News Articles | August 7, 2022

Afghanistan, arctic, China, Climate Change, covid 19, economy, EPA, fascism, Federal Reserve, Global Warming, inflation, Israel, Palestine, Politics, Russia, Ukraine, vaccine, War

Cover Art: We Come As Liberators, Natural Resource Liberation Inc. by Matt Wuerker

Our planet is burning up – at least that is what it seems. The UK is experiencing some of its hottest days ever recorded. From massive wildfires burning thousands of acres of land in California to record-setting heat waves in Western Europe, something is afoot and it doesn’t feel like the next Ice Age. So what is happening and why?

Scientists have long clamored that human activity on Earth has led to the calamitous weather changes we are witnessing today. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed that climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. According to the research, greenhouse gas emissions have heated the planet by an estimated 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last two centuries.

The Nature journal published an article this month detailing what its authors say is proof that heatwaves in Europe have increased three-to-four times faster than in other northern mid-latitude areas such as the United States. The reason for this, according to the article, is due to the fast west-to-east air stream, or atmospheric circulation, which is carrying hot air across the northern atmosphere.

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Is it possible President Joe Biden and the oil and gas companies can work out a new deal on climate? But how could Biden satisfy his Green Transition while pleasing the petroleum industry?

The crimes of the oil, gas, and coal companies

First of all, the fossil-fuel industry is responsible for setting the Earth on fire. It has been causing climate change for a century-and-a-half. Moreover, this industry has been undermining the country’s and the world’s green energy efforts for decades. It has the audacity to deny climate change.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times had this to say about the politics of the fossil-fuels industry:

“The oil and gas companies have so far invested trivial amounts of financial capital in clean energy or carbon capture and zero political capital to enable and accelerate the clean energy transition. They have long endorsed a carbon tax, knowing it has a snowball’s chance in hell of being embraced by either party. And they were all AWOL in arguing for the president’s clean energy platform, which is full of new clean energy job opportunities and would put America back in the lead of the next great global industry.”

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Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is dangerously close to dead pool status for the first time since construction in the mid 1930s. A vicious hammering drought sequence for over two decades throughout the West threatens to bring America’s biggest water reservoir to its knees.

In a word, the implications are unspeakable.

America’s monuments, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, and Hoover Dam are the foundations of Americana, the essence of America, its character, and its culture. Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, 96 lives lost during construction, defines America’s true grit during a bygone era that had to overcome great challenges tagged with the Great Depression, soup kitchens & breadlines (NYC 82 breadlines by 1932), the Dust Bowl, incipient fascism in Europe, and a brewing world war.

Yet, in the face of those overwhelming challenges, similar to a phoenix miraculously rising out of the ashes, in 1934 Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead commenced water filling in celebration of an engineering marvel. Seven years later (1941) Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead stood tall at maximum capacity of 1,220 feet elevation with sparkling blue water that shone for all to behold, becoming the most-visited dam in the world with 7 million annual visitors.

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Blue Ocean Event occurs when virtually all sea ice disappears and the surface color changes from white (sea ice) to blue (ocean). According to many, a Blue Ocean Event starts once Arctic sea ice extent falls below 1 million km².

The image on the right shows a trend pointing at zero Arctic sea ice volume by September 2027.

Note that the volume data in the image are averages for the month September ⁠— the minimum for each year is even lower. Furthermore, since zero volume implies zero extent, this indicates that a Blue Ocean Event (extent below 1 million km²) could happen well before 2027.

The extent of Arctic sea ice was among the lowest on record for the time of year on July 26, 2022. Furthermore, Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at a record low for the time of year...

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Despite the risks of building on barrier islands, developers kept constructing homes on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Now, as sea level rises and storms become more frequent and powerful, the famed vacation spot is fighting an increasingly difficult battle to keep from washing away.

Rounding the corner near the village of Rodanthe, there is a stretch of highway known as the S-Curves because of its twisting loops and turns. It is, by almost any measure, one of the most vulnerable sections of roadway in North Carolina, if not the nation. Years ago, highway officials erected a massive dike here with 2,200 sandbags — each bag was 15 feet long, two feet tall, and five feet wide — and then buried the dike in even more sand in an effort to keep the ocean at bay and the highway, known as NC 12, open.

It didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work as hoped. The Atlantic Ocean continued to pummel the towering artificial dune, crashing over the top, tearing apart sandbags, and flooding the highway — closing the only access on and off of the lower Outer Banks for days and sometimes weeks.

Following each storm, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) sent in bulldozers and graders to rebuild the sand dike and patch the road, only to watch the next storm undo its work. “It’s like the Siege of Troy,” said local biologist Mike Bryant. “It just goes on and on.”

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In the northern and central stretches of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists have recorded the most extensive coral cover seen in 36 years of study, according to a new report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

Researchers tracked hard coral across 87 reefs along the coast of Queensland from August 2021 to May 2022, finding that coral cover reached 36 percent in the northern third of the reef and 33 percent in the central third, up from 27 percent and 26 percent, respectively, the prior year.

The growth was particularly remarkable given that uncommonly warm waters fueled a mass bleaching event earlier this year, causing overheated corals to eject the colorful algae that live in their branches, risking widespread coral mortality, the report said. The 2022 mass bleaching event was the fourth in seven years and the first ever to strike during the Pacific Ocean’s cooler La Niña phase, though it was less severe than other recent bleaching events, making it possible for parts of the reef to bounce back, scientists say.

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Article

Researchers Point To ‘Dangerously Unexplored’ Risk of Global Climate Catastrophe

Primary Author: Christopher Bonasia @CBonasia_

This story includes details on the impacts of climate change that may be difficult for some readers. If you are feeling overwhelmed by this crisis situation here is a list of resources on how to cope with fears and feelings about the scope and pace of the climate crisis.

Climate science has left the most severe outcomes of the climate crisis “dangerously unexplored,” says a team of experts who are calling for a new research agenda to prepare for worst-case scenarios.

“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” write researchers in an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Positing outcomes like “worldwide societal collapse” and even “eventual human extinction,” the international team of researchers writes that there are many good reasons to be concerned about a global climate catastrophe or a “climate endgame.” Events throughout human history show that climatic changes have caused or contributed to civilizations collapsing or transforming, and have also played a role in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history, the current geologic time period that started roughly 538 million years ago.

