Claude Monet O Rio 1881
Setting new rcords. Winning!
Bless Tucker Carlson for providing the platform.
Bless Glenn Greenwald for his eloquent statement. Don’t miss this.
#FreeAssange
Tucker Greenwald Assange
Oh man, I really hope @realDonaldTrump watches Tucker and @ggreenwald
— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) September 12, 2020
George Galloway Assange
Julian Assange revealing war crimes is the real reason for extradition.
Unable to be convicted for journalism, he stands accused of trumped-up charges in what is the trial of the century.
Full Video: https://t.co/TgJAoINuNE pic.twitter.com/gr0FLDKJJ0
— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) September 11, 2020
“How far back does this story go? We will probably never know.”
• Was COVID19 Spreading Freely Worldwide Before Last Christmas? (RT)
A new study from America indicates that people were falling ill with coronavirus-like symptoms in December 2019, but doctors at the time dismissed it as ordinary flu. A team of doctors from Los Angeles scouring the hospital records from last winter has discovered a series of smoking gun clues which almost guarantee that Covid-19 was present in America well before Christmas. Scientists from UCLA have been analysing over 10 million hospital records from December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Comparing that winter to previous ones, they noticed a 50-percent increase in ‘coughing’ as a symptom on admission forms. In addition, 18 more people than would ordinarily be expected were hospitalised with acute respiratory failure.
In fact, the scientists estimate that there may have been 1,000 or more Covid sufferers in LA alone last winter – and presumably those are just the symptomatic minority. At the time, of course, all of this was put down to a moderately bad flu season. Officially, Covid did not turn up in LA until January 22, when a traveller in LAX airport fell ill. He was from Wuhan, and was identified as Covid-positive four days later. This bombshell fits an emerging body of evidence on an earlier coronavirus timeline. Many people may remember the reports of a strange vaping-related illness that ravaged Americans towards the end of last year. There was a good deal of study on it. Scientists at first thought it was the oils in the e-cigs congealing in people’s lungs, but soon debunked that hypothesis.
In hindsight, it is difficult to look past Covid as the real culprit. Pneumonia-like symptoms, ordinarily fit people falling severely ill… it was Covid all over. These revelations come hot on the heels of a very different story from England, which nonetheless points to the same conclusion. Peter Attwood died at the age of 84 on January 30, having been sick for over a month. But in recent weeks, an autopsy has confirmed that he died of Covid, which he probably was infected with in 2019. Underlining this, Attwood’s daughter was sick with similar symptoms two weeks earlier still. All of this happened in Kent, England. But according to the government there, the first Covid death in the UK did not happen until March.
Now, Attwood’s family want answers from the Chinese government on why they did not tell the WHO earlier about the coronavirus, which we know from leaked memos was identified in mid-November at the latest. If coronavirus burned a track through the US and the UK towards the end of last year, is there any reason to suspect it wasn’t doing the same everywhere else? In July, reports came in of coronavirus DNA being found in Spain, Italy and South America as long ago as the spring of 2019. How far back does this story go? We will probably never know.
How about we replace Fauci?
• Fauci Warns US Needs To ‘Hunker Down’ For Fall, Winter (Hill)
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, warned Thursday that the U.S. should prepare for a difficult few months in the fight against COVID-19 as flu season approaches. “We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy,” Fauci said during a panel discussion with doctors from Harvard Medical School. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases went on to warn against underestimating the pandemic’s potential to cause continued destruction. Fauci, who was one of the world’s leading AIDS researchers in the 1980s, compared the coronavirus pandemic to the early days of HIV when the epidemic started with a few gay men to decades later with millions of deaths and infections. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “Don’t ever, ever underestimate the potential of the pandemic. And don’t try and look at the rosy side of things.”
His comments come after tapes released Wednesday by journalist Bob Woodward revealed that President Trump admitted in an interview to purposely downplaying the pandemic in the early months of the virus because he didn’t want to “create a panic.” During Thursday’s panel, Fauci added that vaccine trials are “progressing very well” and repeated his prediction that one will likely be available by the end of the year or by early 2021. Fauci also reiterated that different U.S. cities should expect to see post-Labor Day surges, with the expert saying last week that the country was heading into the fall with an “unacceptably high” level of COVID-19 cases. “We’re right around 40,000 new cases, that’s an unacceptably high baseline,” Fauci said at the time. “We’ve got to get it down, I’d like to see it 10,000 or less, hopefully less.”
