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Colorado’s Marshall Fire: Has Funding Needs Corrupted Climate Science?

By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | January 2, 2022

I was totally shocked to hear the claims by a fire scientist I had once admired and often quoted in my blog posts about wildfire. In a National Public Radio interview Jennifer Balch said, “Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. Then she said “”Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that were burning, they’ve been baked all fall and all winter.”

Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly.

Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO2 global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn.

To minimize recklessly set fire that often occurs as people burn away unwanted dead vegetation, the Nova Scotia government felt the need to counter the Myth that “It’s safe to burn grass as long as there is still some snow on the ground.”

The Fact is: “Within hours of snow melting, dead grass becomes flammable, especially if there have been drying winds. Grass fires burn hot and fast and spread quickly around, and even over, patches of snow.” That’s a fact that Balch and every other fire expert should know!

Apparently, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and the Nature Conservancy and acolyte of climate alarmist Michael Mann and Noah Diffenbaugh, also failed to understand grasses are 1-hour fuel. He stated in an interview for NBC’s article How climate change primed Colorado for a rare December wildfire that “Climate change is clearly making the pre-conditions for wildfires worse across most fire-prone regions of the world,”

But dry grasses are not the pre-condition to be worried about. The pre-conditions that neither Swain nor Balch shared with the public is well known: Boulder County’s invasive grasses increase fire danger. The “main offender is cheatgrass, which was likely introduced to the area alongside agriculture and ranching” and “is increasing fire danger by 29%

In fact, in 2013 Balch published, Introduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA (1980–2009), writing “Cheatgrass was disproportionately represented in the largest fires, comprising 24% of the land area of the 50 largest fires” and that “multi-date fires that burned across multiple vegetation types were significantly more likely to have started in cheatgrass.”

It was also very disingenuous for Balch to say “Climate change has lengthened the state’s fire season”. It is the very same meme that every climate alarmist regurgitates that climate change has made “a year-long fire season the new normal”. But in 2017 Balch published in Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States that human ignitions “have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal ‘fire niche’ in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires”. Balch’s published graph clearly shows that human ignitions have extended fire season all year long. Based on her own research, a more relevant comment would have mentioned that Louisville, Colorado’s population had jumped 10-fold; from 2,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today. Does a 10-fold increase in population create a 10-fold increase in fire probability. The Marshall Fire was not naturally started by Lightning.

In 2015, Balch created the Earth Lab program at Colorado University. In 2017 it became part of CIRES, a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder. Earth Lab, got increasing attention from mass media that’s always seeking click-bait. As Earth Lab’s team began blaming more fires on climate change, it got more attention and Balch got more interviews.

Earth Lab hired Natasha Stavros as Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub Director. In videos posted by the Washington Post, she claimed climate change causes “longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons” reflecting Balch’s conversion to a climate crisis narrative. To get around Balch’s earlier scientific research Stavros deflected, “We are not talking about the ignition source” or the “availability of fuels”, “what we are talking about are the conditions of those fuels”. But in the case of the Marshall Fire, 1-hour grass fuels have nothing to do with climate change. It only takes a few hours to be in highly flammable conditions. That’s weather, not climate!

Although lacking in scientific integrity, pivoting to a climate crisis narrative worked in Balch’s favor. The U.S. Geological Survey has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to host the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) for the next five years. Balch, as director of CIRES’ Earth Lab, and now NCCASC Director had attracted $4.5 million in funding. Universities around the country similarly create such centers to attract such major funding. Certainly, blaming fires on a climate crisis attracts more funding than if its director sounded like a “denier” blaming invasive grasses and human ignitions.

The politics of funding research requires a major level of group think. Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasi-crystals that are now used in surgical instruments. But when he first announced his observations, he was kicked out of his lab by his colleagues. They saw him as a threat to the lab’s prestige and funding because observing quasi-crystals contradicted the consensus that was enforced by Linus Pauling that quasi-crystal did NOT exist.

