. Internment camps have been mentioned, and some say they are being built for those who refuse the jab. Children are being taken away from “unvaccinated” parents. If current jab rates are any indication, half the world’s population may end up in the camps, but that’s not an insanity too far for our would-be masters.
The globalists seem to care very much about getting something injected into us. They know better than we do what that is and what it is supposed to do — we can only speculate. Is it a slow-acting poison like glyphosate, promoted for many years by the same cast of characters? Is it a tool for chronic disease to keep the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment in business, like conventional vaccines? Is it a sterilizing agent to reduce the world population? Is it a code to genetically modify human beings? Is it the foundation of the circuitry that will connect us to 5G so that we can be completely surveilled? Or is it 6G, which will have enough bandwidth to bring us into the completely manufactured reality of The Matrix? We don’t know. But clearly there is a hidden agenda.
Some say the agenda of mass immunization is to institute “vaccine passports” to bring in totalitarian social control. But if this was the only goal, why would the clever technocrats, with all their careful planning, have chosen to inject people with a “vaccine” that doesn’t prevent or stop transmission of the alleged virus and is so harmful that not long after it was rolled out it started killing and injuring people in such large numbers that it couldn’t be covered up? The genius technocrats would have been much better off using a saline solution, then declare victory over the “pandemic” with no side effects. No, it seems that there is something important in the shot, and that the idea is to change all of humanity with it. If so, there will have been no crime more diabolical in the history of the world. While patriots thought their love of country and their guns would protect them, Klaus Schwab walked right in the front door and robbed them blind. Full-on psychological warfare of 2020 became biological warfare in 2021, and not a shot was fired. Our enemy were kindly medical personnel with syringes. Bullets don’t stop nano-scale mRNA.
In a 2017 TedX talk, Tal Zaks, the Israeli chief medical officer of Moderna, bragged about “hacking the software of life.” At this point, science revealed hubris perhaps not seen since the development of the atom bomb. We learn from Greek tragedy that there is always a reckoning when man meddles with forces he knows nothing about — in this case, the human genome. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.” The same story goes back to the ancients.
As they go mad, the globalists are on a race to the bottom. They want to get as many people injected as they can before people realize the injections are not only not stopping disease, they are causing it. The masters of the universe have to suppress clear proof that safe conventional medicines effectively treat whatever the illness is called “covid” — how we hate the word! They want as many people as they can enrolled in their social credit system before people realize they’ve fallen into a trap. They want so much of the crime accomplished that it can no longer be reversed.
The race is desperate. New York Mayor deBlasio has declared that the 8 million people who live in the city be segregated according to their injection status, just like Jim Crow. Dictator Dan is re-enacting the Milgram experiment on the entire population of Australia. Emmanuel Macron wants the French to starve to death if they don’t get the “pass sanitaire.” Joe Biden has told employers outright to require the jab as a condition for work, since the federal government can’t legally do it. He has social media doing the same thing with censorship. Colleges and universities are making injection status a condition of enrollment, destroying careers and higher ducation. Variants of “the virus” are being hyped to create more fear, when there was never a valid test for the original. The dark ritual of masking is coming back. Children are again being muzzled in school, and our entire society is being humiliated as the most innocent and least protected among us — children — are publicly abused. The children themselves may come to see their parents and all adults as cowards for not protecting them. The “unvaccinated” are being vilified, with virtue signalers openly suggesting they deserve to be punished. All this is happening apace because so many people will be getting sick from the injections that there will be no way to cover it up. The globalists are acting more like mad scientists than confident leaders serene in their power . . . because they are mad.
We should understand that what the authorities pretend to be incompetence and unfortunate mistakes are actually intended goals. They haven’t destroyed economies or immiserated, injured, and killed thousands of people by mistake. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing their best to cover it up. The next flu season may bring disaster, with large numbers of people getting sick because their immune systems have been seriously damaged by the jab. At that point, the plan may be so obvious that even the brainwashed will wake up.
It is up to us to put a stop to the mass injection program. If only one person changes their mind after seeing our protests, we will have made a difference. It is not too late.