Well, you can try.
• Trump Campaign Sends Cease-and-Desist To Biden Campaign Over Atlantic Ad (JTN)
The Trump campaign issued a cease-and-desist letter to the Biden campaign this week, directing Biden’s camp to stop airing an advertisement that a lawyer for Trump’s team called “false and misleading.” Trump Campaign Senior Legal Adviser Jenna Ellis wrote in the letter that the Biden campaign had shared a digital advertisement on the Democratic candidate’s Twitter feed that incorporated claims from a viral Atlantic article alleging Trump had made derogatory remarks about fallen American military servicemembers. “The Atlantic article and the False and Misleading Ad both rely upon statements allegedly made by anonymous sources who were directly contradicted on the record by twenty-one individuals present with President Trump that day,” Ellis writes.
“Additionally, the contemporary facts in the Secret Service record totally debunk this fake story.” Ellis was referring to the nearly-two dozen individuals who have publicly disputed the story’s claims since its publication last week. Nobody has yet gone on-the-record confirming the story. Ellis in the letter “demand[s] that Joe Biden and the Biden Campaign immediately cease and desist using the False and Misleading Ad.” “We also ask Twitter and Facebook to review and apply their community standards equally and fairly and remove entirely the False and Misleading Ad from their platforms,” she added. Facebook and Twitter CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were copied on the letter.
For some people, war/not war is the most important issue of all. Like soldiers.
• MSM Attempts To Spin Trump’s Attacks On Senseless Wars Distort Reality (RT)
The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers. Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don’t actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain. Alas, ignorance of these obvious truths probably isn’t the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.
The latest example is the New York Times spinning President Donald Trump’s critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex as disrespect for the military at large. “Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief,”the Times quoted retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump’s alleged “despicable comments” about the nation’s war dead – reported last week by The Atlantic, citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump “must go.” Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic’s report. The Times couldn’t resist when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military’s latest propaganda campaign against Trump.
First the president disses the troops, calling them “losers” and “suckers,” then he has the temerity to say Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy. Except the pieces don’t fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don’t have the same interests as the few people who send them to war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there’s not a legitimate national security reason for the war they’re fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn’t serve the nation’s national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.
[..] Trump has managed to keep the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May interview with CBS News that Trump had given up US “leverage” in Syria. Trump also has turned around the VA hospital system, ending decades of neglect that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.
Is it November yet? They’re not going to stop this before then.
• Ex-Judge Reviewing Flynn Cases Urges Guilty Plea Be Upheld (JTN)
A retired judge named to review Michael Flynn’s case recommended Friday the former national security adviser’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI be upheld, suggesting the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the charge was caused by pressure from President Trump. “In the United States, Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty — twice, before two different judges — and whose guilt is obvious,” the former jurist John Gleeson wrote in a report to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the case. “The government’s attempt to dress up a politically motivated dismissal that smacks of impropriety as a ‘policy judgment,’ should be rejected,” added Gleason, now a lawyer in private practice who used to be a federal judge in New York.
Gleeson’s views on the case were known before Sullivan even appointed him to write an independent report. Both Flynn’s lawyers and DOJ have argued the charge and guilty plea should be dismissed because of evidence of FBI and prosecutorial wrongdoing, including the withholding of exculpatory evidence of innocence that U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen uncovered during a review of the case. Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, on Friday lambasted Gleeson’s recommendation. “Gleeson’s filing was predictable and meaningless,” she tweeted. “It’s the irrelevant and wrong smear he intended it to be–ignoring the mountain of exculpatory evidence Mr. Jensen unearthed and produced that shows the investigation and prosecution of General Flynn was corrupt from its inception.”
Both sides are spying and “influencing” like there’s no tomorrow.