Similarly, esteemed atmospheric scientist Dr Cliff Mass was criticized by Washington University administrator’s for detailing how an episode of problematic acidic waters that had been pumped into the state’s oyster’s hatcheries, was due to natural upwelling events, not climate change. But contradicting the climate crisis angle threatened funding to WU’s Ocean Acidification Center. Up until then Mass had been the Seattle Times go-to person for all weather events, but that stopped when his one analysis didn’t support climate crisis groupthink. Dr Peter Ridd was fired for presenting evidence showing his colleague’s claims of coral reef destruction were exaggerated.  So, all savvy university professors know you can’t contradict the meme if you want funding, or worse, keep your job.

Climate crisis groupthink, also ignores natural climate change, as did Balch and Swain. But one meteorologist confidently blamed the lack of snow and dryness on a natural La Nina. The science is well established that depending on how colder Pacific surface waters set up during a La Nina, atmospheric currents can carry higher or lower amounts of moisture to different regions. California had record snowfall this December while Colorado snowfall was very low. And if the Marshall Fire had been ignited just 2 days later, there would have been a snowfall to suppress the fire.

However too often, alarmist scientists cherry-pick one-year events. They weaponized this year’s low snowfall while ignoring that last year’s Colorado snowfall was far above normal. In November last year, Fort Collins received more than 15 inches of snow on its way to 80 inches, which is 25 inches more than normal. Again, such variations in snowfall are weather, not climate.

Alarmists also weaponized the dry conditions as solely due to global warming drought. They ignored the drying and warming effects of the Chinook winds that are very common in Colorado. Chinooks are known as “snow eaters” because as the winds pass over the mountains of the western USA they are forced upward and precipitate all their moisture. When those winds descend from the Rockies down to Boulder, temperatures rise adiabatically (due to pressure not added heat) and the warm dry air quickly removes moisture or snow from the surface. Southern California’s Santa Anna winds are similar and drive large fires.

Sometimes Boulder’s winds reach speeds of 100+ mile per hour. NOAA reported The Chinook Wind Events Winter of 1982 during which peak wind gusts more than 100 mph damaged areas around Boulder. Weatherwise journal reported 100+MPH winds over Boulder on January 7, 1969, which snapped power poles and toppled planes as seen in the photographs below. In November 2021 the weather service gave a red flag warming due to the high winds from a Chinook event. But without a coinciding human ignition, there was no rapidly spreading fire.

I would like to believe that Balch’s Earth Lab scientists have been campaigning for the housing developments in Boulder’s suburbs of Louisville and Superior to create a system of firebreaks and defensible space. Those suburbs had built into easily ignited grassland in a region where fires are rapidly spread by the dry Chinooks descending from the Rockies. Such natural fire danger is not always obvious to the public looking for affordable housing. But it is not obvious that was ever done, at least not as obvious as faulty climate change narratives.

Fire experts should have pushed for building codes, requiring adequate spacing between new houses. As a story in Wildfire Today reported today, one common feature of the surviving homes was they were more distant from neighboring homes. Many houses in the devastated subdivisions were only 10 to 20 feet apart. Without adequate fire breaks or defensible space, if just one house allowed the fire to reach it, the heat of that burning house is enough to ignite any house next to it. Similar dynamics were seen in California’s Tubbs and Camp Fires that demolished neighborhoods.

But perhaps local governments were greedy. Eager to build a tax base a growing Louisville population was most important. Politicians had worked hard to present Louisville as one of the top 10 most livable little cities. Putting natural fire danger front and center, might put a damper on the city’s attractiveness. And not surprisingly the Denver Democrats didn’t waste time to capitalize on the Marshall Fire devastation. The released a statement claiming “This fire has also punctuated our climate crisis and made abundantly clear the need for bold action. The science is clear, and the impacts are very real. We will continue to work with our community and legislators to ensure climate change is treated with the urgency and attention it deserves.”

But the science does not show a connection between the Marshall Fire and Climate Change. And due to the greed of the media, politicians, and selfish scientists, only scientific integrity is facing a real crisis.

Finally, it is worth noting that some scientists are acutely aware of the increasing fire danger presented by the build-up of dead vegetation. To remove that hazard prescribed burns are being performed. But sometimes prescribed burns get away and burn down people’s homes. So prescribed burns are carefully planned for times when fires are most easily controlled. So, one must wonder just how unusually dangerous local conditions were if the City of Boulder planned a prescribed burn on Monday, December 13, 2021, just 2 weeks before the Marshall Fire. Had climate change really made conditions so dangerous?

Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Covid passport microchip developer says chipping humans is happening “whether we like it or not”

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | January 3, 2022

Towards the end of last year, tech start-up Dsruptive Subdermals announced a microchip installed under the skin that can be scanned to reveal Covid vaccination status.

The technology was criticized, with many calling it “invasive.”

In an interview with Express, the company’s managing director doubled down on the technology and told critics the technology was here to stay.

The technology is a pre-programmed and scannable implant about the size of a grain of rice. It stores the vaccination information, displaying a person’s Covid-19 vaccine passport when scanned.

Speaking to Express, Hannes Sjobald, the company’s managing director, said: “This technology exists and is used whether we like it or not.

“I am happy that it is brought into the public conversation.

“New technologies must be broadly debated and understood.

“Smart implants are a powerful health technology.

“That is what we are building at Dsruptive and our goal is to transform healthcare on a global scale.”

Sjobald said the technology makes the vaccine passports more “accessible.”

“This means it is always accessible for me or for anyone else, really, who wants to read me.

“For example, if I go to the movies or go to a shopping center, then people will be able to check my status even if I don’t have my phone.”

Related:

Over 6,000 Swedish citizens are already chipped

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | 1 Comment

Supreme Court to Hold Special Session on Legal Challenges to Biden Vaccine Mandates

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 3, 2022

The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 7 will convene a special session to hear oral arguments in two cases related to the Biden administration’s COVID vaccine mandates.

The two cases pertain to the mandates imposed on private businesses with 100 or more employees, and healthcare facilities participating in the Medicare or Medicaid programs.

The Supreme Court announced Dec. 22, 2021, it would hold a special session to hear both cases, following a series of decisions in lower courts that successively implemented and lifted injunctions against the two mandates.

In both disputes, the formal legal question at hand pertains to whether the federal government can continue enforcing the mandates while legal challenges against them work their way through the judicial system.

In the first instance, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling Dec. 17, 2021, lifted an injunction against Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses previously issued by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The mandate is now set to come into force on Jan. 4, though the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it will not begin enforcement of the rule until Jan. 10. The mandate, if and when it is enforced, will impact an estimated 84 million U.S. workers.

Immediately following the 6th Circuit Court ruling, 27 states and several business groupscompanies and ministries submitted applications to the Supreme Court seeking an emergency stay.

Two of these requests, one filed by a trade group and the other by a group of states led by Ohio, were formally accepted for oral argument.

These groups were joined by more than 170 Republican lawmakers who on Dec. 30, 2021, jointly filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing OSHA has no legal authority to impose a vaccine mandate on private businesses.

The Supreme Court, via Justice Brett Kavanaugh — whose jurisdiction includes the 6th Circuit — asked the Biden administration to submit a response to the legal challenges by Dec. 30, 2021.

In its response, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued the Biden administration possesses the authority, under federal law, to impose the mandate and the Supreme Court should not block a program that will save thousands of lives.

The Supreme Court will also hear arguments pertaining to Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers at facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding. This rule is estimated to impact more than 17 million workers across the U.S.

In this instance, it was the Biden administration that filed an emergency request with the court, requesting it be allowed to temporarily enforce the healthcare worker mandate, which is currently blocked in 24 states following a series of injunctions issued by lower courts.

brief filed with the Supreme Court by 14 Republican-led states described the mandate as “plainly unlawful.”

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service, which oversees the healthcare mandate, announced Dec. 29, 2021, it will begin enforcing the mandate in the 26 states where it is not blocked.

A modified enforcement timeline accompanied this announcement: Healthcare workers will now be required to receive the first dose of a COVID vaccine by Jan. 27, and the second dose by Feb. 28.

The Supreme Court’s move to hold oral arguments in deciding whether or not to issue an emergency stay is considered unusual. Typically, such cases are placed on the “shadow docket” and are decided without a full briefing or a presentation of oral arguments.

In this instance though, the Supreme Court may seek to alleviate the uncertainty which exists among employers and workers who remain unsure as to whether they are subject to a mandate or not.

It remains unclear whether a decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the injunctions against the healthcare worker mandate will impact all 50 states or only the 24 where the mandate is currently blocked.