September 5, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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As we’ve been detailing of late, the goalposts in ultra-vaxxed Israel keep perpetually moving after health authorities’ recent initiative to demand all citizens get a third COVID jab. This even as this past week witnessed the small Mediterranean country reach yet more daily case records.
Despite the WHO coming out against countries giving their populations booster shots at this point, Israel has as of Friday issued a third dose to 2.5 million Israelis. Given the likelihood that this too will fail to blunt the growing numbers of infections, naturally the question is: so what next?
You can’t make this up, health authorities are providing this “answer”: “Israel’s national coronavirus czar on Saturday called for the country to begin making preparations to eventually administer fourth doses of the coronavirus vaccine,” The Times of Israel reports.
The ‘coronavirus czar’, Professor Salman Zarka made the statements to Kan national broadcaster:
“Given that that the virus is here and will continue to be here, we also need to prepare for a fourth injection.”
As if bluntly admitting that the country will continue with the very simplistic strategy of ‘throwing more shots’ at the problem, Zarka added, “This is our life from now on, in waves.”
This also all but ensures that the controversial “Green Pass” system will also likely continue expanding and being “updated” indefinitely. Already authorities have said that this form of a ‘vaccine passport’ which gives the holder entry to specified public venues like restaurants, gyms, and publish worship spaces, is subject to expiration depending on if the holder received their second or third dose of the vaccine.
Now Israelis can look forward to a “pass” that will be dependent on getting a fourth vaccine.
Presumably if a forth jab is in the works, the Green Pass will at the same time eventually be voided for people only on their third dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
Unvaccinated after two doses? Israel was also the first to start talking openly about the “pandemic of the vaxxed”…
Given the pass is good for six months since the last jab, this means Israelis might be ordered to get a fourth shot in a mere half-year… and on and on it will go, apparently.
We give it a mere months if not weeks before officials start floating a 5th future shot, or even a 6th. There will be no end.
September 4, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Israel |
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A new report by Arab news outlet Al-Khanadeq has confirmed what many have suspected: the October 17th movement was an attempt to destabilize the Lebanese government.
The protest group suddenly appeared on the scene in 2019, when they took to the streets demanding the government disarm Hezbollah, one of Israel’s most powerful foes in the region, and replace the carefully designed sectarian balance of the state with liberal “technocracy.” They remain active, launching sporadic riots that are openly supported by US figures as diverse as neo-conservative former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Senator Bernie Sanders.
According to an investigation by journalists at Al-Khanadeq, 32,000 activists working for US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were spread out throughout the country and tasked with organizing and seeding the October 17th movement. The network of NGOs are a front for American intelligence services and are openly run out of the US embassy, with controversial ambassador Dorothy Shea serving as their spokeswoman.
Under the auspices of the US State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), 60 “civil society” groups that in 2016 were combined under the “NGOs Are Stronger Together” project by agents of the United States were utilized to help spur unrest. According to Lebanese state records, an estimated 12,000 protesters were full-time paid activists belonging to this coalition, while approximately 20,000 were volunteers recruited and utilized by them.
A USAID report released in 2020 reveals that there are over 8,000 NGOs officially operating in Lebanon, but Lebanese intelligence officials believe the number is closer to 14,000.
US-funded NGOs received a massive influx of cash in the run up to the protests. 259.7million was injected into these groups in the first few months of 2018, which increased to 334.5 million during the same time frame.
Aside from rioters and phony journalists, the US has also been funding the political vehicle for October 17th, the Sabaa Party, which in spring 2018 was able to elect a single parliament candidate, the TV news celebrity Paula Yacoubian, who immediately supported the protesters when they arrived on the scene, including leading a theatrical storming of the parliament.
Yacoubian and her party have been defensive when asked about the opaque funding for Sabaa. According to the party’s leadership, it is bankrolled by a Gulf businessman. Al-Khanadeq disputes this, citing evidence that it is in fact financed and directed by Washington.
It appears that ultimately, the attempt to use “soft” power to turn the Lebanese against Hezbollah and liberalize their society further has failed. Various Jewish and American sponsored regime change operations related to the October 17th movement have fizzled out. Last July, US diplomat David Hale decided to give the Lebanese state a more direct ultimatum: reform or face further economic decline.
