What “community standards” did this comment breach? #18
OffGuardian | February 20, 2019
The following comment – posted to twitter by Craig Murray – was censored by The Guardian. Which of the well-publicised CiF “community standards” did they breach?
Removed comment, posted under this live news feed earlier today:
Screen shot of where it used to be:
For those of you unfamiliar with the video Craig linked to, or the story connected with it: In 2017 Joan Ryan MP was secretly recorded having conversations with employees of the Israeli embassy, in which she appeared to be accepting large amounts of money in order to influence other MPs.:
This recording was released as part of the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. In the same documentary is this clip where an Israeli embassy employee discusses a plan to “take down” Jeremy Corbyn.
Seven of the eight (so far) Labour defectors were members of the Labour Friends of Israel. Joan Ryan was the chair.
But back to Craig’s comment, and its removal: Which of the Guardian’s “community standards” did it break?
- Does it “misrepresent the Guardian and its journalists”?
- Is it “persistent trolling or mindless abuse”?
- Is it “spam-like”? Or “obviously commercial”?
- Is it “racism, sexism, homophobia or hate-speech”?
- Is it “extremely offensive of threatening?”?
- Is it “flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations”?
- Is it not “relevant”?
If none of the above – why was it taken down?
“Hyperalarming” study cited by WAPO was hype
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 11, 2019
Confirmation that the GWPF have sent a formal complaint to PNAS, regarding the paper published by them on insect decline last October:
The scientific paper behind newspaper claims that insect populations were threatened with extinction was based on data known to be unreliable. That’s according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which today called for the paper to be withdrawn.
The paper, by US scientists Bradford C Lister and Andres Garcia, claimed that a rapid decline in insect populations in a rainforest in Puerto Rico was the result of rising temperatures. The Washington Post called the study “hyperalarming”, while the Guardian discussed climate change causing “insect collapse”.
However, the authors’ evidence that temperatures had, in fact, risen turns out to be based on a single weather station, which was known to be unreliable because of undocumented changes to equipment and location resulting in a substantial and abrupt increase in recorded temperatures in September 1992.
Since 1992, temperatures at this station have actually declined.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has issued a formal complaint to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the journal that published the article, asking that the paper be withdrawn.
‘Secret’ Pentagon Report: Climate Catastrophe Due Next Year
By Paul Matthews | Climate scepticism | January 18, 2019
A classic from the Guardian/Observer archives, from February 2004:
The article is so absurd that it hardly needs any commentary. After explaining that Britain will be Siberian by next year according to a suppressed report, it goes on to claim that the ‘findings’ of the report will embarrass the climate-denying president:
The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.
The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Climate change ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.
An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.
Later on we are told more details of the catastrophes that will occur by 2020:
Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.
Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. ‘This is depressing stuff,’ he said. ‘It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.’
Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. ‘We don’t know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,’ he said.
Of course the authors of the report, Randall and Schwartz, aren’t climate scientists. But their report gets the glowing endorsement of two leading UK climate scientists — Sir John Houghton, former boss of the Met Office and IPCC co-chair, and former IPCC chair Bob Watson:
Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office – and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism – said: ‘If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.’
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
‘Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It’s going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush’s single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,’ added Watson.
Hugely embarrassing indeed, but for Watson, not Bush. Why would a senior scientist like Bob Watson say that a report claiming global catastrophe by 2020 is non-wacko and should be taken seriously? Well there’s a hint that politics may be a factor, later on in the article:
So dramatic are the report’s scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush’s stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.
The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry’s cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed ‘Yoda’ by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence’s push on ballistic-missile defence.
Is it not rather worrying that the defence of the USA is in the hands of people who produce such garbage?
This Pentagon report was cited in a recent article Climate Change and National Security, Part II: How Big a Threat is the Climate?
The consequences of abrupt, severe warming for national security are obvious in general, if unclear in the specifics. In 2003, the Defense Department asked a contractor to explore such a scenario. The resulting report outlined the offensive and defensive national security strategies countries may adopt if faced with abrupt climate change, and highlighted the increased risk of inter- and intra-state conflict over natural resources and immigration. Although the report may be off in its imagined timeframe (positing abrupt climate change by 2020), the world it conjures is improbable but not outlandish.
This is a bit like the doomsday cults that say that the world is going to end this year, and then when that doesn’t happen, say it’s going to happen next year. Even more comically, a few paragraphs before acknowledging that the 2003 report got it wrong, the article claims that “Scientists can predict the consequences of climate change to 2050 with some measure of certainty”.
That article also provides a link to the Pentagon climate report by Schwartz and Randall, dated October 2003.
By looking at the report, we can see to what extent it is in itself complete nonsense, and to what extent it was misrepresented by the Observer’s journalists. As usual in the game of Climate Chinese Whispers, there’s an element of both. The report starts with a boxed disclaimer, acknowledging that “We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.” The Observer journalists Townsend and Harris quite dishonestly only quote the second half of that sentence.
The report plays a common climate game — we’re not making a prediction, we’re setting out a scenario — but then sets out its scenario like this:
thereby making it very easy for a journalist to accidentally or deliberately interpret it as a prediction.
Where did Schwartz and Randall get all this from? Did they just make it up? At the beginning, they say that they “interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts.”
But who were these leading climate scientists? As far as I can see, only one climate scientist is mentioned in the report — notorious fraudster Peter Gleick.
More Child Exploitation as the Globalist Climate Project Creates its very own Bana Persona
By Barbara McKenzie | December 15, 2018
People who followed with awful fascination the Bana account, designed to facilitate the destruction of Syria, will have a sense of deja vu at the arrival on the ‘climate’ scene of another shocking example of cynical child exploitation and manipulation: that of Swedish girl Greta Thunberg.
The Bana Alabed twitter account tweeted ostensibly from Aleppo in the months leading up to its liberation from terrorist forces. Her task was to claim war crimes on the part of “Assad” and Russia and demand action on Syria from world leaders, WIII if necessary, but at least a Libya-style “no-fly-zone”.
From the age of seven Bana Alabed has been shamelessly exploited by the world’s media, forced to dissemble, to take part in bogus interviews where she clearly had no idea of what she was saying, and to pose with a series of mature men from terrorists to Erdogan to UNICEF’s Justin Forsyth. Although she became a citizen of Turkey, there is no evidence that Bana has ever been to school in Turkey, or given the opportunity to learn the Turkish language,. Instead, she has been given the star treatment, appearing at conferences and flying all over the world (The Crucifixion of Bana Alabed). At the same time her role as a puppet exposes her to eternal ridicule.
We are now being treated to another gruesome spectacle of child abuse, the creation of the Greta Thunberg persona. At 15 Greta is older than Bana, but is self-described as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a fact which if anything appears to make the exploitation more acceptable in the eyes of the mainstream and ‘alternative’ media). Bana has been a media star from the age of seven – all the signs indicate that normal life is over for Greta Thunberg too. (For further information on Greta, she now has her own Wikipedia page, in eight languages.)
Greta Thunberg’s function is not to call for destruction, but on the contrary, to warn of impending doom for the planet if we do not do something about CO2 – presumably something which gives more power to the United Nations and helps pave the way for global government. She first hit the headlines with a call to school children to strike to save the climate.
Being both older and a citizen of Sweden, many of the flaws in the Bana accounts are not obvious with Greta. When her account opened Bana’s spoken English was non-existent, and so the contrast between the speech in her videos and the perfectly idiomatic English of her tweets was positively embarrassing. In the case of Greta, however, one could argue that a well-educated Swedish girl might just have the immaculate English of her speeches. Furthermore, the completely passionless delivery of her claims of ‘climate breakdown’ and fast-approaching ‘extinction’ can be put down to her Asperger’s Syndrome.