Research shows that climate change can drive threat multipliers—like international conflict or the spread of disease—and lead to “system-wide synchronous failures” through indirect stresses like water and food scarcity, they add. In the wake of these disasters, human societies will likely be weakened and vulnerable to other threats, such as nuclear war.

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Article

Can Appalachia Be Saved? Or Will ‘Worse and Worse’ Flooding Wash it Away?

By Chris Kenning, Connor Giffin and James Bruggers

Kentucky’s historic floods, amid rising extreme weather in the U.S., have fueled fears in one of America’s most vulnerable regions. Poverty, dispersed housing in remote valleys and strip-mined mountains that accelerate floods make climate adaptation an extreme challenge.

JACKSON, Ky. — Teresa Watkins worked to salvage a few mud-caked belongings from her home on a Breathitt County branch of the Kentucky River after July 28 floods slammed her neighborhood for the second time in 17 months.

The 54-year-old, who has lived off Quicksand Road since she was a teenager, said the flooding in recent years—“more and more, worse and worse”—has left difficult dilemmas in a county where median household incomes of $29,538 are less than half the national average.

She pointed to a mobile home one family abandoned last year. Now, more say they’re leaving for safer areas, she said, but it’s not that easy.

“I don’t know how they can afford it, or where they’re going to go. Any property is basically along the river line or creek banks,” she said. “And if they go up on the mountains, the mountains slide.”

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From hurricanes to flash floods, to increasingly destructive wildfires, climate-driven natural disasters are forcing more Americans out of their homes and triggering waves of relocations as some regions of the country become too burdensome or dangerous for many people to continue living in them.

Known as climate migration, it’s a situation that scientists have been sounding an alarm on for years. Yet a growing body of evidence, including another summer marred by deadly extreme weather, suggests that the United States is still not prepared to handle it.

For the Holden family, who narrowly escaped one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California’s history, rebuilding in their hometown of Paradise simply proved too difficult. The 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed 19,000 structures in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, took nearly everything from the family of seven and reduced their home to a “pile of ash and the chimney.”

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Climate science is clear: Floodwaters are a growing risk for many American cities, threatening to displace not only people and housing but also the land-based pollution left behind by earlier industrial activities.

In 2019, researchers at the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated climate-related risks at the 1,571 most polluted properties in the country, also known as Superfund sites on the federal National Priorities List. They found an alarming 60 percent were in locations at risk of climate-related events, including wildfires and flooding.

As troubling as those numbers sound, our research shows that that’s just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Many times that number of potentially contaminated former industrial sites exist. Most were never documented by government agencies, which began collecting data on industrially contaminated lands only in the 1980s. Today, many of these sites have been redeveloped for other uses such as homes, buildings or parks.

For communities near these sites, the flooding of contaminated land is worrisome because it threatens to compromise common pollution containment methods, such as capping contaminated land with clean soil. It can also transport legacy contaminants into surrounding soils and waterways, putting the health and safety of urban ecosystems and residents at risk.

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One of our most-read old posts is the step-by-step explanation for why increasing CO2 is a significant problem (The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps). However, that was written in 2007 – 15 years ago! While the basic steps and concepts have not changed, there’s 15 years of more data, updates in some of the details and concepts, and (it turns out) better graphics to accompany the text. And so, here is a mildly updated and referenced version that should be a little more useful.

Step 1: There is a natural greenhouse effect.

The fact that there is a natural greenhouse effect (that the atmosphere restricts the passage of infra-red (IR) radiation from the Earth’s surface to space) is easily deducible from; i) the mean temperature of the surface (around 15ºC) and, ii) knowing that the planet is normally close to radiative equilibrium. This means that there is an upward surface flux of IR around \sigma T^4 (~398 W/m2), while the outward flux at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) is roughly equivalent to the net solar radiation absorbed (~240 W/m2). Thus there must be a large amount of IR absorbed by the atmosphere (around 158 W/m2) – a number that would be zero in the absence of any greenhouse substances. Note that this IR radiation is sometimes called longwave (LW) radiation to distinguish it from the shortwave (SW) radiation coming from the sun.

Step 2: Trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect.

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It was an “instant classic” viral video. A hiker enjoying a guided trip in the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan pulled out his cellphone and captured the sectional collapse of, and ensuing avalanche from, an enormous glacier. Much like a horror movie, the suspense builds as the massive, billowing wall of ice, rocks and debris moves ever closer to the hiker, Harry Shimmin of the U.K., whose steady hand maintains the crystal-clear picture on his phone.

Ultimately, the avalanche bears down on Shimmin, who acted like a voyeur watching a dangerous drama in which he actually had a starring role. At the last minute, and after a couple of “Oh, dear Gods,” he hastily dropped behind a rock as the barrage unleashed by the climate-afflicted glacier began pelting him and the group of hikers travelling with him. Luckily, they all survived.

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The Rhine River’s low water levels threaten Germany’s largest industrial players that rely on the 800-mile (1,288-kilometer) waterway from Switzerland to the North Sea for transport. A new estimate cautioned water levels could decline through the weekend, taking it within centimeters of being impassable by barge.

The official depth at Kaub near Frankfurt, Germany, declined to 23.6 inches (60 centimeters) on Tuesday, its lowest for this time of year in at least two decades, according to Germany’s WSV inland waterway agency. The last time water levels were this low was December 2018.

New forecasts indicate the water level at Kaub will continue to decrease to 18.5 inches (47 centimeters) by Saturday, according to the German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration.

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Managers in the EPA’s New Chemicals Division have refused to assess the risk of cancer and other harms from chemicals deemed to be “corrosive.”

A GROUP OF whistleblowers has provided evidence that the Environmental Protection Agency has not adequately assessed the health risks posed by several new chemicals on the grounds that they are corrosive. Managers in the New Chemicals Division have repeatedly and incorrectly used the idea that a chemical may cause irritation to the eyes, skin, and respiratory tract as an excuse to avoid assessing the risk of other harms it may cause. Those harms include cancer, miscarriage, and neurotoxicity, according to the whistleblowers, who work as health assessors in the division. In some cases described in a complaint that the whistleblowers shared with The Intercept and will soon submit to the EPA inspector general, the risks were calculated, found to be significant, and later deleted from official documents.

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US Ecology failed to report more than 11 million pounds of PFAS-contaminated waste at its facility in Beatty, Nevada.

A WASTE MANAGEMENT company received millions of pounds of waste containing toxic firefighting foam and other materials contaminated with the industrial chemicals known as PFAS in 2020 yet did not report it to the Environmental Protection Agency, according to public records.

