News Articles | January 1, 2021
The US and its allies are pushing the world toward nuclear armageddon. The US and its allies armed Al Qaeda in Syria. The US and its allies are carrying out a literal genocide in Yemen. The US and its allies are deliberately starving children by the thousands. Shut up about Russia and China.
Desmond Tutu said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is especially true of the unjust situation in which the largest power structure on earth oppresses and tyrannizes populations around the world to force their obedience. Refusing to take a clear stance against that power structure is siding with it. READ MORE -or- LISTEN
Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.
Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism. READ MORE -or- LISTEN
Ayear-and-a-half after a scathing Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that the US Department of Energy (DoE) has no coherent plan in place to manage nuclear waste from weapons manufacturing piling up at more than 150 sites across the country, the DoE has made little progress in developing a safe and strategic plan to handle the waste. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of handling the material is rising steadily — $512 billion at last count — and the federal government hasn’t yet figured out how to pay for it.
And, of course, much of the waste will have to somehow remain safely stored for 10,000 years or more, a timeframe even more mind boggling than the size of the debt. READ MORE
Asmall group of climate activists has established an encampment near President Joe Biden’s private home in Delaware where they are demanding he declare a national climate emergency and immediately order the end to fossil fuel development in the United States.
Establishing the camp on Christmas Day and sleeping overnight in tents or cars on a roadside area not far from the family’s Wilmington residence, the campaigners operating under the “Occupy Biden” banner say if the president truly recognizes that the world is in a “code red” situation when it comes to soaring global temperatures then he must act accordingly. READ MORE
As labor advocates hail 2021 as the “year of the worker,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is encouraging workers to maintain the momentum by using their collective leverage to organize.
On Wednesday, Sanders issued a warning to corporations and executives on Twitter. “For the ruling class, greed is a religion. They will cut back on workers’ wages, on workers’ benefits, on workers’ safety on the job — all for the sake of having more, more, more,” he wrote. “I’ve got news for the ruling class: you cannot have it all. The working class is fighting back.”
Sanders’s statements come at the end of a consequential year for the labor movement. Over 100,000 workers authorized strikes this year, with workers at John Deere, Kellogg, and more – along with health care workers across the country – securing wins in contract negotiations with employers. READ MORE
Tens of thousands of Coloradans were forced to flee their homes Thursday as two fast-moving wildfires — whipped up by wind gusts reaching 110 mph — tore through communities just outside of Denver, engulfing entire neighborhoods in flames and destroying hundreds of buildings.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has declared a state of emergency to help aid the disaster response as officials characterized the late-December fire event as among the worst in the state’s history.
“None of this is normal,” said Colorado state Rep. Leslie Herod (D-8). “We are not OK.” READ MORE
Five years after police brutalized activists opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump has dismissed a lawsuit accusing North Dakota law enforcement officers of excessive use of force—a decision that critics have characterized as a tacit endorsement of the violent repression of climate justice advocates.
Several peaceful protesters who gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to struggle against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure were assaulted by law enforcement officers on November 20, 2016. Police sprayed demonstrators with water cannons amid sub-freezing temperatures that night, and according to the plaintiffs' lawyers, they also used tear gas and fired rubber bullets and exploding munitions "indiscriminately into the crowd." READ MORE
Capping off what organizers and other labor rights advocates have dubbed "the year of the worker," employees at two more Starbucks stores are seeking to unionize.
Workers at a pair of Starbucks locations in Broomfield, Colorado and Chicago, Illinois filed union petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a Twitter account associated with organizing efforts at the coffee giant announced Thursday. READ MORE
Alleging that Georgia's new GOP-drawn General Assembly district maps violate the Voting Rights Act and attempt to disenfranchise Black voters, civil rights groups on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Republican secretary of state in a bid to block the maps.
The suit was filed in the United States District Court in Atlanta by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Georgia, and Wilmer Hale on behalf of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the Sixth District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and individual Georgia voters against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. READ MORE
The head of North America's largest pilots union said Thursday that its members would "follow the science" regarding Covid-19 safety precautions as opposed to new guidance released by the CDC earlier this week which critics say put the needs of corporate profits over worker safety.