September 4, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Lebanon, United States, Zionism |
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It seems that there are to be no dissenting voices on the twentieth anniversary of 9-11. Even film director Spike Lee was forced by media outcry to edit out of his documentary mini-series the half-hour dedicated to skeptics of the official version of the event. Thus the citizenry has been saved from “a bog of heinously dangerous ideas.”
This phrase comes from Slate.com columnist Jeremy Stahl, for whom the alternative theories of 9-11 are “arguments that have been debunked a thousand times.” This, of course, is nonsense. The debate rages to this day. But as with the issue of vaccination against coronavirus, the mainstream media will not brook the least opposition. Stahl puts great stock, for example, in the “three-year-long, $16 million investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” as if these numbers and a solemn-sounding agency title could not possibly be challenged. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the U.S. Government is itself the accused party here, and in similar circumstances has been caught fudging facts. The NIST report has actually taken heavy criticism from Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, the most important group pushing alternative theories of the attack.
Why do journalists favor the government version so fiercely? The sheer vitriol of their attacks on Truthers reflects deep personal anger; clearly no Deep State maven stands over them dictating their articles. In theory, the more onerous discoveries of 9-11 investigators — the presence of explosive material in the dust that spread through Manhattan, the dubious cell-phone calls made from the hijacked aircraft, the impossibly high speeds of low-altitude flight by three of the airplanes — should be red meat to reporters. But all of it is ignored, if not ridiculed. What has happened to this “fifth column” of democracy?
Before television came along, reporters were hacks: working-class guys who wore their suits poorly and smoked too much. Nowadays they are college grads with master’s degrees and big ambitions. Their role models are the millionaire voices of CNN and Eyewitness News anchorpersons. The Internet pipsqueaks who have to beg for donations every three months don’t have three-car garages and sweet vacations every summer. They may get closer to the truth of issues, but they don’t have source lunches on the company dime.
Journalists don’t take long to understand which side of the bread holds the butter. They jump at the well-paying jobs, and slowly the resistance to any type of “conspiracy theory” builds. They instinctively reject the work of armchair detectives, and on several levels.
First is the theoretical level: reporters ought to be able to ferret out the dirt wherever they see it. But they soon realize they can’t: some stories are simply out of bounds. Imagine the journalists — and there must be a great many of them, especially in the New York and Washington areas — who got great tips in the aftermath of 9-11 and saw Pulitzers for the taking. But their editors rubbed their necks and spiked the stories, telling them We are not in the conspiracy business. There is just some news that’s not fit to print, and reporters must stand at the fence and envy those allowed to cross it into the fertile fields beyond.
Next is the professional level: the armchair guys have scooped them. They are the ones who debunked the government’s first hypothesis that the Twin Towers “pancaked” down; who discovered that the Fox News helicopter had altered the image of the second plane hitting the South Tower; who called out reporters for saying that Building Seven had collapsed before it did.
Then the social level. Journalists, by the nature of their work, achieve a kind of fame. They are the kind of people that others like to brag about living next to. Television journalists are recognized in the supermarket, print ones publish their lofty opinions to thousands of readers. They get front-row seats at a political campaign, and now and then rub elbows with movie stars and billionaires. Reporters are not hacks anymore and would resent the suggestion that they are.
The patriotic level. War brings out the worst in journalists. Among many disheartening stories in Seymour Hersh’s memoir Reporter is that he alone reported in detail on the order by an American general to attack retreating Iraqis at the end of the Gulf War — this when the Iraqis had been promised safe passage back to their country from Kuwait. The result was a veritable massacre of unarmed men. “It was a reminder of the Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule,” Hersh wrote: “If it’s a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime.” Weeks before his article, the general got wind of Hersh’s investigation and impugned his integrity; his comments were published widely. Reporters rally both to the flag and the official narrative, and they don’t like seeing either wrinkled.
Even twenty years after 9-11, the patriotic media as one pounced on Spike Lee over his meager half-hour of skepticism, the basic points of which have long ago been circulated and digested by anyone with an interest in the subject. In his article, Stahl worries that the leader of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage, “has never had the type of audience that HBO is offering.” He even sent a letter to HBO objecting to Gage’s appearance.