As with the Bana account, but even more so, Greta’s social media accounts are completely focused on the task in hand (creating ‘climate panic’ in defiance of the facts), and certainly nothing like what might be expected from a 15 year-old, Aspergers or no Aspergers. The Facebook account is series of self-promotional posts with no interraction with comments. The list of people that Greta follows on twitter parallels in an eerie fashion those favoured by Bana Aalbed: world leaders and major political figures such as Antonio Guterres and Bernie Sanders, climate and environment accounts like Soros-funded Greenpeace and WWF (i.e. all supporting the UN’s climate/world government project), like-minded celebrities such as Michael Moore and Ricky Gervais, and like-minded media such as the Guardian.
Bana was never more than media and political spin, promoted by the likes of the New York Times and the BBC, as well of course by the United Nations, but without any mass following. Although she bought up thousands of twitter followers, the majority of comments on her tweets came either from critics or from obvious trolls or bots with a handful of followers. At the very least the same thing will happen with Greta, however the plan is more ambitious. There are clearly genuine hopes of galvanising the world’s youth in her support.
Greta works in tandem with Extinction Rebellion (XR), which appears to be the climate cult’s Antifa, promoting civil disobedience in order to force action on the ‘climate emergency’ (see Frances Leader, From Occupy to Extinction Rebellion: Exposing the Common Purpose).
Within a few short months Greta’s stature was such that she was invited to address the UN’s Climate Change Conference at Katowice, making her plea for ‘climate justice’.
Extinction Rebellion and Greta are both heavily promoted by media specialising in climate catastrophism, from the Guardian’s George Monbiot
to ‘independent analysts’ Media Lens.
Greta was motivated, it seems, by a heatwave in Sweden, due of course to “climate change” -never mind the fact that Swedish high temperature records go back many decades, still unbroken by July 2018, which is hardly consistent with runaway global warming whatever may have happened later that summer.
Greta’s very first tweet back in June 2018 was to post an article (in English of course) which warned that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
For the first time in 33 million years, it seems, we are almost at a point where there is no ice at either pole. ‘The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,[…] with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years’.
This is obviously claptrap, the Arctic was never anywhere melting away, and latest reports indicate that the poles are putting on ice. The earth has not returned to the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period when Greenland was colonised – how can we be approaching temperatures not seen in 33 million years?
Being both older and a citizen of Sweden, many of the flaws in the Bana accounts are not obvious with Greta. When her account opened Bana’s spoken English was non-existent, and so the contrast between the speech in her videos and the perfectly idiomatic English of her tweets was positively embarrassing. In the case of Greta, however, one could argue that a well-educated Swedish girl might just have the immaculate English of her speeches. Furthermore, the completely passionless delivery can be put down to her Asperger’s Syndrome.
As with the Bana account, Greta’s social media accounts are completely focused on the task in hand (creating ‘climate panic’ in defiance of the facts), and certainly nothing like what might be expected from a 15 year-old, Aspergers or no Aspergers. The list of people that Greta follows on twitter parallels in an eerie fashion those favoured by Bana: world leaders and major political figures such as Antonio Guterres and Bernie Sanders, climate and environment accounts like Soros-funded Greenpeace and WWF (i.e. all supporting the UN’s climate/world government project), like-minded celebrities such as Michael Moore and Ricky Gervais, and like-minded media such as the Guardian.
As with the Bana account, there is growing concern at the unashamed exploitation of Greta Thunberg:
The spectacle of the globalist media using a young girl in order to panic the world into giving more power to the United Nations is both bizarre and horrifying.
Thousands of the world’s scientists (see here and here) have called climate alarmism a hoax. However, ludicrous as it may seem, we are expected to ignore the facts about geological history, Co2 and global climate, and to follow the lead of a 15 year old who parrots arrant nonsense embedded in unending cliché, on the say-so of the likes of George Monbiot and Media Lens, the very people who have themselves been parroting the same nonsense for years.
And as with Bana Alabed, the media serving the globalist agenda have absolutely no qualms about the callous exploitation and manipulation of a child in order to further the goal of world government.
See also:
Jamie Spry, Global Warming Is The Greatest And Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud In History
Windows on the World have produced a series of articles and videos on Extinction Rebellion, see Globalist Fake Revolution
A large number of people have pointed out the function of the climate scare is actually to scare the world’s populace into accepting an ever increasing role for the United Nations, and eventually global government by the Club of Rome elite that control the corrupt United Nations bureaucracy. See for example Agenda 21: The Plan for a Global Fascist Dictatorship. or Maurice Newman, The Corrupted UN Must Not Be Allowed to Lecture Us.
BuzzFeed’s Cohen Lies Just Latest Example of Embarrassing ‘RussiaGate’ Hysteria
By Kit Klarenberg | Sputnik | January 21, 2019
In a bombshell report, on 17 January BuzzFeed claimed Donald Trump had told his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the specifics of the ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ project — a felony, and indeed an impeachable one.
Other news outlets the world over eagerly regurgitated the story, and Democratic lawmakers on social media and indeed on the floor of the US legislature advocated kickstarting impeachment proceedings.
However, in an unprecedented move, the very next day special counsel Robert Mueller broke with his 20-month-long convention of not commenting on news reports relating to his investigation by announcing the story wasn’t true. Moreover, he was critical of BuzzFeed’s failure to contact his representatives and ask for verification on the story before publication.
History of Fabulism
Not long after Mueller’s denial, more critical voices began scrutinizing the report. Many noted Jason Leopold — one of the reporters on the story — had previously been involved in another epic ‘fake news’ fiasco at BuzzFeed relating to Russia. In November 2017, he authored a story which claimed the FBI was investigating records indicating in August 2016 the Russian Foreign Ministry sent US$30,000 to its embassy in Washington for “election financing”.
A shock story evidently written for maximum ‘clickbait’ value, Leopold — almost certainly consciously — opted to bury the fact the payments related to Russia’s own elections in September 2016, in which expatriate Russians were permitted to vote in their adopted home countries. As of January 2019, the article hasn’t been removed from web, although a qualifier has been added to its introductory paragraph.
Jason Leopold
Others expressed shock Leopold was still employed by any media outlet at all, for as Colombia Journalism Review documented back in 2006, his lengthy career has been typified by controversy, ignominy and dishonesty.
For instance, in August 2002 Leopold wrote an article for Salon claiming then-Secretary of the Army and former Enron vice chair Thomas White knew more about the company’s infamously questionable accounting practices than he’d admitted up to that time. The key piece of evidence for the allegation was an internal Enron email that was apparently leaked to Leopold by an anonymous source — but after he was unable to produce a copy when asked by his editor, and it was revealed he’d plagiarised portions of the piece from the Financial Times, it was pulled from the website.
In a perversely ironic twist, in 2005 Leopold’s memoir (Off the Record), in which he pledged to come clean about all the “lying, cheating and backstabbing” he’d engaged in over the course of his journalistic career and set the ‘record’ straight on his various ignominious departures from media organisations (including the Los Angeles Times and Dow Jones ), was dumped by planned publisher Rowman & Littlefield just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue.
Leopold had claimed the source in question, Steven Maviglio — spokesperson for then-California Governor Gray Davis — had told him he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information”, which was apparently totally untrue.
The next year, Leopold again landed in hot water when he published a story for Truthout claiming Karl Rove “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” he was due to be indicted in the Valerie Plame scandal. In the piece, he said multiple anonymous sources had confirmed Rove’s indictment “was imminent” — mere days later prosecutors confirmed Rove would not face charges. Despite this, Truthout chief Marc Ash stood by the story despite a lack of corroboration elsewhere and furious denials from all named in the story for some time.
Standing By
Intriguingly, there were shades of Ash’s response in BuzzFeed’s reaction to Mueller’s denials — namely, the outlet stood by the story, not only refusing to retract it, but “reconfirming” it — and editor-in-chief Ben Smith vehemently defended his decision to publish in a much-ridiculed interview on CNN, claiming the reporting would be “borne out” by future disclosures.
Other outlets have chosen to retract and/or correct their reporting on the story — although, journalist Doug Henwood has noted while New York Times covered the report on the front page of its print edition, its correction was buried on page 11 the next day.
Despite BuzzFeed’s defence of the story, it’s likely to go down as yet another utterly embarrassing mainstream media ‘RussiaGate’ failure in a very long line — stories which have briefly generated borderline-hysteria on social media and cable news, but been proven to be utterly without foundation in short order. Here are some of the most notorious.