"We've followed the science throughout the pandemic and will not allow corporate interests to replace the good judgment pilots show daily in making decisions about whether they are healthy to fly," said Capt. Joe DePete, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents pilots at 38 airlines in the U.S. and Canada. READ MORE
Calls are mounting for President Joe Biden to terminate an under-the-radar Trump-era pilot program that—if allowed to run its course—could result in the complete privatization of traditional Medicare by the end of the decade.
A petition recently launched by Physicians for a National Program (PNHP) has garnered more than 10,000 signatures as doctors and other advocates work to raise public awareness of the Medicare Direct Contracting program, which the Trump administration rolled out during its final months in power. READ MORE
Human rights advocates and attorneys representing Guantánamo Bay detainees on Thursday decried a secret new courtroom reportedly being built by the Pentagon at the notorious offshore U.S. prison.
The New York Times reports Gitmo's new second courtroom—which will cost $4 million—will not allow members of the public to witness proceedings against detainees to be tried for alleged terrorism-related offenses. People wishing to view those trials will have the option of watching delayed video footage in a separate building. READ MORE
National Nurses United (NNU) today condemned the Biden administration's latest moves to rip away protections from health care workers and the public, saying the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) weakening Covid isolation guidelines and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announcing that it will rescind critical Covid protections for health care workers—right when the Omicron variant is exploding across the country during a winter surge–puts countless lives at risk.
“Nurses have fought since day one of this pandemic for protections based on science and the precautionary principle,” said NNU President Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN. “Our demands included optimal isolation times to prevent further Covid spread and an enforceable OSHA Covid health care industry standard to mandate our profit-driven employers, who would never do it on their own, give us optimal protections at work. Nurses applauded the Biden administration when OSHA issued an emergency temporary Covid standard (ETS) in June of 2021, and now we are dumbfounded and enraged that OSHA is rescinding those protections at the same time that the CDC is weakening isolation guidelines to seven days for health care workers and even less time ‘if there are staffing shortages.’” READ MORE
As the U.S. military continues construction of a controversial new base at Henoko Bay, Okinawa, the recent discovery of extreme levels of highly toxic "forever chemicals" in local waterways and groundwater has renewed long-standing opposition to the American occupation of large portions of the Japanese archipelago.
The Asahi Shimbun reported Tuesday that water quality checks near U.S. bases in Okinawa found "alarming" levels of perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) at 38 locations, or more than 70% of tested sites. READ MORE
A United Nations special envoy on Tuesday raised alarm about the safety of civilians in war-torn Yemen given escalating violence, including airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition.
"The escalation in recent weeks is among the worst we have seen in Yemen for years and the threat to civilian lives is increasing," said Hans Grundberg, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres' special envoy for Yemen, in a statement. READ MORE
Global heating caused by human activity could warm oceans enough to fuel hurricanes and tropical storms that strike cities as far north as Boston, a new study published Wednesday projects.
"This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change," Joshua Studholme of Yale University, the study's lead author, said in a statement. "This research predicts that the 21st century's tropical cyclones will likely occur over a wider range of latitudes than has been the case on Earth for the last 3 million years." READ MORE
As parts of Alaska obliterated high-temperature records earlier this week, meteorologists and climate scientists warned that extreme heat and rainfall are the new normal in the nation's largest state and other Arctic and subarctic zones.
On Sunday, the town of Kodiak in southern Alaska hit 67°F—seven degrees warmer than the daytime high in San Diego—and shattering the December record for Alaska by nine degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The town also broke the local December record by more than 20 degrees.
"I would not have thought such a thing possible," Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, tweeted Tuesday. READ MORE
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday said that nearly two years after the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the public health crisis that shows no sign of coming to a swift end has brought into stark relief "the vulgarity" of the U.S. healthcare system, suggesting the political establishment must end its defense of the for-profit healthcare industry as he re-upped his call for Medicare for All.
