At The Daily News Source, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by The Daily News Source and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, The Daily News Source makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
The Daily News Source does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on The Daily News Source.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to The Daily News Source and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on The Daily News Source send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
The Daily News Source has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. The Daily News Source"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
At The Daily News Source, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by The Daily News Source and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, The Daily News Source makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
The Daily News Source does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on The Daily News Source.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to The Daily News Source and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on The Daily News Source send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
The Daily News Source has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. The Daily News Source"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
At Alternate Viewpoint, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Alternate Viewpoint and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Alternate Viewpoint makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Alternate Viewpoint does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Alternate Viewpoint.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Alternate Viewpoint and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Alternate Viewpoint send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Alternate Viewpoint has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Alternate Viewpoint"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
At Those Damn Liars, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Those Damn Liars and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Those Damn Liars makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Those Damn Liars does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Those Damn Liars.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Those Damn Liars and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Those Damn Liars send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Those Damn Liars has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Those Damn Liars"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
Are private cities the miracle cure for Honduras’ surging violent crime, state violence and institutional disarray?
For many Hondurans, the past few years have been among the worst in memory. In the wake of a June 2009 coup that removed leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, violent crime has soared and state institutions have fallen into disarray if not outright failure. Five months after the coup, the de facto government held elections which members of the political opposition boycotted and regional heads of state overwhelmingly refused to recognize. Under the resulting government, led by the National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and Zelaya loyalists have routinely been the victims of threats, arrests and assassinations.
The role of the national police in violent, often politically motivated crime became a liability for the Lobo administration, which responded by developing a highly publicized police reform law. The bill appeared on its way to passage until November 2012, when a Supreme Court panel, by a 4 to 1 vote, ruled the law unconstitutional. Shortly after the court’s decision, the congress, in an extraordinary session reminiscent of Zelaya’s ouster years earlier, voted to dismiss the four justices who rejected the cleanup law. The press raised concerns that the move could turn into a full-blown crisis, many commentators focused on the police reform ruling as the conflict’s source; others pointed elsewhere.
A month earlier, the same four justices had ruled unconstitutional a law that would allow the creation of privately run municipalities with their own police, tax structures, and judicial systems, known as Regiones Especiales de Desarollo, or RED. According to Russell Sheptak, a Research Associate at the University of California and co-author of the Honduras Culture and Politics blog, the proximate cause for the justices’ removal was their ruling on the police reform law. “However, the muttering against them began at the top with Lobo Sosa chastising them over the RED ruling,” Sheptak wrote in an email, “and remained in the background of the debate about removing them.”
The idea of building private cities is a divisive one. Many of the country’s elite advanced the concept as something new to spur economic growth. The cities would facilitate foreign investment and development, which would reduce the influence of criminal networks. Those opposing the concept, however, variously rejected the proposition as a neoliberal gift to the rich, a continuation of oligarchic rule and a threat to democratic governance. These objections came in the context of economic policies that have exacerbated inequality, poverty and unemployment. According to a recent report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, from 2010 to 2011 over 100% of income gains went to the 10% of Hondurans at the top of the income distribution ladder.
In 2009 Paul Romer, an economist then teaching at Stanford University, started presenting his idea to build new cities in poor countries as an innovative economic development strategy. The RED came to prominence in Honduras shortly after Pepe Lobo met with Romer. The new “charter cities,” as the U.S. economist called them, would be overseen by developed countries with a stronger rule of law and would prioritize investments in infrastructure. Each city would resemble a country within a country and would compete for hard-working, law-abiding residents from around the world. The islands of economic development would, in Romer’s vision, pressure governments to clean up their act and, cumulatively, could have a massive global impact.
Honduras’ governing officials enthusiastically embraced the idea and, given the country’s poverty and crime, Romer likely saw it as a natural fit. Yet after Lobo’s emergence through fraudulent elections, with the country’s institutions in shambles and many leading officials suspected of having ties to criminal networks, one could begin to see the plan’s inherent contradiction: How could you build brand new, principled institutions in partnership with a government so plagued by corruption?
Can violent video games help prevent real-world violence? Some experts say it can and cite it as one of the lesser-known factors contributing to a two-decade decline in violent crime in the U.S.
By Andrew Blankstein, Investigative Reporter, NBC News
Sharper policing strategies, stiffer prison sentences and newer technologies are again being credited as police officials proffer explanations for the two-decade decline in violent crime in America’s biggest cities.
But experts say the real reasons behind the downturn — which included double-digit decreases in homicide rates last year in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles — are more complicated and may involve factors as mundane as that X-Box sitting in the living room, Americans’ changing work habits and what comes out of your gas pump.
Here are seven other seldom-mentioned factors that those who study crime — and even some who fight it – say may be helping keep a lid on harmful behavior:
Xbox effect: Dinner bells that summoned children from the great outdoors have long gone silent, and youths and young adults are spending more time on indoor pursuits involving high-definition TVs, gaming consoles and computers. That, say researchers, is having a positive impact on crime. Why? Fewer young people on the street mean fewer potential criminals and fewer targets for criminals.
Potential criminals may also be spending more of their time stealing virtual cars or robbing virtual banks.
Two college professors in Texas working with a researcher at the Center for European Economic Research released a study in 2011 showing violent video games such as “Grand Theft Auto” or “Call of Duty” could mitigate aggressive behavior and lead to a decrease in crime. The researchers called the phenomenon the “incapacitation effect.” Translation: When you are at home playing video games, “You are not hanging out on street corners, in alleys or out with your buddies getting into trouble,” said University of Texas, Arlinginton, Professor Michael R. Ward, one of the authors.
Ward and his research partners calculated that the correlation was fairly weak — only about a 1 percent decrease in violent crime for every 100 percent increase in sales of violent video games – hardly “a panacea for crime fighting,” he noted.
Still, said John Roman, senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, the benefits may extend beyond keeping potential criminals and victims inside.
“People who might have a predilection for violence, they act it out through video games,” he said.
Gadgets and technology also have had other impacts on criminal behavior. Street corners and drug dens are no longer as dangerous as they once were, because cellphones and the Internet have largely taken their place as marketplaces for illicit goods, says UCLA Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman.
“The cellphone and the beeper have made open air drug dealing and crack houses mostly obsolete,” he said.
The Urban Institute’s Roman said the availability and pricing of technological innovation is also changing the criminal dynamic.
“When a hot new product doesn’t have a cheap substitute, there’s a little spike in robberies,” he said, but as soon as cheap substitutes appear and prices fall, so does crime.
For example, Roman says wearable technology – watch phones, Google glasses, etc. – may be the next targets for armed robbers and thugs, but only until cheaper substitutes come out.