Manafort Meeting Never Was
On 27 November 2018, The Guardian published a seismic exclusive report authored by Luke Harding that claimed Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and now-convicted felon, met with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on three separate occasions.
The story stretched believability to breaking point — Manafort somehow managed to enter and exit the Embassy without being photographed, filmed or even noticed, and left no record of his presence in the building’s visitor log — and was based entirely on anonymous sources.
WikiLeaks immediately issued a vehement denial, declaring the story to be completely “fabricated” and noting the paper had given them virtually no time to respond prior to publication. Within hours, the organisation had set up a legal fund seeking donations in order to sue The Guardian for libel, and were calling for the resignation of Editor Katherine Viner. The paper responded by softening the report’s wording significantly, making clear it was based entirely on unverifiable allegations from anonymous sources, rather than anything even approaching actual evidence.
In less than a day, what Harding and Viner had evidently hoped would be the journalistic scoop of the year was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in news reporting since Germany’s Stern magazine published ‘The Hitler Diaries’ in 1983, a disaster that could severely — and enduringly — damage the reputation of The Guardian and land the paper in significant legal hot water. Despite this, the story was uncritically regurgitated by news outlets the world over. As of January 21, neither Harding nor Viner has retracted or apologized for the piece.
Dates Mixed Up
On 9 December 2017, CNN claimed Donald Trump Jr. was offered advanced access to the notorious DNC and Podesta email troves by WikiLeaks — a smoking gun proving the Trump campaign had colluded with WikiLeaks to undermine Hillary Clinton. The story was then backed up by MSNBC, with intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian breathlessly claiming to have “independent confirmation” of the story.
It would be mere hours before the incendiary story would be completely shredded by reality. In truth, Trump Jr. had been apprised of the email dumps’ existence by a member of the public 10 days after their release. The assorted anonymous sources who’d confirmed the story to both networks had evidently all got their dates mixed up, or indeed were lying — or didn’t even exist perhaps, as both networks’ refusal to name their sources may imply.
The pair’s determination to cover up their colossal journalistic failure doesn’t end there — both have deleted every trace of the story from their official websites and YouTube channels, and attempts by individual users to upload their own copies invariably result in copyright claims and deletion.
Just Ain’t Crickets
In another major disaster for MSNBC — and its star reporter Dilanian — in September 2018, the network repeatedly claimed Russia was the primary suspect in “mysterious” attacks giving US diplomatic staff in Cuba “brain injuries”.
“Sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon were likely used on the government workers… [they are] so sophisticated the Americans don’t even fully understand it,” Dilanian said.
Subsequent reports claimed CIA intercepts of Russian communications backed up the conclusion the Kremlin was directing the dastardly brain damaging blasts. Such was the ferocity of the reporting — and the seriousness of the allegations — Republican Senator Cory Gardner appeared on the network to say Russia should now be classified a “terror state”.
MSNBC carried on with their microwave weapon crusade despite academics casting significant doubt on their analysis — it would not be until January 2019 the story would be totally debunked, when two scientists — Alexander Stubbs of Berkeley and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the UK’s University of Lincoln — published a study based on recordings of the sounds embassy personnel complained of hearing, and blamed for their “brain damage”, revealing the ‘microwave weapons’ to in fact be…Caribbean crickets during mating season.
READ MORE:
‘Not Accurate’: Mueller Refutes BuzzFeed Cohen Scoop
Cuban Horror Stories: How US Scares Investors Off From the Island — Pundits
US Questioning Ecuadorian Embassy Staff Over Debunked Assange-Manafort Story
As Guardian’s Manafort-Assange Story Exposed as Fake, Ex-CIA Agent Blames Russia
Buzzfeed, Question Time & the purpose of Fake News
Image source
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | January 19, 2019
Two days ago BuzzFeed published a front page story, under a “BREAKING” banner, headlined: President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project
In the article, Buzzfeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier claim to have been told, by two anonymous sources, that Robert Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation had evidence Donald Trump had instructed his lawyer to lie to Congress. That would be a felony, and obviously an impeachable offence.
The reaction of the news media and associated twitterati was as quick as it was predictable. MSNCBC, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian… the usual suspects. They were all over it within hours.
But then, less than a day later, Robert Mueller’s spokesperson Peter Carr issued this statement:
BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate,”
Despite this, BuzzFeed is sticking to its guns. Insisting that Mueller’s statement is vague, and therefore does not undercut the heart of their story.
The rest of the mainstream media are sensing the tone though and jumping ship. The Washington Post – not known for their pro-Trump slant – ran an editorial pointing out the scarcity of Mueller’s public comment (this the first statement Mueller has ever issued concerning evidence or claims in the press), and arguing that the rush to refute the BuzzFeed article means it is probably completely false.
Nevertheless, BuzzFeed has not retracted or altered their story in any way – except for putting in one small paragraph reporting that Mueller’s office disputes their story. There is no note of the update, and the rest of the story remains unchanged.
There is a striking parallel here, with a story Luke Harding contributed to The Guardian in late November last year: “Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy”
The article claimed Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort had met with Julian Assange at least three times prior to the 2016 Presidential Election. No evidence was produced, save the word of “unnamed intelligence officials”, “secret Ecuadorian documents” and the like. While the predictable news outlets picked up the story and ran with it with the eagerness of a 6-month-old Golden Retriever, we in the alternative media were quick to point out the logical and factual deficiencies in the story.
Within hours, The Guardian had edited its language to be rather more circumspect, and include the denials made by both accused parties. The edits made to the article were not noted or highlighted in any way, we only know they exist because of internet archives. The next day The Guardian released a brief, terse, defensive statement. That statement was itself refuted by both Manafort and WikiLeaks. As of today, WikiLeaks is actively pursuing legal action in this case.
Later, it was revealed that a key contributor to the story had been previously been convicted of forgery.
No apology has been made, and no retraction issued, no explanation given. Both the editor, Katherine Viner, and Luke Harding have been totally silent on the topic.
So, in the last 2 months both Buzzfeed and The Guardian have issued “BREAKING NEWS” stories that made bold claims, but were not backed up with any evidence. Both these stories were shown to be untrue in less than 24 hours.
Anonymous sources are a common area here – both stories rely exclusively on the word of “unnamed sources” from either “the intelligence services” or “government agencies”. Anonymous sources are the batarangs on the propagandist’s utility belt. Flexible, simple, timeless.
Anonymity allows government agencies to leak misinformation on purpose, without hurting their credibility. It allows newspapers to control public opinion without having any actual facts on hand. It allows intelligence agencies to plant narratives they may want to revisit, or to give targets of blackmail operations a warning. And, most obviously, it allows journalists to simply make stuff up.
I don’t know which specific class these two stories fall into – but I do know it’s one or all of them.
So we come to the question of motive: BuzzFeed and The Guardian must have known there was no evidence to back up their assertions (yet, anyway). They must know the “significant minority” of the population who believe “conspiracy theories about their own government” will research and refute these claims.
So why publish them?
Well, in the Guardian’s case, every story demonising Assange discredits WikiLeaks’ future output, whilst also softening public sympathy for Assange in preparation for potential extradition of to the US. All the mainstream press have turned on WikiLeaks, but The Guardian – for some reason – has a particularly strong institutional axe to grind with WikiLeaks, and specifically Julian Assange.
Similarly, every “Russia bad!” story primes the public to accept increased defence spending, increased control of the internet by the government and increased social media censorship. It is very much the gift that keeps on giving in that regard.
In BuzzFeed’s case, it has been apparent for a while now that the Mueller investigation is likely to fizzle. Articles and interviews from various media sources have been prepping the public for a “let down” for a few weeks. At this point, there is no case for impeaching Trump. But the Deep State still needs to keep him over a barrel.
Trump has been a disappointment to his base and is yet to implement half the policies he discussed on the campaign trail, but he’s not fully and totally being controlled by the warhawking Deep State yet, either. His policy of peace with North Korea and decisions to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan show that there is a tug-of-war ongoing inside the administration. It’s probably no coincidence that this latest of many “bombshells” comes so quickly on the heels of Trump’s announcement of the Syria withdrawal.