Any emergency stay issued by the Supreme Court would not constitute a final ruling regarding either case, but would freeze the enforcement of the two mandates until legal challenges make their way through the federal appeals courts before, most likely, ending up in the Supreme Court for a full hearing.

Separate Biden administration mandates pertaining to such categories as federal contractors and military personnel also have been challenged legally.

In the most recent such example, Judge James “Wesley” Hendrix of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled against a mask and vaccine mandate for participants in federal Head Start programs. The rules were set to take effect by the end of January.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton described the ruling as “a win for the children of Texas.”

However, the Supreme Court will not examine any of these other Biden administration mandates in the Jan. 7 special session.

While the Supreme Court previously rejected requests for emergency stays against state-level vaccine mandates, the court is also viewed as one that is skeptical of the power of federal agencies to issue mandates relating to COVID countermeasures.

This stance was evident, for instance, when the court lifted a moratorium on evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the basis it was outside the agency’s authority.

Notably, a well-known Supreme Court decision from 1905, Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, which, according to proponents of vaccine mandates, sets a legal precedent for their legality, actually pertains to state-level mandates.

This argument was made by the state of Arizona in its lawsuit against the OSHA mandate, as previously reported by The Defender.

The lack of a federal-level precedent may therefore weigh into the justices’ decision.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Update On Physician Whistleblower Dr. Patricia Lee

Since pleas to CDC/FDA regarding serious COVID-19 vaccine injuries remain unaddressed, she has escalated her concerns to Congress

By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | January 3, 2022

Back in October, I shared the story of the brave Dr. Patricia Lee, a fully vaccinated intensive care unit physician and surgeon, who stepped forward after witnessing numerous serious injuries in her patients following COVID-19 vaccination.

Since that story was published, Dr. Lee had a Zoom meeting with six federal health officials, including Dr. Peter Marks of the FDA and Dr. Tom Shimabukuro of the CDC. The meeting left Dr. Lee more frustrated than she had been prior to the meeting – the officials had no interest in the specific harms she detailed, even after hearing the heartbreaking and traumatic stories that Dr. Lee shared about her individual patients. Without asking a single question or reviewing any of the relevant medical records, Dr. Lee was effectively told that COVID-19 vaccines did not cause these injuries in her patients.

Given the lack of interest in understanding the harm to her patients, Dr. Lee made only one request. She asked that both the FDA and the CDC publicly announce that physicians should not be retaliated against for advocating for their injured patients, so that they would not fear reporting injuries from COVID-19 vaccinations. The individuals in the meeting indicated that they welcomed those reports and that they view physicians as partners in monitoring safety. However, to date, no such public statement has been made, even after a follow-up letter was sent requesting just that. Nor has any other action been taken.

Dr. Lee is not willing to let this go – as a physician, she has an ethical duty to her patients. And so she has now reached out to the oversight committees in Congress. You can read her letter to these committees below highlighting the federal health authorities’ refusal to even recognize vaccine injuries, let alone address this serious issue and those whose lives have been devastated by these injuries. Hopefully these elected officials do the right thing:

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

UK plans to test EVERY school child TWICE this week

… so what happens when you run 7 million lateral flow tests in five days? And are you ready for the “new wave” of “cases” it will likely produce?

OffGuardian | January 3, 2022

New plans, announced before Christmas, will require every secondary school pupil in the UK to take an on-site Covid test when school resumes after the Christmas break.

The government plans, allegedly to “monitor” Covid infection in students, go on to suggest that every child should receive a follow-up test 3-4 days later.

The tests being used are lateral flow tests, which have repeatedly been shown to be completely unreliable, and can test positive using apple juice or coca-cola.

There are roughly 3.5 million school pupils aged 11-16 in the UK and they plan to test them all twice.

If just 2% of them test positive just once, the media will scream about 140,000 new “cases” of Covid in children.

Further, the “recommendations” suggest children should then continue to be tested twice a week, every week, or “more frequently if asked to do so”:

Secondary, college and university students and education staff and early years staff should then continue to test themselves twice a week, and more frequently if they are specifically asked to do so, such as in the event of an outbreak.

At least 7 million lateral flow tests per week, every week.