The Vermont independent senator, whose decades-long push for single-payer healthcare was dismissed by President Joe Biden as not "realistic" weeks before Covid-19 was first detected in the U.S. in January 2020, wrote about the issue on social media shortly after the country recorded 800,000 known deaths from the disease. READ MORE
Data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 21 million people across the country live in households where there was "sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last seven days," a five-month high.
The new figures come as the expanded child tax credit (CTC)—a program that has helped millions of families afford food and other necessities during the pandemic—is set to lapse due to the opposition of Republican lawmakers and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who reportedly wants to remove the benefit from Democrats' Build Back Better package. READ MORE
A New York jury on Wednesday found British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of child sex trafficking and four other counts in connection with her procurement and grooming of minors to be abused by her close friend, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell, 60, was convicted of five of the six counts against her, including sex trafficking a minor, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy. She was acquitted of enticing a minor to travel in order to engage in illegal sex acts. READ MORE
When Oliver Stone first ambles through Dealey Plaza in Dallas in the opening frames his new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, I couldn’t help but think the man is a soldier. Rumpled, restless, and searching, the 75-year old director looks around the scene of the murder of President John F. Kennedy with the gaze of a combatant and a survivor.
Stone is the dogged veteran of a culture war that has been going on for thirty years since the release of his 1991 Oscar-winning feature film, JFK, a struggle to define American history that ripples through the culture with every new development in the ever-evolving JFK story. He is also a Vietnam veteran who did a dangerous tour of combat duty, as depicted his 1987 film Platoon. The man risked his life for his country, I thought, a sacrifice that few of his harshest critics have ever made. READ MORE
That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021.
Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw “progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a “clean” audit by… get this … 2027.
The Pentagon, with some $3 trillion (give or take a trillion but who’s counting?) in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has for the third year in a row failed its audit. An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government’s largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn’t give it a pass.
They couldn’t even figure it out. READ MORE
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire
So former President Donald Trump, who has been impeached twice by the House but saved from conviction by his loyal Senate Republicans, may have committed a criminal offense during the Jan. 6 attempted coup at the Capitol.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., an avowed Never Trumper who is vice chair of the House committee investigating the siege of the icon of American freedom, first broached such a possibility publicly. The panel’s chair, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., confirmed it to The Washington Post.
The committee, which The Guardian reported has evidence gathered from more than 30,000 records and interviews from more than 300 people, has homed in on how Trump spent his time on Jan. 6. It wants to know why it took three hours and seven minutes before he called off his mob charging the Capitol to halt the certification of Joe Biden as president-elect, as if Biden were the enemy. READ MORE
Late last year, Politico described the Revolving Door Project’s Executive Director Jeff Hauser as “the thorn in the Biden transition’s side” for trying to push the Biden administration to reject standard, corporate-friendly, revolving door appointees in favor of those who would zealously fight for the broad public interest. In 2021, RDP has only become thornier with its relentless scrutiny of the executive branch. RDP envisions an executive branch that works as hard as possible and without fail for regular people, not for corporate interests. Its hard-hitting research and fiery commentary are helping to move us closer to that point. READ MORE
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space on Dec. 25, 2021, and with it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets and accomplish many other scientific goals.
I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera – or NIRCam for short – aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole.
To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built. READ MORE
“Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”(Source: Susanne Rust, Unprecedented Die-offs, Melting Ice: Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc in the Arctic and Beyond, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2021)
“Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe. READ MORE
I hope you know this by now, but on Christmas morning the Russian military announced a sizable troop withdrawal from Russian territory near Ukraine. The New York Post’s Eileen AJ Connelly jumped on the story. At noon Saturday her piece, “Over 10,000 Russian troops leaving Ukraine border region after month of drills”, was posted.
While the drawdown was announced without fanfare, it might represent the first quid for the quo’s that President Vladimir Putin expects from U.S. negotiators next month in talks originally proposed by President Joe Biden.
