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September 1, 2021

Military Service Members With Natural Immunity File Lawsuit Against DOD, FDA, HHS Over COVID Vaccine Mandate

'The mandate constitutes an unconsented physical invasion of the worst kind.'By Megan Redshaw

Two active duty members of the U.S. Armed Forces on Aug. 17 filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of themselves and 220,000 active service members who are being forced to get a COVID vaccine despite having had COVID and acquired natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2.

The lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Staff Sergeant Daniel Robert and Staff Sergeant Holli Mulvihill, allege U.S. Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin ignored the DOD’s own regulations and created an entirely new definition of “full immunity” as being achievable only by vaccination.

According to the lawsuit, the military’s existing laws and regulations unequivocally provide the exemption the plaintiffs seek under Army Regulation 40-562 (“AR 40-562”), which provides documented survivors of an infection a presumptive medical exemption from vaccination because of the natural immunity acquired as a result of having survived the infection.

Under the military’s regulations (AR 40-562, ¶2-6a.(1)(b):

“General examples of medical exemptions include the following … Evidence of immunity based on serologic tests, documented infection or similar circumstances.”

According to the lawsuit, Dr. Admiral Bret Diroir, HHS assistant secretary, stated in an interview Aug. 24 with Fox News: “So natural immunity, it’s very important … There are still no data to suggest vaccine immunity is better than natural immunity. I think both are highly protective.”

Yet on the same day, Austin issued a memo mandating the entire Armed Forces be vaccinated, in which he wrote:

“Those with previous COVID-19 infection are not considered fully vaccinated.”

In that memo, plaintiffs allege Austin created a new term and concept, which contradicts  the plain language of DOD’s own regulations, long-standing immunology practice, medical ethics and the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence regarding this specific virus.


Natural immunity appears to confer longer lasting + stronger protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization from the Delta variant compared to Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.https://t.co/VECtpj7485


— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 31, 2021


Plaintiffs claim Austin, who is not a doctor, changed the DOD’s own regulation without providing “a scintilla of evidence to support it.”

They also allege Austin made the regulation change without going through the required rulemaking process, in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act review.

According to the lawsuit, Pfizer’s phase 3 trials — designed to test long-term side effects — are not scheduled for completion until 2023, and that “inexplicably, in the middle of that phase 3 trial, the manufacturer un-blinded the two cohorts, and members of the placebo group were given the opportunity to take the vaccine if they wanted to.”

Plaintiffs claim the FDA allowed Pfizer to turn the study from a placebo-controlled, blinded trial into an open, observational study.

 

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Published on September 01, 2021 16:07

New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House

[Source: washingtonpost.com; collage courtesy of Steve Brown]

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Covert Action Magazine

Yet even after over 50 years, high government officials like Vice President Kamala Harris are still trying to cover up the truth about his murder.

On June 5, 1968, a few minutes after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while walking through a narrow serving area called “the pantry.” Kennedy had just won the California primary and was on his way to a room where print media reporters were waiting to hear him speak.

In early March, Lyndon B. Johnson had thrown open the race by announcing that he would not seek re-election because of the failure of his Vietnam policy. Kennedy emerged as a leading contender by energizing the youth wing of the party with his calls for sweeping social change.

Kennedy was in many ways a strange liberal icon because he grew up idolizing Herbert Hoover, was closest in his family to his father, Joseph, the millionaire business tycoon, began his career supporting Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt, called for victory against communism in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and oversaw a terrorist campaign designed to overthrow the Cuban government.

Nevertheless, by the latter part of the 1960s, Kennedy had evolved into a crusader for the poor and dove on Vietnam who was trying to ride the wave of the protest movement into the White House.[1]

Biographers Lester and Irene David wrote that Bobby was the Kennedy who
“felt deepest, cared the most, and fought the hardest for humanity—crying out against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, championing the causes of blacks, Hispanics, and Mexican-Americans, and crusading against the suffering of children, the elderly and anyone else hurt or bypassed by social and economic progress.”[2]

After Kennedy’s death, the Democratic Party became a shadow of its former self, with six of the next nine presidents being Republicans. The Party in this period abandoned its core base—union laborers, minorities, and blue-collar workers—and started catering to Wall Street.[3]

Official Version of Assassination

According to the official version, Kennedy was shot and killed by a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian-born Jordanian citizen who was allegedly aghast by Kennedy’s recent decision to send 50 jet bombers to Israel to do harm to the Palestinians.

[…]

Sirhan initially confessed to the killing but later claimed to have no memory of it. After the events transpired, he had appeared calm, but not “in complete control of his mind.”

