News Articles for November 21, 2021
Who is America's god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn't serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
In God We Trust is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of "turn the other cheek"? The one who found his disciples among society's outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say, give me a break. READ MORE
WASHINGTON -
Today, Earthjustice filed a petition along with a coalition of 10 health, community, and farmworker groups, filed a petition asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban neurotoxic organophosphate pesticides, which are prevalent in our food and water, and endanger farmworkers and their families. The EPA recently banned all food uses of chlorpyrifos, the most well-known organophosphate pesticide, but only one among a dangerous pesticide group. Chlorpyrifos is just one of over a dozen organophosphates the agency reauthorized for use in agricultural fields, even though they are acutely neurotoxic — meaning that people who are exposed at high doses over a brief period can experience severe neurological symptoms — and are linked to neurodevelopmental harm to fetuses and infants. READ MORE
Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech—the makers of the two most successful coronavirus vaccines—are raking in a combined $65,000 in profits every minute as they refuse to share their manufacturing recipes with developing countries, where billions of people still lack access to lifesaving shots.
According to a new People's Vaccine Alliance analysis of recent earnings reports, the three pharmaceutical giants have made a total of $34 billion in profits this year, which amounts to roughly $1,083 per second, $64,961 per minute, or $3.9 million per hour. READ MORE
In a surprising development, Republican governor Kevin Stitt has refused to implement the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. This has placed the governor directly at odds with Pentagon brass and with the White House as it aggressively attempts to enforce its latest vaccine mandate for all military personnel. The Washington Post sums up the situation:
Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) last week removed the state’s adjutant general, who had directed troops to comply with the vaccine mandate, and replaced him with a new commanding general who promptly issued the order rejecting it. In his memo, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the state’s new National Guard commander, said personnel could sidestep the policy with no repercussions unless they are put on federal duty.
The legal situation is complicated. As originally imagined by early Americans, the state militias are supposed to be independent military units unless called into national service during wartime. Moreover, state governors have at times exercised a de facto veto over federal control of state troops. READ MORE
Pfizer told the world 15 people who received the vaccine in its trial had died as of mid-March. Turns out the real number then was 21, compared to only 17 deaths in people who hadn’t been vaccinated.
On July 28, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech posted a six-month data update from their key Covid vaccine clinical trial, the one that led regulators worldwide to okay the shot.
At a time when questions about vaccine effectiveness were rising, the report received worldwide attention. Pfizer said the vaccine’s efficacy remained relatively strong, at 84 percent after six months. READ MORE
Is COVID19 being used to put Democracy itself under world-wide siege?
The Atlantic article, Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty, asks “how long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?” Australia’s highest court struck down challenges to their government’s draconian rules that have turned Australia into a hermit continent and a police state. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews defends “It is not about human rights. It is about human life.” READ MORE
What’s Behind the COVID Curtain?
The “men behind the COVID curtain” are working overtime to prevent interference in their COVID agendas, which is why emergency use authorization (EUA) for COVID 19 vaccines persists and is protected by worldwide stakeholders. EUAs are only legally possible when there are no effective treatments (which there are). Maintaining the COVID 19 illness and its vaccine EUAs serves an enormous number of enterprising people, absent the rest of humanity. Many folks realized something nefarious was going on. The following provides some background. READ MORE
CDC once was a federal agency that nearly everyone respected. That no longer is the case. Now there are many reasons why CDC should be widely disrespected. Its latest debacle is how it changed the definition of vaccine.
Just imagine this: The entire push for COVID “vaccines” was based on a lie – they did not meet the official CDC definition of a vaccine. By doing this the government could coerce the entire population to get the shot. Calling them “vaccines” was the biggest lie from Fauci and the key to drug companies making many billions of dollars. READ MORE
With saber rattling from the U.S. General Staff, Washington, D.C. is awash anew with schemes for the next arms race.
A parade of weapons manufacturers is plying members of Congress with arguments for new weapons technologies and dollars for the next election cycle. Leading the way: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon Technologies.