Careful “leaks”, planted stories and social media witch-hunts remind Trump how precarious his position is, whilst simultaneously distracting the public – both pro-Trump and anti-Trump – from real issues.
The case-specific “why?” doesn’t matter so much as the general aim of this type of manipulation. The important question is: Why does the media tell lies if they know they will be revealed as such?
Clearly, the lies serve a purpose, regardless of their retraction or qualification.
Telling a lie loudly and then taking it back quietly is an old propaganda trick – it allows the paper to maintain a facade of “accountability”. The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It’s a method that can be used to distract and disseminate and divide.
The accuracy of the statement is immaterial. The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: “Assange was working for Russia”, “Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress”, “Russia hacked the US election”, “Donald Trump worked for the KGB”, “Assad gassed his own people”, “Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite”.
The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence, fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified.
That is the purpose of “fake news”, to forge the Empire’s “created reality”, and force us all to live in it. These are world-shaping, policy-informing, news-dominating narratives… and are nothing but feathers in the wind.
A perfect examplar of this occurred just two days ago on the BBC’s flagship Political debate show Question Time.
The (notionally impartial) host not only sided with right-wing author Isabel Oakeshott in criticising Labour’s polling, but then joined in mocking the Labour MP Diane Abbott for attempting to correct the record.
Both Oakeshott and Fiona Bruce, the host, were factually incorrect – as shown a hundred times over since. But that doesn’t matter. The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. “Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise is a laughingstock”.
The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.
That’s why fake news is so important to them, and so dangerous us.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Integrity Initiative: By all means smear & attack, but at least be honest about it
By Simon Rite | RT | January 13, 2019
We’ve all met those people who describe themselves as laid back, when in reality they’re just one loud noise from a mouth frothing breakdown. So when something describes itself as having integrity, be wary.
Enter the Integrity Initiative (II), Britain’s very own government funded influence network which is currently in the process of having its underpants revealed to the world. There’s no doubting it’s an initiative, the jury’s out on the other bit. Some of the people behind it are alleged former spies (can you be a former spy?), a calling not often linked to integrity.
There’s a good chance you may not know much about the Integrity Initiative, the mainstream media is not exactly straining to tell you about it. Labour MP Chris Williamson suggests that’s because a number of mainstream journalists have signed up to work with it.
The only time II briefly attracted the attention of the mainstream world was when it became clear it had been pushing conspiracies about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s links to the Kremlin. That’s not a good look for an organization which receives cash from the Foreign Office.
It describes itself as non-partisan, but then as we’ve discussed, it also has “Integrity” in the title. Maybe it can get away with it, always worth a try I suppose. It also claims to be “combating propaganda and disinformation,” but as you’ll see for yourself on its Twitter account, it’s simply a stream of invective and criticism about Russia. If you want to spend cash smearing an entire nation, fine, fill your boots, but don’t then act all moral about it.
Integrity Initiative deals in propaganda, mainly against Russia, and if anyone involved tries to deny that, then they’ve clearly been drinking their own Kool Aid. Of course, it defends itself by saying it’s on the front line of the fight against so-called Russian disinformation, which is a pretty wide category these days. But it doesn’t matter if it’s propaganda you agree with or disagree with, it’s still propaganda.
One of its main aims is to put together what it calls ‘clusters’ of journalists, writers and the like who are sympathetic to the cause. If you’ve been paying attention, you won’t be surprised to find out who are making up those clusters.
Some of those journalists who have had their links revealed are carefully backtracking. One interesting form of mea culpa from some of them is to admit that while they did do some work for II, they didn’t get paid much to do it, which is a curious defense if you think about it. If you’re involved in something you might feel the need to defend in the future, at least make sure you getting paid! About £200 for a talk or an article seems to be the going rate if you’re interested.
Good luck to anyone signing up to work with II, we’ve all got mortgages to pay, there’s no judgement from me, but at least take responsibility for it. And if you really didn’t know you were engaging in propaganda, then perhaps a period of self-reflection is in order.
Guardian journalist James Ball, for example, wrote a column in which he came clean on his links to II (he gave a training talk for about 225 quid) but there was no real self-reflection. The headline “When free societies copy Russian media tactics, there’s only one winner” is indicative of the myopia which drives the movement against so-called Russian disinformation. Even when he is literally caught up in a Western government funded propaganda effort, he somehow still manages to reflect it back on Russia. Moscow made me do it!
Ball goes on to lament the hacking of Integrity Initiative in a newspaper which revelled in publishing juicy stories from WikiLeaks.
He even analyses the events around the Salisbury poisoning by saying: “Russian-backed outlets and supporters threw question after question to cast doubt on the official narrative.”
There we have it, the biggest crime of all – casting doubt on the official narrative.
Real Crickets, Fake News
By Patrick ARMSTRONG | Strategic Culture Foundation | 14.01.2019
You’re an American diplomat. Posted to Cuba. You compose yourself for peaceful slumber, as an innocent American dip should… What’s that noise? Whine, buzz. Get up. Lights on. Look. Nothing. Head on pillow. Whine, buzz. We’ve all been kept up nights by some unidentifiable sound. You promise yourself you won’t listen to it. Aha, it’s stopped… no, there it is again. Another night of tossing and turning. Very understandable. The next morning you tell a colleague, heard it too, another hadn’t but can’t help listening. Soon everybody is awake listening to this irritating noise. Doctors come, check people out and find this and that (as ageing apes we all have something. Is there any before and after take on these injuries?) This is happening in Cuba, a country richly furnished with noisy insects. At some point, this irritating sound, that could be insects, morphs into something more sinister: “‘microwave hearing,’ also known as the Frey effect” for example.
The US Embassy in Havana re-opened in July 2015. About a year later, it was reported that some American diplomats complained about strange noises. The Guardian reported the story using numerous variations on the word “attack”. Crickets are mentioned, but only to be dismissed; “But this is Cuba”, wink, wink, nudge, nudge; Russia peeps above the horizon:
In fact, almost nothing about what went down in Havana is clear. Investigators have tested several theories about an intentional attack: by Cuba’s government, a rogue faction of its security forces, a third country like Russia or some combination thereof. Yet they’ve left open the possibility an advanced espionage operation went horribly awry, or that some other, less nefarious explanation is to blame.
Attacks – the story builds. A recording is produced (verrry irritating; keep anybody awake). “High pitched cricket sound”. That’s because they are insects say the Cubans. The phrasing of the AP report that covered the Cuban findings has to be read to be believed: it’s written in the sneering tone that tells you to ignore them:
Cuba on Thursday presented its most detailed defense to date against U.S. Accusations… Cuban officials attempted to undermine the Trump administration’s assertion… alleged was a lack of evidence for the U.S. Accusations… an exhaustive investigation ordered by “the highest government authorities,” a clear reference to President Raul Castro… Thursday night’s special did not present an alternate explanation for the facts presented by U.S. officials, with one significant exception…
What a dishonest way to cover a report by Cuban specialists saying we compared the recordings with cicada sounds and there was a good fit. Fortunately, as we shall see, honest people did follow that lead.
American tourists are solemnly warned “Exercise increased caution in Cuba due to attacks targeting U.S. Embassy”. Washington expels Cuban diplomats and the Guardian helpfully tells us:
Cuba employs a massive state security apparatus that keeps hundreds and possibly thousands of people under constant surveillance. US diplomats are among the most closely monitored people on the island. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to take action against an American diplomat without an element of the Cuban state being aware.
So the state of play as of the end of 2017 is this. Facts: noises, medical findings, investigations, expulsions. Speculation, they’re “attacks”, the Cuban authorities control everything and the insect explanation should be laughed at. Next year it’s China’s turn.
But at last, in September 2018, the Russian sun rises over the horizon.