US Ecology, a hazardous waste company with dozens of sites around the U.S., received 11,638,732 pounds of waste containing the firefighting foam known as aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, at its facility in Beatty, Nevada, in 2020, according to public reports filed under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The company has also received, and did not report, waste containing AFFF at its facilities in Robstown, Texas, and Grand View, Idaho. It is unclear whether the company’s failure to disclose the waste violated the law or whether it was legal under a loophole in the reporting requirement.

US Ecology referred questions for this story to Republic Services, a waste management company that acquired US Ecology in May. Republic Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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It wasn’t long ago that economists in our capitalist system were absolutely giddy over what they dubbed “globalization.” In this reality-denying construct, nations all over the planet would work together, each producing commodities using available resources, and we’d all be happily living in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity for all. “A rising tide would lift all boats” we were told.

But now globalization has run headlong into the grim realities of war, resource depletion, and a planet on fire. Toss in wars, international sanctions, the pandemic, and globalization, for what it was ever worth, is deader than a doornail.

Looked at objectively, one can credibly wonder how these economists and politicians ever expected humanity to suddenly “just get along.” What, they didn’t foresee Russian attempting to continue its excursion into Ukraine? What have nations ever done except to invade and plunder resource-rich countries for themselves?

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Ukraine said parts of the facility were "seriously damaged" by Russian military strikes.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) raised grave concerns on Saturday about the shelling the previous day at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, saying the action showed the risk of a nuclear disaster.

IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said he was "extremely concerned" by the attacks on Europe's largest nuclear power plant.

These strikes threaten "the very real risk of a nuclear disaster that could threaten public health and the environment in Ukraine and beyond," Grossi said.

"Any military firepower directed at or from the facility would amount to playing with fire, with potentially catastrophic consequences," he added.

The New York Times reported Saturday: "Fighting raged on Saturday near a sprawling nuclear power plant in the south of Ukraine, despite warnings from nuclear safety watchdogs earlier this week that conditions there were posing risks and “out of control.”

The Times also reported: "Mr. Grossi said he was far more worried about Zaporizhzhia than he was about Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, also in Ukraine, that radiated the surrounding area and imperiled Europe."

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In our first glimpse at a post-Dobbs political landscape, the reverberations are still flowing from the "thunderclap" of deep-red Kansas voting by a "staggering" margin to protect women's access to abortion as "every woman's choice, and not the government's." The explosive backfire on a key front of the right's culture wars came in a GOP-majority state long pivotal in the abortion fight - see the Summer of Mercy - and one so conservative it once banned Charlotte's Web for "blasphemous" talking animals; its school libraries continue to ban books The Handmaid's TaleThe Bluest Eye, The Hate U Give that looks at racist police, a Cats vs. Robots comicbook that mentions the word "nonbinary" - at a ferocious rate. Still, abruptly questioning a longtime, anti-choice narrative in their statehouse, Kansans came out in droves to tell those in power, "Get your hands off our bodies." Dobbs, said one, "woke up a giant."

Thank Alito. In the wake of a SCOTUS decision that "rolled a political grenade into every statehouse across the nation," residents of a heartland state Trump won by 15 points showed up in the biggest turnout for a midterm election, ever. Right-wingers had deliberately timed the vote during an August primary with typically very low, mostly Republican turnout; instead, more than 900,000 Kansans - double the number expected, four times the last primary, and almost what a presidential election draws - turned out for a landslide of 58.8% to 41.2% result. Contributing to the stunning numbers: 70% of newly registered Kansas voters were women. Twitter: "Lmao, GOP," "Thing I never thought I would say: Thank God for Kansas," and in nods to the Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy can go home now" and "We're not in Kansas anymore. Abortion rights: Yes, we are."

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"The pebble that he threw in the pond became a ripple, became a wave. And so, this will carry him on into eternity," said fellow Angola Three Black Panther Robert King. "He won't be forgotten."

Albert Woodfox, a wrongfully imprisoned Black Panther activist who spent his 43 years in solitary confinement uplifting himself and others before finally being freed in 2019, died Thursday of complications from Covid-19 at age 75.

"With heavy hearts, we write to share that our partner, brother, father, grandfather, comrade, and friend, Albert Woodfox, passed away this morning," Woodfox's family said in a statement. "Whether you know him as Fox, Shaka, Cinque, or Albert—he knew you as family. Please know that your care, compassion, friendship, love, and support have sustained Albert, and comforted him."

The family added that Woodfox was a "liberator" who inspired Americans to "think more deeply about mass incarceration, prison abuse, and racial injustice."

Civil rights attorney and former NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill called Woodfox "one of the most extraordinary human beings I've ever met."

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"A recession caused by the Fed raising rates too aggressively would undo a great deal of the enormous gains that have occurred in the current recovery," warned one economist.

New Labor Department data published Friday showed that U.S. job growth surged to 528,000 last month, defying analysts' expectations of a slowdown and deepening concerns that the Federal Reserve will continue hiking interest rates in its bid to curb inflation.

The better-than-predicted hiring and the slight uptick in wage growth after months of deceleration increase the likelihood that the central bank will impose its third consecutive 75-basis-point interest rate boost in September, despite warnings that the Fed's effort to cool economic demand and rein in prices could induce a damaging recession and mass unemployment.

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said Friday that while the new jobs figures show that "we're almost surely not in a recession now, the Fed may have already overshot and secured a recession in coming months" as rate hikes slowly work their way through the economy, slashing investment by making borrowing more expensive.

"Regardless, they should slow the pace of rate increases substantially and be ready to go into neutral or even cut rates," Shierholz argued. "A recession caused by the Fed raising rates too aggressively would undo a great deal of the enormous gains that have occurred in the current recovery."

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"We cannot provide billions of dollars in new tax breaks to the very same fossil fuel companies that are currently destroying the planet."

Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to offer a sweeping critique of the Democratic Party's new reconciliation package, applying particularly close scrutiny to the legislation's massive and destructive handouts to the fossil fuel industry.

While Sanders (I-Vt.) applauded the Inflation Reduction Act's "serious funding for wind, solar, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, energy-efficient appliances, and low-income communities that have borne the brunt of climate change," he raised concerns about the "billions of dollars in new tax breaks and subsidies" that the oil and gas industry will receive under the measure, which could get a Senate vote as soon as this week.