It’s not hard to see where it goes from there, with the headlines blaring that lack of social distancing over the holidays gave rise to a “fourth wave” (or would it be fifth? I’ve lost count).

I would start preparing for a new lockdown, if I were you.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Lukashenko Told You It Was a Psychosis TWO YEARS Ago

Anti-Empire | January 3, 2022

The entire interwebs are ablaze with the term “mass formation psychosis”. Since a smart Ph.D. visited Joe Rogan everyone and their grandmother are now reading up on it, and emitting into the ether how the COVID panic (hysteria) is nothing but a mass psychosis. That is great. Except that it is January freaking 2022.

It has been a psychosis for nearly TWO YEARS now. It has been evident it is nothing but brain rot in the heads of excitable idiots this whole time. Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Belarusian potato farmer, and a much less educated man than Dr. Robert Malone, diagnosed it as a “psychosis” and an “info-demic” way back in March 2020.

Psychosis:

“Despite some criticism on my part, I call this coronavirus nothing other than a psychosis, and I will never deny that, because I’ve gone through many situations of psychosis together with you, and we know what the results were.

“Coronavirus is yet another psychosis, which will benefit some people and will harm others.”

Info-demic:

Doesn’t it seem to you that the powerful forces of the world would like to remake the world, without a ‘war’(Emmanuel Macron has already called it a war), through this so-called ‘corona-psychosis’, or ‘info-demic’? Many people are asking: ‘what will happen after the pandemic?’”

Some need the permission of a PhD to start thinking, preferably a PhD they saw on a massive media outlet like Rogan.* Others, like Lukashenko have their common sense.


*Who is on record as saying that without lockdowns you would have had more COVID deaths.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

Clay Shaw, Liar and Perjurer

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 3, 2022

In 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw. In the trial, Garrison rejected the lone-nut theory of the assassination of President Kennedy. He alleged instead that Kennedy was assassinated in a highly sophisticated regime-change operation spearheaded by the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison alleged that Shaw had played a role in that operation.

Although Shaw was quickly acquitted, Garrison’s prosecution later inspired Oliver Stone to come out with his movie JFK, whose theme was the same as Garrison’s — that Kennedy was assassinated by his enemies within the national-security establishment. 

At the end of Stone’s movie was a blurb that informed people that official records relating to the assassination would continue to be kept secret until the year 2029. The inference was clear: The secrecy was designed to advance a cover-up of the national-security state’s regime-change operation against Kennedy.

That blurb produced such an outcry among the American people that Congress was effectively forced to enact the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA, release their long-secret assassination-related records to the public. To enforce the law, Congress called into existence the Assassination Records Review Board, which operated from 1994 to 1998.

The ARRB’s enforcement of the JFK Records Act is how we learned that the national-security establishment had conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. The nature of that fraudulent autopsy was detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 

That fraudulent autopsy is how we know that the national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out one of its patented regime-change operations against Kennedy. As I have repeatedly emphasized over the years, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Once one concludes that the Kennedy autopsy was fraudulent, there is but one reasonable conclusion that he can reach: The national-security establishment, which conducted the fraudulent autopsy, orchestrated and carried out the assassination.

Thus, if it hadn’t been for Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw in 1969, it is a virtual certainty that we still wouldn’t know today that what occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas was a national-security state regime-change operation. That’s because Garrison’s prosecution led to Oliver Stone’s movie, which, in turn, led to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB, which led to the evidence that established a fraudulent autopsy.

Ever since the Garrison’s prosecution, however, defenders of the lone-nut theory of the Kennedy assassination have portrayed Clay Shaw as an innocent victim of an abusive criminal prosecution. As it turns out however, Shaw wasn’t as sweet and innocent as the lone-nut theorists have long claimed. He actually was a perjurer and a liar.

At his trial, Shaw testified in his own behalf and denied that he had played any role in the Kennedy assassination. During his testimony, which, of course, was under oath, the following transpired:

Q: Mr. Shaw, have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?

A: No, I have not.

After he was acquitted, Shaw was interviewed by Penthouse magazine. In the interview, he stated, “I have never had any connection with the CIA.”