Housing projects: Cold, impersonal, utilitarian, dense and scary. Those were just some of the characteristics of your typical inner-city housing project built from the 1940s through the ‘70s. But with authorities taking wrecking balls to many of these magnets for violent crime in recent years and building more livable replacements, that equation appears to be changing.
M. Spencer Green / AP file
Demolition begins at the last high-rise of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex on March 30, 2011. Cabrini-Green was built on Chicago’s North Side starting in the 1940s.
Susan Popkin, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communications Policy Center, studied long-term effects of the destruction of huge housing projects in Atlanta and Chicago.
“We found that overall of the city there was a huge reduction in crime where the public housing was demolished and a net decline in violent crime citywide, which was sustained, from 2000 to 2010,” she said.
When the housing project residents moved to other neighborhoods they brought crime with them, but the net effect for the city overall was still a lower crime rate, Popkin said.
It’s not clear if other cities are seeing similar results. In Los Angeles public housing is becoming more diffuse and police are emphasizing partnerships with other government agencies to bring resources to the projects. Popkin said people are taking better care of housing developments, which might also being having a positive effect on the crime rate.
Cocaine market cracked: A surge in crack cocaine use is often blamed for fueling the explosion in gang warfare and violent crime that led to record murder rates in the early 1990s in many big cities across America. But little notice is typically paid to the role that declining cocaine consumption has played in violent crime’s tailspin.
A survey by the 2011 by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that the number of Americans who said they used cocaine fell 40 percent from 2006 to 2011. Over the same period, there was a comparable decline in dependency.
“It’s the biggest win ever in the history of drug control and nobody pays much attention,” says Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie-Mellon professor and co-director of Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center.
Meanwhile, maturation of drug sales and distribution networks also may be playing a role, as violence has claimed the lives of the most combustible sellers. And Maryland Professor Peter Reuter said baby-boomers still using crack cocaine aren’t the negative force they once were because they are “aging out of violent crime.”
Attendant Joe Turchiano pumps gasoline in Shirley, on New York’s Long Island, on May 14, 1979, as an alcohol-unleaded gasoline mixture goes on sale for the first time.
Lead footprint: Exposure to lead among children has long been linked with lower IQs and cognitive skills, and its physiological impact on the brain also has been connected to the sorts of impulsive and aggressive behaviors that underpin violent crime. In the late 1970s, lead was removed from gasoline and paint, resulting in the lead levels in American bloodstreams falling 80 percent by 1991. But could an environmental impact also spill over into social policy?
In a landmark 2007 study, Amherst College Public Health Professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes found a remarkable correlation between lead exposure and violent crime. According to her calculations, exposure to the heavy metal could have accounted for between 28 percent and 91 percent of the 83 percent increase in violent crime in the U.S. between 1972 and 1992. And as lead exposure dropped, so too did violent crime, falling 56 percent during the 1990s, she found.
Reyes forecasts that the trend will continue, with violence decreasing by as much as 70 percent by 2020.
Roe v. Wade: The conclusion of the lead study referenced another factor thought to significantly influence the falling crime rate: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion.
In 2001, University of Chicago Economics Professor Steven D. Levitt and Stanford Law Professor John J. Donohue published a study that later became the basis for a chapter in the best-selling book “Freakonomics,” arguing that legal abortions appeared to account for as much as a 50 percent plunge in crime between 1985 and 1997. Underlying their theory was the assumption that legal abortions led to fewer unwanted babies being born and that those babies would have been at increased risk for criminality as adults because they were more likely to suffer abuse and neglect as children. The study found that in five states that legalized abortion before Roe, crime started falling before the rest of the country. Additionally, from the year of the Roe decision to 1988, states with high and low abortion rates had identical crime patterns. This was happening as the crack epidemic and urban violence began to peak.
Home bodies: Conventional wisdom says that crime goes up when the economy turns down, but numerous studies have shown otherwise. That’s because while adversity breeds desperation, it also creates more supervision.
Police and social scientists were watching closely for a possible spike in violent crime during the Great Recession that began in 2008, but it never materialized. That’s partly because more people were staying home because they lacked work, deterring criminals through their presence or quickly phoning police if they see suspicious behavior, the experts say. Other subtle social forces were at work as well. Since the 1990s, for example, Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys have consistently found that between 20 and 25 percent of the employed do some or all of their work at home. And a growing pool of retirees helps bolster the number of stay-at-home crime-stoppers.
Immigration: New immigrants are often perceived as contributing to disorder, but the reverse is often true. Harvard Professor Robert Sampson, author of “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,” examined crime statistics amid one of the largest influxes of new arrivals in U.S. history and found that, for the most part, immigrants brought with them strong work ethics, tight-knit family structures and a distaste for violent street crime.
Sampson and his colleagues examined violent crimes involving 3,000 men and women in Chicago from adolescence to age 25 and found that first-generation immigrants were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than third-generation Americans, while second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to carry out such crimes.
Meanwhile, new arrivals helped revitalize urban centers that had been beset by lawlessness.
Academics have posited other explanations for falling murder and violent crime rates, including the fact that more criminals appear to be pursuing identity-theft related crimes that reduce the danger for them while allowing for potentially bigger pay days.
Or perhaps a generation that suffered the chaos and shame sown by drugs and violence has sought not to repeat the past. Maybe, it’s all part of an evolution.
Whatever the ultimate reasons behind the crime drop, the right blend of enforcement, collective and individual experience, culture and technology appears to be having a positive multiplier effect, said Los Angeles police Cmdr. Andrew Smith.
“Like the whole, crime reduction is really the sum of its parts,” he said. “And law enforcement and society are reaping the benefits.”
But UCLA’s Kleiman cautions that same complexity means there are no guarantees that the decline will continue.
“Nobody predicted the crime explosion that started in the early 1960s,” Kleiman said “and nobody predicted the crime collapse in 1994.”
The French parliament early on Saturday backed a reform of the country’s prostitution law that will impose a 1,500-euro fine on anyone paying for sex. The bill will give France some of the toughest legislation on prostitution in Europe, similar to that of Sweden. Under the new bill, prostitutes’ clients will become offenders while soliciting itself will no longer be considered a criminal offense. Previously, buying and selling sex for money was not illegal in France but the act of soliciting was, as was pimping. The reform, which has divided the country, still needs to be formerly endorsed by parliament on Wednesday.
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
The FBI has just released its hate crime statistics report for 2012, and the numbers show that we as a nation still have a way to go toward alleviating these crimes that have such a devastating impact on communities.
For the 2012 time frame, law enforcement agencies reported 5,796 hate crime incidents involving 6,718 offenses, down from 2011 figures of 6,222 incidents involving 7,254 offenses. Also during 2012, there were 7,164 hate crime victims reported (which include individuals, businesses, institutions, and society as a whole), down from 7,713 in 2011.
