Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 422
May 9, 2023
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Abducted Prior to Court Appearance
(Photo Credit Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images)
The Cradle Khan’s PTI party vows protests in response to what they describe as his abduction by paramilitary forcesFormer Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan has been arrested by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) from the Islamabad High Court (IHC), Geo News reported on 9 May.
Khan was taken into custody by security personnel known as “Rangers” outside the IHC where he had gone to seek bail as a result of graft charges.
According to Fawad Chaudhry, the official spokesperson of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf party (PTI), the ex-prime minister has been “abducted from court premises. Scores of lawyers and general people have been tortured.”
BREAKING: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been arrested during a court appearance in Islamabad. Video of the arrest shared by his PTI party showed security forces in riot-control gear whisking the 70-year-old away in a van. #ImranKhan #Pakistan pic.twitter.com/VR1ELUiynT
— 5Pillars (@5Pillarsuk) May 9, 2023
Khan was arrested in connection with the allegations that Bahria Town allotted land worth 530 million rupees to the Al-Qadir Trust, owned by the PTI chairman and his wife, according to Islamabad police.
“Khan has been whisked away by unknown people to an unknown location,” Chaudhry said.
According to Imran Khan’s spokesman Raoof Hasan, “He was taken away…before he could appear before the judges, which is in violation of all laws.”
“The party has given a call to immediately start protests across Pakistan,” PTI leader Azhar Mashwani tweeted.
Khan’s arrest was not authorized by IHC Chief Justice Aamer Farooq, however, who requested the attorney general appear before the court within 15 minutes and instructed him to immediately find out who was behind the arrest.
“If an inquiry has to be conducted, action will also be taken against the prime minister and ministers,” the chief justice said.
Security forces previously attempted to detain Khan last March after an Islamabad court issued an arrest warrant to ensure his attendance in court to face graft charges.
However, security forces were blocked by hundreds of the former prime minister’s supporters, who gathered outside his Lahore home to prevent his arrest. The clashes between both sides, in which security forces fired tear gas and water cannons, and Khan’s supporters threw stones, led to dozens of injuries.
The former cricket star, who was ousted as prime minister in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022, went to Islamabad to appear before three courts on charges of selling state gifts and failing to disclose assets but failed to appear before the fourth court to face indictment in the graft case, which is a legal process for starting his trial.
Khan claimed the charges filed against him, which include terrorism charges, are an effort by his successor, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, to discredit him and prevent him from contesting the upcoming elections.
At the time of his ousting as prime minister, Khan accused the United States of working with a coalition of Pakistani opposition parties to topple his government.
Khan alleged that US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu met with the Pakistan Ambassador Asad Majeed and warned that there could be implications if Khan was not ousted as prime minister.
Khan has long been known for his opposition to US foreign policy. In 2017, Khan organized a motorcade march to Pakistan’s tribal areas to protest US drone strikes against Islamic militants.
In November 2022, Khan was the target of an assassination attack. A gunman opened fire with an automatic weapon on his convoy of lorries and cars, injuring Khan’s leg and killing one of his supporters, and injuring seven more.
[…]
Via https://thecradle.co/article-view/24615/imran-khan-arrested-on-graft-charges
Long Term COVID-19 Vaccine Data: Sustained Vascular Injury and Thrombosis at 2 Years
Early in 2020 I published with former US FDA physician Dr. Zhang that the SARS-CoV-2 viral Spike protein was damaging the vascular endothelium and causing blood clotting. This means capillaries would be systemically injured if exposed high concentrations of the Spike protein. Dr. Bruce Patterson has demonstrated the Spike protein is long-lasting (months to years) in the human body after both severe COVID-19 infection and vaccination. This leads us to a concern, that the vaccinated would have sustained vascular damage over the long-term. Now the first two-year data report in and the news could not be worse. The serious implications for long term cardiovascular risk cannot be understated.Xi et al used the massive TriNetX network with data on 95,156,967 individuals, of whom 7,318,437 met the inclusion criteria. After excluding cases with COVID-19 illness, 6,755,737 individuals were separated into two cohorts: 883,177 vaccinated and 5,871,737 unvaccinated individuals. In both cohorts, any diagnosis of retinal vascular occlusion six months and treatments including antiplatelets, anticoagulants, diuretics, contraceptives, used 4 weeks prior to the index date. Ultimately, 745,041 vaccinated and 3,874,458 unvaccinated individuals yielding matched pairs of 739,066 vaccinated cohorts to the unvaccinated cohort at a ratio of 1:1.