The top 20 Defense contractors contributed $47 million to federal candidates in 2020. Lobbying efforts of defense contractors totaled more than $87 million in 2021. READ MORE
UN Security Council members alone may legally impose sanctions on nations, entities or individuals.
When this action is taken by one or more nations against others, it’s a flagrant international law breach — what I call war by other means.
Time and again, hegemon USA breaches international and its own constitutional law in pursuing its diabolical aims — including by waging sanctions war against invented enemies.
No real ones exist!
On Monday, interventionist Blinken falsely called Nicaragua’s democratically open, free and fair election process a “sham” — a bald-faced Big Lie he and likeminded US extremists are infamous for. READ MORE
An FBI SWAT team raided the home of an activist mother of three in Colorado on Tuesday, Nov. 16, knocking down her door, bursting into the house and handcuffing her while she was homeschooling her children.
This is the first known case of the federal government making good on its promise to not only intimidate but actually carry out a raid on a mom who was involved in her local school board politics, said Brannon Howse, who interviewed Sheronna Bishop on his live broadcast at Lindell TV Wednesday night. Sheronna broke the story on Lindell-TV an hour earlier on the Lindell Report with host Mike Lindell and co-host Brannon Howse. Howse invited Sheronna to stay over for another thirty minutes and go deeper into her story on his live broadcast. READ MORE
The testimony has concluded in the Georgia murder trial of the three white men who targeted Ahmaud Arbery because he was Black and then killed him. Evidence presented at trial transported us back to the days of the infamous slave patrols. Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. are on trial for killing Arbery on February 23, 2020, during a purported “citizen’s arrest.”
Racism has infected every aspect of this case — from the defendants’ racial profiling of Arbery, to the 10-week delay in filing charges, to the seating of a nearly all-white jury, to the defendants’ racist statements, to the defense’s attempt to ban Black pastors from attending the trial. READ MORE
"We’re seeing a rising effort to erase materials dealing with the Black American experience or the experiences of transgender people,” said librarian Angie Manfredi.
Gender Queer. Sex Is a Funny Word. The Hate U Give.
These are just a few of the hundreds of books targeted for banning amid a revived movement to limit students’ access to literature about race, sex and gender and to challenge curricula that broach these topics. In October, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom announced that it recorded 60 percent more challenges to books in September 2021 than it had recorded during the same month last year. READ MORE
Apocalypse normal means we can go back to school, get on planes, and hit up restaurants and bars — as long as we don’t think too hard about disabled people, unvaccinated children or long COVID. It means experiencing escalating heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and scrolling past news about ‘code red’ climate reports, and the refugees that climate catastrophes create, without retaliating or rebelling against political leaders who have once again refused to chart a different course.” In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes tackles the idea of “getting back to normal.” READ MORE
There is a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s bleak masterpiece Apocalypse Now that came to mind in the aftermath of the Glasgow climate conference and Wednesday’s big oil lease shindig for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.
Captain Willard, played by an impossibly young Martin Sheen, has dragged a boat crew deep into the Vietnam jungle in search of his target, Col. Walter Kurtz. The boat arrives at the Do Lung Bridge, the scene of what appears to be a permanent battle, and the night is split with explosions, rifle fire and the screams of the dying. Willard goes in search of the commanding officer, only to find a handful of U.S. soldiers cowering behind an earthen wall. READ MORE
As Indigenous Water Protectors and allies in northern Minnesota are stuck with legal and environmental fallout of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline’s construction and operation, Enbridge is already moving on — eyeing ways to streamline and further expand its ability to deliver Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast for export to global markets.
The Canadian oil giant is looking to increase capacity across its fossil fuel infrastructure systems that connect to the Texas Gulf Coast, including potentially building a pipeline linking the Houston area to its newly acquired crude-export hub at the Port of Corpus Christi in order to accommodate Line 3’s ramped up capacity, according to reporting by S&P Global Platts. READ MORE
Members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have elected Teamsters United’s Sean O’Brien as the influential union’s president after more than two decades of leadership from James P. Hoffa, son of the notorious Jimmy Hoffa, who had ties to organized crime.