48.3 percent of the 5,790 single-bias incidents were racially motivated, while 19.6 percent resulted from sexual orientation bias and 19 percent from religious bias.
Of the 7,164 hate crime victims, 55.4 percent were victims of crimes against persons and 41.8 percent were victims of crimes against property. The remaining 2.8 percent were victims of crimes against society (like drug offenses, gambling, and prostitution).
39.6 percent of the victims of crimes against persons suffered simple assaults, while 37.5 percent were intimidated and 21.5 percent were victims of aggravated assault. (Law enforcement also reported 10 murders and 15 rapes as hate crimes.)
An overwhelming majority—75.6 percent—of the victims of crimes against property were victimized by acts of destruction, damage, and/or vandalism.
Of the 5,331 known offenders, 54.6 percent were white and 23.3 percent were black.
Recent Changes to Hate Crime Data Collection
Beginning in January of this year, new UCR data collection methods allowed law enforcement to get even more specific when submitting bias motivation information. For example, as a result of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, agencies can now report on crimes motivated by “gender identity” bias and “crimes committed by, and crimes directed against, juveniles.” And a federal directive enabled our UCR Program to expand and/or modify its data collection categories for race and ethnicity. (This enhanced 2013 hate crime data will be published in 2014.)
FBI’s Role in Combating Hate Crimes
In addition to our annual hate crime report—published to help provide a more accurate accounting of the problem—the FBI is the sole investigative force for criminal violations of federal civil rights statutes. As a matter of fact, hate crime is the number one priority in our civil rights program, and during 2012, we opened some 200 hate crime investigations.
But in addition to our investigations, we also work closely with our state and local partners on their investigations—offering FBI resources, forensic expertise, and experience in identifying and proving hate-based motivations. We participate in hate crime working groups around the country to help develop strategies that address local problems. And we conduct training for local law enforcement, minority and religious organizations, and community groups to reduce civil rights abuses.
Annie Dookhan, who pleaded guilty to falsifying drugs tests at a Massachusetts state crime lab.
Steven Senne/AP
Annie Dookhan, who pleaded guilty to falsifying drugs tests at a Massachusetts state crime lab.
Steven Senne/AP
A former chemist for the state of Massachusetts’ crime labs pleaded guilty Friday to falsifying drugs tests that potentially compromised tens of thousands of criminal cases. WBUR reports she admitted all 27 counts against her.
Annie Dookhan, 36, has asked for a one-year prison sentence — in part because she is divorced and the primary caretaker of her 7-year-old disabled son, as WBUR have said. The station adds that the judge in the case has said “she would not exceed a three- to five-year sentence for actions she described as ‘shaking the criminal justice system to its core.’ “
“The ripple effects of the potentially bogus testing are staggering for the criminal justice system and for the defendants. As authorities review the cases involved, they’re also considering cases where defendants received stiffer sentences because of previous offenses. Or cases where defendants risked or lost jobs, public housing, custody of their children, or deportation.
“District attorneys have set up ‘war rooms’ in their offices just so staffers can research and match the cases in which Dookhan tested the drug evidence. They’ve hired retired judges to preside over dozens of special court sessions to review each case and decide whether to release those incarcerated and/or hold new trials.”
The Associated Press says:
“Dookhan sent the state’s criminal justice system into a tailspin last year when state police shut down the state Department of Public Health lab she worked at after discovering the extent of her misconduct.
“Prosecutors said Dookhan admitted ‘dry labbing,’ or testing only a fraction of a batch of samples, then listing them all as positive for illegal drugs, to ‘improve her productivity and burnish her reputation.’
“Since the lab closed in August 2012, at least 1,100 criminal cases have been dismissed or not prosecuted because of tainted evidence or other fallout from the lab’s shutdown.”
Two Indiana University students were arrested and charged Sunday morning in connection with a stabbing that injured another student at a campus apartment building, school officials said. (Oct. 27)
Thanks for checking us out. Please take a look at the rest of our videos and articles.
What prevails is a well organized camouflage. The public health disaster in Japan, the contamination of water, agricultural land and the food chain, not to mention the broader economic and social implications, have neither been fully acknowledged nor addressed in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion by the Japanese authorities.
Japan as a nation state has been destroyed. Its landmass and territorial waters are contaminated. Part of the country is uninhabitable. High levels of radiation have been recorded in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of 39 million (2010) (more than the population of Canada, circa 34 million (2010)) There are indications that the food chain is contaminated throughout Japan:
The crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war”. In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami:
“This time no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.”
Several Global Research reports and background articles have outlined the dangers of Worldwide radiation resulting from the Fukushima disaster. This disaster is being sustained by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the Abe government.
What prevails is a well organized camouflage. The public health disaster in Japan, the contamination of water, agricultural land and the food chain, not to mention the broader economic and social implications, have neither been fully acknowledged nor addressed in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion by the Japanese authorities.
Another related dimension of the Fukushima crisis pertains to the role of Japan’s organized crime, the Yakusa in recruiting personnel for dangerous tasks.
The Yakuza labor practices at Fukishima are based on a system of subcontracting. This process of recruitment and subcontracting does not favor the hiring of competent specialized personnel. It creates an environment of fraud and incompetence, which in the case of Fukushima could have devastating consequences.
Fukushima in the wake of the Tsunami, March 2011
This role of Japanese organized crime also pertains to the removal of the fuel rods from Reactor no. 4. As documented in several GR articles, this undertaking –if mishandled– could potentially lead to a massive radioactive fallout:
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now – “as early as November 8″ – at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper floor.
To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room….
Fukushima and the Yakusa
A recent Reuters report documents in detail the role of Japan’s Yakusa and its insidious relationship to both TEPCO as well as agencies of the Japanese government including the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare:
The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets for generations.
Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050 members operate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by three major syndicates – Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say.
Ministries, the companies involved in the decontamination and decommissioning work, and police have set up a task force to eradicate organized crime from the nuclear clean-up project. Police investigators say they cannot crack down on the gang members they track without receiving a complaint. They also rely on major contractors for information.
In a rare prosecution involving a yakuza executive, Yoshinori Arai, a boss in a gang affiliated with the Sumiyoshi-kai, was convicted of labor law violations. Arai admitted pocketing around $ 60,000 over two years by skimming a third of wages paid to workers in the disaster zone. In March a judge gave him an eight-month suspended sentence because Arai said he had resigned from the gang and regretted his actions.
Arai was convicted of supplying workers to a site managed by Obayashi, one of Japan’s leading contractors, in Date, a town northwest of the Fukushima plant. Date was in the path of the most concentrated plume of radiation after the disaster.