• Beijing To Impose Restrictions On All US Diplomats In China (AlJ)
Beijing will impose “reciprocal restrictions” on all American diplomats in China in response to earlier curbs on the activities of its embassy staff in the United States, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said. The unspecified countermeasures will apply to all US embassy and consulate staff, as well as the consulate-general in Hong Kong, a ministry statement said on Friday. “To urge the US to repeal its wrong decisions as soon as possible, the Chinese side has recently sent a diplomatic note announcing reciprocal restrictions on US embassy and consulates, the consulate-general in Hong Kong included,” it added.
The announcement comes days after China threatened to respond to a new raft of US restrictions on Chinese diplomats, such as a requirement to seek approval for university visits, holding cultural events with more than 50 people outside embassy grounds, or meetings with local officials. Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said those measures were a response to long-established controls on American diplomats in China, drawing an angry rebuke from Beijing. It comes as part of a Trump administration campaign against alleged Chinese influence operations and espionage activity. The State Department had said it would also take action to help ensure all Chinese embassy and consular social media accounts were “properly identified”.
No idea what the odds are he can win. But he’s rich enough to fight this fight, while most others are not.
• Fortnite Maker: Apple and Google Monopolies Need To Be Stopped (NPR)
From his perch in Cary, North Carolina, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has launched a war against Silicon Valley powerhouses Apple and Google. The billionaire maker of video game phenomenon Fortnite dragged the tech giants to court last month over the 30% fee they charge on purchases made in their mobile app stores. Since then, Sweeney, an iconoclastic executive who owns enormous farms and dabbles in fast cars, has not talked publicly about his decision. He broke his silence to NPR, insisting he had the backing of countless other app developers who also believe the tech titans are taking advantage of them. “It’s not just Epic being exploited by Apple, but it’s every developer who goes along with that scheme colluding with Apple and Google to further their monopoly,” Sweeney said in the interview.
“These stores are making a lot more money from creative works than the creators.” In some ways, Sweeney said, being far away from the orbit of Silicon Valley, a culture he has long accused of “groupthink,” has made his gamble easier. He said many companies either rely too much on the tech giants to help them distribute their products and reach consumers, or dream of becoming the next Apple or Google themselves. “Everybody doesn’t have a great incentive to challenge Apple and Google’s 30% because they want to be the next bastard to charge 30%,” Sweeney said. To be clear, Apple and Google object to Sweeney’s characterization. They have long charged the 30% fee for in-app purchases. The companies say the commission supports technical staff who make sure apps on iPhones and Androids are safe and secure.
In response, Sweeney, a veteran computer programmer, says that justification is offensive. “Every Apple engineer who works on these services and ensures that iPhone is the most secure platform in the world has got to deeply resent the business guys for taking credit and claiming that their store monopoly is the reason why the platform is secure,” Sweeney said. “It’s just not true.” In its latest legal filing, Apple says Sweeney is positioning his company as a “modern corporate Robin Hood, in reality, it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing.”
Apple readily points out that Sweeney chose to break the rules that govern the app store — rules that clearly state developers cannot make users pay in-app purchases. Before Sweeney did that, leading to Apple’s tossing Fortnite out of its store, he wrote an email at 2 a.m. to tech executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook. He detailed what Epic was about to do, according to court documents. “We choose to follow this path in the firm belief that history and law are on our side,” he wrote in the email.
Starting a religion?
• Left, Right Mock Pelosi For Saying Angry Mother Earth Caused Wildfires (RT)
Top US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was bombarded with online mockery after saying that massive ongoing wildfires raging in California were the result of “Mother Earth” and her displeasure with humans. The house speaker addressed the blazing wildfires that have engulfed her home state on Friday in an interview with MSNBC. “Mother Earth is angry,” Pelosi said. “She’s telling us … with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the west, whatever it is … the climate crisis is real and has an impact.” Her colorful rhetoric did not sit well with either the political left or right, as both factions took to social media to air their various grievances with the politician and her figure of speech.