"In my view, if we are going to make our planet healthy and habitable for future generations, we cannot provide billions of dollars in new tax breaks to the very same fossil fuel companies that are currently destroying the planet," the Vermont senator said. "Under this legislation, up to 60 million acres of public waters must be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before the federal government could approve any new offshore wind development."

Sanders proceeded to spotlight some of the fossil fuel industry's positive responses to the measure, which was negotiated primarily by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the top recipient of oil and gas campaign donations in Congress.

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Fossil fuel fast-tracking will erase climate gains

WASHINGTON -

Bloomberg published a copy of draft language for the ‘permitting reform’ bill that Senator Joe Manchin demanded in order to support the Inflation Reduction Act.

The proposal aims to fast track a variety of environmental and public safety reviews for major infrastructure projects, and requires the President to create a list of at least 25 projects deemed to be of “strategic national importance” that would be subject to the review. The list would be updated every six months.

The draft requires that at least five of the priority items “shall be projects to produce, process, transport, or store fossil fuel products, or biofuels, including projects to export or import those products.” Two of the priority projects should be devoted to the “capture, transport, or store carbon dioxide, which may include the utilization of captured or displaced carbon dioxide emissions.” This fossil fuel prioritization continues well past 2030, requiring at least three projects to be fossil fuel oriented while allowing greater discretion to add more to the priority list.

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Israeli forces killed a five-year-old girl and at least several other Palestinians on Friday in their latest bombardment of the Gaza Strip, an occupied and deeply impoverished territory that Israel has been strangling for decades.

Citing Palestinian officials, the Associated Press reported that "Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes in Gaza on Friday," killing at least eight people including the young girl and a "senior militant" identified as Tayseer al-Jaabari.

At least 40 people were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Israel claimed it carried out the assault to preempt an "imminent threat" from Palestinian militants who vowed retaliation after Israeli forces arrested a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militant in the occupied West Bank earlier this week.

But observers were quick to cast doubt on that rationale.

"Despite threats by PIJ, there had been no Palestinian escalation from Gaza and the ceasefire formula in place since the last war in May 2021 had been working," Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow and Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Friday, referring to the tenuous agreement put in place after Israel's previous large-scale attack on Gaza, which left hundreds of Palestinians dead and nearly 2,000 wounded.

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Washington Gas's customers, said the plaintiffs, "have a right to the facts about the environmental and health impacts of the products and services they use—including where they get their energy."

Warning that a Washington, D.C. utility has run afoul of the U.S. capital's consumer protection law, three public interest groups on Thursday announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Washington Gas Light Company over what they called the "greenwashing" of its use of highly pollutive methane gas.

U.S. PIRG Education Fund, Environment America Research and Policy Center, and ClientEarth filed their lawsuit in the District of Columbia Superior Court, saying Washington Gas is consistently misleading more than one million customers by advertising its use of natural gas as a "smart choice for the environment."

"Washington Gas consistently refers to fossil gas in customer-facing materials as clean and sustainable... compared to electrification," said ClientEarth in a statement.

The company has focused heavily on convincing customers that using natural gas, whose main ingredient is methane, is a sustainable way to power their homes and workplaces—despite the fact that methane has 80 times the climate-heating potency of carbon emissions in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

With fracking driving a surge in global gas production over the past two decades, methane is now responsible for nearly half of planetary heating to date and for 23% of Washington, D.C.'s greenhouse gas emissions.

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Malcolm Fraser was right about ‘our dangerous ally’. The US is the most aggressive and violent country in the world. It is addicted to a belief in its exceptionalism, grounded in aggression both at home and abroad, and finding it hard to admit mistakes.

Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war.

The record is clear. Time and time again we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into the imperial wars of the UK and then the US. We have forfeited our strategic autonomy.

Over two centuries, the US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments. It has a military and business complex that depends on war for influence and enrichment. It funds our War Memorial and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and many other fronts for US military and business interests.

Records show that the US is a much more aggressive and violent country than China.

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“It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

-George Orwell

“Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.”

-JG Ballard

Take it from a penniless middle American pauper when I tell you that, rightly or wrongly, no one gives a flying fuck about January 6 in flyover country. Even in the full throws of their self-stoked hysteria over the five-alarm dumpster fire that is the US House Select Committee to Investigate January 6, the political class seems to be at least somewhat aware of this yocal malaise over the summer’s hottest partisan craze and naturally, they already have the two-thirds of the country that they barely even know exists figured the fuck out.

Once again, they’re all just a bunch of lazy slack-jawed hicks who can’t be coaxed off their tractors to bother with the greatest threat to liberal democracy since Hitler wore lederhosen. Just like those lazy peasants who dare not vote, the rural lumpenproletariat are just genetically pre-dispositioned to be indifferent to what really matters in this world and trust me when I tell you that many of my neighbors are equally mystified and annoyed by these condescending coastal elites who keep trying to sell them tickets to Washington’s biggest monster truck rally since Watergate.

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In the 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade.

Since then, the agenda of right-wing U.S. leaders, of which abortion is only a part, has become clear: slashing school food programs; denial of Medicaid expansion in states that need it most; attacks on Black, Brown and Native people by the police and border patrol; Supreme Court decisions to put fossil-fuel companies ahead of the rest of society; as well as the rights of gun manufacturers; denial of sovereignty to indigenous people and tribes and failure to protect voting rights and ending the constitutional right to abortion.

The Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade, has made life in America distinctly more dangerous. The seismic aftershocks of that ruling are already being felt across the country: 22 states have laws or constitutional amendments on the books now poised to severely limit access to abortion or ban it outright. Even before the Supreme Court issued its decision, states with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal-mortality and infant-mortality rates. Now, experts are predicting at least a 21 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths across the country.

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In Rishi Sunak’s latest attempt to revive his floundering leadership bid, he has announced that he would widen the definition of extremism to include those with an “extreme hatred of Britain.”

Anyone expressing anti-nationalist views could be referred to Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation scheme. Though the government claims participation in the “deradicalization” programme is voluntary, when referrals lead to the police banging on your door at dawn or pulling your child out of maths to interrogate them, the government’s definition of “voluntary” starts to seem as vague and inconsistent as its definition of ‘extremism’.

There’s a long history of British governments criminalising dissent. Sedition laws were a cornerstone of the counterinsurgency strategy that Britain used to quell anti-colonial rebellions. The Indian Penal Code, drafted by Thomas Macauley, makes displaying “disaffection” towards the government a criminal offence. India, like many other postcolonial nations, kept this repressive law on the books. The Modi government has used it to cement its shift towards a virulent, authoritarian nationalism. Now the postcolonial boomerang is rebounding once again on British shores.