A police official with knowledge of the investigation said Arai’s case was just “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of organized crime involvement in the clean-up.
A spokesman for Obayashi said the company “did not notice” that one of its subcontractors was getting workers from a gangster.
“In contracts with our subcontractors we have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime,” the spokesman said, adding the company was working with the police and its subcontractors to ensure this sort of violation does not happen again.
In April, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare sanctioned three companies for illegally dispatching workers to Fukushima. One of those, a Nagasaki-based company called Yamato Engineering, sent 510 workers to lay pipe at the nuclear plant in violation of labor laws banning brokers. All three companies were ordered by labor regulators to improve business practices, records show.
In 2009, Yamato Engineering was banned from public works projects because of a police determination that it was “effectively under the control of organized crime,” according to a public notice by the Nagasaki-branch of the land and transport ministry. Yamato Engineering had no immediate comment.
…
In towns and villages around the plant in Fukushima, thousands of workers wielding industrial hoses, operating mechanical diggers and wearing dosimeters to measure radiation have been deployed to scrub houses and roads, dig up topsoil and strip trees of leaves in an effort to reduce background radiation so that refugees can return home.
Hundreds of small companies have been given contracts for this decontamination work. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed in the first half of 2013 had broken labor regulations, according to a labor ministry report in July. The ministry’s Fukushima office had received 567 complaints related to working conditions in the decontamination effort in the year to March. It issued 10 warnings. No firm was penalized.
One of the firms that has faced complaints is Denko Keibi, which before the disaster used to supply security guards for construction sites. (Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters, by Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito, Reuters, October 25, 2013)
In the face of ceaseless media disinformation pertaining to the dangers of global nuclear radiation, our objective at GR has been break the media vacuum and raise public awareness, while also pointing to the complicity of the governments, the media and the nuclear industry.
“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise their power from behind the scenes.” — Justice Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court.
YOUR RANDOM DHS MONITORED PHRASE OF THE DAY
Competitor
Paid advertising at What Really Happened may not represent the views and opinions of this website and its contributors. No endorsement of products and services advertised is either expressed or implied.
CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY (UPDATED FOR 2013)
Now, I don’t know if the Carbonazis really view the general public as that gullible and that stupid, or they are simply reinforcing this particular deception to protect all the other deceptions, but that it IS a deception is inescapable.
One would think that if stopping global warming were the real agenda, the governments and institutions who had signed on to the global warming screed would proclaim the data as proof of success in dealing with the problem, declare victory, and move onto other projects. But the real agenda all along has been to trick the public into buying carbon credits (from which Al Gore profits handsomely) and carbon taxes (which Obama is pushing for), which is why the failure of the real world to match the draconian predictions of the global warming cult is being concealed from the public. And that alone proves the global warming issue is politics, not science.
Coming from a science background myself (former NASA), I value the scientific method for discerning the truth. But I also understand that individual scientists are just as corruptible as individual politicians and clergy. Just as the witch-hunters in the middle-ages who were paid to find witches saw witches everywhere they looked, so too to scientists paid to find global warming see warming everywhere they look.
This has led to massive fraud on the part of what I call the “Carbonazis”, from placing temperature measuring stations next to trash incinerators to the emails and computer codes from Hadley CRU that proved intentional deception to “Hide the decline.” This latest IPCC report continues that fraud.
I do not care how many scientists traded their honor for global warming funding. Science is not a democracy where the majority rules. In 1633, virtually every scientist was in agreement that Galileo was wrong when he concluded that the Earth moved around the sun. Motivated by peer pressure, the church, and fear of losing their jobs, all those scientists went along with the desired agenda, and history eventually showed they were all, down to the last man, flat-out wrong.
Scientists need funding, and scientists know that if they say, “I found this phenomenon, but it doesn’t really seem to do anything” that there will be little funding and no media attention. But if they say, “I found this phenomenon, and it’s the end of the world”, media attention will skyrocket, followed by more funding to study the problem. From this simple economic mechanism we get fed stories about killer bees, computers freezing up on Y2K, catastrophic global warming in 1817, catastrophic global warming in 1922, catastrophic global warming in 1947, a coming ice age in 1975, and back to catastrophic global warming in the 2000s.
Back in 2000, the UK Independent reported that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” We have had several record winters since, and as I type these words, a major snowstorm is closing highways in Wyoming. So BBC and IPCC can scream global warming all they want, to justify the theft from the people under the rubric of “saving the world”, but the public will simply look out their doors and windows in the coming months and realize that human-caused global warming is no more real than Saddam’s nuclear weapons.
But the reality is that climate on Earth always changes. It was changing before humans were here and will go on changing long after we are gone. The dominant controls over climate are solar activity, as demonstrated when the Maunder Minimum triggered the Little Ice Age, and the shape of the Earth’s orbit, which slowly oscillates from circular to more elliptical and back over roughly 100,000 year cycles. When Earth’s orbit is circular, Earth is warmer. When the orbit is more elliptical, owing to Kepler’s laws, Earth spends more time further away form the sun at the far end of the ellipse and we get the ice ages. So until the global warming crowd can influence the sun or change the shape of Earth’s orbit, they cannot really stop climate change. All they can do is trick the public out of money by screaming about it.
Please forward this page to all your contacts to let them know that human-caused global warming is no more real than Saddam’s nuclear weapons.
Evansville Wyoming this morning, 9/27/2013, sent in by a reader.
In Chicago, it was so cold last winter that water coming out of the hoses of firefighters froze against the side of the burning building they were trying to save.
You are witness to one of the greatest frauds perpetrated on the people of planet Earth, to trick them out of their money and into obedience under the guise of the fight against Human-Caused Global Warming (now rebranded “Human Caused Climate Change” to explain away the icicles we were told were not going to happen). The global warming scare was concoted out of outright lies, purchased science, and scare mongering to trick you ionto being willing to pay carbon taxes to solve a non-existent crisis you were told was all your fault. And, of course, to lull you into accepting the dicates of a glogal government that needed to save the Earth from you icky-poo human beings.
And it was all a lie. Here is how it all happened.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken (1918)
“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.” – Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.
The recent exposures of fraud coming from the Hadley Climate Research Unit, then followed by similar exposures at New Zealand’s NWIA, Australia’s climate center, NOAA, the Climategate emails, and now Climategate 2.0, have only confirmed the doubts arising from the obviously NON-scientific methods employed by the Anthropogenic Global Warming supporters, hereinafter called the “Global Warming Cult”. I call them a cult because of the abandonment of scientific method by many of the acolytes, together with a recent British Court decision that declared belief in Global Warming was accorded the status of a religion.