The vote was called on Thursday, with O’Brien decisively winning 66.5 percent to 33.4 percent. O’Brien will take the helm of one of the largest unions in North America, representing workers in a wide range of industries including transportation, manufacturing and film and television. READ MORE
Union workers for equipment manufacturer John Deere voted to approve a new contract on Wednesday, ending a strike sustained by over 10,000 workers at 14 locations for nearly five weeks.
The new agreement lasts six years, and includes a 10 percent wage increase, 5 percent raises in 2023 and 2025 and the preservation of a previous pension program that the company had originally planned on cutting for people hired after a certain date. The contract also includes a $8,500 signing bonus. READ MORE
In 2003, George W Bush set up the destruction and privatization of Medicare. The end of "real Medicare" is getting closer every day, and Congress and Medicare's administrators are doing nothing.
Last Friday the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) announced a 14.5% increase in Medicare Part B premiums, raising the monthly payments by the lowest-income Medicare recipients from $148.50 a month to $170.10 a month next year. READ MORE
October saw the largest number of workers on strike in years, and 2021 has seen a dramatic rise in coverage of unionization efforts. John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, took aim on his show at the efforts by companies to keep unions out. Whether or not you are likely to see a union drive at your workplace, it matters that more Americans understand how union busting and corporate pressure tactics work; the more you know, the better you can push back against their deceitful propaganda. READ MORE | Watch
Amid the recent skirmishes over revising the reconciliation bill, known as the Build Back Better Plan, lawmakers once again skipped a chance to reform the General Mining Law of 1872.
Under this outdated law, hardrock miners can extract profitable minerals such as gold and silver from public lands without having to pay any federal royalties. Though it has been challenged several times over the past few decades, mainly by Democrats, the law has not been significantly updated in the nearly 150 years since its passage. READ MORE
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 100 federal prison workers have been arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019, including a warden indicted for sexual abuse, an associate warden charged with murder, guards taking cash to smuggle drugs and weapons, and supervisors stealing property such as tires and tractors. READ MORE
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.
NASA and the nation’s top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system.
NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade. READ MORE
There’s been a lot to think about nationally this week. There was the extraordinary report showing that between April 2020 and April 2021 more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses: I can’t think of any single piece of data I’ve seen in recent years that so succinctly shows the scale of America’s current addiction tragedy, or the vastness of the societal dysfunction and desperation unleashed these past decades by peddlers of death such as the Sackler family. There was also news on California’s budget front showing that the state is once again improbably flush with cash, and heading for a $31 billion budget surplus. That will open up doors for more expansive social policies and safety net programs. On the other hand, there’s been the relentlessly bad news about inflation and supply chain snarls, and the impact this is having on national politics and on the public perception of the Biden administration. READ MORE
AFTER THE TERRORIST attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, that killed more than 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden issued a warning to fighters from the Islamic State. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said on August 26. Three days later, Biden authorized a drone strike that the U.S. claimed took out a dangerous cell of ISIS fighters intent on staging another attack on the Kabul airport. READ MORE
THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY has withheld information from the public since January 2019 about the dangers posed by more than 1,200 chemicals. By law, companies must give the EPA any evidence they possess that a chemical presents “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” Until recently, the agency had been making these reports — known as 8(e) reports, for the section of the Toxic Substances Control Act that requires them — available to the public. In 2017, for instance, the EPA posted 481 substantial risk reports from industry on ChemView, a searchable public database of chemical information maintained by the agency. And in 2018, it added another 569 8(e) reports to the site. But since 2019, the EPA has only posted one of the reports to its public website. READ MORE
Tripping over the doorsill into “Joe Biden’s” dark winter, what do you see out in the gathering gloom? That old Shining City on a Hill is looking more like Detroit in a sleet-storm, with dumpster fires sputtering here and there in the broken streets. The darkness descending is something more ominous than any ordinary night. In the shadows, an insectile legion seems to be stealing away with what remains of your country.
