Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 384

Yes, Ecosystems Are Collapsing. No It Has Nothing to Do with CO2

 

By  Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D.

Fossil fuels are far from harmless, but excessively focusing attention on CO2 emissions overlooks more pressing issues like ecosystem destruction and clandestine weather manipulation.

Last week, Nobel physicist John Clauser came out of the “Clausit” to speak his own inconvenient truth about global warming and CO2. No good deed goes unpunished.

Another physicist, Freeman Dyson, who was a personal hero of mine has expressed similar views.

This is a big subject, and I don’t feel engaged enough with the issue to write a book on climate, but I will say a few things about which I feel pretty certain — but to which Right Thinking People may take exception.

Global ecosystems are indeed in crisis, and this is the result of human activity.Greenhouse gasses, CO2 and climate change are peripheral to this story. The net effect of CO2 emission is likely to be beneficial, if at all relevant.Environmental activism may be the most important movement on the planet today, and its diversion into a narrow focus on carbon is dangerous.Weather manipulation is a well-developed, sophisticated science being practiced on a global scale, without open scientific backing and without democratic consent. This, too, is a crime and a major danger.

1. Ecosystem collapse

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, “The Sixth Extinction,” is the best single guide to what is at stake. Species are disappearing at a rate that has only been rivaled five previous times in the 4-billion-year history of life on Earth. These are seminal events, changing the face of the Earth and the nature of life. The most recent extinction (the fifth) was the disappearance of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

We know just enough to realize that ecosystems are complex and interdependent in more ways than we can understand. Ecosystems are robust, and the loss or replacement of a few species triggers adaptations so that the ecosystem continues in a new equilibrium. But ecosystems can also collapse if a keystone species is lost, or if it is sufficiently disrupted.

A large fraction of the species on Earth is either extinct or rapidly disappearing. It is impossible to offer a more quantitative estimate because most of the macroscopic species have not yet even been cataloged, and of the microscopic species, including bacteria and fungi, our understanding has barely scratched the surface.

At some point, ecosystems collapse and species disappear because other species on which they depend are disappearing. This is happening in large stretches of the world.

Ocean life is seeking a new equilibrium after the pollution, overfishing and the killing spree of the last 50 years in particular. Forests and wetlands the world over no longer support the diversity of life that they once harbored, and the collapse of biodiversity has a momentum that continues over decades.

Major reasons for this collapse include:

Habitat loss.Deforestation.Every war is an environmental disaster.Widespread poisoning of insects, which are at the base of the animal food chain.Insects are also pollinators, and plant life becomes fragile when insects disappear.Draining of wetlands, mining of fossil water and damming of rivers.Deliberate targeting of apex predators, including lions, wolves and whales.Washing of topsoil into the rivers and oceans.Wasteful practices in mining, agriculture and industry.Global travel, bringing invasive species that tend to homogenize ecosystems worldwide.

Many people, consciously or otherwise, imagine a transhuman future in which the Earth is paved over and food is grown hydroponically. We’ll eat lab-grown meat and live in a virtual paradise, even after we kill the ecosphere. This is a dangerous delusion! All life is interdependent. No species can survive outside an ecosystem.

Bacteria manufacture chemicals crucial for life. Insects pollinate. Fungi recycle waste, make atmospheric nitrogen biologically useful and connect trees underground. No species can exist without a rich ecosystem, and we don’t begin to understand all the connections that create a functional ecosystem.

Mankind’s one attempt to create an artificial ecosystem, dubbed Biosphere 2, fell flat on its face within weeks.

In murdering nature, we are destroying the foundation of human life as well.

2. Carbon dioxide has little to do with this

Anthropogenic global warming is a tiny fraction of the natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

There are great natural cycles in the Earth’s temperature. One of the best-documented is a cycle of about 100,000 years. The reasons are not well understood, but the present warm period in which human civilization has developed is not typical.

Ice ages are typical. As recently as 12,000 years ago, the part of Pennsylvania where I live was under a glacier two miles thick. When these conditions inevitably return, it will create a far greater disruption to animal life and to human activity than anthropogenic warming. “We’re overdue for the next ice age,” and it may be that “global warming” is helping to stave off that destiny, at least temporarily.

So, it’s true that we are at the warmest point in the last 100,000 years, but that has little to do with human activity. The 100,000-year cycle has a range of about 10oC, and human activity in the last 200 years is responsible for only about one 1oC.

Compared to local effects in America and Europe during the Little Ice Age of the 18th century, the effect of all our burning of fossil fuels is lost in the noise.

Global warming is a worldwide average, while the Little Ice Age was regional; but the point is that even in the last few hundred years, ecosystems have had to adapt to much larger changes than those that human activity has imposed.

All the hype about a climate catastrophe based on carbon emissions is based on computer models that are woefully inadequate. These models have been wrong about the changes in the last 40 years since modeling began.

They are no reliable guide to future climate response, though they are continually being cited as authority. In the last 7 years in particular, CO2 emissions have continued and accelerated, atmospheric concentration has increased steadily, but temperatures have gone up and down.

Dyson makes the point that plants grow faster when there is more CO2 in the air, and when temperatures are warmer.

Plants are the productive basis for all ecosystems, so ecosystems are enriched by higher CO2 levels. Clauser makes the point that there is no evidence that a pattern of extreme weather events can be related to more CO2 in the air.

3. The environmental movement has been derailed by the carbon narrative

Many people of goodwill are passionate about reducing their CO2 footprint. Many companies and organizations are profiting from scaring the public about climate change and selling solutions to enrich themselves such as carbon credits, or pushing nuclear power as a friendlier form of energy than burning wood, coal or petroleum products. (It is not.)

Government policies regarding energy could certainly be improved. The most effective thing we can do is to adopt technologies that use energy much more efficiently than we now do.

Cars that get 200 miles per gallon of gasoline already exist, and public transit can be much more efficient. Buildings can be designed so that they remain comfortable with much less energy input. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been creatively documenting the necessary policy changes for decades.

There is an urgent need for all of us to get back to advocating the diverse policy changes that are required to preserve and restore ecosystems, to slow and mitigate the Sixth Extinction. Reducing carbon emissions is dauntingly difficult, both technically and politically.

Technically, because so much of what we do depends on fossil fuel energy, politically because the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels accrue locally, while the costs, if any, are spread across the globe.