The results are striking. There is a progressively increasing risk of both arterial and venous occlusion in the retina over two years after injection and the survival curves continue to separate. The source the thrombi can be from the heart, aorta, carotids, and ultimately the blood vessels servicing the eyes and returning venous blood from the eye in the ocular orbit. The eye is a window to the systemic vasculature. In aggregate, these data drive the compelling conclusion that mass vaccination has caused ongoing, cumulative vascular injury in some recipients that has continued for at least two years. These data predict a rise in nonfatal and fatal events associated with progressive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease including: 1) myocardial infarction (heart attack), 2) stroke 3) peripheral vascular disease with systemic embolism, 4) critical limb ischemia with amputation. Additionally, vaccine recipients are likely to be generally hypercoagulable and are set up for venous thromboembolism with usual provocateurs (surgery, prolonged immobility, estrogen use, etc.).
The practical ramifications are many: 1) like patients with diabetes mellitus recipients should be vigilant and have a low threshold to see an ophthalmologist for a dilated retinal exam if there are any visual symptoms, 2) medical doctors and their patients should be assiduous in the detection and treatment of atherothrombotic disease in the coronary and systemic vasculature, 3) The National Eye Institute, American Association of Ophthalmology, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, American Neurological Association, and all physician and hospital stakeholders should join me in calling for an immediate moratorium on COVID-19 vaccination.
See also
Dr. McCullough US Senate: to Save Lives Pull the COVID-19 Vaccines off the Market, Dec 7, 2022
Via https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/long-term-covid-19-vaccine-data-evidence/
Australia PM: No Point in Continued US Pursuit of Assange
The WikiLeaks founder has been in a UK jail for years as he fights extradition to the US on charges including espionage.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has expressed frustration at the United States’s continuing efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange who has been in a high-security United Kingdom prison for the past four years as he fights the case.
Albanese, who is in the UK for King Charles III’s coronation, said he was frustrated there had not yet been a diplomatic resolution to the issue and concerned about the mental health of the now 51-year-old.
“There is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration,” Albanese told the ABC in an interview on Friday.
Albanese said Assange’s case had to be examined in terms of whether the time he had “effectively served” was more than a “reasonable” sentence if the allegations against him were proved.
“I just say that enough is enough,” Albanese said.
“I know it’s frustrating, I share the frustration. I can’t do more than make very clear what my position is and the US administration is certainly very aware of what the Australian government’s position is,” he added.
Assange, an Australian citizen, has spent years battling in UK courts to prevent his extradition to the US, where he is wanted on criminal charges including espionage over the release of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables in 2010.
[…]
May 8, 2023
NIH Restarts Bat Virus Grant Suspended 3 Years Ago by Trump
Jocelyn Kaiser
Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.
The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002–04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices.
But EcoHealth’s embattled director, Peter Daszak, says his group is pleased: “Now we have the ability to finally get back to work,” he says.
After NIH halted the grant in April 2020, many scientists protested the move as political interference with scientific peer review. Now, they are welcoming the grant’s resumption. “It is long overdue. Unfortunately, the original cancellation reflects the ongoing partisan politics where first Trump and now many Republicans are attacking science unfairly,” says Nobel Prize winner Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs. In May 2020, he helped organize a letter from 77 Nobel laureates protesting the grant’s suspension.
Grant number R01AI110964, which NIH renewed in 2019 with a subaward to WIV that totaled nearly $600,000 over 8 years, is probably the most scrutinized grant in the agency’s history. Trump called for its cancellation in April 2020 amid unsupported allegations that a lab leak at WIV started the COVID-19 pandemic. The project later drew concerns for experiments, conducted in virologist Shi Zhengli’s lab at WIV, in which researchers attached the spike protein of various wild bat coronaviruses to a different virus “backbone” in order to gauge the wild pathogens’ potential to infect human airway cells. Such experiments allow scientists to isolate the role of the spike protein and study coronaviruses that they can’t culture easily.