Some on the left recalled that the speaker publicly dismissed the ‘Green New Deal’, an anti-climate change proposal drafted by progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Pelosi famously called it “green dream or whatever,” which some noted was in stark contrast to her latest “Mother Earth” language. “Didn’t Pelosi mock the idea of a green new deal? Spare us your crocodile tears,” one person wrote. Conservatives, on the other hand, made light of what they perceived as hyperbole, mocking Pelosi for presuming to speak for the forces of nature and calling into question the Democrats’ definition of themselves as the “party of science.” Some users had other simpler theories, saying that California has “horribly mismanaged its forests” and that might be responsible for the wildfires’ scale.
Then there were those who didn’t take any issue with Pelosi’s comment, saying she was “so right.” The 2020 California wildfires have become an inescapable political topic as they tinted the state’s skies orange due to their sheer scale. Cal Fire confirmed this week that one of the fires was sparked by a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” used at a ‘gender reveal’ party in San Bernardino County.
There is a huge communication problem here. IPCC projections for 2300 are utterly meaningless for people living today. You MUST change your message.
• Earth Barreling Toward ‘Hothouse’ State Not Seen In 50 Million Years (LS)
Sixty-six million years ago, after a massive asteroid hit Earth with the explosive energy of roughly 1 billion nuclear bombs, a shroud of ash, dust and vaporized rock covered the sky and slowly rained down on the planet. As plant and animal species died en masse, tiny undersea amoebas called forams continued to reproduce, building sturdy shells out of calcium and other deep-sea minerals, just as they had for hundreds of millions of years. When each foram inevitably died — pulverized into seabed sediment — they kept a little piece of Earth’s ancient history alive in their fossilized shells. For decades, scientists have studied those shells, finding clues about the ancient Earth’s ocean temperatures, its carbon budget and the composition of minerals spilling through the air and seas.
Now, in a new study published today (Sept. 10) in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples to build the most detailed climate record of Earth ever — and it reveals just how dire our current climate situation is. The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth’s climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era — the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states — dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states — in response to changes in the planet’s orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.
The zig-zagging chart (shown above) ends with a sobering peak. According to the researchers, the current pace of anthropogenic global warming far exceeds the natural climate fluctuations seen at any other point in the Cenozoic era, and has the potential to hyper-drive our planet out of a long icehouse phase into a searing hothouse state. “Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that,” study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for 2300 in the ‘business-as-usual’ scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years.”
The only thing I think these days when seeinng people dragging take-out coffees down the street is: 500 YEARS. That’s how long it will take for that cup you use for 10 minutes to dissolve.
• How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)
Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried. “To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.” Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state. But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn’t want to hear it.
“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.” But it’s not valuable, and it never has been. And what’s more, the makers of plastic — the nation’s largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.
The industry’s awareness that recycling wouldn’t keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program’s earliest days, we found. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry’s most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
[..] Here’s the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice. On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It’s made from oil and gas, and it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh. All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled.
Babylon Bee.
• Nobel Peace Prize Committee Tells Trump To Launch More Drone Strikes (B. Bee)
The Norwegian Nobel Committee was reportedly considering President Trump as a recipient of its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, as the president had submitted his name for consideration to them over 67 times. But after reviewing his credentials, the committee concluded that he had not launched enough drone strikes against foreigners to qualify. “Yeah, you’ve dabbled in attacks, but what we’re really looking for is someone who’s really committed to a secret drone war,” said a spokesperson for the committee. “Look at previous winners like Barack Obama: now there’s a shining example of someone who achieved world peace not through lame diplomacy but by blowing up foreigners with impunity.”
Obama also criticized Trump’s drone strike count, saying they were “rookie numbers” and he needs to “pump those numbers up.” “My fellow Americans, it represents a danger to democracy when we have a president who’s either unwilling or unable to bomb as many foreigners as I did,” Obama said, reading off a teleprompter. “During my scandal-free presidency, I was able to drop over 26,000 bombs some years.” “Those were the days,” he added, going off-script as his eyes glazed over and he recalled the feeling of dark, evil power that coursed through his veins when he ordered drone strikes on foreign nations we were not at war with, innocent civilians, and the occasional American citizen. The Nobel Prize committee said they would consider Trump again next year, provided he starts a war with Iran.
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