[…]

RFK Jr. Believes Sirhan Is Innocent

In a 2018 interview with The Washington PostRobert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that he traveled to meet with Sirhan at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional facility in San Diego County, and, after a relatively lengthy conversation, believed that Sirhan did not kill his father and that a second gunman was involved.

Kennedy Jr.’s view is shared by his sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, and by Paul Schrade, regional director of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and one of Bobby’s closest advisers, who was shot the night that he was killed.

[…]

Kennedy believes the real assassin was Thane Eugene Cesar, an employee of Lockheed’s Burbank facility—which manufactured the CIA produced U-2 spy plane—and previously Hughes Aircraft who was moonlighting as a security guard for Ace Security Services.

[…]

Jim Yoder, who bought the alleged assassination weapons from Cesar after Kennedy’s death, claimed that Cesar worked in off-limits areas at Lockheed, to which only special personnel had access. These areas were under the control of the CIA.

RFK Jr. believes that Cesar was the one that shot his father in the back of the head after hiding in the pantry and waiting for his appearance in the pantry or, alternatively, that he held his father and shot him three times under the arm, while another assassin—a man dressed in a busboy outfit, fired the two shots to Kennedy’s head that killed him—with a gun that was disguised or small enough to remain hidden.[11]

Planning at one point to visit Cesar in the Philippines until he demanded a payment of $25,000, RFK Jr. stated: “With 77 people in the pantry, every eyewitness said Sirhan was always in front of my father at a 3-6 feet distance. Sirhan fired two shots toward my father before he was tackled. From under the dog pile, Sirhan emptied his 8-chamber revolver firing 6 more shots in the opposite direction 5 of them striking bystanders and one going wild.”

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09/01/new-evidence-implicates-cia-lapd-fbi-and-mafia-as-plotters-in-elaborate-hit-plan-to-prevent-rfk-from-ever-reaching-white-house/

 

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Published on September 01, 2021 15:01

Scientists increasingly question the necessity of booster shots; no data show they will help at all

Scientists increasingly question the necessity of booster shots; no data show they will help at all

Dr Eddy Betterman

The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has been granted full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and more and more businesses and organizations are pushing for mandates for their employees to get inoculated, with a third booster shot being pushed aggressively by officials.

However, scientists have questions over the strength of the evidence to push with such protocols, as such decisions are “rash and based on weak evidence.”

There is little information regarding the safety of the booster shots, including potential side effects that people may face and for whom the additional dose will be beneficial.

Experts also noted that the guilt-ridden drive to line up for booster shots fuel more confusion. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration noted that what these booster shots are doing is scaring people. “We sent a terrible message. We just sent a message out there that people who consider themselves fully vaccinated were not fully vaccinated.  And that’s the wrong message because you are protected against serious illness.”

It is also important to note that the government is not keeping track of the number of people getting breakthrough infections — they are only keeping track of those that end up in hospitalizations or death.

Overall, the hesitancy over getting shots isn’t as rare as the media wants people to believe — only about half of eligible Americans are fully inoculated, as per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In a recent interview, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that people who have had the shot could experience “worsening infections over time.” She did not offer any insight on whether this trend could be related to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which happens when antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but cannot prevent infection.

Instead, officials have been using such worsening infections as a call for people to have their booster shots merely eight months after their second dose.

Yet, reports of adverse health reactions and deaths following the shots continue to roll in: the CDC noted that there had been over 595,700 adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since December 14, 2020, including 13,068 deaths as of August 13, 2021. (Related: Even the WHO says booster shots are unnecessary, but Biden’s White House prefers to listen to Big Pharma: BOOSTER covid shots coming to the USA.)

Scientists question evidence behind booster shots

Based on available data on vaccine protection, it is not clear whether younger, healthier individuals will find themselves at risk. “We don’t know if that translates into a problem with the vaccine doing what is most important, which is protect against hospitalization, death, and serious disease,” said Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University in Washington and a former chief scientist at the FDA.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2021/09/01/scientists-question-necessity-booster-shots/

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Published on September 01, 2021 13:18

Word War II: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction

Download World War 2 Wallpapers Gallery

A Skeptic’s Guide to American History

Episode 19 Misconceptions and Myths About World War II

Mark Stoler PhD

Film Review

I found this lecture, in which Stoler purports to challenge prevailing myths about World War II, extremely disappointing. It’s been well-established since 1943 (when George Seldes published Facts and Fascism) that numerous Wall Street corporations funded the rearmament of the Third Reich, enabling Hitler to launch World War II. Charles Higham also covers this in depth in his 1983 book Trading with the Enemy.