Critics, including several Republicans in Congress, argued this work qualified as risky “gain-of-function” (GOF) research that makes potential pandemic viruses more dangerous and should have undergone a special review. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its director at the time, Anthony Fauci, responded that the work did not fit NIH’s risky GOF definition; the bat viruses weren’t known to infect people and WIV had no intention of making them more dangerous. NIH also pointed out that the WIV chimeras were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-2.
Concerns escalated when public records requests from the nonprofit news organization the Intercept revealed some of the chimeric viruses showed unexpected growth. NIH and EcoHealth disagreed about whether this result was reported promptly as required by the grant. (Earlier this year, an NIH advisory board recommended expanding the rules for risky GOF experiments.)
NIH told EcoHealth in August 2022 that because WIV had not responded to requests to turn over lab notebooks and electronic records, it had terminated the subaward to WIV. But the agency also said EcoHealth could renegotiate the grant without WIV. As discussions continued, in January a federal audit found that EcoHealth had misreported $90,000 in expenses for the grant, and that NIH had also erred by not justifying the grant’s suspension.
EcoHealth is sharing details of the new grant, which restarted on 26 April, in order to promote transparency, Daszak says. The project no longer involves collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses. WIV has no role beyond contributing more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection, Daszak says.
EcoHealth staff will use computers to analyze the viral genomes for risky features, then partner with a previous collaborator, Linfa Wang’s lab at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, to test whether the viruses’ spike proteins can bind to the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor, which SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter human cells. Wang’s lab will also study “pseudoviruses” that combine a wild coronavirus with a completely different virus that can’t cause human disease. And the project will study archived clinical samples from Southeast Asia to look for signs of “spillovers” where bat viruses infected people.
“We think we can achieve a huge amount of work based on archived samples … that will really answer some fundamental questions about why coronaviruses have such diversity,” Daszak says.
NIH is also imposing new requirements on all of EcoHealth’s NIH grants, including prior approval for spending, submission of invoices and timesheets, and a financial audit that EcoHealth must pay for. The nonprofit has three other NIH grants to collect bat and human samples in South and Southeast Asia, including one that proposes chimera work. But Daszak notes that work would only move forward if it passes the special GOF review.
Other virologists agree the revised grant will still yield valuable insights. “I consider the extra parts [in the original grant] useful, but not essential. So I think the project will still move forward very well,” says Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Iowa. Virologist Simon Anthony of the University of California, Davis, who has worked with EcoHealth on a virus surveillance project called PREDICT, agrees. “In my view there is nothing wrong with taking the time to pause, reflect, and redirect so that this critical work can be conducted as safely as possible,” Anthony says.
But both he and Perlman say if viruses with the potential to spill over into humans are identified, it will be important to study the live pathogens in high-containment, biosafety level-3 conditions. Although not GOF research, some scientists have argued that even studying natural wild viruses imposes unacceptable risks of a lab escape and should be curtailed. Anthony, however, says “cutting out work with live natural viruses would be tremendously detrimental.”
One vocal EcoHealth critic, microbiologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, calls the restarted grant “an outrage” because EcoHealth “flagrantly and repeatedly” violated the terms of the grant.
[…]
Via https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-restarts-bat-virus-grant-suspended-3-years-ago-trump
Iraq and Syria to re-open crucial oil pipeline
The Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline revival.
Vanessa BeeleyAccording to various media reports– negotiations are ongoing to revive the strategic Iraqi Kirkuk to Syrian Baniyas oil pipeline. Iraqi Trade Minister Atheer Al Ghurairy has intimated increased efforts by Iraq to develop energy cooperation with Syria in the coming months and years.
During a meeting with the Syrian Oil and Mineral Resources Minister Firas Hassan Kaddour views were exchanged on the launch of investment in oil and energy fields in both countries. Despite the current US military occupation of Syrian oil resources, Kaddour presented a strategy to facilitate investment by Iraqi companies in the Syrian oil industry. On the table was the restoration of the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline which would re-connect Iraqi oil fields with Syrian maritime ports and crude oil refineries.
This would resolve some of Syrian energy deprivation issues and provide Iraq with a more expedient oil transport route to refineries in Syria that could process the 12% of total Iraqi oil reserves that originate in Kirkuk.