The suspicion that Russia is likely behind the alleged attacks is backed up by evidence from communications intercepts, known in the spy world as signals intelligence, amassed during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence… If Russia did use a futuristic weapon to damage the brains of U.S. personnel, it would mark a stunning escalation in Russian aggression toward Western nations, compounded recently by the use of a military-grade nerve agent to poison an ex-spy and his daughter in Britain.
Love the juxtaposition of “suspicion”, “likely” and “alleged”: how many degrees of uncertainty is that? You have to wonder whether an Integrity-challenged Initiative clusteroid gave that little gem to NBC – the “signals intelligence” will probably turn out to be a five-year-old RT report about insomnia. Also note that the US military “has been working to reverse-engineer the weapon or weapons used to harm the diplomats”.
Ensorcelled by this “un-elaborated” “intelligence”, the Gadarene media swine rush straight for the cliff:
- Did Russia Attack U.S. Officials in Cuba? U.S.S.R. Used Microwaves Against American Diplomats During Cold War (Newsweek)
- Russia Is No. 1 Suspect in Mystery Brain Attacks in Cuba and China: Report (Daily Beast)
- Russia Might Be Behind Those Sonic Attacks on U.S. Government Workers in Cuba and China (Fortune)
- The U.S. Now Believes RUSSIA May Be Behind Sonic Attacks On Americans In Cuba And China (Daily Wire)
- So the Russians were ‘sonic-ing’ down in Cuba? (American Thinker)
- Russia main suspect behind illnesses of US staff in Cuba and China – report (Guardian)
- Russia suspected in Cuba mystery ‘attacks’ against US diplomats (NBC)
- Report: Experts Suspect Cuba May Have Had Russian Help in ‘Sonic’ Diplomat Attacks (Breitbart)
Altogether a perfect illustration of how fake news is built.
► Step One. Something that could be lots of things but we’ll call it an attack.
► Step Two. Attacks have attackers, so who is it? (I find it interesting that they weren’t quite ready to blame Havana, although they expelled a few Cuban diplomats: “‘I still believe that the Cuban government, someone within the Cuban government can bring this to an end,’ Tillerson added.”)
► Step Three. Drum roll… Putindunnit!
It’s surprising, actually, that it took so long; after all, Putin has weaponised Soviet history, Syrian refugees, Photoshop, humour, Pokemon, and Russophobia, why would you think he’d have forgotten crickets? Nothing is beyond or beneath him: “14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin?“.
This happy complacency was interrupted…
by…
a loud…
POP!
The Sounds That Haunted U.S. Diplomats in Cuba? Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say.
And, because they’re Western scientists, not Castro’s Cuban Collaborators, we have to believe them. Two honest scientists – remember their names: Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Zapata of the University of Lincoln in England – on their own it seems, applied human reason to the problem and solved it. Here’s a summary of their paper.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
So that’s it; the story’s dead (although the NYT does its best to keep it alive: “That’s not to say that the diplomats weren’t attacked, the scientists added”). Would be nice, though, if State took its warning down. In time the details will fade away leaving a vague sense that Cuba’s a bad and dangerous place and nasty Russians do nasty things for the fun of it. But that’s the purpose of propaganda: to leave an impression when the details are forgotten.
So what really happened? Irritating cricket sounds produced a kind of dancing mania among US diplomats and the presstitutes sank to the occasion – even though the Cuban evidence was out there – and blamed Russia.
PS. My neighbours often ask me from where I get my news when I tell them something they’ve never heard of. Well not from the Guardian or the NYT or NBC or the others that boomed this fake story: I learned from Moon of Alabama that it was crickets waaaay back in October 2017 when he (a one-man operation who does more reporting than the entire NYT building) beat the NYT by 14 months. You should read him too so you too can get next year’s NYT headlines today.
The EU and the warning signs of Fascism
Image source – here
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 10, 2018
Things are spiralling out of control in Europe, faster than many predicted. Outside of Brexit, there is strong anti-EU feeling in Hungary, Spain, Italy, Greece and France. The EU is in danger of crumbling, and people afraid of losing power are prone to extreme acts of dictatorial control.
How long before the EU truly becomes the authoritarian force that people from both ends of the political spectrum have always feared?
The EU Defence Force
Earlier this year, the EU voted to “punish” one of its own members, Hungary, for the internal policies of its elected government. To be clear about this – whatever you think of Viktor Orban, he was elected by the people of Hungary. He is their legally recognised democratic leader. Hungary voted for him – in contrast, Hungary did NOT vote for any of the 448 MEPs who supported the motion, posed by Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini, that:
The Hungarian people deserve better… They deserve freedom of speech, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice and equality, all of which are enshrined in the European treaties.”
Note that “democracy” is not included on that list. “Tolerance”, “justice” and “equality”, but not democracy. A Freudian slip, perhaps.
The European Parliament vote was, itself, a corrupt nonsense – one in which abstentions were disregarded so the 2/3rds majority could be reached. Forcing through a bill that, essentially, calls for a change of regime in Hungary via:
“appropriate measures to restore inclusive democracy, the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights in Hungary”
One suggested punishment – “The Nuclear Option” – is a loss of voting rights. Hungary would still be a member of the EU, would still have to pay into the EU, would still have to obey all EU laws and regulations, but would no longer have a say in what those laws were.
This would, notionally, be in defence of “inclusive democracy”.
How long before disapproval and punishment of certain leaders turns into outright removal? Can we really say that would never happen?
This month, Paris (and other French cities) have seen the massive Gilets Jaunes protests against the fuel tax, austerity and income inequality. The violent repression of these protests has received no criticism from either individual member states of the EU, or the EU itself. However, an armored vehicle painted with the EU’s insignia was seen on the streets of Paris.
Both Macron and Merkel have talked, recently, of the need for an EU Army – will these protests in France be used as an excuse to implement those plans?
Let’s assume the EU Army is brought about – let us supply the European Union with its coveted “defence force”. 250,000 hypothetical men, drawn from all the member states. What is their purpose? What is their function?
For example, would they have been deployed to Catalonia last year to “keep the peace”? Would an EU army have moved against a peaceful vote to “defend” the integrity of the Union?
Would a possible step in dealing with Viktor Orban’s government be to deploy the EU Defence Force to Budapest and remove the man who is a threat to “equality”? Would that count as “appropriate measures to restore inclusive democracy”?
If Brexit is ruled a “threat to human rights” (or some other collection of buzzwords), would the EU army be rolling armoured vehicles along the streets of London to protect us from ourselves?
There have been, and could be, many situations in the EU’s recent past where military intervention was only avoided because it literally wasn’t an option. An EU Army would make it an option, do we trust Brussels not to avail themselves of it?
Some argue that an EU Army would be a good thing because it would decrease Europe’s reliance on NATO, and remove US influence. I don’t believe that to be the case, and as evidence, I supply the fact that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a well-known US-backed NGO, is very much in favour of the plan.
The EU’s Ministry of Truth
Of course, the increasing possibility of an EU consensus imposed by force is only one part of the threat.
Outside of physical repression – both by the EU (of national sovereignty), and by the state (of the individual right to protest) – there are warning signs of intellectual repression. A coming crackdown on freedom of expression and opinion.
There is a scary article on The Guardian today: Russia ‘paved way for Ukraine ship seizures with fake news drive’ . It’s not scary because of the headline – it’s scary because of the motivations behind it, and the implications for the future of Europe.
The meat of the article is an unsourced, unlinked, evidence-free claim of Russian malfeasance, and as such, Hitchens’ Razor applies.
The first half of the article is riddled with lies, omissions and mistakes. It’s the Guardian, you expect that. Disregard the babble about cholera and nuclear bombs. Disregard the factual errors – many though they are. In this instance, none of it matters.
All that matters is the second half – the proposed “solution” to the “problem” to which this article is a “reaction”. Namely, online disinformation. Specifically, “Russian” online disinformation.
Julian King, former UK ambassador to France and now EU security commissioner, wants tech companies to take steps to prevent the spread of “fake news”. It’s a war against dissent, with three fronts.