On November 1, 2021, the National Archives released a CIA document that had been kept secret since February 1992. That date was several months before the JFK Records Act was signed into law in October 1992. It was clearly an assassination-related record that should have been disclosed during the term of the ARRB in the 1990s. Instead, it was kept secret under a loophole in the law that entitled the CIA and other federal agencies to continue keeping certain records secret for another 25 years, on grounds that their disclosure would reveal “sources” or “methods” or endanger “national security.”

If you read the document, you will see that there is no possibility that it falls within any of those categories. The CIA simply lied to the ARRB to ensure that the document would continue to remain secret for 25 more years. Then, when that 25-year deadline came due in 2017, the CIA again lied, this time to President Trump, to get even more time for continued secrecy of the document. Trump gave the CIA another five years of secrecy. When that deadline came due in 2021, the CIA persuaded President Biden to grant another extension of time for secrecy, this time to December 2022. For some unknown reason — perhaps even a screw-up — the National Archives released the document in November of 2021.

The document is a memo sent by J. Kenneth McDonald, the Chief of the CIA History Staff, to the Director of the CIA, with copies being sent to other CIA personnel. It pertains to how the CIA should handle the CIA’s records from the reinvestigation of the Kennedy assassination by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s. 

In his memo, McDonald states the following: “These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1965.”

Thus, by the CIA’s own admission, it turns out that Clay Shaw wasn’t the sweet, innocent man that lone-nut theorists in the Kennedy assassination have long portrayed him to be. At the very least, he was a perjurer and a liar, which, of course, taints his entire testimony at his trial. 

Do you see why the CIA is loathe to disclose the 14,000 records that it continues to keep secret from the American people that related to the Kennedy assassination and why it continues to demand continued secrecy of such records? 

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | 3 Comments

US Senator Calls for Renewed Investigation of Murder of Palestinian Activist Alex Odeh

Alex Odeh with his daughters months before he was assassinated. Photo: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
IMEMC | January 3, 2022

In a report filed Saturday in Liberation magazine by Reem Zubaidi, the author explains that new information has come to light about the assassination of Alex Odeh, a Palestinian-American human rights activist killed in 1985 by a pipe bomb planted in his office.

Odeh’s murder was never solved – and he was one of a number of Palestinian and Arab activists targeted in the 1980s by anti-Arab terrorist groups operating in the United States.

Zubaidi writes: New information has come to light through a recent Los Angeles Times interview with a former Santa Ana police officer. The revelations prompted U.S. Senator Richard J. Durbin, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to call upon the FBI to “intensify its efforts to investigate the murder of Mr. Odeh and bring his killers to justice.”

On Oct. 11, 1985, Alex Odeh, 41, was killed in a premeditated attack upon opening the door to his Santa Ana office. Odeh’s office was broken into and the pipe bomb that killed him was planted the night before.

Odeh was a Palestinian activist and the west-coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, an organization that protects the civil rights of Arabs and Arab-Americans in the U.S. He was also a poet and father of three young daughters at the time of his murder 36 years ago. As of yet, no one has been charged for the murder despite strong evidence against suspects who fled to Israel following the attack.

The Arab-America Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said they welcome renewed interest in Odeh’s case, but want to put it in context. “While, understandably, we have focused on bringing Alex’s killers to justice, we also want to ensure that this attack is not viewed as an isolated incident. This was a deliberate attempt to silence an Arab-American civil rights icon and organization,” said Samer Khalaf, ADC National President, adding that ADC offices were also targeted in Boston and Washington, DC.

The attack occurred during a wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria whipped up here by the media in response to international incidents where American lives were lost. Odeh was killed just hours after he appeared on two TV news shows defending the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), explaining that that the PLO had no role in the hijacking of the Achille Lauro ship.

The FBI classified the bombing as a terrorist attack. The assassination was condemned by President Ronald Reagan and even by Zionist organizations like the American Committee on Israel and the Anti-Defamation League. Two weeks after Odeh’s death, the FBI attributed the assassination — along with two other bombings —to the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization founded by fascist American-Israeli politician Martin Kahane. The national chair of the JDL, Irv Rubin,  made a public statement after the bombing saying: “I have no tears for Mr. Odeh. He got exactly what he deserved.”

In response to the FBI’s statement linking the JDL to the attack, Rubin denied involvement. After facing backlash, the FBI went back on their original stance, saying instead that further investigation was needed before any final attribution was made, although the JDL was “probably” responsible for the attacks.