Was it reassuring to see Dr. Anthony Fauci declare on MSNBC: “What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who have been fully vaccinated but not boosted”? And the moral of that story? Get more of the same thing that’s not working — and if you don’t volunteer to get it, maybe we can find a way to force you. READ MORE
Who is America’s god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn’t serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
In God We Trust is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of “turn the other cheek”? The one who found his disciples among society’s outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say, give me a break. READ MORE
Let me throw out some very basic propositions. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Starting with a question: In a democratic country — government of the people, by the people, for the people — who “owns” the government’s money?
Either money is privately owned (people, companies, corporations, investment banks, etc) or it’s publicly owned. READ MORE
Acceleration of the temperature rise may speed up further soon, for a number of reasons:
Aerosols: As cleaner alternatives become more economic, and as calls for cleaner air become stronger, this could result in a strong temperature rise soon, as sulfate cooling falls away and more black carbon may result from more wood burning and forest fires, as discussed at the aerosols page.
Sunspots: Within a few years time, sunspots will be reaching the peak of their cycle, and they are looking stronger than forecast, as illustrated by the image on the right showing sunspots up to October 2021. READ MORE
Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways.
FORT MCMURRAY, Canada—The first mine opened when Jean L’Hommecourt was a young girl, an open pit where an oil company had begun digging in the sandy soil for a black, viscous form of crude called bitumen.
She and her family would pass the mine in their boat when they traveled up the Athabasca River, and the fumes from its processing plant would sting their eyes and burn their throats, despite the wet cloths their mother would drape over the children’s faces. READ MORE | Watch
Cassie King grew up in San Diego, the daughter of loving parents, and she’d wanted to be a teacher since she was 5 years old. As a teenager, she had planned to have children of her own.
“But with more health crises and climate catastrophes, I started to worry more about the state of the world in just 10 years, let alone in 100 years when the children of my grandchildren would be having kids,” she said. “That makes me feel like it would be wrong to bring someone into that chaos, without their consent.”
After graduating college at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, she is now working full-time as an animal rights activist, and she has decided never to give birth.
King, 23, is emblematic of a growing number of young people who are worried about having children in a world marked by climate and ecological crises and threatened by overpopulation. READ MORE
RICHLAND, Washington—Near the Columbia River, Clay Sell hopes to launch a new era of nuclear power with four small reactors, each stocked with billiard ball-sized “pebbles” packed full of uranium fuel.
Chief executive officer of Maryland-based X-energy, Sell aims to bring the project online by 2028 as part of a broader attempt to develop safer, more flexible reactors to redefine the nation’s energy future.
These efforts have gained support in the nation’s capital where many Democrats eager to make progress on climate change have joined with Republicans to funnel money into development. READ MORE
Lightning-sparked wildfires killed thousands of giant sequoias this year, leading to a staggering two-year death toll that accounts for up to nearly a fifth of Earth's largest trees, officials said Friday.
Fires in Sequoia National Park and surrounding Sequoia National Forest tore through more than a third of groves in California and torched an estimated 2,261 to 3,637 sequoias, which are the largest trees by volume.
Nearby wildfires last year killed an unprecedented 7,500 to 10,400 giant sequoias that are only native in about 70 groves scattered along the western side of the Sierra Nevada range. Losses now account for 13% to 19% of the 75,000 sequoias greater than 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter. READ MORE
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest rose by almost 22 percent in one year, the highest level in 15 years, according to figures Thursday that cast doubt on promises by President Jair Bolsonaro's government to reverse the trend with "forceful" action.
The 13,235 square kilometers (5,110 square miles) of forest lost from August 2020 to July 2021 period was the largest swath since 14,286 km2 were cleared in 2005-06, according to an estimate by Brazil's national space research institute INPE.
It is the third time in a row that annual Amazon deforestation has increased under Bolsonaro, whom the opposition blames for the spike due to his encouraging of farming and mining activity. READ MORE
The Crow House