Burning oil is associated with spills that devastate ocean life for decades; burning coal is associated with mountaintop removal; fracking causes earthquakes and pollutes groundwater. Cars cause smog and coal-burning power plants put mercury in the air.

I’m not saying that fossil fuels are environmentally benign or that our dependence on carbon-based fuels is sustainable; only that atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the locus of the principal harm.

Focus on carbon emissions is the least effective kind of environmental advocacy, and it is probably counter-productive.

4. Weather manipulation is everywhere, and it’s unacknowledged

Chemtrails are real, though the motivation for this vast, multi-billion dollar project is unclear.

My best guess is that the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP, and similar large antennas are being used to push air masses around the globe with electrostatics and stratospheric heating and that seeding the stratosphere with aluminum is part of a coordinated effort to send that radio energy to desired locations.

Dane Wigington has done more than anyone to document this. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the phenomena, but I don’t believe he understands the motivation for weather manipulation. This is his introductory video.

Droughts and cold snaps are being weaponized to reduce agriculture output. Hurricanes are being steered toward inhabited areas. It may be that weather manipulation could be applied in a productive and broadly beneficial program, but the evidence is that the opposite is being pursued.

I believe that the long drought in California, floods in Texas, and the recent transport of smoke from Quebec to blanket the densely populated Eastern U.S. are all examples of weather manipulation.

I believe that these engineered weather anomalies are being put forward as evidence that CO2 is deranging the weather. I realize that it is difficult to prove that any particular weather anomaly is engineered, but Wigington’s evidence convinces me.

But there is no doubt that the technology of weather manipulation has been under development for many decades, and present capabilities are unacknowledged. Who is manipulating the weather and what is motivating them? I think these are important, open questions.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ecosystems-collapsing-not-co2-emissions/

Measles Eradication Via Vaccination: The Ultimate Nirvana Fallacy

JAMES LYONS-WEILER

It seems every few years when the peak of the normal cycling of measles cases comes in, those who profit from vaccination and ad revenue from Pharma freak out and go on a rampage against people who decline the MMR vaccine for their children.

The Nirvana Fallacy of a world without measles due to 100% vaccination coverage has been disproven over and over with real-world data on outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations – and breakthrough infections in the vaccinated.

That’s vaccine failure, plain and simple. Let’s not forget about two former Merck employees, both virologists named Stephen A. Krahling and Joan A. Wlochowski.

[…]

In 2010, the whistleblowers filed a suit against Merck. The suit drags on in court (“UNITED STATES OF AMERICA et al. v. MERCK & CO.,” Case No. 2:10-cv-04374-CDJ).

The Huffington Post reports on the charges in the suit (See: Merck Has Some Explaining To Do Over Its MMR Vaccine Claims, 9/24/2014, updated: 11/27/2014):

“…former Merck scientists [claim] that Merck ‘fraudulently misled the government and omitted, concealed, and adulterated material information regarding the efficacy of its mumps vaccine in violation of the FCA [False Claims Act].’”

“According to the whistleblowers’ court documents, Merck’s misconduct was far-ranging: It ‘failed to disclose that its mumps vaccine was not as effective as Merck represented, (ii) used improper testing techniques, (iii) manipulated testing methodology, (iv) abandoned undesirable test results, (v) falsified test data, (vi) failed to adequately investigate and report the diminished efficacy of its mumps vaccine, (vii) falsely verified that each manufacturing lot of mumps vaccine would be as effective as identified in the labeling, (viii) falsely certified the accuracy of applications filed with the FDA, (ix) falsely certified compliance with the terms of the CDC purchase [of the MMR vaccine] contract, (x) engaged in the fraud and concealment described herein for the purpose of illegally monopolizing the U.S. market for mumps vaccine, (xi) mislabeled, misbranded, and falsely certified its mumps vaccine, and (xii) engaged in the other acts described herein to conceal the diminished efficacy of the vaccine the government was purchasing.’”

“These fraudulent activities, say the whistleblowers, were designed to produce test results that would meet the FDA’s requirement that the mumps vaccine was 95 percent effective. To the whistleblowers’ delight, the judge dismissed Merck’s objections to the case proceeding, finding the whistleblowers had plausible grounds on all of the claims lodged against Merck.” The whistleblowers’ charges include detailed specifics on how Merck cheated, in order to produce the false conclusion that the mumps component of the MMR vaccine was 95% effective. For example, Merck placed rabbit antibodies into blood samples—pretending these were human antibodies signaling a high level of immune response to the vaccine.”

[From Two More MMR Vaccine Whistleblowers: They’re Suing]

Below is a letter sent by Cindy Bevington Olmstead (LinkedIn) to Margaret Wente at the Globe and Mail, Canada in July of 2013. Wente had published an article attempting to lay the blame for a local measles outbreak on people who choose to not have their children vaccinated with the measles, mumps & rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The problem with blaming so-called “Anti-vaxxers” is that as far as assessing causality goes, Science says it’s not AVers who are responsible. They just help provide evidence that the vaccine efficacy is waning. More on that in a moment. Here’s Cindy’s letter:

“Dear Ms. Wente,

As a journalist, you should do your homework Ms. Wente.

If you had done so, you would know that measles often occurs in fully vaccinated populations (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3821823), that the vaccine often does not work if the vaccinee has exposure to the sun or UVR rays around the time of vaccination (http://www.springerlink.com/content/v545057823230786/)*, that the active form of vitamin D (1,25(OH)2D3), derived from UVR-supported biosynthesis has well-documented immunomodulatory effects, and that there has been concern that increased exposure to UVR due to stratospheric ozone depletion could hamper the effectiveness of vaccines, particularly BCG, measles, and hepatitis (http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/climatechangechap8.pdf).

You would also know that Harvard University researchers have found that because measles occur in highly vaccinated populations, VACCINATED PERSONS ARE A GREATER RISK TO THE UNVACCINATED than vice versa (See “AN EXPLOSIVE POINT-SOURCE MEASLES OUTBREAK IN A HIGHLY VACCINATED POPULATION: MODES OF TRANSMISSION AND RISK FACTORS FOR DISEASE https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/129/1/173/58793”) and that based on measles dynamics for industrialized countries, high birth rate regions should experience regular annual epidemics (See http://www.cidd.psu.edu/research/synopses/measles-outbreaks-niger/?searchterm=measles) because measles outbreaks come in waves just like pertussis.