One – establish the “truth”:
Last week the European Commission announced it would set up a rapid alert system to help EU member states recognise disinformation campaigns
Essentially, there will be an EU mandated list of acceptable “news”, and anything which deviates from that in the slightest way will be branded “disinformation”. This will allow people to dismiss, rather than engage with, views that differ from their own.
Two – eliminate dissent:
King said social media platforms needed to identify and close down fake accounts that were spreading disinformation.
By “fake accounts”, they mean accounts which spread “disinformation”. Being a “bot” is not about whether or not you are a real person, it’s about whether or not you have the right opinions. As has been demonstrated, they either do not know or do not care who is real and who is not. Perfectly real people have been labelled Russian bots in the media, when they are proven to be neither Russian nor bots. Whether this is incompetence or corruption does not matter, the point is governments have shown they cannot be trusted on this issue.
Three – control the narrative:
We need to see greater clarity around algorithms, information on how they prioritise what content to display, for example. If you search for anything EU-related on Google, content from Russian propaganda outlets like RT or Sputnik is invariably in the first few results…. All of this should be subject to independent oversight and audit.
The Google algorithm is allowing news that either disagrees with the EU, or is directly critical of it, to be shown in their results. This is unacceptable. What the EU security commissioner wants is for Google to “fix” their system, to make sure news that deviates from the EU’s agenda does not show up in their results.
Now, if you think that sounds like censorship, don’t worry because [our emphasis]:
What we are not trying to do is to censor the internet. There is no suggestion that we – or anyone else – should become the arbiter of what content users should or shouldn’t be consuming online. This is about transparency, not censorship.
The EU wants Google to remove certain websites from their algorithm, but it’s about transparency, not censorship. So that’s OK.
Conclusion
To sum up:
- The European Union’s two major figureheads are both in favour of an EU army.
- The European Union’s flag is painted on armoured vehicles repressing anti-government protests in France.
- The European Union is putting aside £4.6 millio (5 million Euros) to “help people recognise disinformation”.
- The European Union wants to pressure social media companies into “shutting down” accounts that spread “fake news”.
- The European Union wants Google to alter their algorithm, to promote news that praises the EU and demote sites critical of it.
- The European Union wants us to understand that this is about “transparency” and is definitely NOT censorship.
Does this sound like an organization of which we want to be a part? Are we supposed to like the proposed multi-national EU “defense force” putting down anti-EU marches on the streets of Barcelona or Rome? To cheer on the idea that the EU Army could be sent into non-cooperative member-states to remove “dangerous” elected leaders because they are a threat to “equality”?
We won’t even be able to get to the truth of those matters, because the EU will be supplying lists of “fake news” social media accounts to Twitter and Facebook, who will dutifully shut them down. While Google alters and re-alters their algorithm to make sure any news covering EU repression of democracy is pushed so far down the results pages it may as well not exist.
The British press, pundits and talking heads are constantly referring to the “Brexit crisis”, but that’s just hysteria and fear mongering. Re-negotiating your position in a trade bloc is NOT a crisis. A crisis is what happens when an unelected, bureaucratic power structure suddenly senses its grip on power is slipping, and acts accordingly.
And a crisis could well be on the horizon. The signs are there, if you want to see them.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Mainstream Media Assaults on Freedom of Speech. “The Truth” is No Longer “Important”
Alternative news sources have come under sustained attacks
By Shane Quinn – Global Research – December 7, 2018
The New York Times unveiled a new slogan early in 2017 titled, “The truth is more important now than ever.” It has acquired a seemingly noble motto but a perhaps contentious one if we examine the Times’ recent history. Two international law specialists, Howard Friel and Richard Falk, published a book after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq called The Record of the Paper, which has scarcely been reviewed.
Friel and Falk focused on the Times due to the newspaper’s importance. The authors point out that in 70 Times editorials on Iraq – from September 11, 2001 to March 20, 2003 – the words “international law” and “UN Charter” were never mentioned. The “truth” did not seem terribly “important” as the Times stood idly by in the destruction of Iraq.
Such was the barrage of propaganda directed at the American public that 69% believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the September 11 attacks. That is a significant achievement in manipulation. The poll results must have been news to the Iraqi dictator himself, a forgotten one-time American ally.
Why Hussein would take it upon himself to orchestrate a surprise attack on the United States, of all nations, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps if he had a death wish but as later events proved he was not the suicidal type.
The Times was not alone in its position of selling the Iraq war to the American people, as television networks from Fox News to CBS and CNN were overwhelmingly pro-war. Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch – who strongly backed the illegal conflict – placed a permanent US flag in the corner of the screen. Fox employees were compelled to describe the invasion as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis later being killed.
The pattern continues into other illegitimate interventions as the liberal Guardian newspaper championed the demolition of Libya in 2011, with editorials imploring, “The quicker Muammar Gaddafi falls, the better.” The Guardian encouraged NATO “to tip the military balance further against Gaddafi”, while later that year summarising that “it has turned out, so far, reasonably well” – by that point thousands had been killed.
In 2015 Ian Birrell, then deputy editor of the Independent, still assured his readers, “I would argue that Britain and France were right to step in [in Libya]. The failures came later on.” Apparently it was fine for two old imperial powers to “step in” to shatter a sovereign nation, then afterwards absolve the invaders of blame with “the failures” only coming “later on”.
Sceengrab from The Independent
It’s a rare thing indeed to hear a prominent commentator question the balance of Western mainstream coverage. The same voices can be heard piping up when alternative news sources take a different line not so palatable to their tastes.
Nick Cohen, writing in the Guardian, accused the network Russia Today (RT) of being a “propaganda channel” and that Russia was “prostituting journalism”. In the following sentence, Cohen describes the BBC and New York Times as being “reputable news organisations”.
Cohen firmly supported the Iraq war, writing at the time that “the Left betrays the Iraqi people by opposing war”, and “an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation”. He was deemed not to be “prostituting journalism” in backing this violation of international law, nor when later supporting other interventions in Libya and Syria.
The BBC’s reputation, which Cohen previously claimed to be “reputable”, was dealt a blow when it was revealed by Cardiff University that the network “displayed the most ‘pro-war’ agenda of any broadcaster” with its coverage on the Iraq invasion.
Steven Erlanger of the New York Times described RT as “an agent of Kremlin policy” used to “undermine Western democracies” and to “destabilise the West” – failing to back up the claims with any evidence. To gain perspective on these attacks, it may be worth pointing out a key excerpt from the First Amendment of the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law… abridging [curtailing] the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
This law does not exist in Western democracies but attempts at limiting freedom of expression continue apace, while attacks on alternative media outlets by institutions of power grow. It has reached a point whereby the French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after assuming office, publicly attacked legitimate news sources of “behaving like deceitful propaganda”.
Perhaps the hidden concern about RT, for example, is its continued increase in both popularity and scope – with the channel enjoying a total weekly viewership of 70 million people and rising. RT is available to viewers in Western heartlands such as Britain and the US, with eight million Americans watching the station each week. It represents quite an achievement that a channel with the word “Russia”, featured in its title, can attract viewers in their millions, despite the growing anti-Russian sentiment espoused by the powers-that-be.
It is revealing that elite figures like Hillary Clinton have lamented in the past, “We are in an information war and we are losing that war.” For the first time in history, populations have broad access to alternative news angles – points of view that they likely find of a more balanced nature. Gone is the unchallenged monopoly on the public mind.
Fact-checking the second volume of the U.S. National Climate Assessment
By Roger Andrews | Energy Matters | December 4, 2018
This recently-issued study (the “Assessment”) was seized on by the media as proof of the massive damage the US will suffer if nothing is done about climate change. The Assessment’s conclusions are based largely on speculative model projections that aren’t amenable to checking, but it also claims that the US is already experiencing some of the impacts of man-made climate change, and these claims can be checked. This post accordingly evaluates them claim-by-claim and finds that they are rarely backed up by any hard data, that in some cases they are contradicted by disclaimers buried in the text, and that in no case is there any hard evidence that conclusively relates the impacts to man-made climate change. The credibility of the Assessment’s predictions can be judged accordingly.