Human Caused Global Warming is not being researched; it is being promoted. Al Gore and his fellow investors have spent over a hundred million dollars in creating a crisis of human-caused global warming out of (quite literally) thin air. They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect to reap billions in profits from the trading of Carbon Credits, a “license to pollute” available for a price and subject to brokerage fees. One of the people Al Gore relied on to create this scheme was Ken Lay, late of ENRON, aka the Crooked “E”. Al Gore plans to use Carbon Dioxide to do to the world what Ken Lay did to California using electricity; loot the people!
Coincident with the desire to reap huge profits from the general population of the world is the agenda to promote a global government. Currently, the push for a global government rests on three pillars, Global Warming is one of them, leading to a surrendering of national sovereignty attempted at the Copenhagen Conference December 7th, 2009 (but temporarily delayed when the conference was hit with a major blizzard). The other two pillars exploited to create the “need” for a global government are a global swine-flu pandemic, requiring a global health organization, and a global financial crisis, requiring a global bank. The political power behind this push for global government is immense; enough to win Al Gore an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, despite a court ruling pointing out the numerous provable lies and distortions in it.
To any real objective observer, the methods employed by the Cult are not those of science and research but of salesmanship and propaganda. Scare tactics are well in evidence. To anyone of an age enough to recall previous scare campaigns, the hue and cry for Anthropogenic Global Warming is reminiscent of “Killer Bees” and Y2K scares of yesteryear.
To put it bluntly, Anthropogenic Global Warming is a load of government-sponsored bovine excrement. Its purpose is to trick you out of money and into obedience. And despite the shrill cries of those who insist that government would never conceive or let along execute such a monstrous fraud upon the people, the fact is that Anthropogenic Global Warming has a very long pedigree of deception behind it.
Here are some examples.
Ramses and the Hittites
In Egypt, one of the greatest surviving monuments (and source of tourism revenues) is the great temple at Abu Simbel. Built by Ramses II, known as Ramses the Great (by his own admission), the walls at Abu Simbel are carved with a unique style called “sunken relief”, a method of artwork that was less expensive than full bas relief and more difficult to erase. And there, depicted in indelible sunken relief cross the walls and pylons of Abu Simbel are scenes of Ramses the Great, victorious in battle against the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh. Immortalized in stone is his victory for all to see. Similar carvings at Abydos and Luxor also show Ramses defeating the Hittites at Kadesh.
Except …
Ramses the Great didn’t defeat anyone at Kadesh. Fed false information by Hittite spies, Ramses led his men into a trap and barely avoided losing his entire army. Ramses was forced to sign a peace treaty with the Hittites (the first non-aggression treaty in history), ending Egypt’s expansion into the north.
Ramses, like any head of state, had a huge ego and together with not wishing to appear less than godlike to his population (who were taught that he was a God), Ramses promoted the idea that the battle in Kadesh had been a great victory for Egypt, certain that most Egyptians lacked the means to actually travel to Kadesh and find out for themselves what the truth was. (The Canaanites did find out, and emboldened by Ramses’ lack of victory, revolted, thereby ending Egypt’s dominion beyond the Sinai.)
There is a motto here. Rulers serve bovine excrement to their own people in order to control them. That is a fact carved in stone for all to see, 3200 years ago. It is no less true today than it was in the time of the pharaohs.
The Donation of Constantine
Prior to the time of Constantine, Kingship was either won in battle or inherited from father to son. There was no specific ceremony upon taking the throne (although one finds records of some very wild parties held in celebration). But in the time of Constantine, the church invented for itself the ritual of coronation, in which the Bishop of Rome prayed over Constantine and then slapped a crown on his head, thereby sending out a clear message that the church claimed responsibility for Constantine ‘s earthly power and authority.
Following Constantine ‘s death, a document appeared in which Constantine purportedly donated the imperial regalia of Rome to the church, with the request that it be “loaned” to all future rulers of the Roman Empire . From that day on, the loan took the form of the ritual of coronation, in which the holy oil of anointment created the king, rather than conquest or the bloodline. Coronation added the imprimatur of God’s will to the legitimacy of the monarch, and as an inevitable corollary, nobody could ascend to the throne without the permission and blessing of the church.
Except …
Constantine had not been informed ahead of time of his own coronation and by all accounts was rather shocked and angered by the church’s brazen attempt to portray his civil authority as a gift of their religion. As for the donation of Constantine, which literally reshaped the political history of Europe for half a millennium, it was a forgery, most likely written within the Papal offices, to steal for the church the “right” to declare who would or would not be kings of Europe.
There is a motto here. Bovine Excrement is shoveled out of places besides the civil government.
Prester John
In the 1130s, the Turkish Empire under the leadership of Imad ad-din Zengi began to encroach on the Crusader Kingdoms of the Holy Land . Most Crusaders considered their vows to the first Holy Crusade fulfilled and had already returned to Europe, leaving the Pilgrim road from Jaffa to Jerusalem under the guard of the newly emergent Knights Templar (who seemed to spend all their time digging under the Temple Mount). The Knights Templar, although able to guard a road when not shoveling dirt, were insufficient a force to hold off an entire invasion, and in 1145, Hugh, Bishop of Jabala, was sent to meet the newly enthroned Pope Blessed Eugene III to ask for help. Pope Eugene, far less bloodthirsty than his predecessors, balked at a new and costly crusade so soon after the last one. Hugh told the Pope that a new crusade to preserve Christian dominion over the Holy Lands would be easy and cheap, because somewhere far to the east of the Holy Lands was the Kingdom of Prester John .
Prester (or Presbyter) John was a Christian King; a direct descendant of one of the Magi who had visited the infant Jesus, and reportedly whose kingdom was powerful, wealthy, and peaceful. According to Hugh, Prester John was committed to preserving Christian rule over the Holy Lands, and awaited only a sign of equal commitment from the armies of Europe .
Rumors of the impending intervention of Prester John bolstered the courage of the Christians of the Crusader Kingdoms and of Europe, and based in part on the promise of Prester John as an ally, Pope Eugene launched the Second Holy Crusade, led by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany .
But Prester John did not show up as promised. The Second Crusade ended in the rout of the Crusader armies at Damascus, and the Christians found themselves holding less of the Holy Lands.
In 1165, just as the situation in the Holy Lands began to deteriorate further, a letter began to circulate around Europe purportedly from Prester John. The letter again promised support for the Christian armies of Europe . The letter included descriptions of the wonders of Prester John’s kingdom. The letter was so popular it was copied far and wide, and portions of it set to music!
But again, Prester John did not show up when promised, and in 1187 Jerusalem fell to Saladin. This prompted the start of the Third Crusade. Once again, rumors of Prester John’s armies attacking the Muslims from the East bolstered the invading forces.