How to explain the silence of the corporate media on the troop pullout? One can imagine the reaction of the eggnog-ed elite running our foreign-policy/media strategy upon hearing the news. “Another Russian dirty trick, announcing this on Christmas day! Who is in good shape enough to prepare our customary press guidance? You know, our Daily Memo for the Media? We also need to focus on what subtle treachery lies behind this ostensibly conciliatory move by Russia.” READ MORE
Another cache of emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) reveals Dr. Anthony Fauci and his boss, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, colluded to quash dissenting views on the lockdowns
October 4, 2020, three medical professors — Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford — launched the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of high-risk individuals rather than the continuation of blanket lockdowns
As support of the declaration rapidly spread, Fauci and Collins discussed how they could stop the call for a sane, science-based approach. In an email to Fauci, Collins wrote, “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises” READ MORE
“From an epidemiology perspective for causality, we apply what’s called “The Bradford Hill” criteria. And they go as follows…
“The first question we’d ask is “does the vaccine have a mechanism of action, a biological mechanism of action, that can actually kill a human being?”
And the answer is yes!
“Because the vaccines all use genetic mechanisms to trick the body into making the lethal spike protein of the virus. It is very conceivable that some people take up too much messenger RNA.
They produce a lethal spike protein in insensitive organs like the brain or the heart or elsewhere. The spike protein damages blood vessels, damages organs, causes blood clots. So it’s well within the mechanism of action that the vaccine could be fatal. Someone could have a fatal blood clot. READ MORE - WATCH
Comrades, many American citizens stood jaw agape as they watched Australian metropolitan police departments begin cracking skulls and making arrests for violating COVID rules and restrictions. Yes, it always seemed like Australia, New Zealand and Europe were the beta testing ground to see if police would comply with jackboot arrests of their own community.
Well, now we can see those same tactics being deployed in the U.S.
New York City was the first large metropolitan area to require vaccination identification cards to enter restaurants, bars, dining establishments and various public and private venues. Now comes the enforcement part. READ MORE-WATCH
Despite an overwhelming majority of New York residents being fully vaccinated, hospitals in the state are reportedly filled with Covid infected patients [based on the flawed PCR test] and an increasing number of those admitted with the virus are children.
During a remote press briefing from City Hall on Monday, outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed there were 17,343 new Covid-positive test results in the city, of which 296 were hospitalized.
Statewide, hospitalizations surged by 11 percent in just one day, from 4,891 on Christmas to 5,526 on Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday.
The number of pediatric admissions in New York City increased by 395 percent in the past two weeks. From Dec. 5 to 11, there were 22 cases of Covid hospitalizations amongst children in NYC. The number jumped to 109 from Dec. 19 to Dec. 23, ABC 7 reports.
Statewide, pediatric hospitalizations increased from 70 to 184 during the same time frame. READ MORE
Well, that didn’t take long.
Just two days ago we posted about the door-to-door efforts taking place to convince the “hesitant” within the United Kingdom. Back in July we posted about the National Guard gearing up for similar work here in America. (Coincidentally [?], we’ve also covered the job openings for ‘resettlement/internment officers’ within the National Guard. Who will be resettled? Who will be interned?)
And now we have agents arresting those who don’t have the jab in New York City.
*6 months ago* – “They’re going to make it so you can’t eat without the jab.”
We’ve witnessed people arrested at a Applebee’s because they didn’t have the appropriate yellow star/papers needed to eat there. We watched as a veteran was thrown to the ground (literally along with an American flag. There’s some symbolism for you.) as he attempted to order a meal at a Panera Bread. Where? New York, of course. READ MORE
The COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer
A paper published in early May 2021 reported the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion
Antigens in vaccines have been shown to induce defects in the immune system that can raise the risk of autoimmune diseases
Leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can also trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses, and the COVID jabs are among the leakiest “vaccines” ever created
According to health authorities, the vaccine-evading Omicron variant necessitates a third COVID injection, but this recommendation will only perpetuate mutation READ MORE
“Tyranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”—An academic study into pathocracy
Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.
Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:
Riots, martial law and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. READ MORE
If the past year has confirmed anything it is that the mainstream media is thoroughly dishonest. Yes, most people already suspected this, but the last 12 months have provided more confirmation than the past several years combined. 2021 has made is clear that the mainstream media is a propaganda arm of political and corporate elitists, from big government to big pharma.
While there have been a few shining examples of independent and mostly unbiased journalism in the MSM, these moments are as rare as Loch Ness Monster sightings and almost as unbelievable. The public has been lied to so consistently that sometimes we ignore legitimate journalism when it pops up because it’s safer to assume the media is disingenuous at all times. READ MORE
Decades of peer-reviewed research has determined that exposure to wireless “Wi-Fi” radiation is biologically and environmentally harmful (see 1, 2). Some countries have already recognized risks and government agencies have taken action to warn and protect the public. Eleven organizations in four Nordic countries have appealed to their governments to better protect the public and the environment from the adverse effects of wireless devices and infrastructure.
From Environmental Health Trust:
Nordic Appeal on Wireless Technology Calls For Protections for Humans and The Environment
Nordic Organizations from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden Request Protections for Humans and the Environment
Press release December 16, 2021:
Nordic Appeal from 11 NGO’s – calling for better protection against wireless technology
In a joint letter, representatives from 11 Nordic organizations from 4 European countries, active in the field of health risks from radiation from wireless technology, request that humans and the environment must be better protected.
There is virtually no proof that children have been seriously affected or dying from the COVID-1984 or any of its so-called “variants”. People who refuse to take their children for COVID jabs are very wise. They should be applauded for not subjecting their children to experimental, unnecessary injections that have been proven to cause serious injury and death! — Truth Unmuted editor Jesse Smith
In response to increasing COVID-19 cases and the rise of a more infectious variant as the holidays and Carnival approach, Mayor LaToya Cantrell expanded New Orleans’ indoor vaccine or negative test requirement Thursday to children ages 5 to 11 and the New Orleans public school system mandated vaccination for students age 5 and older. READ MORE
This has by all estimations been a tough year for a lot of people, both the slumbering and the awake.
Many of those who remain asleep have been forced to get a jab that they really didn’t want, just to keep their jobs or their healthcare plans.
Some did it without so much as a second thought and they will get however many “boosters” the system requires of them. Some can be seen on Facebook actually getting excited when they hear of each new injection that gets the government’s rubber stamp of approval.
Others did it with much pain and suffering. They did not want it. But they felt they had no choice, they felt trapped in a world gone mad. READ MORE
Krishnamurti, an Indian writer, philosopher and speaker, was, at an early age, taken in by the Theosophical Society and groomed to become the new World Teacher. Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, the leaders of the Theosophical society at the time, nurtured Krishnamurti at their headquarters in Madras.When the famous quantum theorist, David Bohm, read Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “The First and Last Freedom”, he was blown away by his insight and knowledge regarding the phenomenon of the observer and the observed. Despite having no university-level training, much less formal education in the sciences, Krishnamurti had, through his philosophical writings, demonstrated a profound understanding of various concepts related to quantum mechanics. READ MORE
If 2021 was the year of maximum corruption, political decadence, and mind-fuckery in US history, 2022 is looking like a convulsive snap-back to the harrowing rigors of reality, spiked with shocking losses, reckonings, and not a little retribution for the rogues and reprobates who drove our country into a ditch. Quandaries abound now in the wreckage of economy, culture, and polity. The years of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters have ended — though you might not know it yet, at this very advent of Twenty-Double-Deuce. Welcome to the banquet of consequences. Soup’s on!