The Assessment is 1,600 pages long and I doubt that anyone has read it from cover to cover – I certainly haven’t. I have obtained my information from the Summary Findings, Overview, Report Chapters and Downloads sections in the boxes that clicking on this link leads to. These sections themselves contain several hundred pages of text, much of it repetitive, but there is always the possibility that I’ve missed some critical graphic or piece of text. On the other hand, if I’ve missed it the media, who will have read the introductory sections only, will have too.
And how did the media report the Assessment’s results? Here are some excerpts:
Climate change is already harming Americans’ lives with “substantial damages” set to occur as global temperatures threaten to surge beyond internationally agreed limits ……… The influence of climate change is being felt across the US with increases in disastrous wildfires in the west, flooding on the east coast, soil loss in the midwest and coastal erosion in Alaska
Billions of hours in productivity will be lost. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be wiped from the economy. Tens of thousands of people will die each year. The scientific report, which was produced by 13 federal agencies, describes an American future nothing short of apocalyptic due to rising threats from climate change …. rising sea levels, disruptions in food productions and the spread of wildfires — have all come true today.
Climate change is happening here and now …. It is affecting all of us no matter where we live. And the more climate changes, the more serious and even more dangerous the impacts will become.
From record-breaking wildfires that destroyed more than 14,000 homes in California, to hurricanes that devastated parts of Florida and much of Puerto Rico, long-predicted impacts of climate change are here and wreaking havoc.
The media never lose an opportunity to cast climate change in the worst possible light, or fail to report it when someone else does it for them.
And what are the climate change impacts that the Assessment claims are “happening here and now”, which are the only ones we can verify, or not verify as the case may be, against observations? These excerpts identify them either explicitly or implicitly:
Glaciers and snow cover are shrinking
Increases in greenhouse gases and decreases in air pollution have contributed to increases in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1970.
America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure are threatened by the ongoing increase in the frequency, depth, and extent of tidal flooding due to sea level rise
Existing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure already face challenges from heavy rainfall, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, drought, wildfire, heat waves, and other weather and climate events
Climate-related changes in weather patterns and associated changes in air, water, food, and the environment are affecting the health and well-being of the American people, causing injuries, illnesses, and death.
Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation are intensifying droughts, increasing heavy downpours, reducing snowpack
Our Nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfires
Some storm types such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and winter storms are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change
After eliminating repetition and sorting the individual impacts into something resembling order we are left with droughts; floods; heavy precipitation; heat waves; wildfires; Atlantic hurricanes; tornadoes; winter storms; sea level rise; glaciers and snowpack; injuries, illnesses and death. We will review these in order of appearance:
1. Droughts
The Assessment begins by claiming that climate-change-induced droughts are intensifying in the US. Then later in the text it shoots itself in the foot:
While there are a number of ways to measure drought, there is currently no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics using the Palmer Drought Severity Index
And adds a graphic to prove it, reproduced below as Figure 1:
Figure 1: US drought conditions. The Palmer Drought Severity Index is the commonly-used metric for measuring drought intensity
2. Floods
The Assessment provides no hard data to back up its claims that climate change is already causing increased flooding in the US (coastal flooding is discussed under sea level rise). The only quantitative historical data I can find on US floods are summarized in Figure 2 (data from Researchgate ):
Figure 2: Two measures of US flood damage, 1934-2000
These graphics don’t tell us whether floods in the US are on the increase or not. And the Assessment doesn’t tell us either, Not only does it fail to detect any nationwide trends, it states that it never claimed any relationship between floods and man-made climate change to begin with:
Analysis of 200 U.S. stream gauges indicates areas of both increasing and decreasing flooding magnitude but does not provide robust evidence that these trends are attributable to human influences …. Hence, no formal attribution of observed flooding changes to anthropogenic forcing has been claimed.
3. Heavy Precipitation
Since the Assessment admits that there are no detectable human-induced trends in US flooding we can reasonably assume that the claimed increase in heavy precipitation events has had no impact. But we will look at the data anyway. The Assessment presents this graphic to back up its claim that heavy precipitation events are increasing over the US as a whole (Figure 3). As usual, the source of the data is not specified:
Figure 3: Percent of US land area with heavy precipitation events
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, under the auspices of which the Assessment was written, also produces graphics showing how heavy precipitation has changed with time and by region in the US (they may in fact be buried in parts of the Assessment I haven’t looked at). According to Figure 4 (from Globalchange) heavy precipitation events have increased over all of the US except the Southwest:
Figure 4: Increases in US total precipitation and very heavy precipitation events by region
And Huang et al (2017) produce time series showing how total precipitation and extreme precipitation in the Northeast US have both increased since about 1960 (Figure 5):
Figure 5: Increases in US total and extreme precipitation
So in this case the claim checks out against observations, or least in the northeast US. A lingering question, however, is how much of the increase in heavy precipitation was caused by man-made climate change. The Assessment implicitly assumes that all of it was, but a 2015 study by Hoerling et al. concludes that most of the changes after 1979 were caused by ocean variability:
Based on the modeling results, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change has not been a principal factor driving key characteristics of observed changes in U.S. heavy daily precipitation since 1979 …. Our results provide evidence for an alternative argument for another factor that has been operating in recent decades, namely, that statistics of U.S. heavy precipitation have been sensitive to strong decadal ocean variability since 1979
4. Heat Waves
One of the problems with heat waves is defining them (droughts and floods have the same problem). How hot does it have to get, and for how long, before a warm spell becomes a heat wave? The Assessment does not tell us. All it presents in the way of evidence for an increase in heat waves in the introductory report sections, including the 186-page “Report-in-Brief”, is this graphic (Figure 6), which shows the “heat wave season” increasing since the 1960s but not how many heat waves there were. Once again the data source is not specified, nor is the meaning of the cross-hatching:
Figure 6: Length of US “heat wave season”
The next graphic (Figure 7) is another one I added from the globalchange website. It shows an increase in daily record high temperatures in recent decades but again provides no information on the number of heat waves. How many of the record highs, for example, occurred in the winter?
Figure 7: Record daily highs in the US. The meaning of “ratio of daily temperature records” isn’t clear
The only graphic I found that provided any historic information on the incidence of heat waves was the Figure 8 plot of the EPA’s Annual Heat Wave Index. It’s not surprising that it doesn’t appear in the Assessment:
Figure 8: US annual heat wave index since 1895
5. Wildfires
The Assessment provides two graphics to support its claim that climate change is causing more wildfires. Figure 9 shows the first. Again no data source is cited, but it turns out that it comes from the National Interagency Fire Center:
Figure 9: Acres burned by US wildfires since 1987
It also shows only a fraction of the NIFC data. Figure 10, for what it may be worth, shows the complete plot. I say “for what it may be worth” because the plot comes accompanied by this disclaimer:
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
Figure 10: Acres burned by US wildfires. Figure 9 data carried back to 1926
Figure 11 reproduces the Assessment’s second graphic. It shows that about half of the increase in acreage burned was caused by climate change. (Note that it conflicts with the Figure 9 data, according to which a cumulative total of 173 million acres, not 23 million, has been burned since 1984).
Figure 11: Acreage burned by naturally-occurring wildfires vs. acreage burned by climate-change-caused wildfires
In this case the data source is specified. It’s a 2016 paper written by John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams entitled “Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests”. How did they segregate climate change-caused wildfires from naturally-occurring wildfires? They used climate models:
We quantify the influence of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) multimodel mean changes in temperature and vapor pressure …. This approach defines the ACC signal for any given location as the multimodel mean 50-y low-pass-filtered record of monthly temperature and vapor pressure anomalies relative to a 1901 baseline.
Before we can accept these results as meaningful we must assume that the global CMIP5 climate models can hindcast temperatures and vapor pressures to a high level of accuracy in the US, which they probably can’t (it’s generally accepted that climate models do a poor job of simulating regional changes). We also have to assume that the numerous other variables that affect wildfires have had no impact. This is a stretch, to put it mildly.