Which brings us to the top level, that of Thought Police; its symbol is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where pundits, reporters and movie stars alike chortle over the president’s insider humor. Journalists consider themselves a loose sort of club whose duty is to present a smooth narrative and steer the public away from “dangerous ideas.” And the idea that explosives, placed in the buildings weeks before 9-11, brought down the Twin Towers and Building Seven is very dangerous indeed.
So the journalist throws in his or her lot with the government, which itself enjoys the home-court advantage in foreign and security policy: Americans, rarely interested in either, easily accept the government version of events. The journalist does the math: if he or she opposes the official version, their stories will go straight on the spike and their jobs will quickly follow; or they can not oppose, keep their jobs and make useful contributions in other areas of particular interest to them. I would bet that Spike Lee made a similar calculation when he returned to his editing room.
Hence 9-11 truth, like a lot of other truths, falls by the wayside. And when somebody comes along and picks one up and begins a crusade, journalists loathe him. “Gage is responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks,” writes Stahl. Indeed, his article thunders with the rage typical of commentators who have made it big in America’s fraught journalistic landscape.
And having made it big, they are not about to say the system that has set them up with prestige, fame, and a fine lifestyle is full of compromises.
Journalists are conservatives. We cannot depend on them, as CNN reporters nauseatingly aver in their self-congratulatory ads, “to go beneath the surface of a story” and “peel away the layers.” In foreign and security issues, they are fixed like limpets to the story’s surface — and they hate, they despise those free to dig deeper, and who show them up as frauds.
Happy twentieth anniversary, everyone.
September 4, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CNN, Slate.com |
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In April, Japan’s neighbours expressed outrage in over Tokyo’s plans to release 1.23 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater from a storage facility at destroyed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. Japanese authorities have insisted that the wastewater is safe, but environmental groups have contested such claims.
China Global Television Network (CGTN), a Beijing-based English-language TV news service, has poked fun at Japanese authorities over the apparent hypocrisy shown by Tokyo when it comes to the dumping of hazardous wastewater.
In recent weeks, Japanese media, government officials and environmental activists have been up in arms over plans by US forces in Okinawa to dump potentially dangerous chemicals into the local sewage system.
The scandal began to gather steam in June, when the Pentagon reported the leakage of water containing toxic materials from a US Army storage facility in Uruma and other locations across the strategically situated islands. In July, the US military informed Okinawa authorities of plans to release treated but potentially hazardous wastewater to prevent the danger of another leak.
The US military insisted that the wastewater was treated to Japanese government standards and safe to drink, and began dumping it into the local sewage system on 26 August. The water was known to contain trace concentrations of organofluorine compounds, including perfluorooctanesulfonic acid and perfluorooctanoic acid. Scientific studies have indicated that these chemicals can affect the health of wildlife, with the potential to cause reduced immunoglobulin levels and brain asymmetry in offspring, and to result in increased risk of chronic kidney disease and other ailments among humans. The chemicals’ resistance to natural breakup and tendency to accumulate in organisms have led them to be dubbed “forever chemicals.” Japan banned the production of the acids in 2010, and established strict guidelines on safe levels of the substances of less than 50 nanograms per liter of water last year.
The US military informed Japanese authorities of their plans to dump the chemical-laced water less than an hour before starting, and insisted that their wastewater contained less than 2.7 nanograms of the acids.
Okinawa authorities had asked for an immediate halt to the dumping, but the US military apparently ignored their protest, releasing at least 64,000 liters of the potentially toxic wastewater into the sewage system, with the water then dumped into the ocean due to the system’s inability to treat it. Before proceeding with the dump, US forces turned down a local company’s offer to treat the water, deeming it prohibitively expensive.
At a news conference organized on the day the water was dumped, Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki expressed outrage over the release of the contaminated water. “I feel strong outrage that the US military unilaterally dumped the water even while they knew that discussions were proceeding between Japan and the United States on how to handle the contaminated water,” he said.
Last week, Japan’s national authorities formally intervened, with Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi issuing a strong protest and saying that US Marines’ decision to dump the water was “extremely regrettable.”
“Local residents are feeling very anxious,” Koizumi complained, while promising to work with the relevant ministries and Okinawa authorities “to ensure this is handled in an appropriate manner, as well as reconfirm the details with the United States.”