Except …
Prester John was the invention of the church; a propaganda device to trick Europeans to join a war in which they were clearly outnumbered by the opposing force. As Marco Polo and other travelers brought tales of the Orient back to Europe in the 13th century, church leaders grew alarmed as Christians learned of powerful and advanced civilizations to the east that existed without any awareness of Christianity. Following a brief period when the Dominicans unsuccessfully denounced Marco Polo‘s writings as heresy and fraud, the church again revived the legends of Prester John to prove that Christianity did rule in the far east. Highly fanciful maps were produced of just where Prester John’s kingdom would be found.
The legends of Prester John persisted from the 12th to the 17th centuries even though John himself could not have lived that long. Numerous expeditions to find the Kingdom of Prester John were mounted, all without success. As the map of Asia became filled in accurately with no sign of the fabled Christian Kingdom, the legend was altered to claim that Prester John’s Kingdom was actually in Ethiopia, then as the African map started to fill in, further south in “Darkest Africa.” The realm of Prester John eventually became one of the fabled “Lost Kingdoms of Africa ” that lured explorers into the Congo, often to their deaths.
As for the letter purportedly from Prester John; like the Donation of Constantine it was a clever forgery. In its original version it was apparently derived mostly from Otto von Freisingen’s historical account of the story told by Hugh, Bishop of Jabala to Pope Eugene. The story of Prester John’s palace was actually a description of the palace of St. Thomas the Apostle. As the letter was recopied through the centuries, the stories it contained grew ever more fanciful, filled with strange and wonderful creatures and amazing feats of magic and science. In the 18th century these stories of the land of Prester John were revived as part of the tales of Baron Munchausen. In 1988, the stories of the land of Prester John again surfaced in Terry Gilliam’s film, “ The Adventures of Baron Munchausen .”
The motto here is: A really big lie can last a long time, and there may even be a movie deal in it!
The Seven Cities of Gold
In the year 711, General Tarik ibn Ziyad led his forces across from Africa to Iberia, and commencing with ‘Tarik’s Mountain’ (Gibraltar) conquered all of Spain in mere months. As would be the case with the Templars following their arrest and execution by Philip Le Belle, stories abounded of the treasures of the Spanish Churches smuggled away from the invading armies by seven Bishops and hidden from view.
Then, following Columbus’ discovery of the New World, and perhaps in the realization that whatever it was Columbus had discovered on the far side of the Atlantic was not the Indies he had originally promised, a new story began to surface that the Seven Bishops who had fled Spain in 711 had somehow made their way to the New World, and used their treasure to found Seven Christian cities. Like the Kingdom of Prester John, these were rumored to be cities of immense wealth.
The lure of these mythical cities aided the Spanish explorers in recruiting men for the dangerous business of sailing the Atlantic followed by conquest of an unknown land. A shipwrecked sailor, Cabeza de Vaca, claimed to have seen cities decorated with huge gems. Following Vaca’s descriptions, Fray Marc os de Niza in 1539 claimed to have seen cities with tall gold buildings. It is possible that Niza actually saw adobe buildings shining with silica and pyrite in the sunlight from a distance, but following the killing of his servant avoided close approach to the indigenous people. Despite the absence of provenance, the stories of the Seven Cities of Gold drew both Cortez and Coronado deeper into the new world. The natives quickly realized the lethality of denying the existence of the cities of gold, and simply pointed the Spaniards further inland, promising that the cities were just over the next mountain range.
Except….
There were no cities of gold. They were a propaganda device used to motivate the explorers’ crews in the conquest of the New World, and while they did find gold, the real result of the tale of the Seven Cities of Gold was that Spain pushed all the way into what is now California and New Mexico.
The motto here is that even with gold plating, bovine excrement remains bovine excrement.
The Witches
In the year 1200, Europe entered a period of prolonged cooling which lasted until the mid 1800s. This is called the “Little Ice Age.” Europeans did not understand climate, and owing to theocratic rule following the collapse of Rome had turned their backs on science. All that happened was presumed the will of God. Priests prayed to God to halt the glaciers advancing on the villages. But as the villages succumbed to the ice, the church, rather than admit to failure, began to blame supernatural magical forces for the increasing cold. Seeking a scapegoat, the church set upon those individuals who still held knowledge outside that allowed by the churches. These educated and wise people, people with “wit” were declared heretics and “witches.” A phrase in the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live” was re-translated into “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, and the church now had the perfect scapegoat to blame the unstoppable cold on.
For the next three centuries, up until the incident at Salem, Massachusetts, innocent people were blamed by the church for everything that went wrong. If something bad happened that God could not make go away, it was because of the witches. Cold weather? Blame the witches. Plagues? Blame the witches. Failed crops and livestock? Blame the witches.
Witch-hunting became a full time profession. The accusers and prosecutors grew rich on the confiscated wealth of the condemned. Politicians, business competitors, and even jealous wives quickly learned that they could dispose of a rival with impunity with a simple accusation of witchcraft.
Except…
There are no witches as conceptualized by the church. No witches able to hop on a broomstick and interfere with passenger jets. No witch was ever able to transform himself or herself into an animal. It is all make-believe, and it makes for great books and fun movies, but the evil crimes depicted in the Maleus Malificarum never occurred. The confessions on which the church assurances of witchcraft were based were extracted under torture, some forms of which are sadly still in use in the United States today. Yes, there are people who like to call themselves witches, but their craft at most is limited to natural medicines and midwifery.
For three centuries religiously induced terror and horror stalked across the landscape in Europe. As the grains and cereals on which Europe had fed failed, much hardier potatoes were introduced. But the church declared them the food of the devil because they grew in the ground. Millions starved standing on an abundant food supply, afraid that eating the potato would condemn their souls to hell. When the plagues hit Europe, religious flagellants traveled from town to town, spreading the disease in the droplets of blood flung from the ends of their whips. As the epidemic accelerated in the wake of such rituals, the church fanned the blood-lust for the witches.
Nobody really knows how many people were tortured and killed during the witch trials. The numbers increase and decrease depending on the agenda of who is reporting the numbers. Conservative estimates of victims executed for being witches is a quarter of a million. Estimates of those tortured and then released are considerably higher.
Of all the madness and self-delusions man has collectively engaged in, the search for and execution of witches stands as a monument to all that is dark and fearful in the human mind. A few grew rich and powerful while around them a million people writhed in agony and death. If there is a moral to be found here it is that the execution of accused witches in Mexico in the 1990s (and the evils of Guantanamo Bay) proves that we are not as far from the rack and the stake as we would like to pretend. We comfort ourselves with the idea that the dark ages are long ago and far removed from our modern enlightened age, but the truth is that fanatics can tear down civilization rather quickly. You burn the Library at Alexandria, flay the librarian alive, burn the rest of the books to heat the public baths and set fire to anyone who refuses to bow to the bovine excrement.