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The UK government has had more than a year to revise its Online Safety Bill into a proposal that wouldn’t harm users’ basic rights. It has failed to do so, and the bill should be scrapped. The current bill is a threat to free expression, and it undermines the encryption that we all rely on for security and privacy online.

The government intended to advance and vote on the Online Safety Bill last month, but the scheduled vote was postponed until a new Prime Minister of the UK can be chosen. Members of Parliament should take this opportunity to insist that the bill be tossed out entirely.

Subjective Standards for Censorship

If the Online Safety Bill passes, the UK government will be able to directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn’t like. The bill empowers the UK’s Office of Communications (OFCOM) to levy heavy fines or even block access to sites that offend people. We said last year that those powers raise serious concerns about freedom of expression. Since then, the bill has been amended, and it’s gotten worse.

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“Production of the B61-12 nuclear bomb begins,” Sandia National Laboratories announced from the United States. The B61-12, which replaces the previous B61 deployed by the U.S. at Aviano and Ghedi and other European bases, is a new type of weapon. It has a nuclear warhead with four power options, selectable depending on the target to be destroyed. It is not dropped vertically, but at a distance from the target on which it is directed guided by a satellite system. It can penetrate underground, exploding deep to destroy command center bunkers in a nuclear first strike.

The B61-12s, classified as “non-strategic nuclear weapons,” are deployed in Europe — in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and probably other countries — at distances far enough to strike Russia. They thus have offensive capabilities similar to those of strategic weapons.

Another nuclear weapon system, which the United States is preparing to install in Europe against Russia, is ground-based intermediate-range missiles. They can also be launched from “anti-missile shield” installations, deployed by the U.S. at bases in Deveselu in Romania and Redzikowo in Poland, and aboard five warships cruising in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Baltic Sea close to Russia.

That such installations have offensive capabilities is confirmed by Lockheed Martin itself. Outlining the characteristics of the Mk 41 vertical launch system, used in both land and naval installations, it specifies that it is capable of launching “missiles for all missions, both defense and long-range attack, including Tomahawk cruise missiles.” These can be armed with nuclear warheads.

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Although it is unlikely that Beijing will conduct a military annexation of Taiwan in the coming years, Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taipei will undoubtedly push Beijing closer to Moscow, which could perhaps even extend as support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Confirmed responses against Taiwan include a blockade threat and targeted sanctions.

The speaker of the US House of Representatives landed at Taipei airport on August 2, the first high profile American visit since 1997. When warned by Chinese President Xi Jinping that “those who play with fire will eventually get burned,” Washington, in an attempt to downplay the trip, assured Beijing of its commitment to the “One China” policy and said the visit was Pelosi’s own personal decision.

The Chinese leadership has thus far not reacted to Pelosi’s provocation in a serious way, only announcing military exercises around the island and some sanctions. Another potential response by Beijing could be a strengthening of relations with Moscow, perhaps even over the Ukraine battlefield.

Beijing may have analyzed the balance of power in the region and came to the conclusion that in the near future it cannot solve the Taiwan issue by military means. At the same time, the unprovoked American action could force China to end attempts to stabilize relations with the US and instead supply Russia with significant economic and technical-military support.

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Biden Administration had an option to stop the Ukraine War from taking place in the first place by not inviting Ukraine to join NATO and making Ukraine a neutral country. But it chose the war. Why? Why suddenly so much concern for the people of Ukraine?

Is it because it is a country populated by white people? In 1994, President Clinton did nothing while genocide of Tutsi ethnic Rwandans was going on in Rwanda resulting in the deaths of some 500,000 to 662,000. Was that utter neglect because these were black people?

Or is it because there is a considerable number of Ukrainians living in the United States who would vote for Biden’s reelection in 2024? Or is it because usually a war president gets reelected? Or was it that Biden wanted to look “macho”, a president who cowed down Russia, our long-created perennial enemy? Or are Biden administration, and the Pentagon pursuing the policy suggested by recent Rand Corporation thesis to break up Russia by weakening it by this brutal war? Or are he and the democrats paying back the ‘defense’ contractors—for their donations to the Democrats during elections– with billions of dollars in profit by this war?

Many times, our politicians get their clue from the many think tanks such as The Rand Corporation, existing in the country.

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People injured by COVID-19 vaccines may not realize it, but the pretense that post-vaccination injuries and deaths are just “sad coincidences” — far from being unique to the pandemic jabs — is a trick as old as vaccination itself.

So-called “fact-checkers” are having to work double-time to come up with ways to deny the undeniable fact that COVID-19 vaccines are causing injuries and deaths on a massive scale.

The shot pushers and their media enablers have taken cover-up tactics to absurd new heights by, for example, chalking up the rash of fatal heart attacks and overnight deaths in athletes and young adults to a fluky condition referred to variously as “sudden adult death syndrome” or “sudden arrhythmic death syndrome” (SADS).

What the COVID-19 vaccine-injured do not necessarily recognize, however, is the pretense that post-vaccination injuries and deaths are just “sad coincidences” — far from being unique to the pandemic jabs — is a trick as old as vaccination itself.

Facilitated by well-honed semantic and statistical flimflam, public health officials’ core strategy for perpetuating their fiction is to profess innocence — making unabashedly unsubstantiated pronouncements about vaccine safety, on the one hand, while on the other hand, declaring themselves “baffled” by ailments that emerge in the aftermath of a given vaccine’s rollout.

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Since April 2020, I’ve published a long series of articles arguing that there is a strong perhaps even overwhelming case that the global Covid epidemic that has taken over 15 million lives, including more than a million Americans, was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

Although I believe I have presented an enormous amount of circumstantial—and even more than circumstantial—evidence for this extremely controversial hypothesis, virtually no alternative media outlets let alone mainstream ones have been willing to discuss this topic given its absolutely monumental implications. But that may now be starting to change.

A couple of months ago, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, former chairman of the Lancet Covid Commission, publicly suggested that America may have been the possible source of the virus, and a clip of his remarks went super-viral on Twitter, with 11,000 retweets and a million views.