[…]
For Syria, added benefits would include a stimulation of trade in Syrian ports by increasing maritime traffic despite the threat of punitive US Caesar sanctions that target sovereign nations trade or collaboration with Syria. The Syrian economy would receive a boost from such trade and industry revival.
History of Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline and its geopolitical importance
The 800-kilometer long pipeline, which can discharge 0.3 million barrels of oil per day, was constructed by the globalist US Bechtel Corporation in 1952.[…]
After the pre-planned and unlawful invasion of Iraq launched by the US in March 2003, Bechtel Corp. was one of the primary benefactors of the US savagery with and estimated $ 3 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts. It is worth noting that military industrial complex leader Lockheed Martin was handed “more than $ 11 billion increase in sales and contracts worth $ 5.6 million with the US Air Force in Iraq.” Bechtel made it onto the Business Pundit’s list of the ‘25 most vicious Iraq war profiteers’.
[…]
Syria and Iraq made several attempts to reactivate the strategic oil pipeline between 2007 and 2010. However, technical and political hurdles kept the pipeline shut down.
Pumping was resumed in 2010 but did not last long due to the start of the regime change war against Syria and the occupation of much of the route by ISIS terrorist groups. The US also destroyed sections of the pipeline allegedly in its war on terror/ISIS which has been proven to be a fraudulent claim.
The Russia and Iran element
For some time Russia has been trying to secure an influential role in Iraq via the oil industry route amongst others. Russian oil companies have invested in many of Iraq’s oil fields since 2010.
In 2019 Moscow was planning to help Baghdad to transport Kirkuk’s oil to the Mediterranean sea. In 2007 Russian Gazprom was scheduled to repair the pipeline but Iraqi lack of finances were an obstacle. In 2010, as mentioned, Iraq and Syria attempted to get the pipeline up and running again.
[…]
Back in 2019 Russia was trying to convince Iraqi and Syrian governments that it “can successfully implement the Kirkuk-Baniyas project”.
[…]
This pipeline track will also have potential to strengthen the Iranian-Russian alliance. Before ISIS took control of Mosul in 2014 there had been intensive discussions on an Iranian desire to build a pipeline connecting Iranian oilfields to the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline.
From a geopolitical perspective the US regional resource piracy would inevitably come to an end. “There is a hope that this pipeline will link the fate of Iran, Russia, Iraq, Syria and even Lebanon economically and militarily” while squeezing the US and its Kurdish Contra proxies (Iraq and Syria) out of the equation.
The threat of a US-managed ISIS revival is also to be countered, with terrorist sleeper cells still embedded and active in Iraq and Syria but a united axis of terror-adversaries including Iran and Russia would be able to combat such a risk to the pipeline renewal.
[…]
As Robert F Kennedy JR wrote in 2016 for Politico Magazine – “Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria”:
They don’t hate our freedoms. They hate that we have betrayed our ideals in their own countries – for oil
Let’s face it; what we call the “war on terror” is really just another oil war. We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Dick Cheney declared the “Long War” in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies that have pocketed historic profits, the intelligence agencies that have grown exponentially in power and influence to the detriment of our freedoms and the jihadists who invariably used our interventions as their most effective recruiting tool. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have helped our worst enemies and turned America, once the world’s beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.
Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these conflicts.
It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a century.
[…]
Via https://beeley.substack.com/p/iraq-and-syria-to-re-open-crucial/
Met Police arrest protesters despite approving their protest – and lock up Night Safety Team
Police arrest protesters during coronation weekend
“I believe they had every intention of arresting us… simply because there was nothing that we did do that could possibly justify even being detained, never mind being arrested & held”Graham Smith, CEO of the ‘Republic’ group, told Radio 4 this morning that he believes police deceived him when they said they had no problem with the demonstration and fully intended to arrest them all anyway.
The Met Police’s outrageous conduct during the coronation has been further exposed with revelations that the force arrested protesters whose protest they had been notified of and said they had no problem with – and even brutally arrested City of Westminster’s official volunteer Night Safety Team while it did its job of protecting women, holding both groups in custody for extended periods.