More Recent Deceptions
President McKinley told the American people that the USS Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor by a Spanish mine. The American people, outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack, supported the Spanish American War. The Captain of the USS Maine had insisted the ship was sunk by a coal bin explosion, investigations after the war proved that such had indeed been the case. There had been no mine.
In 1928, in the USSR there was a man named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, a favorite of Stalin, and ultimately, a con-artist. He was as popular then in the USSR as Al Gore is in the US today.
Lysenko’s prize theory, which suited Stalin’s political needs at the time, was that plants and animals could inherit traits acquired from the environment in a single generation. That is, if you used cooling to trick Winter wheat seeds to germinate and grow in the Spring ( a technique already used in the US at the time) the seeds from the chilled plants would go on germinating in the Spring in perpetuity.
There was very little science in Lysenko’s science, but this “revolution” suited Stalin’s desire to outdo the accomplishments in genetics which had occurred under Lenin. Honor upon honor was heaped on Lysenko (just as is done with Al Gore today) and real scientists who questioned his theories were shunned, vilified, and removed from their positions (not unlike the experiences of those modern “heretics” who question the basic beliefs of the global warming cult). The state media of the USSR proclaimed the virtues of the Lysenko method beyond all doubt and question, just as the state media of the USA proclaims the “Science is settled” regarding AGW. But Lysenko had no more real science training than Al Gore, and his theory that the environment could permanently alter the genetic structure of crops in a single generation was completely wrong.
However, for political reasons, the USSR mandated that all farmers had to use the Lysenko method (just as the present government intends to force us all to use the “Al Gore Cap and Credit” method) and the result was widespread famine when, during the following spring, the second generation wheat refused to germinate.
This illustrates the problems which can result when the government thinks it understands science, or that science can be subordinated to political agenda.
FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn’t. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack. Contrary to the official story, the Japanese fleet did not maintain radio silence, but sent messages intercepted and decoded by US intercept stations. Tricked by the lie of a surprise attack, Americans marched off to war.
President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam.
There were no torpedoes in the water in the Gulf. LBJ took advantage of an inexperienced sonar man’s erroneous report of an attack to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam War.
Then there were the lies used to trick the US into war with Iraq.
First off was Tony Blair’s “Dodgy Dossier“, a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a student thesis paper that was 12 years old!
The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated.
Then there was the claim about the “Mobile biological weapons laboratories”. Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, these were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction.
This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.
Colin Powell’s speech to the UN was itself one misstatement after another. Powell claimed that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes whose only possible use was in uranium enrichment centrifuges. Both CIA and Powell’s own State Department confirmed that the tubes were parts for missiles Saddam was legally allowed to have. Following the invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise were found.
Powell also claimed to the United Nations that the photo on the left showed “Decontamination Vehicles”. But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just firefighting equipment.
Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found.
Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found.
Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as “standards” for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, the US moved quickly to destroy the samples before comparison tests could be carried out.
Powell claimed that Iraq was building long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons. The only drones found were short-range reconnaissance drones.
Powell claimed that Iraq had an aggregate of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical and biological warfare agents. Powell gave no basis for that claim at all, and a DIA report issued the same time directly contradicted the claim. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq following the invasion.
Powell claimed that “unnamed sources” confirmed that Saddam had authorized his field commanders to use biological weapons. No such weapons were ever used by the Iraqis to defend against the invasion and, of course, none were ever found in Iraq.
Powell claimed that 122mm warheads found by the UN inspectors were chemical weapons. The warheads were empty, and showed no signs of ever having contained chemical weapons.
Powell claimed that Iraq had a secret force of illegal long-range Scud missiles. None were ever found.
Colin Powell’s UN debacle also included spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam’s massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and during inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be rather benign.
In at least one case, the satellite Powell claimed had taken one of the pictures had actually been out of operation at the time. And many questioned why Powell was showing black and white photos when the satellites in use at the time over Iraq took color images.
Another piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called “Yellow Cake” from Niger.
Since Israel had bombed Iraq’s nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.
This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries! The forged documents were reported as being “discovered” in Italy by SISMI, the Italian Security Service. Shortly before the “discovery” the head of SISMI had been paid a visit by Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin, the Israeli spy operating inside the OSP.
In July, 2005, the Italian Parliament concluded their own investigation and named four men as suspects in the creation of the forged documents. Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes. This report has been included in Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, and Paul McNulty, the prosecutor of the AIPAC spy case.
A recently declassified memo proves that the State Department reported the fact that the Niger documents were forgeries to the CIA 11 days before President Bush made the claim about the Niger uranium based on those documents.
In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq’s WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.
What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged “Yellow Cake” documents, balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators are portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off stolen student papers as contemporary analysis.
The President of the United States and his Neocon associates lied to the people of the United States to send them off on a war of conquest.
“News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising”. former NBC news President Rubin Frank
But in the modern age, where fewer and fewer people are blindly religious, doomsayers have had to eschew the trappings of the religious prophet and don the garb of the scientific prognosticator. However, their track record of success in predicting the end of the world had fared no better than that of their clerical brethren!
The Killer Bees
One of the fastest ways to get attention and funding is to announce the imminent doom of the world, then ask for money and/or obedience to study and perhaps “solve” the problem.
In the 1970s, alarmists warned that a deadly strain of African Killer Bees, accidentally released in Brazil in 1957, were slowly moving towards the United States. The media was filled with lurid stories of vengeance-minded bees slaughtering innocent humans. Movies and TV were filled with killer bee horror films (or comedic skits such as the Killer Bees on Saturday Night Live).
Starting in 2002, the Killer Bees did in fact arrive in the United States. And contrary to the warnings, they do not attack people at random. Like any other bee, they will act to defend their hives when attacked, but since most Americans are smart enough not to do that with ordinary bees, the prophecies of doom and death never materialized.
As a side note, Apiculturists already knew that the Killer Bee alarm was overblown. Worker bees, killer or otherwise, can only sting once, and usually die afterwards. Only the Queen Bees, which never leave the hive after their mating flight, are able to sting multiple times and survive. So bees, killer or otherwise, do not sting unless they are provoked to the point of a Kamikaze suicide attack on the enemy.
Y2K
As the 20th century wound down, concern was raised over the fact that most calendar functions inside computers were “hardwired” with the leading “19″, and that as of midnight, December 31, 1999, computer date functions would leap backwards one hundred years to Jan 1, 1900.