If you bothered to go even a little further in your research, you would know that vaccine researchers have also found that EXPOSURE TO NATURAL MEASLES IS IMPORTANT in maintaining protective antibody levels among vaccinated children (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/149/4/304.long) and that several studies have shown that measles or rubella-like illnesses in MMR vaccinated children are caused by other viruses.

Then again, most journalists these days don’t bother to do their homework so I can understand why you continue to perpetuate the vaccine sales propaganda, blaming non-vaccinated children on the measles outbreaks, along with the rest of the media, which has grown so lazy they don’t question anything that’s fed to them anymore. So sad that as intelligent as you are you haven’t bothered to look up the data for yourself.

[Globe & Mail article: Measles is back. It had help – The Globe and Mail (archive.org)]

Here are some additional fun facts about measles vaccine failure:

“Of the 194 measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were identified as vaccine sequences (R. J. McNall, unpublished data) – 37.6%”

[…]

In measles-endemic areas, breakthrough cases represent less than 10% of total infections, while in areas with high vaccination coverage, these are over 10% of the total. Two different vaccination failures have been described: primary vaccination failure, which consists in the complete absence of humoral response and occurs in around 5% of vaccinated individuals; and secondary vaccination failure is due to waning immunity or incomplete immunity and occurs in 2–10% of vaccinees.

Fappani C, Gori M, Canuti M, Terraneo M, Colzani D, Tanzi E, Amendola A, Bianchi S. Breakthrough Infections: A Challenge towards Measles Elimination? Microorganisms. 2022 Aug 4;10(8):1567. doi: 10.3390/microorganisms10081567. PMID: 36013985; PMCID: PMC9413104.

“Two Vitamin A megadoses (200,000 international units (IUs) on each day for two days) lowered the number of deaths from measles in hospitalized children under the age of two years. Two doses of vitamin A are not considered to be too expensive and are not likely to produce adverse effects.”

Huiming Y, Chaomin W, Meng M. Vitamin A for treating measles in children. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2005 Oct 19;2005(4):CD001479. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD001479.pub3. PMID: 16235283; PMCID: PMC7076287.

We’re going to see measles cases in increasing numbers as vaccine efficacy continues to wane. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. The community of individuals who bother to understand the dynamics involved will not tolerate the restriction of personal and civil liberties over the Nirvana Fallacy of measles eradication.

Twenty-five mainstream studies that demonstrate these products fail, have limited duration, prevent mothers from delivering antibodies to infants, and will in the long-term cause as many problems as they solve – compromising human resistance to measles without remotely eliminating it:

[…]

Via https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2023/08/07/measles-eradication-via-vaccination-the-ultimate-nirvana-fallacy/

Why does Russia now believe that Covid-19 was a US-created bioweapon?

Abandoned papers found at US biolabs in Ukraine have led the Russian ministry of defence to declare its belief that Covid-19 is a bioweapon. Whether purposefully or accidentally leaked is not clear. What is becoming clear is that the holy grail of the imperialist bioweapons programme is producing diseases that will affect certain genotypes (Russian or Chinese in particular) more than others.

The Communists

Reporting of chemical, biological and genetic experimentation, ‘biosecurity’ and bioweapons has become so integral to the information war that it has become hard to disentangle fact from fiction, and truth from psychological operation, even for those with sound political instincts and a healthy scepticism.

Yet the war in Ukraine is shedding some remarkable light on the global network of dual-use biological laboratories that the US state, and its military-medical research-pharmaceutical axis, has been building and operating.

When the many sources of evidence are collated – ranging from data found on Hunter Biden’s laptop to attacks on Latin-American crops, livestock, economies and national leaders, to the US-Ukrainian labs that have fallen into Russian hands during its special military operation – the systematic nature and remarkably sinister aims of the US biological programme are strikingly revealed.

Weaponising the Covid-19 pandemic – information and experimentation

As the Covid pandemic unfolded, there were multiple accusations and counteraccusations regarding the origins of the virus: Covid was a bioweapon released deliberately by China, we were told. Or it was a consequence of natural transfection due to the unnatural proclivity of the Chinese to visit farmers’ markets.

Or, there had been a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experimentation into coronaviruses, including ‘gain-of-function’ research, is carried out – interestingly part-funded by the US company ‘EcoHealth Alliance’, which pursues such research, together with the US military and pharmaceutical companies, at multiple sites around the world, as we shall see later.

Weaponising the Covid pandemic as part of a broader anti-China propaganda war; this trope was carried worldwide by the western media and intelligence agencies.

The Chinese quite diplomatically but firmly pushed back against this propaganda, with US president Donald Trump in turn threatening to cancel Chinese treasury bonds – that is the $1.1tn of the USA’s $28tn national debt then held by China. (Was the Covid theory about a Wuhan lab leak right all along? by Jonathan Calvert, The Times, 4 March 2023)

The World Health Organisation (WHO) did not support this narrative and was promptly defunded by the USA.

In the context of escalating trade and military conflict with Russia and China, the narrative of the Wuhan lab leak is receiving another big push – although evidence of Chinese culpability is conspicuously absent from the web of assertions.

But gain-of-function research (enhancing transmissibility, virus replication, virulence, host range, immune evasion or drug and vaccine resistance) is quite clearly going on, and the prime movers behind this research are the Nato countries, and particularly the USA.

Weaponising pathogens, to be released in strategic locations as part of a multidimensional or ‘hybrid’ war on any nation that steps out of line with the hegemonic aims of Anglo-American imperialism and its allied and servant network of states, underscores this strategy.

Biological warfare and imperialism

Biological agents have been used in warfare for centuries. During the 14th century, Mongol armies catapulted the infected corpses of plague victims over the walls of the besieged city of Caffa, in what is now Fedosia, in the Crimea, to try to force the surrender of the city’s inhabitants.

But with the advent of modern capitalist imperialism, the wider extension and more intense nature of systems of exploitation extending over continents, combined with advancing scientific knowledge have increased the frequency and potency of their use.

What’s more, there are numerous post-WW2 examples of US and British state experimentation on the prison population, the military, and even on their own civilian populations to study the spread of pathogens.

If British and US workers were considered fit subjects for death-by-biological-weapons testing, one need only call to mind the colonial racism and arrogance of the British Raj and of the US elite to realise the contempt in which the imperialists hold the lives of their colonial subjects. It is thus quite easy to appreciate the penchant of these supremacist sociopaths for experimentation upon the subject peoples, with the aim of maintaining their rule and the source of their vast superprofits.