Graham Smith, CEO of the ‘Republic’ group, told Radio 4 this morning that he believes police deceived him when they said they had no problem with the demonstration and fully intended to arrest them all anyway:
.@GrahamSmith_ explaining the events surrounding his arrest on Saturday and how the police subsequently held him for 16 hours! #R4Today pic.twitter.com/tItzYmdp8B
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 8, 2023
Meanwhile, police held Westminster’s Night Safety for some fourteen hours after arresting them – for possessing rape alarms, which they hand out to women out at night to help keep them safe:
They were arrested for being in possession of… rape alarms. They hand them out to women.
— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) May 6, 2023
Riz Choudhry, one of those arrested, accused the force of racially targeting him and of brutality toward the volunteers:
He is also part of XR’s arrest team so is familiar with these police tactics.
— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) May 6, 2023
[…]
RFK Jr: CIA Involved in JFK’s Murder
© Getty Images / Alessandro BremecRT
US presidential candidate says the agency’s culpability in his uncle’s murder was “beyond a reasonable doubt”
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged that the CIA was behind the assassination of his uncle, US President John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1963, and likely involved in the murder of his father, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot dead in 1968.
Speaking during an interview with WABC radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday, Kennedy Jr. said “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in [JFK’s] murder,” describing it as “beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder, and the coverup,” the candidate continued, describing efforts to discredit this theory as a “60-year coverup.” Kennedy cited the book “JFK and the Unspeakable” by James Douglas as the best compilation of evidence on the subject, though dozens if not hundreds of works have been written about the assassination and the CIA’s alleged role.
The official US government explanation, published as the Warren Commission report the following year, holds that US Marine veteran Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting the president while his motorcade was passing through Dallas on November 22, 1963.Oswald was famously murdered before he could stand trial, though he managed to tell journalists he was “just a patsy” shortly after his arrest. The alleged lone gunman was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (real name Jacob Rubinstein) while being transported from Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail.
Speaking to Catsimatidis, Kennedy added that there was “very convincing but circumstantial” evidence the CIA was involved in the 1968 assassination of his father, Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. He described the official story of the assassination, which was pinned on Palestinian horse groomer Sirhan Sirhan, as physically impossible, arguing Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard at the hotel who was concurrently employed by military contractor Lockheed, had actually fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Four years after JFK’s murder, nearly half of the American public did not believe that Oswald had acted alone. The CIA was concerned enough about this fact that it issued a directive in 1967 on how to discredit the so-called “conspiracy theorists” questioning the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Modern use of the term “conspiracy theorist” as a pejorative is often traced back to this 1967 memo.
[…]
Via https://swentr.site/news/575946-cia-killed-jfk-rfk-candidate/
The Irish Sea: Celts and Vikings
Episode 15 The Irish Sea: Celts and Vikings
The Celtic World
Dr Jennifer Paxton (2018)
Film Review
The Vikings* made their appearance in the Irish Sea in the late 8th century AD. With an initial focus on raiding Irish coastal and island monasteries for silver and gold religious artifacts, they eventually occupied all the east coat Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as far as Wessex. For the most part they left Wales, which had no wealthy monasteries. alone.
By the mid-9th century, Viking groups had settled the eastern Irish coast, providing the nucleus of many future Irish cities, including Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Wexford and Dublin. In addition to importing silver from the Muslim world, they also introduced shipbuilding and metalworking skills and the Viking battle ax.
Following numerous intermarriages, Viking settlers gradually came under the control of Ireland’s provincial kings as they converted to Christianity. By 1000 AD, most of the Viking homeland had converted to Christianity and their ocean raids ceased.
In the first English invasion of Ireland (1160-1170), England seized most of the Viking towns and incorporated them into privately owned English Earldoms. These would persist until the creation of the Kingdom of Ireland in 1542.
In Scotland, the Vikings began by invading the Shetland and Orkney Islands in the 8th century and establishing more or less permanent settlements there and in the Herbrides Islands. Viking rule in the Scottish islands wouldn’t be overturned until the end of the 15th century, and all their residents spoke the Viking language Norn until the 18th century.
In 1260, AD Scotland and Norway went to war over the Isle of Man and the Scots won. In the 13th century, both England and Scotland claimed possession of Man. At present it’s an independent self-governing British Crown dependency.