The media was filled with dire forecasts of passenger jets falling out of the skies, banks unable to operate, a stock market crash, power grid collapse, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Now, while it was true that some dedicated clock and calendar chips did in fact have the hardwired “19″ problem, the reality is that most calendar functions were already being handled totally in software and for those that were not, a changeover to software calendars able to deal with the year 2000 was a trivial exercise.
But so convincing were the scaremongers that the public started pulling their money out of banks in anticipation of a crash. As a result, corporations had to spend far more money on demonstrations to convince the public that Y2K was fixed than they spent fixing Y2K. In the end, Y2K turned into a 6 billion dollar enterprise that reaped huge profits for the scaremongerers-turned-software patch and “assurance testing” entrepreneurs.
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.” President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
Global Warming in 1922
“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen , Norway . Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.” — AP as published in the Washington Post, November 2, 1922
World about to end from Global Warming in 1923
And again in 1947.
In 1957, USS Skate sailed to the North Pole and found open water!
So, in 1958, Global Warming again was the fashion!
The Coming Ice Age (1975)
As strange as it may seem, back in the 1970s, NEWSWEEK reported that climatologists were warning that Earth was headed into a new Ice age.
That prophecy didn’t work out either.
In 1977 TIME also reported that climatologists were warning that Earth was headed into a new Ice age.
If there is a lesson to be learned from all of the above, it is that governments, religious leaders, TV Networks; con men of all persuasions, are constantly warning you of something you really ought to be afraid of, or are possibly the cause of, and in any event are able to avoid/atone for with enough cold hard cash.
Let’s get something straight; the climate is supposed to change. In 4 1/2 billion years, there has never been a time when the Earth’s climate remained exactly the same. Careful study of the geological and paleontological record shows that the climate is always changing; that the Earth is always getting warmer or colder in long hundred thousand year cycles.
At present the earth is far colder than the Cretaceous but far warmer than the ice ages. Given that the Earth has only recently come out of the Little Ice Age, it stands to reason we should be getting warmer. It is this idea that the Earth can or should be locked into a particular configuration that is artificial and unnatural. And who was to decide what the ideal temperature of earth should be? What is ideal for people living at the equator is hardly ideal for people living in the polar regions.
Global warming cultists like to talk about the balance of nature. This is a very romantic term, and sounds worthy of preservation. But there is no balance of nature. Nature is change. Nature is chaos. Nature is one life form going extinct while another evolves into being. Nature has never been in balance; it is in fact careening through time colliding with the landscape.
Is there really a crisis? Would it really be a bad thing if the Earth were getting warmer?
Warmer temperatures mean longer growing seasons. Longer growing seasons mean more food. And at a time when much of the world’s population are going hungry, more food is a good thing.
Is carbon dioxide really such a bad thing? Carbon dioxide occurs naturally. The major sources are volcanoes and respiration from animal life on Earth. As carbon dioxide increases plant life which uses carbon dioxide for photosynthesis will grow more abundantly. Again, producing more food. There are even companies which will install carbon dioxide enhancement systems for commercial greenhouses because it has been proven that increased carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth and larger crops.
Is carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas? Yes, it is. But it is not the only one. Water vapor is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, more potent than carbon dioxide. But you cannot tax water vapor, and methane is produced by termites and deep-sea microbes, which are far too intelligent life forms to submit to carbon taxes, so the global warming cultists have settled on carbon dioxide as the villain because a portion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced to human activity.
How much atmospheric carbon dioxide comes from human activity? Not including respiration, human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is .28% of the total atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Now this may not seem like very much, and indeed it isn’t. With volcanoes producing far more carbon dioxide than humans, one wonders what all the fuss is about regarding our cars and industry. But the global warming cult has a handy explanation. The global warming cult likes to claim that natural sources of carbon dioxide are already balanced out by natural sinks for carbon dioxide. Volcanoes are offset by trees. The carbon dioxide emitted by sea life is absorbed by seaweed. By claiming that there is no natural counterpart to human caused carbon dioxide the global warming cult tries to claim that .28% of atmospheric carbon dioxide contributed by human activity is upsetting the balance of nature. But as we pointed out before, there is no balance of nature. It is a romantic notion, but simply not reality. Experiments with enhanced CO2 in greenhouses confirms that as CO2 levels rise, plants will grow larger, absorb more CO2, driving levels back down again.
So how do we know we are dealing with a fraud? As noted above, climate change is something that is supposed to happen. The world is always getting warmer or colder. The promotion of a change in the climate as a threat to humankind requiring the paying of taxes and submission to authority is a manufactured construct.
How do we know an agenda is involved? Simple. If the global warming alarmists were really only interested in the welfare of the Earth, one would expect them to be delirious with joy that the threat of anthropogenic global warming doesn’t really exist after all. But quite to the contrary, those whose paychecks are dependent on the global warming industry are in a total panic to reassure us that, yes, there is a real danger, and it is all our fault!
Another reason we know Anthropocentric Global Warming is a hoax is that Scientific Method is supposed to allow for others to double-check the work leading to the theory. In other words, starting with the same data and applying the same methods, I should get the same results. But in the case of Anthropocentric Global Warming, this is impossible. The CRU, in response to Freedom of Information Requests for the raw data on which they based their dire predictions of doom, first stalled, then admitted they had destroyed the raw data! We mere mortals are expected to simply take their word their conclusions are accurate. I have to wonder with all the tens of millions of dollars in funding CRU enjoyed, why they could not purchase an extra hard drive to save that raw data!
In ancient times rulers ruled by what ever lie would convince the people that they needed to be ruled. One very common dodge was rule by divine right. I am your ruler because God said so. But as mankind has evolved and become more sophisticated, and understands that the idea of God is more a metaphor than reality, rulers intent on using deception to rule their people have had to come up with more convincing myths. Obey me and I will save you from the Communists. Obey me and I’ll save you from the terrorists. Obey me and I will save you from global warming. And so forth…
So the push to sell global government on the basis of human caused global warming is just another variation on the theme of I am the ruler because the gods hath decreed it so.
Maybe it’s time for humans to evolve past this latest deception.
As for the actual evidence calling into question the claims of human caused global warming, we can start with the very small percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually created by human industry. The attempt by the global warming cult to claim that natural carbon dioxide is not a problem because nature balances it out, but human caused carbon dioxide is a threat, betrays the agenda of of taking something that occurs naturally and focusing the blame for it onto humans in order to guilt them out of money and obedience.
Then in 1987, two US Submarines met a British Submarine at the North Pole and again found open water, so the coming Ice Age hysteria ended!
The foreign media has reported on NASA and NOAA exposed for intentional manipulation of temperature datam, including the removal of sensors from colder areas and the artificial inclusion and emphasis on warmer data often from wholly inappropriate remote regions.