The American people have been played backwards and forwards, inside and out, through and through, and up and down; driven to the very edge of national suicide by a combine of enemies within and without. If China’s CCP wanted to take maximum advantage of a weakened, confused USA, they couldn’t have found more zealous help-mates than the seditious Democratic Party, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s treasonous public health empire, the murderous pharmaceutical companies, the recklessly dishonest news media, and a demonic host of federal agencies, especially the three-stooge “Intel Community” — the CIA (Moe), DOJ (Larry), FBI (Curley) — plus the many secret horror chambers in the Pentagon. Throw in the Big Tech tyrants, the Marxist mandarins on campus, and the satanic narcissists of Hollywood. Oh, and let’s not forget the evil principality of grift and swindling that is Wall Street. READ MORE
Twitter has banned the account of controversial virologist Dr Robert Malone, who reportedly had half a million followers at the time of his removal. Malone is credited even by mainstream critics as having played a significant role in the development of the mRNA technology being used for Covid-19 vaccines today, but has recently come under fire for comments about the safety of those vaccines’ use on children which the Authorized Fact Checkers have labeled “dangerously and flagrantly incorrect.”
Everyone should oppose the removal of Malone and commentators who share his views, regardless of whether they agree with them or vehemently despise them. The reason for this is very simple: only a fool would support government-tied monopolistic billionaire corporations regulating public discourse about Covid responses which affect us all. This is true regardless of what you personally happen to believe about mRNA vaccines. READ MORE -or- LISTEN
AT THIS TIME of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas.
WHEN JOE BIDEN was sworn in January 20, the Democrats had control of the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in over a decade.
If politics worked the way we learn about it in school, Biden and his party would have seized this fleeting opportunity to pass his popular agenda and cement and expand their power.
Instead, after a strong start with the American Rescue Plan, passed in March, the Democrats have puttered forward, slowly losing momentum and now appearing at a standstill. Here are all the things they could have done this year, in theory, but did not.
Come Up With a Plan, Any Plan
It’s true that Democrats hold the Senate with the slimmest margin possible, needing the votes of all 50 Democratic senators — including semi-quasi-Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin — to pass anything. READ MORE
MY EDUCATION IN wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000. READ MORE
A leaked report that shows the military knew for years about dangers to civilian areas follows disclosures of toxic PFAS contamination hidden from the Senate.
A LEAKED REPORT describes significant deficiencies in the safety and integrity of the pipelines used by the U.S. military to shuttle fuel to U.S. Marine Corps and Air Force warplanes in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. As early as 2014, the military discovered monitoring system flaws and dangerous leakages in the pipelines, some of which run beneath civilian communities, but it waited four years before initiating repairs and has never alerted Japanese authorities. The dangers have only come to light thanks to a whistleblower who made public a report produced under contract for the Defense Logistics Agency Energy, or DLA-E, the Department of Defense agency that supplies fuel to military facilities. READ MORE
IN DECEMBER 2019, a toxicologist at the Environmental Protection Agency was tasked with assessing a product that was about to be introduced to the market. As is often the case, the single product — a paint — contained several individual chemicals. One of them, a solvent known as parachlorobenzotrifluoride, or PCBTF, made up half of the product’s weight. There was ample evidence that PCBTF causes cancer. But after the toxicologist included the information in his report, a senior leader in the division removed it, according to documents EPA whistleblowers shared with The Intercept and submitted to the EPA inspector general. The deletion left the public with no way to know this widely used chemical was a carcinogen. READ MORE
The judgment on Friday puts Assange at greater risk than ever of facing trial for espionage charges that have alarmed press freedom advocates.
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT has won its appeal of a British court ruling barring Julian Assange’s extradition on Espionage Act charges, setting the stage for the WikiLeaks founder to be sent to the U.S. to face trial. The decision handed down Friday morning reverses a previous conclusion that Assange would face unacceptable risks to his safety if held in the United States. A lower-court judge ruled in January that Assange would be at risk of suicide or other harm if held in American custody. But following reassurances by U.S. authorities that he would be held in the most strict confinement, a judge found that Assange can be extradited on the charges related to his publishing of classified State Department documents. READ MORE
My parents’ neighborhood is full of shady old oak trees. They are majestic and ancient and they keep the streets cool. In many Florida housing developments, there are hardly any trees at all, so when you walk down the street on a hot summer day (or increasingly, a hot winter) you feel as if you are boiling alive. Walking under a beautiful canopy of oaks is a much more pleasant experience for us humans. Numerous other living things also benefit from these trees, which form the backbone of the local ecosystem..