6. Atlantic Hurricanes
In this case the Assessment supplies no data, or at least none that I can find, to back up its claim that Atlantic hurricanes have increased since 1970. So once again I have had to dig up data on my own. Figure 12 (data from the US Environmental Protection Agency) plots the number of North Atlantic hurricanes since 1880. The total number is defined by the orange line, which adjusts for undercounting before 1967, and by the green line after that. There has been an erratic overall increase since about 1970, but since 1880 there has been no clear trend:
Figure 12: Unadjusted hurricane counts, hurricane counts adjusted for undercounting and hurricanes making landfall in the US
The North Atlantic, however, is not part of the US. The important consideration is how many hurricanes have made landfall in the US. These are shown by the red line at the bottom of Figure 12. There is no clear trend since 1970 and if anything a decrease since 1880.
According to Figure 13 (data from Dr. Roy Spencer) major hurricanes making landfall in the US have also been decreasing since the 1930s:
Figure 13: Major hurricanes making landfall in the US
And according to Klotzbach et al (2018) there has been little to no increase in normalized hurricane damages in the US since 1900 (Figure 13):
Figure 14: Normalized damages from hurricanes making landfall in the US
In this case the claim broadly matches observations but conceals (probably deliberately) the big picture, which is that man-made climate change has not increased the incidence of, or the damage caused by, North Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the US since at least the late 1800s.
7. Tornadoes
Some storm types such as … tornadoes … are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change. Once more the Assessment presents no supporting data, but NOAA’s tornado counts (Figure 15) speak for themselves:
Figure 15: Total tornado and strong-to-violent tornado counts since 1954
8. Winter Storms
… winter storms … are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change.
Once again there are no supporting data in the Assessment, but according to Coleman & Schwartz’s 2017 paper An Updated Blizzard Climatology of the Contiguous United States (1959–2014) the incidence of blizzards in the US has been increasing (Figure 16):
Figure 16: Incidence of blizzards in US
Is this counter-intuitive increase related to climate change? NOAA thinks it may be, although NOAA’s explanation works only in the eastern US ….
Conditions that influence the severity of eastern U.S. snowstorms include warmer-than-average ocean surface temperatures in the Atlantic. These can lead to exceptionally high amounts of moisture flowing into a storm and contribute to greater intensification of the storm. Natural variability can affect ocean surface temperatures, but as global surface temperatures increase, the temperature at any time is higher than it would have been without climate change.
…. and it doesn’t match up very well with trends in sea surface temperatures off the eastern US coast (data from KNMI Climate Explorer) ….
Figure 17: Sea surface temperatures along US east coast (30N-45N, 65W-80W)
… and according to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report it’s going off in the wrong direction:
Changes in the frequency, severity, and duration of extreme events may be among the most important risks associated with climate change. In some parts of North America, this includes fewer periods of extreme cold, fewer snowstorms ….
Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms .…
This is one of the cases where the claim matches observational changes, but no conclusion as to causation can be reached until there is agreement over whether climate change causes a) more snowstorms, b) fewer snowstorms or c) both at the same time. My money is on c).
9. Sea Level Rise/Coastal Flooding
These are related phenomena, so I will discuss them under the same heading.
Once more there are no supporting data in the Assessment, so once more I had to go searching for some. This graphic from NOAA shows an increase in high-tide flooding that correlates with an increase in “coastal sea level” (Figure 18):
Figure 18: Average days/year with high-tide flooding vs. US sea level
And as shown in Figure 19 (data from EPA) the increased flooding is dominantly an east coast phenomenon:
Figure 19: Average number of tidal floods/year, 2010-2015 vs. 1950-1959
But note the fine print. These are “nuisance floods” that don’t do any serious damage. There is no accepted definition of a nuisance flood, but a maximum water depth of 10cm has been proposed. And a 10cm-deep flood is hardly a catastrophic event.
And what does sea level rise have to do with the increase in nuisance floods? Not much. The reason nuisance floods are more common along the east coast of the US is that the east coast is sinking (a result of glacial rebound*, sediment compaction and groundwater extraction) while the west coast isn’t, and the rate at which the east coast is sinking exceeds the rate at which sea levels are rising in many places. The PSMSL tide gauge record from Sewell’s Point, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, is an example (Figure 20). The trend line shows sea level rising at an average rate of 4.5mm/year, but according to the United States Geological Survey less than half of this – maybe less than 2 mm/year – is a result of eustatic sea level rise. The rest is caused by land subsidence:
* Glacial rebound causes the land in and immediately around the ice sheet to rise while the surrounding land, which was squeezed upwards by the ice, sinks back down again.
Figure Figure 20: Relative sea level rise, Sewell’s Point, Virginia
10 cm nuisance floods and ~2 mm/year sea level rises also pale into insignificance beside the hurricane storm surges that have occurred in the past and which can be expected to recur in the future along the US east coast. They reached heights of eight feet at Sewell’s point during Hurricane Isabel as recently as 2003 and 18 feet along the North Carolina coast during Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
My 2016 post on Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana describes how sea level rise routinely takes the blame for inundations it didn’t cause. The Assessment cites it as an example of climate change in action.
10. Glaciers and snowpack
North American glaciers have indeed been retreating, as the Assessment claims. But according to Oerlemans (2005, Figure 21) they have been retreating since about 1825 and retreating rapidly after 1890, well before human-induced climate forcings became significant. This raises the question of whether the retreat has anything to do with man-made climate change:
Figure 21: Glacier retreat since 1700. The green line is North America
No data are available on snowpack, but Rutgers University publishes North American snow cover data (Figure 22). The trend line shows only a very minor decrease since 1975:
Figure 22: Snow-Covered Area in North America, 1972-2015
11. Injuries, Illnesses and Death:
Climate-related changes in weather patterns …. are affecting the health and well-being of the American people, causing injuries, illnesses, and death.
No data on illnesses or injuries are readily available, but over the last ten years approximately 25 million people have died in the US. According to Wikipedia
natural disasters of the type that commonly get blamed on climate change (hurricanes, floods, blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes) have claimed only 1,200 lives over this period.
Conclusion:
In this post I have fact-checked eleven separate climate change impacts which according to the Assessment’s summary sections are already doing damage in the US. In six of these cases (heavy precipitation, heat waves, wildfires, winter storms, sea level rise/coastal flooding and glacier retreat) there is observational evidence – most of which I have had to dig up myself – for impacts that might be related to man-made climate change, but in all of them this evidence is equivocal (e.g. wildfires) or the impacts are insignificant (e.g. nuisance tidal floods). In the other five cases (droughts, floods, Atlantic hurricanes, tornadoes, and injuries, illnesses and deaths) the observational evidence either contradicts the Assessment’s claims or the Assessment admits later in the text that the claim isn’t valid (droughts and floods).
Clearly the Assessment was conducted with little regard for the facts. A disregard for the facts, however, is necessary if one wishes to get the climate change catastrophe message across.
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Israel gets far more than $38 billion under the new deal
By Nicole Feied | If Americans Knew | September 19, 2018
The AIPAC sponsored bill that guarantees $38 billion to Israel over the next ten years is a dramatic departure from the deal offered under President Obama’s 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).[1] Passed by the House of Representatives on September 12, 2018, the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018 effectively rolls back every limitation that President Obama placed on the amount of aid we give to Israel.
In addition, the House version provides Israel even more perks than the version passed by the Senate on August 11.
Most dramatically, this new act would eviscerate the ability of President Trump and his successors for the next ten years to withhold United States aid to Israel. Historically, almost every president since Eisenhower has attempted to withhold such aid at one time or another in order to force Israel to the peace table or to stop Israel from committing human right abuses or illegal acts such as taking Palestinian land and giving it to Israeli settlers.
In an unprecedented gift of our executive power to Israel, the House has passed for the very first time a law that forces the American president to give Israel a minimum of $3.8 billion per year. We have, in effect, crippled our ability to promote US interests in the Middle East. … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
~
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March 8, 2011
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February 25, 2010
Look out for the nuclear bomb coming with your electric bill
February 7, 2010
The saturated fat scam: What’s the real story?
December 26, 2009
There’s more to climate fraud than just tax hikes
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