*The word Viking means “to go raiding.” It’s not a cultural or genetic designation.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5701024/5701056
May 7, 2023
Facebook Censors Climate and Atmospheric Science Journal Study on Antarctica
By Paul Homewood
[Ed: Interesting the factcheckers cite a USA Today article to counter a peer-reviewed scientific journal]
This post came up on my Facebook today:
When you click on SEE WHY, this comes up:
And this is the story the Facebook censors don’t want you to see:
[image error]
Quite why Facebook would want to rely on the USA Today for its source of science is a mystery. Perhaps they should have actually checked what real scientists are saying:
The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
In this paper, we investigate whether the high orography of the Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) has helped delay warming over the continent. To that end, we contrast the Antarctic climate response to CO2-doubling with present-day orography to the response with a flattened AIS. To corroborate our findings, we perform this exercise with two different climate models. We find that, with a flattened AIS, CO2-doubling induces more latent heat transport toward the Antarctic continent, greater moisture convergence over the continent and, as a result, more surface-amplified condensational heating. Greater moisture convergence over the continent is made possible by flattening of moist isentropic surfaces, which decreases humidity gradients along the trajectories on which extratropical poleward moisture transport predominantly occurs, thereby enabling more moisture to reach the pole. Furthermore, the polar meridional cell disappears when the AIS is flattened, permitting greater CO2-forced warm temperature advection toward the Antarctic continent. Our results suggest that the high elevation of the present AIS plays a significant role in decreasing the susceptibility of the Antarctic continent to CO2-forced warming.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-00143-w
I’ll post this on Facebook and see how long it takes for the censors to strike!
The Ruling Class Coups Against Nixon and Trump
Donald Trump with his legal team in court on April 4 after being indicted on 34 felony counts. [Source: usatoday.com]
Jeremy Kuzmarov
History as usual provides a cautionary lesson
On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping in Democratic Party headquarters.
Liberals at the time celebrated Nixon’s downfall, believing that the rule of law had been upheld and that Nixon had been held accountable for his abuses of power.[1]
Poorly understood was the fact that Nixon was set up and was the victim of a plot by a cabal within the military and CIA that paved the way for the ascendancy of neoconservatism.
As Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin detailed in their book, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), the CIA secretly infiltrated the “plumbers” and staged the break-in in a sloppy way—likely without Nixon’s approval—in order to get caught.[2]
The key culprits were CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr., a top aide to former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who were coached to change their testimony before the Senate Watergate hearings to be made more incriminating to Nixon and his top aides.[3]
Another key participant in the plot was Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff (1973-1974) and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, who engineered the exposure of the secret White House taping system that recorded all of the President’s conversation in the Oval Office, and subsequently stacked the deck against Nixon’s legal defense.[4]
White House Counsel John Dean III played a crucial role in deceiving Nixon into joining a conspiracy to obstruct justice to cover up a crime he had not actually committed but that Dean had helped orchestrate.[5]
The final revelation that helped undermine Nixon was made by Alexander Butterfield, the White House deputy assistant in charge of supervising the President’s recording system, whom CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr called “the CIA’s man in the White House.”[6]
Mark Felt (AKA “deep throat”), who had overseen COINTELPRO operations before becoming assistant director of the FBI in 1972, leaked the story of the break-in to Bob Woodward, who had an intelligence background going back to his days in the U.S. Navy when he was a briefer for Alexander Haig. Woodward worked for The Washington Post, whose owners, Philip and Katherine Graham, routinely used their newspaper to promote CIA disinformation.
The connection between Woodward and Haig has led some researchers to suggest that Haig was the real “deep throat,” not Felt, whereas others believe the real “deep throat” was someone else high up in the CIA.[7]
The reason that Nixon was targeted was because a faction in the ruling class felt that he was too divisive and could no longer rule by consensus.
Forging an alliance with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP that was part of the East Coast establishment, Nixon adopted tariffs and price controls opposed by high finance, furthermore, and backchannel diplomacy with both Russia and China as a prelude to his support for arms control agreements (notably the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty-SALT I) and détente policies that deescalated tensions in the Cold War.[8]
Nixon additionally opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy, using the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger as a weapon against them after having grown skeptical of their conformism, inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch.[9]
The above policies ignited opposition among neoconservatives, including figures such as Paul Nitze, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Walt W. Rostow, who mobilized in opposition to détente and rallied support behind Ronald Reagan.[10]
[…]
History Repeating Itself in a Different WayFifty years after Nixon’s downfall, the dominant faction of the ruling elite has been involved in another effort—less secret and sophisticated this time—to politically destroy a president who resembles Nixon in certain ways and even shares a key adviser in common (Roger Stone).