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An analysis of VAERS reports shows that contrary to the FDA’s briefing document claiming that the majority of adverse events in Pfizers’ clinical trial were non-serious – at least 58 cases of life-threatening side effects in infants under 3 years old who received mRNA vaccines were reported. For some, it is unclear if they survived. It is also unclear why the infants were vaccinated, and whether they were part of the clinical trials. However, in the upcoming FDA meeting on Wednesday, the FDA will not be able to argue it did not know

“Chest pain; cardiac arrest; Skin cold clammy”. This short description of a cardiac arrest, which occurred one hour after receiving a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, is taken from the VAERS system – the US Vaccine Adverse Eve Reporting System ( case number 1015467), and it does not refer to an elderly person, nor to a young adult, or even a teenager. It is hard to believe, but this report refers to a two-month-old baby.

“A 2-month-old male patient received bnt162b2 (PFIZER-BioNTech COVID-19 VACCINE) lot number: EL 739, via an unspecified route of administration on 02 Feb 2021 at single dose for COVID-19 immunisation”, thus stated in the report. “Patient administered vaccination, observed for 15 minutes left the clinic then returned one hour later on 02 Feb 2021, presenting as skin cold, clammy and with chest pain, cardiac arrest event then developed, patient stabilised and transferred for further medical treatment… The outcome of the events was unknown. This case was reported as serious with seriousness criteria-life threatening from HA. No follow-up attempts possible. No further information expected”.

How did a 2-month-old baby receive the mRNA vaccine? These vaccines have not yet received EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for approved use in children ages five and under by the FDA, or any other regulatory authority, and even if it will, the EUA will only include babies 6 months and older.

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VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 1,357,940 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines, including 29,790 deaths and 247,686 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 22, 2022.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,357,940 reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 22, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). That’s an increase of 6,990 adverse events over the previous week.

VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 29,790 reports of deaths — an increase of 155 over the previous week — and 247,686 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 1,010 compared with the previous week.

Of the 29,790 reported deaths, 19,236 cases are attributed to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, 7,917 cases to Moderna, 2,584 cases to Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and no cases yet reported for Novavax.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 848,094 adverse events, including 13,805 deaths and 86,604 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 22, 2022.

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I want to draw your attention to an extraordinary but little-known book titled Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality: The Medical Assault on the American Brain. It was published in 1990 and it’s out of print but there are still a few used copies available on Amazon and eBay. It was written by Harris L. Coulter (1932 – 2009) a visionary medical historian (with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University) who also co-authored A Shot in the Dark with Barbara Loe Fisher in 1986.

Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality is as close as our movement gets to a Unified Field Theory. Coulter argues that everything from the social upheaval of the 1960s to the sharp rise in autism, cranial nerve palsies, depression, suicide, eating disorders, learning disabilities, seizures, allergies, family dissolution, demyelinating disorders, sexual violence, and other forms of psychopathy & sociopathy — all stem, at least in part, from pervasive subclinical encephalitis (and post-encephalitic syndrome) as a result of vaccines. Coulter provides extensive references from the scientific and medical literature at the end of each chapter to document his claims (this was before science and medicine started censoring all discussion of vaccines).

I disagree with Coulter’s claim that vaccines led to the civil unrest in the 1960s. The U.S. war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia combined with the draft and the introduction of high dose progesterone birth control pills are much better explanatory factors. The fact that the CIA/FBI/deep state systematically assassinated the most important political leaders of that era added to the chaos.

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Wherever you look in the world today, governance is failing and governments are falling. And even where governments hold on, premiers, prime ministers, presidents and parliamentarians tumble around them; disgraced and exposed for one seedy scandal after another.

Be it money, sex, fraud, despotism, embezzlement or quite simply a pandemic of lies. It barely matters, over and over again the unbridled lust for power takes precedence over the responsibility to earn the trust of the nation.

So widespread has this ‘failure to govern’ epidemic become that one is justified in asking whether the electoral system – which supposedly underlies ‘democracy’ – has any merit left in it at all?

Well, you might say “It’s not the system it’s the quality of the candidates that’s the problem.” And clearly that is a big problem, as evidenced by the pandemic of failure to deliver.

But isn’t there something wrong with expecting unaware, uninvolved and unsuspecting members of the general public to choose who should lead their countries? Isn’t this a receipt for chaos and corruption?

Yes, quite obviously it is. By and large, whoever is chosen to take on this leadership role turns out to be a mirror of the mentality which put them there.

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The financial behemoth privately fears that regular people have too much leverage.

A BANK OF AMERICA executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

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Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal the Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19,  originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.

Prof. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity. In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent.

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The 20-year war in Afghanistan is often spoken of as a well-intentioned failure. In fact, it was a major crime originating in bloodlust and an indifference to Afghan lives. The U.S. bears a major responsibility for the present suffering of Afghans and has an obligation to undo the damage it has inflicted.

The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. When lawbreaking occurs, we seek the perpetrators, rather than starting wars with unrelated parties. When the IRA set off bombs in London, nobody called for air strikes on West Belfast (or on Boston, where a great deal of IRA funding came from). When the Oklahoma City bombing was found to have been perpetrated by a white supremacist associated with ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Idaho or Montana. Instead, the attacker was searched for, found, apprehended, brought to court, found guilty, and sentenced.

This was not the approach taken by the Bush administration. Rather than seek out and punish the guilty—and only the guilty—it swiftly launched a “global war on terror” that led to the deaths of millions.1

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The Times has published an article titled “Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears,” subtitled “The singer’s uncompromising individuality makes her a serious threat to the mass imposition of cultural conformity through censorship,” and its contents are exactly as horrifyingly idiotic as you would imagine.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the article by Ben Macintyre, because if I had to read them then so do you:

A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.

 

For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.

 

Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way. Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a brief but diplomatically corrosive visit, the aftereffects from which may be felt for years to come.

Toward the end of her speech alongside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, Pelosi’s brain underwent one of its increasingly common software glitches, causing her to begin babbling inarticulately.

Here is a transcript of what Nancy Pelosi’s brain said:

“In our earliest days at our founding of our country, Benjamin Franklin, our presidency, said, freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy, one thing, security here. If we don’t have- we can’t have either, if we don’t have both.”

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The growing super-scandal surrounding text messages from 1/6 that were deleted by the Secret Service, Homeland Security and now the Department of Defense leaves one grasping for adjectives that fit the moment. Journalist Seth Abramson was unequivocal on Tuesday — “Biggest Cover-up in American History” — and I am hard-pressed to dispute him.