In a separate statement, Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi said that he had asked US forces to please stop dumping any more contaminated water.
Environment Ministry and Defence Ministry officials visited Okinawa this past week to discuss the problem, offering a rare public apology to Masanori Matsugawa, the mayor of Ginowan, Okinawa, the city potentially most heavily affected by the dumping. “We extend our deepest apology,” Makoto Ikeda, the head of the Defence Ministry’s environmental policy division told Matsugawa. “We also consider it extremely regrettable that the water was dumped so suddenly,” he added.
Chinese Media: ‘What goes around comes around’
China’s CGTN poked fun at the Japanese government over the calamity on Saturday, tweeting a political cartoon showing a Japanese man nonchalantly dumping nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, and then complaining as a Marine is pictured dumping hazardous water into Okinawa’s sewage system.
September 4, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | China, Japan, United States |
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I find it extremely unbelievable that nobody will investigate this entire scam for what it is. The people behind the vaccines should be dragged in to testify what is going on. Moderna has admitted it took them only 2 days to create the vaccine. In Texas, they are trying to launch a criminal investigation. The FDA is no longer trustworthy, for the normal time to get anything approved is 12 years. What has been released in less than one year with no animal studies? There has been NO TESTING to determine side effects on pregnancy, fertility, or lactation.
It is just stunning that we have politicians REFUSING to look at anything, probably because they are too busy counting their bribes. The White House said under NO condition would they ever fire Fauci, meaning under NO condition will they investigate anyone.
Meanwhile, even the notorious corrupt Snopes had to admit this is TRUE. Despite demanding everyone gets vaccinated, the White House said its own staff DOES NOT need to be vaccinated provided they are routinely checked. So why is the White House the entire exception? Even the military is demanding 100% compliance. Meanwhile, the White House has demanded everyone else receive vaccinations or lose their job.
The fact that they have skipped animal trials is very disturbing. When the government is part of the conspiracy against the public, we will NEVER know the truth about anything. Jack Dorsey has been especially protective of the narrative. Nobody is allowed to question the government no matter what.
Then there are studies revealing that natural immunity to COVID is 13 times better than the vaccines. They try to bury such studies, and they also try to ensure that they are not peer-reviewed in order to discredit them. The Science journalist Alex Berenson was permanently suspended from Twitter one day after his tweets that reported an Israeli study that making this finding that natural immunity from a prior Covid-19 infection is 13 times more effective than vaccines against the delta variant. Twitter is now acting against the very basis of free speech, which is threatening people’s lives. I would love to see Twitter taken down, for they are clearly now responsible for the deaths of many people from vaccine injuries.
Case Study Immunity
To show that this is one giant cover-up, OSHA has instructed employers NOT TO REPORT vaccine injuries suffered by employees if they only “recommend” the shots. Many employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Nobody should volunteer to be vaccinated to satisfy an employer, for you will not be covered for any injury or loss of pay, and you could be fired for not showing up to work for a period of time. However, if employers mandate vaccines to work, then the vaccine injuries should become subject to reporting, lawsuits, and workman’s comp claims.
September 4, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, Twitter |
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A culture of silence and fear stops people learning what really can happen when you undergo ‘sex change’ operations. The trans lobby tries to portray it as easy and straightforward – yet it’s anything but…
There is an unspoken price being paid for the fashionable transgender theories of our day. There are unseen victims, invisible, though in plain sight. They are hidden because their supporters believe too blindly, and their detractors write them off, and their misery is facilitated by a lack of open discussion and a censorship of the facts.
These victims get overshadowed by the concerns of the general public who are caught in a culture war, by the parents who lose children to this strange and manufactured dogma, and by the disinterested innocents subjected to bewildering pronoun-usage and terrible Netflix adaptations.
These hidden victims are the young transgenders themselves, who are led to believe so strongly that they can ‘change their sex’ that they undergo sex-reassignment surgery, only to find themselves not just disappointed by the result, but horrified.
These are true victims, in the sense that many of them suffer horrific and irreversible physical damage and pain, which often leads to them committing suicide.