Because oak trees are remarkable living things, cities have long placed restrictions on what you can do to them. Developers who would like to destroy some quaint patch of nature often found that they were barred by regulation, and people could not just destroy the trees on their property if the city had protected them. But Florida now has a Trumpian Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and things are a little different under Republican rule. In 2019, DeSantis signed a new law prohibiting cities from restricting what property owners can do to their trees. So long as an architect or arborist hired by the developer calls the tree a “danger,” the owner of the property can do what they want with it.1
This is part of the Republican Party’s never-ending war on “regulation.” READ MORE
Russia has recently set out its list of demands for a resetting of the position of the United States in Europe. The Americans have reacted cautiously, promising to give the Russians an answer “shortly”. It would be unwise to hold one’s breath awaiting a positive response from the Americans. Even in the highly unlikely event they respond positively to the Russian proposals, there must always remain the fundamental question: Can they be trusted?
There is a single characteristic that marks United States foreign policy conduct since the end of the Second World War and it is that any agreement they enter into lasts only as long as they consider desirable or in their interests to do so. The classic illustration of that point, and one that no doubt featured heavily in Putin’s assessment of the situation and the making of Russia’s demands, has been a steady movement Eastward of the NATO alliance. READ MORE
Sounding the alarm this December Nicholas Papachrysostomou, MSF head of mission in Yemen made clear that well beyond the many casualties War claimed over the past seven years, famine weighs much heavier on the war-torn nation, a fate Afghanistan unfortunately shares.
“A nearly seven-year long conflict has badly affected the country’s economy and weakened an already fragile healthcare system … The situation is worsening with every passing day.”
If the world has gotten accustomed to those remarks – such cries of alarm have been so many the world has learnt to look the other way in dismissal, it would be foolish to discount the plight of millions of Afghans and Yemenis on account we cannot grasp the repercussions famine will have on geopolitics, nevermind the region’s broader stability.
Desperation has a way to generate political vacuums we cannot possibly foretell, let alone begin to plan for. And here is where the buck should stop – famine in both Afghanistan and Yemen is not a direct result of war, but rather a weapon of war. READ MORE
According to the United Nations, around 377,000 Yemenis have died since 2015 as a result of the ongoing war which has ripped through the country’s population. Such staggering statistics are partly why constant calls are made for the US President to help end the war. Despite promising to do so, Joe Biden has only made things worse.
Currently, the United Nations puts the estimated Yemen war death toll at 377,000, but has warned that if the conflict is not ended soon that figure could jump up to 1.3 million dead by 2030. A study by ‘Save the Children’, which looked at civilian casualties between 2018-2020, said that at least 25% of those killed were children. This puts the death toll between those years at over 2,300 children. The UN added in that they weren’t able to track all deaths, indicating the toll was much higher. This statistic just looks at direct warfare and doesn’t include those who died from disease, dehydration or lack of food. According to UNICEF, 21 million Yemenis are in need of International Aid, 11 million of which are children. READ MORE
SHEDAI CAMP, Afghanistan (AP) — In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.
Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.
Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.
The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taliban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taliban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago. READ MORE
Amid the 2020 global covid lockdowns and economic dislocations it has caused, Klaus Schwab, a previously low-profile founder of a Swiss-based business forum, emerged on the world stage calling for what he called a Great Reset of the entire world economy, using the pandemic as driver. He even published a book in July 2020 outlining his blueprint. It has been rightly called a technocratic society with global top-down central planning. Schwab uses global warming fears and the plight of the world’s poor to justify what is in effect a plan for global totalitarianism where, as the Davos website puts it, nobody will own anything. What is not well-known is the fact that the inspiration for Schwab’s dystopian plans comes from a Catholic bishop whom he met in Brazil in the 1970’s. That bishop links Schwab’s vast globalist network with the powerful political influence of the present Pope Francis.