“So now we have missing Secret Service texts that could establish contacts between Donald Trump and the domestic terrorists of Stop the Steal, missing DHS texts that would reveal secret lobbying by Trump’s ‘legal team,’ and possibly missing Pentagon texts about *martial law*,” Abramson wrote on Twitter. “The *practical* question, now: do Americans have a moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6? Has the USSS, DOD or DHS left us with any choice but to assume the deleted texts would be incriminating?”

A moral right? At this juncture, can people reasonably do anything other than expect the worst?

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Article

Will Truth Be Criminalized?

Paul Craig Roberts

The Establishment’s determination to close down narrative-challenger Alex Jones has put Sandy Hook back in the news.  As First Amendment protection is fading, I checked to see what I had written about Sandy Hook.  I was relieved to see that I had only reported on the skepticism and asked questions.

My search of the IPE archives brought up my articles on other controversial shootings–Las Vegas and Orlando–and the Oklahoma City Bombing.  The common thread in all of these incidents is that the narrative is established the minute the news is reported, and officials and media never vary from the narrative.  As soon as it happens, the government and the media already know what happened.  No investigation ever takes place.  It was the same for President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother’s assassination, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, etc.

Legitimate questions about the narratives are ignored by officials and media who seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bury the truth.  Skeptics, no matter how prominent or fact-based are demonized as “conspiracy theorists” unworthy of attention.  

Clearly, America no longer has a media watchdog.  America has a propaganda ministry for official narratives.

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Article

How America’s Economy Was Destroyed

Paul Craig Roberts

The Establishment’s determination to close down narrative-challenger Alex Jones has put Sandy Hook back in the news.  As First Amendment protection is fading, I checked to see what I had written about Sandy Hook.  I was relieved to see that I had only reported on the skepticism and asked questions.

My search of the IPE archives brought up my articles on other controversial shootings–Las Vegas and Orlando–and the Oklahoma City Bombing.  The common thread in all of these incidents is that the narrative is established the minute the news is reported, and officials and media never vary from the narrative.  As soon as it happens, the government and the media already know what happened.  No investigation ever takes place.  It was the same for President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother’s assassination, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, etc.

Legitimate questions about the narratives are ignored by officials and media who seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bury the truth.  Skeptics, no matter how prominent or fact-based are demonized as “conspiracy theorists” unworthy of attention.  

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As I recently wrote, the US no longer has an economy.  America is a market for goods produced offshore with foreign labor that US global corporations sell to Americans.  The US which once produced its own manufactured goods and food now imports much of it.  The result is that fewer and fewer American incomes are based in the production of goods and services consumed by Americans.  This is the path of de-industrialization and poverty.

Not only does America no longer have an economy, it no longer seems to have any economic statistics or ones that make much sense.  For example, allegedly inflation is at 9 percent annually, but gold and silver prices have fallen, with gold down about $250 an ounce and silver down about $6 an ounce. Percentage wise, these are large declines.  Inflation is known to erode the value of paper fiat money, but the US dollar is up against the Euro and other currencies, and inflation is eroding the value of real money–gold and silver. 

According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the economy has regained 9 million of the lost lockdown jobs, dropping unemployment to 3.6%.  With about 2 job openings for every person seeking a job, we are at full employment.  Wages have risen strongly but by less than inflation, so real earnings are declining but corporate profits are high. There are slight decreases in the number of people without health insurance and in the number receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  So there are signs that things are improving. 

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America’s deadliest epidemic is fueled by dangerous numbness and self-loathing, says Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Dr. James Gilligan, whose work analyzes the crisis of nihilistic violence through patient case studies, Greek myths, and Shakespeare.

American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administrating the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help. Dr. James Gilligan argues that childhood abuse, and the shame it engenders, is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic. This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage. It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic, and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society. Dr. Gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he works with, but Greek myths and Shakespeare.

Dr. James Gilligan is a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University. Formerly, he served as the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. He is the author of Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, and Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David A.J. Richards.

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The specter haunting the United States consists not only of an impending fascism, but also of the inability of conscience, morality and justice to catch up with reality. The United States has increasingly come closer to tipping into the abyss of a new fascist politics. The latest indications of this include how the GOP is seeking to deputize vigilantes to prevent abortion seekers from even leaving their own states to seek abortions in other states, the ongoing evidence showing that Republicans are actively setting the stage to steal the 2024 election if they lose, new revelations about right-wing brainwashing in K-12 education, the enactment of voter suppression laws, the banning of books, the normalizing of “white replacement theory,” attacks on LGBTQ youth, and threats against librarians for refusing to remove censored books from their library shelves.

What is even more disturbing is the simultaneous crisis of political agency and historical consciousness, and the collapse of civic responsibility that have made it possible for the threat against democracy to reach such a perilous moment.

Politics in the U.S. is no longer grounded in a mutually informing regard for both its residents and the institutions that provide for their well-being, freedoms and a vast array of civic rights. With the collapse of conscience has come the breakdown of politics as the foundation for a democratic society.

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On Wednesday, around 250 farmworkers and their supporters took their first steps of a 24-day Delano-to-Sacramento march to demand more voting options for farmworkers when casting a ballot on unionization.

The march, organized by United Farm Workers, or UFW, has been billed as the “March for the Governor’s Signature,” a reference to demands that California Gov. Gavin Newsom sign a new bill meant to protect farmworkers from voter suppression by employers.

“California is a very wealthy state and agriculture contributes to that wealth, but farmworkers continue to be poor and their families suffer — that’s what we need to change,” Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, told a crowd of marchers gathered at Forty Acres, the site of UFW’s original headquarters in Delano.

“We want everything that you’re doing here to reach the hearts of the growers and the heart of the governor,” said Huerta, before shouting “Si se puede,” a phrase she originated in 1972, while campaigning against legislation that denied workers’ right to organize during harvest seasons.

Over the next several weeks, participants are expected to march roughly 15 miles per day, before reaching the state capital in Sacramento on Aug. 26, which Gov. Gavin Newsom declared “California Farmworker Day” last October. They’ll be marching in the scorching summer heat, behind the same Lady of Guadalupe banner that UFW has been using since the 1960s.

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Amid soaring inflation and record corporate profits, progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) unveiled a bill on Thursday aimed at combating the increasing costs for expenses ranging from housing to gas.

The Emergency Price Stabilization Act would create a sub-task force within the White House to monitor price raises and corporate profiteering, potentially making recommendations to the president to regulate and moderate prices in food, energy, housing, health care and transportation. The group would have subpoena power over corporations’ financial records in order to determine if companies are raising prices for profit or out of necessity.