‘Biosecurity’, research and biological warfare

In February 2022, during the first weeks of the Russian intervention against the US-installed fascist junta in Ukraine, the Russian government and military highlighted their findings that the USA had been operating some 26 biolabs in Ukraine. The information they supplied was initially dismissed by Nato politicians and the western mainstream press as “Russian subterfuge”. (Russia plans ‘very graphic’ fake video as pretext for Ukraine invasion, US claims by Julian Borger, The Guardian, 3 February 2023)

“The Russian army has obtained documentary evidence confirming the Pentagon was involved in financing military-biological projects in Ukraine, the chief of Russia’s radiation, chemical and biological protection force, Igor Kirillov, has said.

“‘We believe that components of biological weapons were being created in Ukraine,’ Kirillov said. He demonstrated a document dated 6 March 2015 confirming ‘the Pentagon’s direct involvement in financing military biological experiments in Ukraine’.

“He stressed that it was standard practice to fund US sanitary and epidemiological wellbeing projects in third countries, including those in Africa and Asia, through national health service agencies.” (Russian military has documentary evidence US funded bioexperiments in Ukraine , 17 March 2022)

Hunter Biden’s role shows direct links to the US president

Moreover, these claims were substantiated by leaked emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden (US president Joe Biden’s son), and even admitted to by some mainstream papers.

The Daily Mail, for example, noted that “the commander of the Russian nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces claimed there was a ‘scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects’ and pointed to the ‘financing of such activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, which is headed by Hunter Biden’ …

[…]

Igor Kirillov also drew attention to the Bidens’ connection to the bioweapons programme:

“‘Incoming material allowed us to trace the interaction scheme between US government agencies and the Ukrainian biolab,’ Kirillov said, adding that the involvement in financing these activities by structures close to current US leadership, in particular Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca investment fund, draws attention to itself …

“‘At the same time, a close relationship has been established between the fund and key contractors of the US military, including Metabiota, which alongside Black & Veatch, is one of the main suppliers of equipment for Pentagon biolaboratories around the world,’ Kirillov added.” (Hunter Biden’s investment fund linked to Ukrainian biolabs engaged in pathogen research: Russian defence ministry, Global Times, 25 March 2022)

[…]

China’s view

Zhao Lijian, spokesman for the foreign ministry of the People’s Republic of China, was asked during a press conference – also on 8 March 2022 – to comment on the Ukrainian biolabs. His statement was far more balanced than anything to be found in scores of articles on the subject in the British press:

“Lately, US biological labs in Ukraine have indeed attracted much attention. According to reports, a large quantity of dangerous viruses are stored in these facilities. Russia has found during its military operations that the USA uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans …

[…]

Lawless protectorates the ideal venue for unethical research

The extensive network of US biolabs points to the larger goal: the control and domination of the biological environment as a means of war.

Many analysts rank cultured and genetically-engineered biological organisms as the most dangerous of all existing weapons technologies, with the potential for producing far more extensive and devastating effects on human populations than even fusion nuclear weapons.

[…]

The special military operation in Ukraine

Russia’s SMO has unearthed – literally – evidence that “the regime in Kiev had urgently eliminated traces of a US Department of Defence-funded military biological programme in Ukraine. Ukrainian laboratories’ staffers testified that on 24 February 2022 pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other deadly diseases were urgently eliminated.” (Biden must explain his son’s involvement in biolabs operation in Ukraine – Duma speaker, Tass, 24 March 2022)

[…]

Genotyping to ‘racially’ target bioweapons

“We have already informed you that more than 16,000 biological samples, including blood and serum samples, were taken from Ukraine to the USA, Georgia and European countries.

“Against the background of the US administration’s assurances that the genetic information obtained from Ukrainian citizens will be used ‘exclusively for peaceful purposes’, I would like to quote a statement by Jason Crow of the US House Intelligence Committee at the North American security conference in July.

[…]

Increasing evidence that USA caused the Covid-19 pandemic

“In May 2022, Jeffrey Sachs – a leading expert in the respected medical journal The Lancet and professor at Columbia University, which is the leading academic institution for global biosecurity – told a conference in Spain that ‘the coronavirus was artificially created and is very likely to have been created using American advances in biotechnology’.

“‘According to our experts, this is evidenced by the uncharacteristic variability of the genovariants that cause different peaks in the incidence of coronaviruses, significant differences in lethality and contagiousness, uneven geographical distribution, and the unpredictable nature of the epidemic process as a whole. It appears that despite efforts to contain and isolate the disease, the pandemic is being artificially fuelled by the introduction of new variants of the virus in a particular region.

“‘We are considering the possibility that the US Agency for International Development (USAid) was involved in the emergence of the new coronavirus. Since 2009, the agency has funded the Predict programme, which has investigated new species of coronaviruses by capturing bats that carry the viruses. One of the contractors for the project was Metabiota, a company known for its military-biological activities in Ukraine.’

[…]

Via https://thecommunists.org/2023/07/03/news/russia-believes-covid-19-usa-bioweapon/

U.S. manufacturing jobs and trade: A tale of two graphs

Dean Baker

Real-World Economics Review Blog

The first decade of this century was pretty awful for U.S. manufacturing workers. In December of 1999 we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. This number had fallen to 11.5 million by December of 2009. This amounted to a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.

It’s also worth pointing out that most of these jobs were lost before the onset of the Great Recession. We had lost almost 4 million jobs by December of 2007, the official start date of the Great Recession. The obvious culprit here is the explosion in U.S. trade deficit that we saw in this decade. If we’re buying more goods from other countries, in general, that means we are producing fewer goods here.

It’s also worth noting that even the manufacturing job loss that resulted from Great Recession may have a substantial trade component. Manufacturing is always highly cyclical. We lose manufacturing jobs in a downturn, but get them back when the economy recovers. That didn’t happen with the recovery from the Great Recession.

This matters because manufacturing was traditionally a heavily unionized sector. Due to its high unionization rate, manufacturing jobs paid a wage premium over jobs in other sectors. This was especially important for workers (primarily male workers) without college degrees. Manufacturing was an important source of high-wage jobs for workers with less education.

The lost jobs in this period were disproportionately unionized jobs. In 2022, the unionization rate in manufacturing was just 7.8 percent, only slightly higher than the 6.0 percent rate for the private sector as a whole.

Anyhow, that’s the story from the standpoint of someone who thinks our trade policies have done real harm to a large group of workers. It is possible to paint a different picture.

Suppose we look at manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. Here’s that picture.

It doesn’t look like anything special is going on in the first decade of this century. The manufacturing share of employment had been dropping for decades. The 00s don’t look very different from 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. What is there to complain about?

This is the graph that proponents of U.S. trade policy like to tout. But there is another graph. This one just shows manufacturing employment since 1970.

While there are cyclical ups and downs in the prior three decades, there is only a modest downward trend over this period. That changes in a big way when we get to the 2000s. You can’t look at this graph (or at least I can’t) and say that the 00s were just more of the same.

This was the period where we saw a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The economy looked very different in these states at the end of the decade than it did at the start of the decade.

I will make one other point here. No one should say that the issue here was “globalization.” There are an infinite number of ways that we can increase the integration of the U.S. economy with the rest of the world. For example, we could reduce our patent and copyright protections so that U.S. technology, especially in areas like health care and climate, can be more easily shared with the rest of the world.

We can also focus our trade deals on standardizing licensing requirements for professional services, so that foreign doctors, dentists, and other professionals from the rest of the world can more easily practice in the United States. This would offer the textbook “gains from trade,” but the losers would be workers in highly paid professions and the rest of us would be gainers.

But we chose not to go this route with our trade deals. Trade deals were focused on making it as easy as possible to import manufactured goods, putting our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in China, Mexico, and elsewhere.

This had the predicted and actual effect of costing millions of manufacturing jobs and sharply reducing the pay in the ones that remain. But this was not a story of “globalization.” It was a story of crafting trade deals in a world where doctors and other professionals have much more political power than manufacturing workers.

[…]

Via https://rwer.wordpress.com/2023/08/07/u-s-manufacturing-jobs-and-trade-a-tale-of-two-graphs/

Is this First Lady Also the First Female Presidential Assassin?

[Source: historycentral.com]

Jeremy Kuzmarov

Covert Action Magazine

Evidence Suggests that First Lady Florence Harding Killed Her Husband, the 29th President Warren G. Harding, A Century Ago Today to Protect His Reputation and Legacy.

On the night of August 2, 1923, exactly one hundred years ago, President Warren G. Harding, 57, suddenly fell ill and died at the opulent Palace hotel in San Francisco.

In most history books, the cause of Harding’s death is listed as a heart attack. But significant contemporary testimony—including that of the heir of the man who owned the San Francisco hotel where Harding died, says Harding should be added to the list of presidents who have been assassinated while in office, and that he was actually murdered—with the primary suspect being his wife Florence.[1]

On the night Harding died, Florence was reading to her husband, who had been traveling on the West Coast after visiting Alaska.

When Warren suddenly stopped breathing, Florence screamed for doctors. After he was declared dead, the doctors kept switching the cause of death, first claiming that a blood vessel in Harding’s brain had burst, then saying he had died of a stroke, and then of a heart attack and gall bladder condition.

Florence ordered that no autopsy be performed and that Warren’s body be embalmed immediately.[2]

Shortly before he died, Harding had been asking Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover’s advice on publicly exposing “a great scandal in our administration.”[3] Hoover said that when he walked into Harding’s room, his doctor, Charles Sawyer was oddly lying on the bed next to his dead body.[4]

When Janet Johnston, the granddaughter of the Palace Hotel’s founder, U.S. Senator William Sharon (R-NV) entered the Hardings’ room and saw that Warren was dead, Florence flew into a rage, claiming that the hotel’s food had killed her husband and that she was going to sue.

Janet, however, told Florence that the claim was ludicrous as no one else staying at the hotel suffered from any food-borne illnesses.

When Janet picked up a half-filled glass near President Harding’s bed, she found that it had a noxious odor and suspected that whatever was in the glass had something to do with his death.

Janet told Florence that she intended to have the contents of the glass analyzed, at which point Florence snatched the glass away and managed to pour whatever was in it down the drain. She then turned to Janet and said “there will be no lawsuit.””[5]

[…]

The Duchess and “her Warren”

Florence was among the more popular First Ladies whose words were quoted in newspapers and magazines and whose image was displayed in newsreels.

A feminist who supported suffrage and championed the interests of the nation’s World War I veterans, Florence had opened the White House to visitors and encouraged women to exercise, play sports and be as physically fit as men.[6] At the same time, she wrote and corrected her husband’s speeches and weighed in on his choices for important Cabinet posts.[7]

Florence’s behavior on the night of her husband’s death was not out of character as she had a domineering nature and was fiercely loyal to “her Warren,” who called her “the Duchess.”

Gaston Means, a private investigator hired by Florence to look into her husband’s extramarital trysts, described Florience as a “woman of brains: cold, logical [and calculating]” with a “consuming thirst for power.” For years she was the financial head of the Harding household since Warren was a “child in business matters.”Possessing beautiful blue eyes and a delicate body with unusually large hands, Florence had worked tirelessly behind the scenes to place her husband “in the highest position in…the greatest nation of the world.”

She was “familiar with everything pertaining to governmental affairs to the last detail,” Means wrote. This included “every phase of state and diplomatic strategy.” As First Lady, Florence “continue[d] to be the central moving factor [in her husband’s political career]: the determining factor.”[9]

What Kind of President Was Warren G. Harding?

A newspaper publisher from Marion, Ohio, Harding defeated his Democratic Party challenger, James Cox, in the 1920 presidential election, campaigning on a slogan of a “return to normalcy” after the tumult of World War I and the first Red Scare.

During a five year career in the U.S. Senate Harding introduced 134 bills of which 122 were local Ohio affairs, with the other 12 focusing on mundane matters like promoting celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims. The New York Times considered Harding to be the “firm and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal.”[10]

As President, Harding reduced the federal debt and released political prisoners like Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had been jailed for opposing U.S. entry into the Great War.

He also proposed a reduction in military spending, withdrew U.S. troops from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and oversaw the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922 in which the world’s major powers agreed on a naval limitation program—albeit one that maintained strategic advantage for the U.S. and England vis-à-vis Japan, which expanded its program of militarization and regional colonization in response.[11]

In 1923, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge confided to a friend that “Harding is very satisfactory to the financial interests.”[12] His Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, “quashed prosecution of war profiteers and other spoilsmen of Wall Street and waged vigorous warfare against labor organizations” while the Commerce Department, under the direction of Herbert Hoover, was transformed into a “marketing agency for the big industries.”[13]

Harding’s white supremacist outlook was apparent in his praise for Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) warned about the destruction of white society by invading non-white hordes.

As a precursor to modern day conservatives, Harding supported a harsh anti-immigrant bill mandating deportations and drastic income tax cuts (the top marginal rate was reduced from 75% in 1921 to 25% in 1925) based on the argument of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon[14] that lower rates would increase tax revenues because, when income taxes were high, money was driven underground or abroad.

Libertarian historians credit these cuts with ushering in a dramatic period of economic growth, though many other historians blame Mellon’s economic approach for the sweeping inequality and economic volatility that produced the Great Crash of 1929 and the Depression.[15]

An Administration Scarred with Shame and Corruption

When Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. polled historians to measure presidents’ standing in 1948 and 1962, Harding ranked dead last. Schlesinger concluded that Harding and Ulysses S. Grant were “morally obtuse” and conducted administrations “scarred with shame and corruption.”[16]

According to historian Ferdinand Lundberg, Harding was a product of Mark Hanna’s Standard Oil machine in Ohio and his administration was “soaked in petroleum.”[17]

The Ohio gang was a collection of powerful political figures and industrialists mainly from Ohio who held sway over Harding and pushed him to sign legislation that benefited the petroleum industry and made them rich.[18] They were involved in an array of criminal schemes, including arranging for the sale of permits to people who wanted to withdraw liquor from bonded government warehouses and worked out illegal sales of government property.[19]

A popular saying held that “everything was for sale in Washington during the Harding administration—except the dome of the Capitol.”[20]

Just three months after his inauguration, Harding issued an executive order transferring the Navy’s oil reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior so they could be acquired by private companies.

The Ohio gang derived enormous profits from buying up oil company stocks. Hundreds of thousands of dollars derived from illicit financial dealings and graft were stored in secret vaults, as members of the gang “had daily banquets of the finest food and finest wines.”[21]

The corruption in Harding’s administration was exemplified by the Teapot Dome scandal in which a Senate investigation led by Senators Thomas J. Walsh (D-MT) and Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) uncovered that Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies—Sinclair and Pan American Petroleum and Transport—at low rates without competitive bidding after taking $404,000 in bribes.[22]

Government investigators and people linked to the scandal died suddenly before they were slated to testify. Harry Daugherty’s gopher, Jess Smith, was said to have shot himself with a pistol in Washington’s Wardman Hotel; however, nobody heard the shot, and Smith never fired a pistol in his life—he was mortally afraid to ever hold one.[23]

Senator James Thomas Heflin said: “nobody knew what he [Smith] knew, and with him dead there was nobody to tell the story—so Jess Smith was murdered.”[24]

Who Tipped Off The Wall Street Journal Publisher?

Clarence Walker Barron, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, seems to have had foreknowledge of Harding’s death–which would seem to corroborate that he had been poisoned.

During a bridge game at his home the night Harding died, Barron had his secretary phone his office until news came across the wire that Harding had a stomach ache from eating crab.

Barron then exclaimed: “That’s it! get me the vice-president [Calvin Coolidge]”–who was spending the evening with his father and one of Barron’s good friends.[25]

Revelations of Gaston Means

Gaston Means was hired by Mrs. Harding to investigate Warren’s affair with a young woman named Nan Britton who alleged that Harding fathered her child—a claim that was validated by correspondence found 40 years after Harding’s death and recent DNA testing.[26]

In 1930, with the assistance of a ghostwriter, May Dixon Thacker, Means published a book, The Strange Death of President Harding (New York: Guild Publishing Corporation, 1930), which suggested that Mrs. Harding had killed her husband to prevent his impeachment and protect his legacy, which would have been tarnished by revelations about his philandering and the deep corruption in his administration which was in the process of being exposed.[27]

Postscript: For weeks after Warren’s death, smoke could be seen rising from the White House chimney as Florence burned her now deceased president’s papers in order to protect him—a task that she continued after she returned to live on a farm in Marion, Ohio.[37]

A year later, Florence died—like her husband under suspicious circumstances. Perhaps she too was a victim of the machinations of the Ohio gang, which either sought revenge on her or wanted to ensure that the truth of her husband’s death never got out.

Vaccines and SIDS (Crib Death)

Steve Kirsch

Executive summary

They are lying to you.

Most of the SIDS cases (likely 75% or more) are due to the childhood vaccines. Vaccines are the main cause of autism as well, likely 75% or more.

In fact, pediatric clinics that avoid vaccines have zero, or near-zero, rates of SIDS and autism.

In this article, I’m going to discuss how just two black swans can destroy the medical consensus by proving that the medical community couldn’t have gotten it right on their claims that vaccines don’t cause autism or SIDS:

A police officer who investigated 300 SIDS cases over a 7 year period (about 3 to 4 cases per month), observed that 75% of the cases happened within 48 hours after a vaccine.A couple who got their triplets (not identical) vaccinated all developed autism within hours after the shot (and each other).

These anecdotes happened, and they are “statistically impossible” to have happened by chance (at least not in our lifetime).

I don’t believe it is possible to attack this data or explain it away.

Too many SIDS cases happened within 48 hours of the vaccine for the vaccine not to have caused the deaths

In an earlier Substack, I reported the case of a police officer assigned to investigate SIDS cases over a 7 year period who observed that 75% of the 300 cases happened within 48 hours of a vaccine.

At the time, I wasn’t sure how to calculate the probability of that happening.

But now, thanks to Professor Norman Fenton, I do.

If SIDS is just randomly happening to babies, and babies are vaccinated every 60 days like clockwork, the chance of a SIDS death happening within any 48 hour window post-vaccine is 1/30.

So if there are 300 babies who died of SIDS, we’d expect that 10 of them, on average, would happen within every 48 hour window post vaccine.

So what are the chances of 75% of these deaths (or more) happening within 48 hours after the shot?

The calculation is trivial to get the chance of seeing 225 deaths or more:

>>> poisson.sf(225-1,10)
3.7718601504237225e-213

That’s not a typo. 10 to the -213. That’s as close to impossible as it gets.

In other words, if SIDS is randomly happening with respect to the time of vaccination, it is impossible to have made this observation. We can cherry pick all we want, we’ll never find a cherry like this to pick. Ever.

This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the vaccines are the primary cause of SIDS, and that they are, at a minimum, causing 75% or more of all SIDS cases.

What’s so special about this police officer

She asked the parents of the deceased when the child was last vaccinated!!

Few other police officers in the world would ever ask such a question because they all know that “it couldn’t be the vaccine.”

So we were lucky enough to find a police officer that asked the question for each of her cases.

And by the way, even if she got it wrong and only 10% of the cases were within 48 hours of the vaccine, there is, by random chance, less than 1 chance in a million of observing that.

Our autism anecdote is also impossible if vaccines aren’t causing autism

The McDowell triplets (featured in the movie Vaxxed II) all got autism on the same day, within hours of each other.

Did that happen by chance? It happened within hours of their vaccine injection.

Check this out. Nearly 1M views in less than 24 hours after posting.

Again, the calculation is trivial.

Say kids only get autism between ages 1 and 4 to be conservative, so an exposure window of 3 years = 1095 days. The current rate of autism is 1 in every 35 kids per the CDC, but the McDowell triplets were vaccinated on June 25, 2007.

So around 1 in 100 kids would get autism in the 1095 day exposure period back in 2007.

So what’s the expected number of cases of autism in a single day per child? Pretty darn low: 1e-5. So if you have 3 kids, you’d expect to get 3e-5 autism cases in any 24 hour period, on average in 2007.

To see 3 (or more) events in a 24 hour window when you expected to see 3e-5 events is:

>>> poisson.sf(2,3e-5)
4.499898751214992e-15

This means that the McDowell triplets couldn’t have possibly happened by “bad luck.”

The vaccine they were given just hours earlier is the only possible way this event could have happened.

This means vaccines can cause autism.

We didn’t need more than one anecdote to prove that conclusively.

Speculation re: genes cause autism to happen at the same time

I just provided an anecdote where all three kids got autism within hours after a shot.

If you want to make the hand-waving argument that it is just a coincidence because triplets all get autism at the same time, simply show me a case where the autism happened in triplets all on the same day where a vaccine was not involved.

Also, explain this anecdote where one twin was given the vaccine and developed autism, and the twin not given the vaccine didn’t. You can simply show us the opposite anecdote where after the vaccine shot, the twin who did not get the vaccine got autism and the twin who got the vaccine did not get autism.

If you cannot provide evidence for either, your argument lacks evidentiary support and is simply not credible.

These two verifiable “black swan” anecdotes should be all that is needed to disprove the null hypothesis and totally discredit the medical community on these important issues

The medical consensus was that “black swans” don’t exist, i.e., vaccines don’t cause SIDS or autism.

It takes only a single verifiable sighting of a “black swan” to prove that the consensus was wrong.

[…]

Via https://kirschsubstack.com/p/two-verifiable-anecdotes-are-the

The Sordid History of Britain’s East India Company

Episode 24 The British East India Company

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Between 1757-1857 the British East India Company conquered all of India, an area (1.5 million square miles) larger than western Europe with a far greater population.* Unlike other British colonies, India was never a white settler colony, hosting no more than a few thousand British officials and military officers throughout the 18th and 19th century.

As many British lawmakers opposed imperialism based on military conquest, the colonial takeover of India began incrementally as growing numbers of native merchants, soldiers and servants finding employment with the British East India Company.

After the embarrassing 1756 Black Hole of Calcutta incident (where the Nawab of Bengal held Company troops as prisoners of war), the British parliament became even more squeamish about British forces (either governmental or those commanded by the Company) acquiring Indian territory by force. British commander Robert Clive ultimately conquered Bengal for the British East India Company in 1757 by bribing one of the opposing generals not to fight.

The Company’s control over India’s economy (via their monopoly over cotton and spice exports) ultimately enabled them to control a number Mughal kingdoms without conquering them military. In 1772-73 Clive, who became enormously wealthy, was investigated for corruption and relieved of his command.

In 1774 Prime Minister William Pitt passed the India Act, which specifically military annexation of additional Indian territories by either British forces of the British East India Company. The Company largely ignored the new law. Once they controlled India’s richest province Bengal, they had enough money of their own to pay their sepoy mercenaries to annex other kingdoms. Initially Company officials who annexed new territory were recalled to Britain and prosecuted. However the land they seized was never returned to native rulers.

In an effort to reign in the Company’s military activities, Britain appointed a series of governors general  (of Bengal). The first, in 1772, was a former British East India company employee named Warren Hastings, who became extremely rich annexing territory through military expeditions and was ultimately impeached in the House of Commons. He was tried in the House of Lords, where it took 10 years for him to be acquitted.

The second, in 1786, was General Charles Cornwallis.** Cornwallis frequently used security as an excuse to invade and annex territories adjacent to those owned by the company. In 1805 he was forced to resign for excessive military zeal.

Provincial warlords, who had a long history of fighting with each other, found it impossible to unify against systematic dispossession of their land, especially when those who opposed the British ended up worse off than those who collaborated. India’s deteriorating economy made this even more difficult, especially when the British East India Company began shipping raw cotton to England for processing, putting thousands of Indian weavers out of work.

In 1820 the British East India Company was also awarded a monopoly on the opium trade.

*India had a population of 270 million in 1800, in contrast to Europe’s 180 million.

**Historically Cornwallis is best known for surrendering to American revolutionaries at Yorktown in 1781.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366219

Attorney Reveals the “Exculpatory” Evidence Jack Smith Possesses that Exonerates President Trump

By Cullen Linebarger

It turns out that Special Counsel Jack Smith either failed to review evidence that exonerates President Trump and Mayor Rudy Giuliani or he ignored the findings altogether.

Tim Parlatore, the attorney for former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, told CBS News that Smith’s office has within thousands of pages of records turned over by Kerik that contains “exculpatory evidence.” The exact reason why Smith has not disclosed this critical information remains unclear.

According to CBS News, these documents were submitted to Smith on July 23.

Kerik’s legal team says that these materials, which include affidavits under oath from people raising concerns regarding the integrity of the 2020 presidential contest, demonstrate there was an honest effort to investigate voter fraud claims in the election.

Yet Parlatore got “surprising” news when the special counsel’s office started asking him for documents which he had already handed over after they indicted Trump on Wednesday.

CBS News reported:

In an Aug. 2 email to Parlatore, reviewed by CBS News, a special counsel’s office prosecutor requested “responsive documents as to which the Trump campaign is no longer asserting a privilege,” referring to the Kerik records Parlatore said he previously provided.

Parlatore said he was “stunned” when, after the indictment came down, the prosecutor contacted him asking for the records he said he had already provided. Parlatore said the “records are absolutely exculpatory.

Here is the evidence should exonerate Trump according to Parlatore.

They (documents) bear directly on the essential element of whether Rudy Giuliani, and therefore Donald Trump, knew that their claims of election fraud were false. Good- faith reliance upon claims of fraud, even if they later turn out to be false, is very different from pushing fraud claims that you know to be false at the time.

In other words, Trump and Giuliani honestly believed the 2020 election was stolen. This conclusively proves that Trump is being prosecuted based on his opinions.

There is also other evidence to back up Trump’s claims of election fraud. The Gateway Pundit has extensively reported on the irregularities that occurred during the 2020 Presidential election.

Some examples can be found here and here.

CBS News notes that Parlatore served as a lawyer working for Trump in the Justice Department’s investigations into the 45th president, but left the legal team in May.

A spokesperson for the special counsel refused comment Thursday when asked by CBS News if they had reviewed the material.

[…]

Via https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/attorney-reveals-exculpatory-evidence-jack-smith-possesses-that/

 

Capitol Police Chief Challenged J6 Narrative In Never-Aired Tucker Carlson Interview

Zero Hedge

In never-before-seen footage that was withheld by Fox News, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that January 6th was a complete debacle and a “cover up.”

“Everything appears to be a cover up,” Sund tells Carlson in footage obtained by the National Pulse. “Like I said, I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he continued. “…but when you look at the information and intelligence they had, the military had, it’s all watered down. I’m not getting intelligence, I’m denied any support from National Guard in advance. I’m denied National Guard while we’re under attack, for 71 minutes…”

Beginning around 19 minutes into the conversation, Sund tells Tucker: “If I was allowed to do my job as the chief we wouldn’t be here, this didn’t have to happen,” adding that he’s “pissed off” about being “lambasted in public” over what happened that day.

The full interview has thus far been hidden from the public at the behest of Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly left-wing Fox News channel, which unceremoniously fired its prime time host Tucker Carlson allegedly as part of a private settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. -National Pulse

“It sounds like they were hiding the intelligence,” Carlson said, to which Sund responds: “Could there possibly be actually… they kind of wanted something to happen? It’s not a far stretch to begin to think that. It’s sad when you start putting everything together and thinking about the way this played out… what was their end goal?”

On the day he was fired, @TuckerCarlson was planning to air parts of our 1-hour interview and showcase my book. It was an interview he was excited about and said it “made the hair on my arm stand up.” But Fox canned both Tucker and the interview. Coincidence? pic.twitter.com/QA9jdfFjsb

— Chief Steven Sund (@ChiefSund) May 5, 2023

Last month Carlson told Russell Brand that Sund said the crowd on January 6th was ‘filled with federal agents.’

“I interviewed the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, in an interview that was never aired on Fox, by the way — I was fired before it could air, I’m gonna interview him again,” Carlson said.

“But Steven Sund was the totally non-political, worked for Nancy Pelosi, I mean, this was not some right-wing activist. He was the chief of Capitol Police on January 6, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that crowd was filled with federal agents.’ What? ‘Yes.’ Well he would know, of course, because he was in charge of security at the site.”

“So, the more time has passed… it becomes really obvious that core claims they made about January 6 were lies,” Carlson explained.

“The amount of lying around January 6, and it was obvious in the tapes that I showed, is really distressing.”

Watch:

Tucker Carlson BLOWS The Doors Off January 6th LIES.

Reveals Fox News REFUSED To Air His J6 Interview Of Capitol Chief Of Police PROVING "The US Capitol Was FILLED With Federal Agents"

Tucker Describes Fox Execs Attacking him For J6 Report: "F**k You!”

Narrative Collapse. Wow pic.twitter.com/30UijETvNq

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 7, 2023

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/political/everything-appears-be-cover-capitol-police-chief-challenged-j6-narrative-never-aired

Ex-Pakistani PM Imran Khan jailed for three years

© Getty Images / Parker Song-Pool/Getty Images

The former cricket star claims his conviction for illegally profiting from state gifts was politically motivated.

Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was issued with a three-year jail sentence by an Islamabad court on Saturday after he was found guilty on corruption charges. The verdict means that Khan, who claims the prosecution was politically motivated, will not be able to contest elections later this year.

In a pre-recorded statement released on X (formerly Twitter), Khan told his supporters: “I have only one appeal, don’t sit at home silently.”

Judge Humayun Dilawar declared in court that Khan, 70, had “deliberately submitted fake details” after he was accused of illegally profiting from the sale of gifts he received while serving as Pakistan’s head of state between 2018 and 2022. After issuing the three-year custodial term, the judge also ordered Khan to be banned from politics for a period of five years.

Following the verdict, Khan, who was not in court, was arrested at his home in Lahore and taken into police custody. The claims against the former prime minister are a case of “political victimization,” according to his lawyer Intezar Hussain Panjutha.

“Khan was not given an opportunity to defend himself and say his side of the story,” he said after the verdict. “We wanted to provide witnesses in his favor but he was not allowed this opportunity. Khan was not given a fair trial.”

Khan’s barrister, Gohar Khan, added in comments to The Dawn newspaper that the court’s verdict had been a “murder of justice.”

However, opponents of the former politician appeared to celebrate the court’s judgment outside the building, with some chanting: “Imran Khan is a thief.”

More than 150 cases have been brought against Khan, the former sports star turned populist political figure, since he was ousted from office last April following a no-confidence vote. He has denied all wrongdoing.

Barring a successful appeal, Khan’s conviction means he will be prohibited from standing in Pakistan’s general elections, which are expected to take place in October or November. Khan, who had unsuccessfully called for early elections to take place, has previously stated his belief that Pakistan’s military authorities have attempted to obstruct his Tehreek-e-Insaf party from regaining political power.

It’s the second time in recent months that Khan has been arrested. Around 100 paramilitary troops were involved in his detention last May in connection with one of the numerous cases against him. Khan has alleged that Pakistan’s military is responsible for attempts to subdue his political influence. He has also claimed that the United States has conspired with Pakistan’s government to prevent him from returning to political power.

[…]

Via https://swentr.site/news/580870-pakistan-imrah-khan-jail-sentence/