Far from a traditional Catholic priest, this bishop was known as the “Red Bishop” and endorsed Castro’s Cuba model, as well as the Mao Cultural Revolution in which millions of Chinese were killed or destroyed in a purge of the enemies of Mao. His name was Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, the leading early figure spreading the Church movement known as “Liberation Theology” during the 1960s and 1970s. READ MORE
Bonnie Bridgforth supported five children with an $8.50-an-hour job when she was told she no longer qualified for welfare in Maine. But the state — like so many others — was sitting on a huge stockpile of funds.
When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.
Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.
According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line. READ MORE
Nobody told Yaneli Ortiz’s family that the factory they lived near emitted ethylene oxide. Not when the EPA found it causes cancer. Not when she was diagnosed with leukemia. And not when Texas moved to allow polluters to emit more of the chemical.
Jennifer Jinot didn’t expect to retire early from her role as an environmental health scientist for the federal government. She’d spent 26 years assessing the dangers of toxic chemicals for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The job could be frustrating but, more than that, rewarding.
Early in her career, Jinot evaluated the health impacts of secondhand smoke exposure. It took four years — a pace she remembers thinking was “crazy slow” — to develop a final risk assessment, published in 1993, that determined secondhand smoke causes lung cancer in adults and impairs the respiratory systems of children. The tobacco industry sued the agency. But, in the end, her work spurred changes to the law. The victory was invigorating for Jinot, who had long dreamed of doing what she calls “socially useful” science. READ MORE
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It’s not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution.
A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit — and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities.
ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable.
The agency has long collected the information on which our analysis is based. Thousands of facilities nationwide that are considered large sources of toxic air pollution submit a report to the government each year on their chemical emissions.
But the agency has never released this data in a way that allows the public to understand the risks of breathing the air where they live. Using the reports submitted between 2014 and 2018, we calculated the estimated excess cancer risk from industrial sources across the entire country and mapped it all.
The EPA’s threshold for an acceptable level of cancer risk is 1 in 10,000, meaning that of 10,000 people living in an area, there would likely be one additional case of cancer over a lifetime of exposure. But the agency has also said that ideally, Americans’ added level of cancer risk from air pollution should be far lower, 1 in a million. Our map highlights areas where the additional cancer risk is greater than 1 in 100,000 — 10 times lower than the EPA’s threshold, but still high enough to be of concern, experts say. - READ MORE
The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
…
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said. READ MORE
It's time to stop denying how precarious the situation is.
Remember the Paris Agreement? In 2015, politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pledged they would try and limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Well, an analysis by Sam Carana shows that it was already more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial when the Paris Agreement was reached.
In Sam Carana's analysis, the year 1750 is used as the baseline for pre-industrial. The analysis shows that we meanwhile have also crossed the 2°C threshold (in February 2020) and that the temperature rise looks set to rapidly drive humans and eventually most if not all species on Earth into extinction.
Yet, our politicians refuse to act! READ MORE
Article
The Year in Climate Photos
From the president’s desk to protests and disasters around the world, photos showed climate change is always easy to see but sometimes hard to look at.
Joe Biden, who ran on the most progressive and comprehensive climate plan of any presidential candidate in history, took the oath of office just before noon on Jan. 20 outside a Capitol building that had been ransacked just two weeks earlier by a Trump-supporting mob.
That Wednesday evening, the new president signed executive orders aimed at aggressively fighting climate change—something Trump glaringly failed to do.
From revoking the Keystone XL pipeline permit to rejoining the Paris climate agreement, the sweeping directives laid a road map for the work ahead on the climate crisis. READ MORE
This story includes details about 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.
August 9, 2021: Human activity is “unequivocally” producing a world of heat waves, wildfires, floods, sea level rise, and needless death and suffering, “it is more likely than not” that average global warming will exceed 1.5°C by 2040, and faster, deeper emission reductions will be needed to bring temperatures back below 1.5° by the end of the century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in a landmark science assessment.
“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts, but it really requires unprecedented transformational change—the rapid and immediate reduction of greenhouse gases,” IPCC Vice-Chair Ko Barrett told media. READ MORE