36 years later Justice Department still dragging its feet

For decades, the Justice Department has dragged its feet on bringing justice to Odeh and his family. During that time, evidence has continued to surface that further implicates the suspects of the murder, who were under surveillance at the time. A few years ago, retired law enforcement officers who were on the case at the time expressed frustration at the failure to make any arrests despite having named suspects: “We know who did it. We know where they lived. We know why they did it, how they did it.”

The suspects moved to Israel where two of them are still living freely in a West Bank settlement. Israeli officials continuously thwarted efforts to obtain information about the JDL’s movement between the U.S. and Israel despite the fact that organization and suspects were linked to several other attacks in the U.S. Extradition requests were previously denied until 1993 when one suspect was extradited to face charges in another murder after two years of extradition proceedings, but not for the attack that killed Odeh.

ADC Legal and Policy Director Abed Ayoub explained on Dec. 21, “To have a senior member of the Senate, Majority Whip and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee take a serious look at this case is welcoming, and long overdue. We hope that it brings some answers from the FBI about what’s taking so long in this case and why justice hasn’t been brought for those responsible for Odeh’s murder.”

Zubaidi writes in her piece in Liberation magazine that she believes Odeh’s murder and law enforcement’s failure to bring justice to him and his family decades later makes evident the fact that the U.S. government is a partner in silencing pro-Palestine activists.

She adds that she believes there is a double standard in how these cases are handled. For example, the U.S. government unjustly designated the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Islamic charity in the U.S., to be a “terrorist organization,” shut it down and even jailed its organizers and activists. Yet the U.S. supports Israeli NGOs that raise funds in the U.S. for illegal Zionist settlements and settler terrorism.

Most recently, on Dec. 15 the civil rights group the Council for American Islamic Relations revealed that informants there were recording and passing confidential information to an anti-Muslim hate group with links to the Israeli government. Yet there has been no media outcry or Justice Department investigation.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Is this a global ‘psychic epidemic’?

An extract from ‘A State of Fear’ adds to the theory of #MassFormation

By Laura Dodsworth | January 3, 2022

Since Professor Mattias Desmet’s theory of #MassFormation is trending on Twitter, I’ve decided to share a short extract from A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic. I hope it can assist in contributing to Desmet’s very interesting theory.

The idea that you might be caught up in mass hysteria, mass formation or a psychic epidemic is a threatening one. Bear in mind, it’s just a theory. Read the extract and watch Desmet’s interview with an open mind.

An extract from the chapter “Cults, Conspiracy Theories and Psychic Epidemics”:

“It is tempting to blame the whole mess on a malevolent cult, a cabal or an evil leader. After all we could then find them, expose them and take them down. They can’t hide in the shadows forever. While I don’t think we will find anything so simple, convenient and predictably evil lurking in the shadows, I think we should look to our own shadows for the answers.

Carl Jung wrote about the ‘shadow’ and the danger of psychological projection. Our shadow is the instinctive and irrational side of ourselves. Essentially, it is more comfortable to remain ignorant of our failings, so we project them onto other people, or mythic figures: ‘baddies’. The devil is the ultimate projection of our shadow. Jung recognised that there is a tendency within collectivist movements to project elements from the shadow onto others. The vast scale of the global fear response to Covid and the shocking social re-engineering it has instigated leads me to intuit that there are deep, collective unconscious forces at work.

Although Covid is a real disease and SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus, some of the response felt ‘unreal’ if you were not caught up in the cult-like response. We have not just endured and tolerated but even demanded the curtailment of our freedoms, for a disease which has a median Infection Fatality Rate of 0.05% for under 70-year-olds globally. Our response felt unmoored from the gravity of the threat – why?

I spoke to Jungian psychotherapist, James Caspian, about mass delusions. He pointed out that Jung lived through the striking and destructive collective movements of the world wars and the Cold War. What he said then about mass movements, the shadow and projection can be applied to what is happening in the world now. ‘In times of distress people turn to visions of Utopian or Apocalyptic scenarios,’ Caspian said. ‘Jung said the really dangerous point is when insight and reflection are crushed by the mass movement and the state succumbs to a fit of weakness in that scenario. I think that’s happening. The state is afraid of some of the mass movements, such as political correctness. Rational argument is only possible if the emotionality of a situation does not exceed a critical degree. In that case reason will be supplanted by slogans and fantasies. A collective possession develops which turns into a psychic epidemic.’