You may have heard of these high rates of suicide among transgender people. What many people are not aware of is that this suicide problem is not predominantly due to social rejection, bullying, or self-doubt. It is due to the complex, unnatural, and somewhat shady nature of the surgery involved in ‘sex changes,’ and its after-effects. I will focus in this article on the male-to-female cases, as the list of complications in these operations is long and harrowing.
It should go without saying at this point that a person cannot really change their sex; it comprises your genetic make-up at the molecular level (XX/XY genes). A man who seeks to become a woman will never have a baby. The surgeon’s knife is not a ‘magical’ transformation, it is a complicated cosmetic operation, changing one’s outward appearance. It is a complex, fraught rearranging of flesh.
Many young people today believe (and are being taught) that they can elect their sex like they choose an item of clothing, and go through with ‘surgery’ that will wholly transform them. Often the result leads to disappointment, and there are many stories of regret, and of (too late) reticence just before committing to the operation. These stories are unfashionable to the ears of gender-theory enthusiasts, who wish to forever believe that sex is a fluid and insubstantial thing, and can be easily changed.
With male-to-female surgeries, post operative complications occur at a rate of 32.5% (that is a one-in-three chance of complication), and there is a re-operation rate of 21.7%. This is insanely high for any kind of medical procedure, let alone considering this is an elective surgery, and one that is performed, generally, on healthy, functioning bodies. They now call it ‘gender affirmation surgery’ so that even the language is deceptively adapted to sound positive and non-threatening.
In this sense, medical ethics and genuine concern (not virtue signalling) for these young people appears to be out the window.
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
It is not often discussed (likely because it is not a topic for the squeamish) exactly what are the common complications resulting from modern sex-change surgeries. If you can bear it, I will attempt to elucidate a few of the male-to-female complications, while seeking not to be overly graphic. Those who are faint of heart may wish to stop reading here.
The patient’s “neovagina” is partly constructed from an inverted scrotum and penis, therefore any hair-bearing skin used for the “neo-urethra” can cause chronic infection and obstruction. In vaginoplasty, failure to perform preoperative or intraoperative hair removal can lead to inaccessible hair deep within the vagina. This can result in a hairball, which can be a nidus for debris and infection. Infections are common and known to be incredibly painful, according to sufferer accounts.
There is no natural lubrication for a neovagina. In a procedure called colovaginoplasty, a lubricant is sourced by opening up the abdomen and using part of the colon to join the gap and make the vagina. The lubrication comes from the bowel, and is constant (not based on arousal). Post-op patient questions vary from, ‘Is it dangerous for my partner to ingest this lubricant?’, to ‘Will I need to wear a pad forever?’ (Often, yes).
Another complication is known as a Rectoneovaginal Fistula, which is an ‘abnormal connection between the rectum and neovagina’. The result is that the neovagina begins to secrete fecal matter, resulting in permanent diaper-wearing. There are many difficulties that can arise when you decide to open a new hole in your pelvis that was not there naturally.
Sufferers have complained about ‘never being able to have sex again’ – in some ways an odd complaint after making the decision to castrate yourself. Another common complaint is the necrotising of the neovagina, where the constructed vagina (or portions of it) simply dies off.
The surgery in general requires perpetual clinical follow-up and post-op monitoring, as well as a lifetime reliance on estrogen and other medication.
The wider trans community and the wealthy trans lobby do not want any such negative information about transgenderism to get out. They maintain that it is impossible to tell the difference between a vagina and a negovagina, but this is not true. Many who undergo the procedure learn the hard way that they have caused irreversible damage to themselves, and their suicide rates are astronomical. There are many stories of chronic pain and tissue necrosis that are too graphic to relay, and there is too much fear of censorship and legal threats from the trans lobby for sufferers to speak out.
The sad result of this is that many confused kids, often encouraged by virtue-signalling parents and teachers, are being led down the path that leads to these horrors. Nobody seems to care about the realities that await them, that there is a very high chance their lives will be ruined and they will suffer great pain and remorse. Yet the gender theory activists still pretend that you can easily change your sex with surgery.
These people require rigorous mental health treatment, real role models, and a society which does not encourage them to mutilate themselves.
Brett Sinclair is an author, artist, historian, op-ed writer and blogger who has worked for several national magazines in Canada and international media.
September 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular |
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