“From impossible rents and utility bills to soaring costs for food, health care, and other necessities of life, people in America are being crushed by the burden of high prices and wages that can’t keep pace,” Bowman said in a statement. “We cannot simply step back and allow the Federal Reserve, which hiked interest rates again last week, to address inflation on the backs of everyday people. That approach means throwing people out of work and risking a recession.”

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On a podcast on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) said that he believes Social Security and Medicare should be turned into discretionary spending programs – a move that would require Congress to pass a bill each year in order to fund them and likely lead to massive conservative-led cuts to the programs.

Currently, both programs are funded automatically. But Johnson said he wanted more oversight on them, and that he believes that the best way to do that is through required funding debates annually in Congress. “What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken,” Johnson misleadingly said.

If his plan were to happen, which is unlikely, it would likely lead to huge partisan budget battles each year, with a possibility of cuts in funding to the social spending programs — and thus potential cuts for beneficiaries.

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Commentary

Atonement

As in the USA, the governments of Euroland have declared war on their own people….

Boston, Massachusetts, may be even more Woked-up than the Pacific Coast cities. By “Woked-up” I mean susceptible to a quasi-religious frenzy that compels the performance of moral atonement scripts with an emphasis on obeisance to “experts” (credentialed hierophants) — such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Dr. Klaus Schwab, and the various distinguished authors of Critical Race Theory. But it was still a bit of a shock last week to see the Boston Red Sox playing in sky blue and yellow uniforms in solidarity with the neo-Nazi failing state, Ukraine. I’d be surprised if Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers could find Ukraine on a map.

News flash to Boston: Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine is all over except the shouting. Plus, nobody in the USA cares about it anymore, and if they do, probably for the wrong reasons. The right reason to care is that the “Joe Biden” regime’s insane campaign to destroy Russia has only brought Western Europe to the brink of collapse and ruin, thereby threatening the continuation of Western Civilization altogether.

You don’t hear much chatter about this emanating from, say, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government because, apparently, they’re all-in on the demolition of Western Civ. It is the ultimate act of atonement, and atonement for the sins of culture and politics is the currency for personal status in Woke Elitedom. America’s elites are secretly disgusted with themselves, especially about the wealth they have been able to grift out of all the racketeering that has replaced honest work in our country — and nowhere is the racketeering more grotesque, or more pretentiously caparisoned, than in the Ivy League universities. Status drives Wokery because Woke Elitedom has more money than it knows what to do with, so just having a lot of money means less than it used to — just ask Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Don’t worry. Soon they will have a lot less money. Or rather, first they will have a lot of money that’s worthless and then they will have no money, like everybody else. The demoralizing inflation underway leads to the destruction of credit and when enough credit is destroyed, there will be no money, since our money is based on credit. When that happens, see what your self-proclaimed moral purity will buy you.

The credit-driven money system is a metaphor representing the expectation that we will always have more of everything. That was surely the consensus in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was born. 1913 was the last year of the Belle Époque, the beautiful era preceding the First World War. It was also the coming-of-age of economies based on oil. In that moment, Western Civ stood in amazement at its achievements and in thrall to its glittering future. The slaughter in the trenches of WWI shattered that confidence, nowhere more deeply than in Germany, which afterwards lurched from the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic to the depravity of Hitler’s Third Reich, and from there back to ruin in the Second World War.

Today’s Woke Elitedom of Europe, led by Germany, is deliberately driving the EU nations into a ditch without bothering to go to war. They certainly don’t have the military mojo to prosecute a war with Russia — which is what they would be doing if NATO intervened actively in Ukraine (ain’t gonna happen). Instead, they have torn-up reams of trade agreements and imploded a richly-constructed supply network of basic operating resources like oil, natgas, minerals, and grains in an absurd act of atonement, in obeisance to the experts at the World Economic Forum and the fiends behind “Joe Biden.” And lately, they are bent on destroying their food supply with cockamamie campaigns against their farmers, in line with WEF hallucinations about climate change.

As in the USA, the governments of Euroland have declared war on their own people. Germans are scuttling around collecting firewood now, with natgas looking scarce and unaffordable going into winter at the dark upper latitudes. I would bet that there are close to zero wood-stoves available at this point, and how many cold seasons will it take before they cut down all the forests of Europe? Meanwhile, Europe’s industries and businesses disintegrate. The Great Re-set at hand won’t be der Schwabenklaus’s transhuman nirvana but rather a return trip to the 12th century.

All this does not even include the forthcoming attrition among the vaccinated. We have succeeded in disabling and destroying the immune systems of many millions of people with mRNA shots. They are going to get sick from all sorts of things. A lot of activities will stop working, including the medical industry, so many of the injured and dying will not receive care. In this late summer interim, American pharma says it’s ready to bring forth new-and-improved mRNA shots supposedly keyed to the latest emerging variants of the C-19 coronavirus. Pharma and its enablers in the NIH-CDC matrix actually have no idea what variants are coming — nowhere is nature more of a trickster than in disease organisms — and you can be sure that their new vaccines will be more shuck-and-jive.

Anyway, nobody believes them anymore. Few are lining up for the boosters and fewer parents are dragging their kids and babies to the shotmeisters. What remains to happen, and probably will by summer’s end, is a massive uprising of the non-Woke against the Woke Elites and the end of their insane depredations. They can atone all they want at their trials and executions.

By: James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation Blog

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Read another good one:

Playing Chicken with the Fates

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The Pyramid of Power: Chapter 11 – The Banking Cartel & The Future of Money

The purpose of the investigation will be to briefly explore the history of banking and the role the banks – and the people behind them – have played in shaping our world over the last centuries. Because of the nearly universal use of banking institutions it is of vital importance that we understand how the bankers influence our lives, and whether we prefer to allow this influence to exist in the first place. We will also examine the latest trends in banking and how they signal the shift of our world into a new era of digitalization.

First, let’s take a look at the history of banking itself. Archaelogical findings indicate record keeping of transactions and the use of grain and animals as a form of currency as far back as 5,000 BC in Sumeria, as fhe well as ancient Greece and Roman periods. Around this time it was common for wealth to be stored at temples and palaces of different kingdoms. Much of what was stored at these temples was gold and coins of varying sizes and metals. Wealthy aristocrats would store their coins and jewels in the basements of temples which often made temples a target during wars and invasions.

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