The looming collective shadow has resulted in mass delusions and mass hysteria before. Humans do this, more often than you would think. Here is a collection of eclectic examples. During the Salem witch trials in 1692–93 there were hundreds of accusations of witchcraft and ultimately 19 executions. A laughter epidemic in a girls boarding school in Tanganyika in 1962 saw up to 159 girls laugh continuously for days in an outbreak of mass hysteria. The ‘glass delusion’ was a mental illness particularly affecting the noble classes most common in the 16th and 17th centuries, whereby aristocrats believed they were made of glass and could literally shatter to death. The 1528 ‘dancing plague of Strasbourg’ was an inexplicable instance of mass delusion, with hundreds of people compelled to dance, some to the death.

In other examples of mass hysteria, if not psychic epidemics, The War of the Worlds radio broadcast caused panic among listeners in the United States who thought the Martians really had invaded. And James Thurber wrote in My Life and Hard Times about the day when everybody in his town, Columbus, thought the nearby dam had broken and ran miles to escape, shouting ‘Go East!’. The dam hadn’t burst and, regardless, the water never could have reached the town anyway. It was a fascinating insight into the contagion of fear and its ability to affect the rational mind. No one had questioned where the rumour started, or noticed the reassuring lack of water, and they hadn’t even got on their horses or started their cars. They just ran, like lemmings.

I asked Caspian how people can protect themselves, and how can societies protect themselves, from psychic epidemics? ‘Jung wrote a book called The Undiscovered Self,’ Caspian told me, ‘and he talked about the plight of the modern individual. To become truly individual that person would need to mis-identify from the collective. Most people are caught up in the collective and in movements and live out their life like that. It’s easier and more comfortable to be swept along. To individuate means in practice that we say there is a collective movement but we think critically about it and we are not prepared to be swept along by it.’ Jung said that it is not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is the greatest danger to man.

If the UK, and maybe much of the world, is suffering a psychic epidemic, how do we learn from this experience and recover now, but importantly protect against the next one? A psychic epidemic has the potential to be far more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic epidemic, not a viral epidemic.

After Hitler’s defeat, Jung concluded, ‘The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than the first outbreak of epidemic insanity, an eruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world.’ The role of the government should be to moderate and contain a psychic epidemic and mass delusion, not to exaggerate and multiply it. If fear was an open door in spring 2020, the UK government did not allow us to walk through it, but used a battering ram to knock it down.”

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Petition to strip Tony Blair of knighthood racks up 400,000 signatures

RT | January 2, 2022

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition calling for the removal of knighthood from Tony Blair. The former UK prime minister “should be held accountable for war crimes” instead, it says.

More than 400,000 signatures were left under a Change.org petition urging the UK prime minister to ask the queen to rescind the order in less than a day after it was launched.

Angus Scott, the author of the petition, says the former prime minister “caused irreparable damage to the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society,” while he was in power between 1997 and 2007.

The petition specifically accuses Blair of “causing the death of countless innocent, civilian lives and servicemen” by dragging the UK into “various conflicts.”

“For this alone he should be held accountable for war crimes,” it says.

While it’s customary for British monarchs to confer most senior knighthoods on former prime ministers, Buckingham Palace’s decision to not snub Blair caused massive outrage among Brits, citing Blair’s role in the 2003 invasion in Iraq and his support for the US-led campaign in Afghanistan.

In 2017, a third of Britons said Blair should be tried as a war criminal for “knowingly misleading” the public about the premise of the invasion of Iraq after an inquiry found that there was no intelligence to back up the claim that late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Blair received the Most Noble Order of the Garter (the highest order of knighthood) in the New Year Honours 2022 list. Responding to the announcement, Blair called the title “an immense honor,” while Buckingham Palace said it was “graciously pleased” to present it to Blair.

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , | 4 Comments

Dr. Robert Malone interviewed by Kristi Leigh after twitter ban

January 1, 2022

January 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment