Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 405

How the Devious Fossil Fuel Industry Cooked Up the Carbon Footprint Sham

Screenshot of BP webpage as documented by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on Feb. 12, 2006

by Mark Kaufman

A ‘successful, deceptive’ PR campaign

Moving forward requires focus. Mashable’s Social Good Series is dedicated to exploring pathways to a greater good by spotlighting issues that are essential to making the world a better place.

In a dark TV ad aired in 1971, a jerk tosses a bag of trash from a moving car. The garbage spills onto the moccasins of a buckskin-clad Native American, played by Italian American actor Espera Oscar de Corti. He sheds a tear on camera, because his world has been defiled, uglied, and corrupted by trash. The poignant ad, which won awards for excellence in advertising, promotes the catchline “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.” What’s lesser known is the nonprofit group Keep America Beautiful, funded by the very beverage and packaging juggernauts pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year (the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch Companies), created the PSA.The real message, underlying the staged tear and feather headdress, is that pollution is your problem, not the fault of the industry mass-producing cheap bottles.

Another heralded environmental advertising campaign, launched three decades later in 2000, also won a laudatory advertising award, a “Gold Effie.” The campaign impressed upon the American public that a different type of pollution, heat-trapping carbon pollution, is also your problem, not the problem of companies drilling deep into the Earth for, and then selling, carbonaceous fuels refined from ancient, decomposed creatures.

British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.

It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.do matter.) But there’s now powerful, plain evidence that the term “carbon footprint” was always a sham, and should be considered in a new light — not the way a giant oil conglomerate, who just a decade ago leaked hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, wants to frame your climate impact.

The evidence, unfortunately, comes in the form of the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a century. We were confined. We were quarantined, and in many places still are. Forced by an insidious parasite, many of us dramatically slashed our individual carbon footprints by not driving to work and flying on planes. Yet, critically, the true number global warming cares about — the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide saturating the atmosphere — won’t be impacted much by an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2020 (a drop the International Energy Agency estimates at nearly eight percent compared to 2019).

This means bounties of carbon from civilization’s cars, power plants, and industries will still be added (like a bank deposit) to a swelling atmospheric bank account of carbon dioxide. But 2020’s deposit will just be slightly less than last year’s. In fact, the levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere peaked at an all-time high in May — because we’re still making big carbon deposits.

So when BP tweets an ad encouraging you to “Find out your #carbonfootprint” with their “new calculator,” it’s time to rethink the use of the term. While superficially innocuous, “carbon footprint” is intended to manipulate your thinking about one of the greatest environmental threats of our time. (The threat of nuclear warfare with the potential for both the harrowing spread of radioactive material and the development of a nuclear winter are in the running, too.)

[…]

“It’s time to go on a low-carbon diet,” BP wrote in bold letters on its website in 2006, with its “carbon footprint calculator” just a click away. (In 2004 alone, 278,000 people calculated their footprints.) The site was part of BP’s ad campaign, “Beyond Petroleum.”

Fast forward, and BP is still producing bounties of oil and gas every day (4 million barrels a day in 2005 versus 3.8 million barrels today). In 2019, BP purchased its “biggest acquisition in 20 years,” new oil and gas reserves in West Texas that gave the oil giant “a strong position in one of the world’s hottest oil patches,” according to the company. Today, BP touts its foray into lower-carbon fuels, but these are limited in scope. In 2018, BP invested 2.3 percent of its budget on renewable energies. Its bread and butter is still black oil and gas. What low-carbon diet?

It’s evident that BP didn’t expect to slash its carbon footprint. But the company certainly wanted the public — who commuted to work in gas-powered cars and stored their groceries in refrigerators largely powered by coal and gas generated electricity — to attempt, futilely, to significantly shrink their carbon footprint. In 14-year-old web pages no longer accessible online but documented by Julie Doyle, a professor of media and communication at the University of Brighton, BP published ads asking “What on earth is a carbon footprint?”, “Reducing our footprint. Here’s where we stand,” and “What size is your carbon footprint?”

Doyle concludes BP sought to explain what a carbon footprint is “in a way which assigns responsibility for climate impact to the individual, while BP registers its own concerns by appearing already to be doing something about it.”

Yet in a society largely powered by fossil fuels, even someone without a car, home, or job will still carry a sizable carbon footprint. A few years after BP began promoting the “carbon footprint,” MIT researchers calculated the carbon emissions for “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters” in the U.S. That destitute individual will still indirectly emit some 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide each year.

“Even a homeless person living in a fossil fuel powered society has an unsustainably high carbon footprint,” said Stanford’s Franta. “As long as fossil fuels are the basis for the energy system, you could never have a sustainable carbon footprint. You simply can’t do it.”

[…]

BP, powerful and wealthy, signaled it would wean itself from oil. “Only they didn’t go beyond petroleum,” wrote Kenney. “They are petroleum.”

[…]

While the pandemic has laid bare that our personal actions alone won’t stabilize the planet’s disrupted climate, some voluntary decisions beyond voting can still be important, and influential. Here’s a poignant example: When someone installs solar panels on their roof, their neighbors are more likely to install the panels too, a trend that’s shown in multiple studies. “It’s the effect of social contagion,” said Hassol.

[…]

It’s true that each time we fill up at the pump and drive off we’re inevitably emitting heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. That’s technically a “carbon footprint.” But we’re given no other choice. “The strategy is to put as much blame on the consumer as possible, knowing the consumer is not in a good place to control the situation,” said Franta. “It basically ensures that nothing changes.”

[…]

BP wants you to accept responsibility for the globally disrupted climate. Just like beverage industrialists wanted people to feel bad about the amassing pollution created by their plastics and cans, or more sinisterly, tobacco companies blamed smokers for becoming addicted to addictive carcinogenic products. We’ve seen this manipulative playbook before, and BP played it well.

[…]Via https://archive.is/2022.03.27-193901/https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham#selection-725.0-1433.70

Give Me Liberty

Give Me Liberty: Handbook for American Revolutions

By Naomi Wolf

Simon and Schuster (2008)

Book Review

This book is a call to ordinary citizens to address increasing repression by government and police (what she refers to as a “fascist shift”). It’s main focus is the protections supposedly guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Overall I found the book disappointing, in part owing to Wolfe’s failure to acknowledge the significant body of scholarship into the mechanics of drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Declaration of Independence

She goes along with the popular misconception that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which contradicts significant documentary evidence that it was written by a four-man committee chaired by Benjamin Franklin – who was responsible for most of its content. See Hidden History: The Clash of the Two AmericasShe credits John Locke for Declaration of Independence language about inalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is also erroneous. In his Second Estate, Locke defines natural rights to “Life, Liberty and Estate (ie “land” in modern language). Franklin’s committee changed this “inalienable” right to property to an “inalienable” right to Pursuit of Happiness comes from Commentaries on the Laws of England, published by William Blackstone in 1765. Presumably Franklin’s committee didn’t go along with Locke’s view that ordinary people had an inalienable right to land.

Constitution and Bill of Rights

1) Wolfe fails to note that the Constitutional Convention held their meetings in secret, with meeting notes and minutes to be kept secret for 50 years.

2) She talks about the genius of the Bill of Rights, failing to note that the majority of America’s enfranchised voters opposed ratification of the Constitution – that its framers were forced to add the Bill of Rights to persuade 9 of the 13 state legislatures to approve it. See Hidden History of the US Constitution

3) She omits any mention of the 2001 Patriot Act, and its violation of 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The Patriot Act enables the FBI to seek more easily obtained “intelligence” warrants (in contrast to probable cause criminal warrants) to clandestinely break in and search people’s homes. It also allows the FBI to use intelligence warrants to demand a list of books you have checked out from public libraries.

While I generally support her call for a direct democracy revolution, I disagree with her belief that this can be accomplished via electoral reform as she suggests.

Nonetheless, there were some parts of the book I found really interesting. She quotes a section from John D Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage about Republican Senator Robert Taft speaking out against the Nuremberg trials on Constitutional grounds. The US Constitution prohibits ex-post facto prosecutions (prosecution for breaking laws that didn’t exist at the time of the alleged crime).

She also offers excellent advice to protestors about wearing bullet-proof vests (available from any sporting goods store), bike helmets or hard hats, work gloves and strong hiking boots to protect themselves against police batons and tasers.

I was also impressed by Wolfe’s participation (along with other pro-choice activists) in and daylong “deliberation” with pro-life activists. To her surprise, she found she had more in common with them (mainly a deep compassion for the suffering of women and children) than with most people outside the room. She also recognized for the first time that both pro-choice and pro-life lobbyists and “professional leaders” went much farther in their demands than the membership they supposedly represented.

I totally agree with two demands at the end of the book to 1) ban all electronic voting machines and 2) establish a centralized federal electoral commission to organize and fund all federal elections

Manufacturers Add Toxic Chemicals to Clothing to Make It Smell Better — and Boost Profits

By  Dr. Joseph Mercola

The scent wafting from your clothing is the result of fragrances added to reduce the obnoxious scent of synthetic clothing. As fragrance isn’t regulated, manufacturers are free to add any toxic chemicals to achieve their goals.

Story at a glance:In his first documentary film production, Jon Whelan presents overwhelming evidence showing dangerous chemicals are added to clothing and other products by design, to reduce cost and increase profits.The scent wafting from your clothing is the result of fragrances added to reduce the obnoxious scent of synthetic clothing; since fragrance is not regulated, manufacturers are free to add any toxic chemicals to achieve their goals.Although Europe practices precautionary principles, the U.S. assumes chemicals are safe until proven otherwise. Unfortunately, it may take many years before science can prove a toxin triggers negative health effects, unnecessarily exposing you to danger.Laundry detergent, fabric softener and dryer sheets also add fragrance to your clothing, much of which may be vented to your neighborhood through your dryer, contributing to declining air quality.

In his first documentary film production, Jon Whelan, a single dad after his wife died from breast cancer, presents overwhelming evidence that dangerous chemicals are added to products by design.

As he discusses in this interview about his documentary “Stink!,” available on Netflix and YouTube, fragrances and scents are a dangerous, yet purposeful addition to products you use daily.

Your sense of smell is one of the most primal of your five senses. It is a key to survival, is often the first warning of safety or danger and is linked to memory.

In fact, a powerful attraction to fragrances is manipulated by advertisers and marketers in order to sell clothing, personal care products and laundry products.

You can recognize up to 10,000 different smells and, according to Stuart Firestein, Ph.D., of Columbia University, this system is very closely connected to the limbic system, said to contain your most basic drives.

A study in 2015 published in Chemosensory Perception investigated how odor-evoked memories influence consumers’ perception of a product. Researchers found fragrances evoking stronger personal emotional memories were preferred by the study participants.

It is not surprising scent is powerfully connected to emotion and memory and drives buying decisions.

Unfortunately, companies add toxic fragrances to mask the odor of noxious chemicals and as scent branding to acquire new customers and keep customers.

Smelly pajamas led to documentary film

The documentary film “Stink!” was triggered when Whelan purchased a pair of pajamas from the children’s clothing company Justice for his daughter.

After opening the package, he found a weird smell. Whelan called the company to be sure the clothing was safe but was stonewalled by company representatives.

Returning to the store, he found all of the packaged pajamas had the same odor. At this point, he decided to tape the conversations he had with Justice and other companies and began delving into the addition of chemicals to clothing and personal care products.

In a telling conversation with Procter and Gamble, manufacturer of a long list of cleaning and personal care items, including Crest toothpaste, Dawn dish soap, Pampers diapers, Tide laundry detergent and Pantene shampoo, the representative claimed they didn’t add a carcinogenic chemical to their products, it was just “there.”

[…]

As with exposure to many different toxins, one exposure at a low level may not trigger an immediate health condition, but what about repetitive or chronic exposure?

[…]

The effect from toxins is cumulative and can add up quickly when you’re exposed to chemicals in your food, furniture, air and clothing, all at once and on a daily basis.

Whelan believes if the legislature won’t ban a chemical that regulators know causes cancer, then it may be nearly impossible to fight for transparency and health protection against a highly-motivated and richly-funded industry destined to forfeit profits if they are forced to stop using cheaper, damaging and dangerous chemicals.

[…]

Dangerous endocrine disruptor chemicals

Whelan uses the example of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in his documentary, stating exposure to these has an inverted dose-response curve.

In other words, the danger is higher with lower-level exposure over long periods of time. Your exposure occurs with the use of personal care products, food packaging materials and clothing.

Vague arguments and claims have been used to dispute reports showing the use of toxic chemicals may be poisoning adults and children, causing damage beginning even before birth.

[…]

However, the American Academy of Pediatrics, a group of over 65,000 well-educated and science-based pediatricians in the U.S., agree with Kristoff and is asking parents to limit their children’s exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastic.

They warn these chemicals, such as phthalates, nitrates and bisphenol, may damage children’s health for years to come.

Research from the World Health Organization (WHO) has even suggested a ban on endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be needed to protect the health of future generations. Their research is one of the most comprehensive studies on different disrupting chemicals to date.

Dr. Leonardo Trasande, an expert in children’s environmental health, believes children are more susceptible due to their dose exposure.

And, as noted by Dr. Claire McCarthy, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, “Because the exposure is small and gradual we don’t even realize it’s happening.”

Fighting to keep chemicals in your products

Whelan believes the solution should be mandatory transparency so companies would make better decisions about what they use in their products and consumers could make informed decisions about what they buy.

Instead, companies are operating under the honor system set up by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) while fighting to keep cheap chemicals in their products so they can be made inexpensively, thereby protecting profits.

Unfortunately, the public pays for these cheaper products on the back end by spending thousands treating diseases triggered by overexposure to chemicals, which can build up in your system when you’re exposed to multiple products, such as personal care items, new furniture and carpeting and even clothing.

Whelan points out that the world knows formaldehyde causes cancer, yet manufacturers are not removing it from their products. In fact, the U.S. was caught using products with heavy levels of formaldehyde in environmentally damaged areas.

[…]

Prop 65 mandates labeling federal government doesn’t regulate

California has taken a more proactive approach to the health of its citizens.

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group, researchers found 287 chemicals in the cord blood of newborns. These babies were essentially born pre-polluted before ever consuming a single manufactured product.

In 1986 California voters approved an initiative best known as “Proposition 65,” requiring the state to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects.

Since it began, it includes nearly 800 chemicals, and manufacturers are required to notify consumers when these chemicals are included in their products.

According to the American Cancer Society, the risk of developing cancer was 40% in men and nearly 37% in women as of 2014. Their global cancer facts and figures suggest this number will grow to 50% by 2030.

Europe practices precautionary principles; the U.S. does not

In the documentary, Whelan reveals the American Chemistry Council spent $121,000 per congressman to assist election campaigns.

The influence pays dividends since it requires legislative action to alter the current status where manufacturers release chemicals under an honor system requiring proof chemicals are safe for consumer use prior to distribution.

Currently, the U.S. does not use precautionary principles, but rather acts under the assumption chemicals are “innocent until proven guilty.” The opposite is true in Europe, where if a chemical is suspected dangerous, it’s phased out.

However, proving guilt is nearly impossible in the short term as these chemicals often accumulate over years in your body before the effects are noticeable. This works to the advantage of the industry.

For example, one of the world’s most popular chemical weed killers, Roundup, made by Monsanto (now Bayer), has been on the market since 1974.

After 45 years on the market, Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million when a jury found Dwayne Johnson’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma was at least partly triggered by glyphosate in Roundup, to which he was exposed as a school groundskeeper.

The judge upheld the guilty verdict but later reduced the damages to $78 million.

After the verdict, the presiding judge, Suzanne Ramos Bolanos, commented the company “acted with malice, oppression or fraud and should be punished for its conduct.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/toxic-chemicals-clothing-scent-corporate-profits-cola/

 

 

Judge to decide if Biden administration improperly censored social media users

Shannon Thaler

New York Post

A federal judge will decide whether President Joe Biden’s administration violated the First Amendment by censoring users on social media over topics like COVID and election security — and if so, what to do about it.

The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana brought the lawsuit last year, alleging that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise” that pressured social-media platforms to scrub away dissenting views, including criticism of mask mandates and objections to COVID-19 vaccination.

The Louisiana judge presiding over the case — former President Trump appointee Terry A. Doughty — is considering whether to intervene in communications between the U.S. government and top social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, among others, court documents say.

The case is among the most potentially consequential First Amendment battles pending in the courts, testing the limits on government policing of social-media content.

[…]

Via https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/judge-to-decide-if-us-gov-wrongly-censored-social-media-users/

DOD Developing AI Weapons: Beware the Frankenstein Chatbots

By Ralph Nader
Common Dreams

Big Tech is rushing ahead of any legal framework for artificial intelligence, or AI, in the quest for big profits, while pushing for self-regulation instead of the constraints imposed by the rule of law.

Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and number-cruncher for Public Citizen, who is known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding presidency. (Biden less than Trump.)

His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “‘Sorry in Advance!’ Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative AI [artificial intelligence] Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms.”

Claypool is not engaging in hyperbole or horrible hypotheticals concerning Chatbots controlling humanity. He is extrapolating from what is already starting to happen in almost every sector of our society.

I challenge you to read his report without experiencing cognitive dissonance and throwing up your hands thinking the genie is already out of a million bottles.

Claypool takes you through “real-world harms [that] the rush to release and monetize these tools can cause — and, in many cases, is already causing.”

Claypool’s analysis takes you through five broad areas of concern, excluding the horrific autonomous weapons the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), aka the Department of Offense, is deeply involved in developing.

The various section titles of his report foreshadow the coming abuses: “Damaging Democracy,” “Consumer Concerns” (rip-offs and vast privacy surveillances), “Worsening Inequality,” “Undermining Worker Rights” (and jobs) and “Environmental Concerns” (damaging the environment via their carbon footprints).

Before he gets specific, Claypool previews his conclusion:

“Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause.”

Just how he doesn’t say. Because with so many increasing generators of these Chatbots around the world, this flood of Frankenstein Chatbots may present the same problem that the dean of the Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound, described regarding the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s as being beyond “the limits of effective legal action.”

Claypool quotes Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who released in November 2022 the shocking ChatGPT AI product, saying afterward: “I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.”

Altman has been busy up on Capitol Hill mesmerizing legislators by saying “regulation is needed,” by which he means the industry itself writing the rules and standards for Congress.

Using its existing authority, the Federal Trade Commission, in the author’s words:

“has already warned that generative AI tools are powerful enough to create synthetic content — plausible sounding news stories, authoritative-looking academic studies, hoax images, and deepfake videos — and that this synthetic content is becoming difficult to distinguish from authentic content.”

He adds that “these tools are easy for just about anyone to use.” BIG TECH is rushing way ahead of any legal framework for AI in the quest for big profits while pushing for self-regulation instead of the constraints imposed by the rule of law.

There is no end to the predicted disasters, both from people inside the industry and its outside critics. Destruction of livelihoods; harmful health impacts from promotion of quack remedies; financial fraud; political and electoral fakeries; stripping of the information commons; subversion of the open internet; faking your facial image, voice, words and behavior; tricking you and others with lies every day.

AI’s potential for deception will make Fox News’ deceptions look comparatively restrained.

With Congress and the White House issuing unenforceable exhortations to the industry to be nice, safe and responsible, critics are looking to the European Union’s first stage passage of an AI Act to protect its people from the more overt damages to their common and individual rights and interests.

The Act’s focus is on which uses of AI need to be curbed, including the adverse impact on elections. It mandates the labeling of AI-generated content.

On May 16, Public Citizen petitioned the Federal Election Commission to issue a rule preventing the use of AI to deceive voters.

All legislative bodies will have to confront the barriers of secrecy — claims by governments on weapons and surveillance development and the already asserted “trade secrets” by corporations.

In the U.S., there will also be First Amendment defenses for free speech by these artificial entities called corporations. Their corporate lawyers will have a lucrative field day concocting delays and obstructions.

Our nation and the world are barely organized enough to control through treaties the use of nuclear weapons — through treaties, poorly prepared for devastating pandemics, and virtually nowhere in foreseeing and forestalling the mega-threats of generative AI “to society and humanity.”

Those were the words of an open warning letter calling for a six-month pause, signed by top CEOs (such as Elon Musk), technologists and academics.

With few exceptions, a lazy Congress, readying for a long July 4 holiday break followed by taking off all of August for a congressional recess, is oblivious to its special powers and duties to the American people.

Let’s see some congressional urgency to put some specificity and enforcement teeth behind and beyond Biden’s nonbinding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in October 2022.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is pushing for the creation of a new federal agency to regulate AI technologies.

For now, I have two recommendations. Demand your senators and representatives join you for local town meetings during Congress’s August recess where you and your lawmakers can listen to each other and address the pressing issues. Tell them that this runaway robotic juggernaut is stripping humans of their own mental identities, autonomy and self-reliant judgments.

Everyone is at risk. Even Microsoft and Google have little idea of the whirlwind they are unleashing, driven by shortsighted profits, not wisdom, civic principles and accountabilities to public institutions and the people themselves.

Have your local experts formulate the focus of the town meeting agendas, backed by your sense of urgency.

Then demand that your members of Congress end their three-day-a-week work routine and conduct rigorous hearings in Washington and around the country with a deadline for passing legislation. Tell them they, too, are at risk for the fakery, slander and imitations of the Chatbots.

Lastly, upgrade and make more precise your skepticism toward the Chatbots already entering and affecting your lives and localities. Be on guard and develop an ever-larger circle of trusting relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

The corporate Chatbots are coming on fast without any legal or ethical frameworks to restrain and discipline them from subverting your freedoms and a true sense of reality.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/dod-artificial-intelligence-weapons-chatbots-cd/

 

Global Warming and the Confrontation Between the West and the Rest of the World

Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow

By Thierry Masson

Voltairenet

The theory of the anthropogenic cause of global warming will soon be at the center of the confrontation between the West and Russia. While no one denies that some parts of the world are warming, there is currently no alternative explanation for this phenomenon. But renowned scientists will be presenting another at COP-28 in Dubai. They happen to be members of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The theory that global warming is observable all over the planet and that it is caused by human activity has been popularized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); a United Nations commission.

I have no expertise in climate issues and I don’t presume to judge whether this theory is true or false, but I am an expert in international politics and I can assess the work of this UN commission.

Ten years ago, I wrote that, as its name suggests, the IPCC is not a learned academy at all, but an intergovernmental group [1]. Its conclusions are therefore not the fruit of a scientific approach, but of a political debate.

The IPCC was created on the initiative of the British Prime Minister, MargaretThatcher, to support her fight against the miners’ unions. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that coal is bad for the environment, while nuclear power is desirable. This is not a scientific theorem, but a political statement.

Furthermore, I pointed out that the creation of greenhouse gas emission rights is not an intergovernmental initiative, but an idea of the Joyce Foundation, implemented by Climate Exchange Ltd. [2]. Each state drafts its own legislation on the subject. It receives a certain quantity of emission rights, which it allocates as it sees fit to companies. Companies that only partially use their rights can resell them on a specialized stock exchange in Chicago.

The articles of association for this exchange were drafted by a then unknown Joyce Foundation lawyer, a certain Barack Obama (future President of the United States). The call for investors to launch the exchange was organized by Al Gore (future vice-president of the United States), and David Blood (former director of Goldman Sachs bank). Whether you consider these people to be bona fide environmental activists or high-flying swindlers is a matter of perspective.

Over time, this political device has been cloaked in a veneer of science and good intentions, making it difficult to question. Yet there is an alternative scientific theory to explain global warming. It was put forward by Croatian geophysicist Milutin Milanković between the wars.

The Earth’s orbit varies according to three natural cycles: eccentricity, obliquity and the precession of the equinoxes. Each of these variations follows a cycle, between 20,000 and 100,000 years, which is perfectly calculable. Combined, these three variations influence the Earth’s insolation and hence its climate. This theory was confirmed in 1976 by the study of ice cores from the Vostok drilling project in Antarctica. But it doesn’t explain everything.

The Russian Academy of Sciences has just put forward a third theory, also based on observation of nature. According to it, “The main cause of local climatic catastrophes is the increasing emission of natural hydrogen due to the alternating gravitational forces of the moon and sun, which cause holes in the ozone layer. The resulting rise in temperature and the mixing of ozone and hydrogen are the main causes of forest and steppe fires” [3]].

The Académie des Sciences not only questions the dogma of the IPCC, it also challenges the mechanism for reducing holes in the ozone layer. Namely, the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol “whose implementation has wiped out entire sub-industries of the chemical industry without affecting the size of ozone holes, which have only increased”.

The Russian Academy of Sciences’ theory is also based on the idea that global warming is not a comparable phenomenon in different parts of the world. Contrary to popular belief, the temperature of the Pacific Ocean is actually cooling [4].

The findings of the Russian Academy of Sciences will be presented at COP-28 in Dubai in late November/early December. A political battle is already underway to silence the scientists. It concerns the appointment of the session chairman, who will be able to give the floor to the troublemakers or, on the contrary, silence them. Mohammed ben Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, is in charge of choosing the chairman. He has appointed Sultan al-Jaber, his Minister of Industry. US and EU parliamentarians immediately wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, asking him to oppose the move. Their argument, as ever, is irrelevant to their objective. They argue that Sultan al-Jaber is also Chairman of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc). He would therefore be judge and jury. Instead, they recommend appointing a non-fossil fuel lobbyist. He would also be judge and jury, but for the opposing camp.

If Russian scientists speak out at COP-28, the assembly is likely to split in two, not along scientific but political lines. Anglo-Saxon supporters versus Russian supporters (the rest of the world). There’s no doubt that the IPCC dogma will soon become the idée fixe of the West and the laughing stock of the rest of the world.

Thierry Meyssan

https://www.voltairenet.org/article219438.html

Via https://rielpolitik.com/2023/06/20/scorched-earth-global-warming-the-confrontation-between-the-west-the-rest-of-the-world-by-thierry-meyssan/

54% of Voters Believe Cheating Will Determine Outcome of 2024 Elections

By Steve McCannAmerican Thinker

A Rasmussen poll taken in October of 2021 found that 56% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.  Another Rasmussen poll dated April of 2023 revealed that 60% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcomes of many 2022 midterm elections.  Unsurprisingly in a Rasmussen poll published on June 14, 2023, 54% of all likely voters believe that cheating will determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

For a majority of the American electorate, and for a much higher percentage of Republicans, the issue of whether there was rampant cheating in the past two election cycles is no longer in question and their concern about the outcome of the 2024 election is fully justified.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), beyond issuing the usual fatuous press releases and reports about what they are going to do, has done nothing of substance on the ground to offset unabashed Democrat cheating.

In an effort to do what they can, individuals such as Scott Presler and his PAC have been on the ground in the various battleground states doing their best to not only register voters but instructing and recruiting volunteers to promote early voting, mail-in voting and ballot harvesting where legal.  However, instead of supporting and coordinating with Presler and organizations such as Turning Point USA, the RNC has deliberately ignored them.

By declaring an obviously senescent, incompetent and iniquitous Joe Biden as their potential nominee in 2024, the Democrat party implicitly is poking Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the eye, essentially, claiming that they can successfully elect any buffoon they choose as Trump and the Party are incapable of offsetting or eliminating their overt fraud and manipulation.

They can justify their arrogance as an inept Republican Party has lost or grossly underperformed in the last three election cycles.  In 2018 with the surprising loss of 40 seats in the House of Representatives, the fraud-riddled 2020 election and the equally fraud-riddled 2022 midterm which should have been a Republican landslide.

Since 2018 there has been one common denominator: the same personnel utilizing the same tactics have been and continue to be in charge of the RNC, the clearinghouse for national strategy and voter turnout.

While the party has been metamorphizing into a populist blue collar and middle-class America-First entity, the hierarchy has remained entrenched in the Bush self-defeating “civility” mindset and the resultant acquiescent approach in dealing with a Marxist-infused Democrat party.

No one personifies this predisposition more than Ronna McDaniel, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, first elected in January of 2017 and recently re-elected through January 2025.  She is the longest serving Chairman since Edwin Morgan, a founder of the Party and its first Chairman (1856 to 1864).

Throughout the months of the ill-advised and debilitating Covid-19 lockdown, the Democrats openly telegraphed their intent to legalize by any means possible mail-in voting and exploit ballot harvesting.  They quickly assembled a massive legal army to descend upon the battleground states to, oftentimes unconstitutionally, change state voting laws.  They were confident in the knowledge that the RNC would not forcefully challenge their efforts.  Further, that after the election, the courts, including the Supreme Court, would not overturn any election without irrefutable evidence — which would be nearly impossible to produce within predetermined timeframes.

The Republicans offered little opposition in the various state courts or legislatures as they haughtily allowed themselves to be caught flat-footed prior to the election and were grossly undermanned after the election.

Kurt Schlichter of Townhall wrote about his experience in Nevada in 2020 and pleaded with the Republican National Committee not to re-elect McDaniel in 2023.

In 2020, I lawyered after the election in Las Vegas.  Las Vegas was one of a half-dozen critical cities in winnable states where we knew the Democrat machine would be working overtime to execute their election shenanigans.  In fact, Democrat lawyers had been there and elsewhere for months prepping the battlefield for election night.  I got a desperate call the day after the election and drove out to Vegas to help.  Guess how many lawyers Ronna had ensured were on the ground by the time I rolled in 24 hours after the election ended.

100?

50?

A dozen?

One?  Not one, Kurt.  That would be crazy.

One

…And that was on Ronna.  Though she denies responsibility.  Remember, nothing is her fault.  You can’t blame her for not getting it done — she was only in charge.

Fast forward to 2022.  Did that look like the RNC’s legal forces were adequately deployed and ready to win?  Governor Lake, what are your thoughts on that?

Lost once, GOP?  Shame on you.  Lose twice?  Shame on you again.  Lose three times? What the hell are you people thinking re-electing someone who keeps blowing it?

Among the unfathomable aspects of this entire debacle is that Donald Trump, the victim of the rampant voter fraud and manipulation in 2020, wholeheartedly endorsed and called for McDaniel’s re-election as Chairman in January of 2021 stating: “I am pleased to  announce that I have given my full support and endorsement to Ronna McDaniel to continue leading the Republican National Committee.”   She easily won re-election and oversaw the overwhelming disappointment that was the 2022 mid-term.

Even more confounding is that in January of 2023, while taking a publicly neutral position in the vote to re-elect McDaniel for a fourth term, Trump had his staff lobby for her with the RNC delegates.  Despite having the option of electing an extraordinarily well qualified and proven candidate in Harmeet Dhillon, McDaniel on the strength of Trump’s influence was again re-elected.  Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, a diehard Trump supporter, openly expressed his disappointment and incredulity that Trump would again put her in office.

Trump’s continual backing of Ronna McDaniel cannot be justified or dismissed even by the most intransigent Trump supporters as he has had three distinct opportunities to replace her and chose not to.

Thus, the oft-repeated excuse that Trump relied on others to recommend personnel choices cannot be used as an explanation.  A defense which, in actuality, is a backhanded indictment.  Trump is the one who ultimately chose among others, John Bolton, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, Christopher Wray, and James Mattis — the tip of the iceberg of a long list of hires who have turned against him.  Further, Trump refused to fire gross incompetents such as Drs. Fauci and Birx.

2024 is a watershed election that may well decide the fate of the nation.  If Donald Trump is serious about winning in November of 2024, he must acknowledge that competence, the ability to motivate the grass roots, and outstanding managerial skills are far more important than personal loyalty or obsequiousness.

The time has come for Trump and other viable Republican candidates to call for Ronna McDaniel’s resignation and for a housecleaning at the RNC.  Rampant Democrat voting manipulation and fraud will not be defeated in the gilded offices in Washington D.C. but in the precincts throughout all the battleground states.

[…]

Via https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/the_gop_is_losing_the_vote_fraud_war_.html

 

The Coming Crisis of Cities: Get Out While You Still Can

 

The Coming Crisis of Cities: Reinvention or Bankruptcy

by Charles Hugh Smith
of two minds.com

The human population has become increasingly urbanized for compelling reasons that have been in play since cities were founded thousands of years ago.

In a nutshell, cities offer greater economic / social opportunities and more novelty, variety and excitement.

Cities became possible when agricultural surpluses enabled labor to become specialized.  This increased: 
1. productivity, as skilled workers in workshops, mills, kilns, etc. could produce more goods per unit of time than households;
2. transportation, enabling the expansion of trade of commodities from rural areas and manufactured goods from other cities;
3. commerce, as goods could be warehoused in secure entrepots and sold in markets that attracted buyers from the entire region;
4. governmental services, as taxes on all this activity funded infrastructure and state and military functions;
5. non-governmental functions such as temples, schools, the arts and entertainment.

On the downside, cities were crowded and unsanitary and thus killing zones. Cities relied on mass in-migration of new residents to offset the horrendous annual death toll from cholera, plague and other infectious diseases.

Other hazards included conflagrations, being sacked by rapacious armies and rampant crime, especially at night (there were no streetlights in ancient Rome).

Elites congregated in cities because power was wielded in person. The ambitious of all classes also gathered in cities, as this was where wealth and power offered opportunities to get ahead.

As Fernand Braudel observed in his histories of France and European Capitalism, cities have always had higher costs of living due to this ever-greater demand for commodities, services, shelter and land.

The core utility and function of cities changed as the economy industrialized. The First Industrial Revolution of the 19th century required vast aggregations of capital, which led to the rise of banking and finance: surplus labor and workshops were no longer enough, finance had to scale up to fund the immense investments required to build real-world infrastructure such as railways, ports, mines, factories, etc.

The expansion of globalization as nation-states expanded into empires also placed a premium on finance and its sibling, insurance, as the financial risks of large-scale capital had to be hedged. This expansion of complexity required a managerial class trained in an expanded system of education, and a government capable of regulating this expanding systemic complexity.

Cities did not cease being centers of manufacturing and commerce; the so-called FIRE economic functions (finance, insurance, real estate) were added to the city’s core functions.

This mix began changing as advanced nations shifted to post-industrial “knowledge” economies. Dirty industries were shipped overseas or relocated outside urban areas, container ports replaced labor-intensive ports, and cities hosted the expansion of the “knowledge” industries of marketing, digital technologies, communications, data processing, etc.

Cities such as San Francisco transitioned from working-class economies of longshoremen, factory workers and shop-keepers to “knowledge/FIRE/tourism” economies, as the legacies of the working class city–the cable cars, port warehouses, Chinatown, North Beach (the Italian immigrant neighborhood)–became, in Jerry Mander’s phrase, “replicas of themselves,” urban Disneyland-type attractions.

The runaway expansion of financialization and globalization that has fueled the explosive expansion of the global economy for the past 30 years was kind to “knowledge/FIRE/tourism” cities and unkind to commodity-producing rural areas, as a flood of global supply suppressed the value of commodities.  Small towns that lacked the high-paying jobs of  the knowledge/FIRE economy decayed as capital and talent poured into mega-cities.

[…]

By artificially suppressing interest rates and flooding the system with credit available to the wealthy, the Federal Reserve has inflated one enormous speculative bubble after another in the past 25 years. The net result is cities are no longer affordable to the bottom 80%, or even the bottom 90%.

[…]

Those who bought houses 20 or more years ago are now wealthy, through no effort of their own. This generational inequality is tearing apart the social fabric. This level of inequality can have no other result.

Now cities are facing another transition, one that threatens their high-cost dominance: remote work and the reversal of financialization and globalization. Interest rates and inflation are rising for systemic, cyclical reasons, and globalization is reversing as national security becomes more pressing than increasing corporate profits.

[…]

In summary, here’s what’s happening: given the increasing speed of digital communications, the majority of the knowledge/FIRE economy work can be done from anywhere. This has long been the reality, but the pandemic lockdown acelerated the recognition of this reality.

Given the higher wages paid to knowledge workers and the absurdly high costs and life-limitations (kids and homeownership are unaffordable) of living in big cities, the incentives for those who were too young to buy a house for $150,000 that’s now worth $1 million are to move to an affordable locale and abandon the marginal benefits of the city (novelty, entertainment).

The incentives for the poor living on social-welfare benefits and the working-poor who do “real-world” jobs is to stay put, as their opportunities are considerably diminished in less wealthy regions..

The problem is the poor and working-poor pay a relatively modest percentage of taxes. The high-wage earners who are incentivized to leave pay the majority of taxes.

Cities are terribly costly to operate, and most of these costs are fixed, meaning they stay the same regardless of how many customers use the services. About 75% to 80% of all municipal budgets (the general funds, not projects paid by borrowing money via selling muncipal bonds) go to labor–government employees and their pension/healthcare costs.

Buses, subways and trains all have the same fixed costs and staffing whether they’re full or empty.

The BART subway/train system in the SF Bay Area is an example of how high fixed costs and declining ridership creates a “doom loop”–a “doom loop” that hollows out downtown office towers and the small businesses that depend on thousands of commuting office workers, and the transit systems that bring the workers to the office towers.

BART ridership has fallen precipitously, from 400,000 riders a day pre-lockdown to 166,000 today. This 60% decline in rider-paid revenue is far below the system’s fixed costs, and so somebody somewhere has to be taxed more to subsidize the system.

The older generations who’ve become wealthy due to the soaring value of their homes naturally want everything to stay the same: they want their homes to continue being worth $1 million, their property taxes to stay the same, the city services to stay the same, and so on. Speculative bubbles, financialization and globalization have been very good to them and they are unwlling to face the doom-loop generated by the excesses of financialization and globalization finally coming home to roost.

A Tale of Paradise, Parking Lots and My Mother’s Berkeley Backyard. (NYT.com)

But this isn’t realistic as young remote workers (and those older workers who want to cash out their massive gains and retire in more affordable locales) leave, the legacy costs remain sky-high but there are fewer residents with the wealth and income to pay for them.

Somebody has to pay more, or these services will go away. Municipal workers are unionized and will resist reductions in pay and benefits, even in municipal bankruptcy.

Remote work and the systemic inequality created by financialization and globalization are generating a doom-loop of incentives to leave before the inevitable collision with reality occurs: either services are slashed or taxes are raised, or more likely, both.

Higher taxes and fees means there is less income left to spend on novelty and entertainment. So raising taxes to pay legacy costs diminishes the disposable income needed to support the entertainment, dining, arts, etc. industries.

There are macro-consequences of the cyclical end of low inflation and low interest rates that also feed into the urban doom-loop. As the costs of essentials continue climbing, the bottom 90% have less disposable income to spend on vacations, novelty and entertainment. This means cities depending on the free-spending pursuit of pleasure will only be affordable to the top 10% who have bubble-generated wealth or unearned income from wealth.

The end of cheap commodities and money is a global transition which will reduce the disposable income of the majority of people who are currently free-spending tourists. Tourism, the most vulnerable form of disposable spending, will decline globally, possibly precipitously in high-cost cities.

Yet this “the pleasures of the city” model is what’s being offered as the “fix” for the doom-loop: 26 Empire State Buildings Could Fit Into New York’s Empty Office Space. That’s a Sign.
“New York is undergoing a metamorphosis from a city dedicated to productivity to one built around pleasure.”

The problem is only the top 10% can afford the city’s pleasures, and that’s simply not enough to fund the immense legacy costs. Furthermore, the top 10% have the means to spend now, but once the unsustainable bubbles pop and borrowing money becomes unaffordable, even the top 10% will be hard-pressed.

[…]

Via https://healthimpactnews.com/2023/the-coming-crisis-of-cities-get-out-now-while-you-still-can/

 

Corrupt news media can’t save Biden from Ukrainian bribery scandal

David Marcus

If they weren’t so deeply troubling, the numbers revealed by Media Research Center on the amount of time major network news spent on the alleged Biden bribery scandal would be laughable. Between June 8th and June 12th, the days following the bombshell breaking of the Biden story as well as the announcement of Donald Trump’s second indictment, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 291 minutes on Trump, and not a single second on the Biden corruption saga.

Sadly this pathetic lack of curiosity is not surprising. After all, this is the same liberal media that took two years to admit the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and that only after buying hook, line, and sinker into a fabulous tale of Russian disinformation. All the while, mind you, not a single person in Biden world ever denied the laptop was Hunter’s. Not one time.

But this week, as more revelations emerge a significant tide has turned. The big three networks can ignore this story all they want, but it is now too big, too real, too fleshed out to go away. Between huge conservative outlets like Fox News, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and the galaxy of smaller online right wing media, this shocking story is making its way into the public consciousness. So what changed?

The most important and obvious change is that Republicans under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy now have the power to run investigations and compel cooperation. For all the “woe is us,” hand wringing after the disappointing 2022 midterms, the slim victory in the People’s House has finally unlocked the Pandora’s Box of Biden corruption. From FBI documents, to bank records, and beyond the GOP has in just 6 months uncovered a treasure trove of nefarious actions.

Last Month, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer revealed that a whopping 9 members of Biden’s family had received payments from foreign interests, and just like that the idea that Hunter Biden was just one bad egg went up in a puff of crack smoke. There is no more innocent explanation to this spider web network of payments to the Bidens than there is of Hunter’s laughable $83,000 a month position on Burisma’s board of directors.

And speaking of Burisma–the Ukrainian gas company at the heart of Donald Trump’s first impeachment–this month Comer obtained, after long objections from FBI Director Chrishtopher Wray, a document directly alleging a bribery scheme. That’s right, according to a credible, long time FBI informant, the owner of the company claims to have directly given $10 million dollars to the Bidens, and says he has the receipts in the form of recorded phone calls, which he kept as “insurance.”

And now, Joe Biden is starting to get more questions about this whole sordid mess, this week when asked at a pool spray why the FBI document refers to him as “The Big Guy,” a clearly agitated president snapped back asking, “Why’d you ask such a dumb question?” Here’s why Joe, because that nickname for you comes up time and again in this scandal, oh and also, when first asked about all of this you blatantly lied about never having spoken to Hunter about his business dealings. That’s why.

The truth is a funny thing. It can be hidden, it can be hard to find, but it’s always there, and like a weed it always finds a way to pop through obfuscation and make itself known. For years now the mainstream media has tended to the garden of Joe Biden’s image with loving care, protecting the few flowers and fruits while hiding the infestation of corruption. But it’s not working anymore, this story is not going away.

It has become completely obvious that the liberal news media is trying to run the Hunter laptop play again, to ignore it for as long as possible, and eventually, maybe years later, gravely say, “oh well, maybe there was something to it after all, but it’s not a big deal.” But this is, in the immortal words of Joe Biden himself, a big f*cking deal and there isn’t a rug in the world big enough to sweep it under.

Do not get distracted. There is only one major, earth shattering story in American politics today, it is the Biden bribery scandal. The dam is breaking and sooner rather than later, as always, the truth will out.

[…]

Via https://humanevents.com/2023/06/18/david-marcus-corrupt-news-media-cant-save-biden-from-ukrainian-bribery-scandal

The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist

Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept

An undercover FBI agent befriended the teenager online. When he turned 18, he was arrested for supporting ISIS.

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a teenager in Massachusetts on allegations of providing financial support to the Islamic State group.

A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted in the United States. The Department of Justice’s own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura’s arrest for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”

[…]

The only problem with the case and how it has been described, however, is that according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.

The arrest has shaken his family, who denied allegations that their son was a terrorist and said that he had been manipulated by the FBI. Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students.

“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura said. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”

Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.

There is still much that remains to be known about Ventura’s case, which remains in its early stages. More information may still come to light as it moves to discovery and trial, including about his dealings with the FBI and other activities online.

Yet based on the government’s own account of what led to Ventura’s arrest, there is reason to believe that his case is less a serious terrorism bust than one of the many instances in which a troubled or mentally unfit young man was groomed by undercover FBI agents to commit a crime that would not have otherwise happened.

[…]

Paul Ventura said that in 2021 armed FBI agents from visited his home, informed him that his son had been browsing websites “that he shouldn’t be looking at,” and connected him with what they said was a counselor. After the initial visit, he said he had no knowledge of his son’s ongoing communications with the FBI undercover agent online.

[…]

The facts of the case against Mateo Ventura laid out in the government’s criminal complaint detail how his relationship developed with the FBI.

In August 2021, when he was 16 years old, Ventura began communicating with an undercover FBI agent online. He told the agent of his desire to make “hijrah,” or migrate to territories under control of the Islamic State.

By the time of the discussion, ISIS had been largely vanquished in its home territories of Iraq and Syria, though it is not clear whether Ventura had been aware of this. According to the Department of Justice’s complaint, an undercover FBI agent impersonating an ISIS member communicated to the 16-year-old in broken English, encouraging his decision and expressly telling him not to inform anyone else about their online conversations, including friends or family.

[…]

Ventura continued chatting with the undercover agent about what he could do for ISIS, including potentially fighting for them in a foreign country. The two settled on him buying a $25 Google Play gift card and sending the redemption code to the FBI agent. At the FBI’s direction, the 16-year-old also recorded an audio file of himself elaborately pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and transmitting the audio recording over the chat.

Over the next year two years, Ventura continued sending small amounts of cash through gift cards to the FBI agent, mostly through gaming stores like Steam, PlayStation Network, and Google Play. The amounts of his small transactions, which spanned over roughly two years, added up to a total of $965 during the time that he was a juvenile, and another $705 after he became a legal adult.

All the while, Ventura’s conversations with the FBI undercover operative online continued, including promises to make a passport and assurances that he would teach himself Arabic “very fast” in case he traveled to Egypt on behalf of the group.

In the end, Ventura appeared to get cold feet. In September 2022, when he was 17 years old, he told the agent that he could no longer “go for hijrah,” because he had been “hurt very bad in fall and can no longer walk.” The injury was an excuse that the FBI — which, according to the affidavit in the case, interviewed Ventura six days thereafter — concluded had been made up by the teen.

In January 2023, just after his 18th birthday, Ventura got back in touch with the FBI agent on the encrypted messaging platform. Apologizing for not being communicative in previous months after his supposed injury, Ventura again said he wanted to travel to the Islamic State. The pair discussed the possibility of him dying in an attack by ISIS fighters somewhere in the world or attending a training camp.

At the FBI undercover operative’s direction, Ventura took a video of himself and sent it over the chat, telling the agent that he had a beard now. The FBI agent praised the performance, saying Ventura was “strong” and “Look (sic) like lion.”

Ventura sent the FBI operative another $25 Google Play gift certificate, which he was assured would be used for jihad, before trying and failing to book several flights due to apparent lack of access to a credit card. On April 10 this year, Ventura finally succeeded in booking a Turkish Airlines flight to Egypt.

But instead of boarding the flight, or even leaving his residence on the night it was scheduled, Ventura contacted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and reported a tip, stating in a rambling message that he wanted “10 million dollars in duffel bags” in exchange for information on future terrorist attacks. “I known (sic) you thought I am retarded fool but jokes on you I will not admit I sent this or communicate until the cash is delivered,” the message said, according to the criminal complaint in the case.

By this time in the investigation, Ventura had not only seemingly developed cold feet about joining the group, but appeared eager to sell out his supposed ISIS contact to law enforcement.

Ventura called the FBI again several times in the coming days, telling them that he wanted to help with “terror” and again offering to help stop a future ISIS terrorist attack and to provide information about people who were facilitating travel for the group, in exchange for cash and legal immunity for himself.

[…]

On April 20, according to the affidavit, he was informed in a phone call from the FBI that the information he had provided was “not specific and therefore not actionable.”

Meanwhile, as his attempts to blow the whistle on the FBI’s own informant in exchange for millions of dollars of cash appeared to stall, Ventura also continued communicating with their undercover operative online, apologizing for missing his flight to Egypt and inquiring about other ways he might travel to join ISIS. On May 16, he sent another Google Play gift card to the agent, with a value of $45.

These interactions continued until Ventura was arrested in early June and charged with one count of “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization” — reference to the gift card donations he had spent years sending to the FBI during their chats online.

Although news reports echoed the Justice Department’s portrayal of the arrest as the foiling of a nascent Islamic State funding operation in the U.S., there is no indication in the allegations against him that Ventura had ever been in touch with the terrorist group.

[…]

Via https://theintercept.com/2023/06/15/fbi-undercover-isis-teenager-terrorist/