Donald Trump is a megalomaniac who presents himself as an outsider like Nixon and whipping boy of the Eastern establishment, while railing against a largely invented left (Trump called arch-capitalist Joe Biden a “trojan horse of socialism”) and calling for law and order.
Like Nixon, Trump is also very polarizing in a way that threatens domestic stability.
The part of the ruling class that hates Trump is in favor of aggressive imperialist actions to strengthen the U.S. empire, whereas the wing supporting Trump is less aggressive internationally because their economic base is rooted in domestic manufacturing, which Trump had promised to revitalize in part through revival of Nixonian protectionist policies, and less in finance.
Though escalating the drone war and provoking confrontation with China, Trump met with American adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, and expressed scorn for the CIA in a way no president ever has, suggesting that U.S. intelligence officers are “disgraceful, “politically motivated” and “sick people,” who “spread fake news.”
Trump further earned the ire of many in the ruling class by a) vowing to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, b) cutting back on U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and Somalia, c) questioning the legitimacy of NATO, and d) blocking the U.S. from joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy that promised endless corporate profits.
Additionally, Trump adopted extreme immigration policies that threatened to undermine cheap labor supply; and advocated at times for an “America First” program that harkened back to early 1930s isolationism.[12]
More recently, Trump offered a stinging rebuke to the Biden administration’s foreign policy, stating in a February 28th speech that “for decades, we’ve had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like in the case in Iraq and other parts of the world and now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III.”
Trump’s volatility, thinly veiled bigotry and crudeness was not in the manner expected of imperial statesmen.[13] Calling his generals “dopes” and “losers,” Trump admitted that America was not really exceptional; stating that Americans had occupied Syria to steal its oil; and telling a Fox News reporter who asked whether Putin had killed his opponents that: “there are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”
This isn’t what presidents are supposed to say.
In 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Trump challenged the claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Bernie Sanders was also seen as a threat to the ruling class in the 2016 and 2020 elections that was successfully contained when he was removed through a rigged primary process by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Since Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, he had to be dealt with by other means.
From Russia-gate to the April 4 IndictmentThese means have included the artificially manufactured Russia-gate scandal, which was initiated by the “deep state” as a 21st Century successor to Watergate.
Hillary Clinton, a key mastermind, had herself commenced her career as a Watergate lawyer on the House Judiciary committee, where she began to develop her reputation as a liberal Nixon for her use of political dirty tricks.[14]
The supposed smoking gun in the Russia-gate proceedings was the Steele dossier, which was exposed as a hoax produced by a British spy, Christopher Steele.
An alleged email hack by the Russians that purported to expose their election interference was shown by former intelligence American professionals to have been a leak undertaken somewhere in the U.S. based on the speed of the modem.
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a report, it determined there was no evidence to corroborate that Trump had colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election.
In 2019, the Democrats tried in vain again to impeach Trump by accusing him of withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to pressure Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s appointment to the board of a natural gas company in Ukraine, Burisma.
[…]
In 2022, the House formed a select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riots, headed by Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), which recommended criminal charges against Trump—now a private citizen—for triggering the insurrection.
While the latter charges held merit, the committee’s singular focus on Trump’s role in provoking the riot left unanswered questions about FBI informants and possible provocateurs among the rioters and other oddities surrounding the events, including some unexplained deaths and the placing of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.
The latest salvo in the ruling class plot to remove Trump appears to have taken place on April 4, 2023, when Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records as part of a scheme to cover up two illicit affairs.
Legal experts quickly pointed out that the offense in which Trump is charged is normally categorized as a misdemeanor.
Bragg said in the indictment that Trump made false statements to cover up crimes related to the 2016 election, though he does not lay out any evidence of this—causing Trump’s supporters and many legal experts to question the validity of the case.[16]
Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay fines of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabeling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele dossier,” as “legal expenses”—which is very similar to what Trump is accused of doing in a slightly different context.
[…]
The Most Revolutionary Act
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