Instead Stoler makes the blanket statement that war was inevitable because Hitler refused to be “appeased” by Britain’s appeasement strategy. This also turns out to be untrue, based on evidence Peter Padfield explores in his 2013 book  Hess, Hitler and Churchill: the real turning point of the Second World War. The book spells out how Hitler offered Britain a secret peace deal, in which which Germany would withdraw from Western Europe prior to invading the Soviet Union. And how Churchill rejected the offer.

Stoler does address the common myth that the US singlehandedly won World War II for the Allies. Although the US contributed two-thirds of the Allies’ munitions and military equipment, they only contributed 25% of the troops and suffered the lowest number of casualties (killed and wounded). US casualties totaled 418,500 and British 449,800. In contrast, Russian casualties were between 25 and 29 million. Russia also inflicted 93% of the casualties experienced by the German military.

However he disputes the so-called “conspiracy theory” that President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Robert Stinnett has clearly documented that US intelligence had decrypted various Japanese military and diplomatic cables delineating the the exact time and date of the Pearl attack and transmitted them not only to Roosevelt, but to key members of his cabinet and top military leaders, including US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall.**

*See also https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf)

**See https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/12/06/pearl-harbor-roosevelt-knew/

The film can be viewed free at Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/world-war-ii-misconceptions-and-myths

 

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Published on September 01, 2021 12:58

August 31, 2021

Woman Dies of Rare Brain Disease Within 3 Months of Second Pfizer Shot, Doctor Says Vaccine Could Be Responsible

Cheryl Cohen, a healthy 64-year-old woman from Florida, died three months after her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

By  Megan Redshaw

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni Cohen said her mother, Cheryl Cohen, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting the Pfizer vaccine, and died within three months of her second dose.

Cheryl Cohen, a healthy 64-year-old woman from Florida, died three months after her second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. According to Chery’s daughter, Gianni Cohen, her mother suddenly developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) — a rare, degenerative and fatal brain disorder — soon after she was vaccinated.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni said her mother received the first dose of Pfizer on April 5, and her second dose on April 25.

On May 6, Cheryl experienced her first episode indicating “something was neurologically wrong,” Gianni explained. “She had extreme brain fog and confusion. She couldn’t remember where she was driving, and got really scared.”

On May 31, Cheryl called 911 because she was experiencing a severe headache. She was taken to Nordstrom Medical Center in Homestead, Florida, where she was hospitalized for 10 days.

Gianni said:

“She got taken to this hospital and I don’t know what they considered it, but they kept her for 10 days and released her home. She was in a very very bad state. She said, ‘Hey, I don’t know where I am.’

“My mother had mass confusion and brain fog. She could not do simple things and something wasn’t right. We had to have round-the-clock care with friends and families, thinking this was something that needed to be detoxed from her system.”

Gianni, who at the time did not know Cheryl had been vaccinated, said her mother’s condition grew progressively worse.

“She went from being able to work and do normal everyday activities to being able to do only basic things,” Gianni said. “Before she was vaccinated, she had her own apartment and worked every day as a sales representative. She cooked, cleaned and was in a great place in life.”

Around June 19, Cheryl experienced another severe headache, which became so bad she felt her head was going to explode, so she went to the emergency room and was admitted to the hospital, her daughter explained.

“A few days later, I visited her in the hospital and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Gianni said. “She couldn’t walk, spoke in broken sentences, wasn’t making much sense, had uncontrollable body movements, was trembling and unable to be still.”

The daily regression was rapid. “It was mind-blowing, confusing and truly heartbreaking. Watching her brain have no control was hard,” Gianni said.

At first doctors couldn’t find anything medically wrong with Cheryl other than a slightly elevated white blood cell count, Gianni said. But then MRI imaging of the brain showed evidence of prion disease, prompting doctors to immediately perform a lumbar puncture — which ruled out acute infection, tuberculosis, syphilis, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prion diseases are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.

The CDC’s website states:

“The term ‘prions’ refer to abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and are able to induce abnormal folding of specific normal cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain. The functions of these normal prion proteins are still not completely understood. The abnormal folding of the prion proteins leads to brain damage and the characteristic signs and symptoms of the disease.”

On July 12, a second lumbar puncture came back positive for CJD — a prion disease. Cheryl’s tau protein value was 38,979 pg/ml, while the spectrum for CJD positive patients is 0 – 1,149.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cheryl-cohen-dies-rare-brain-disease-second-dose-pfizer-covid-shot/

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Published on August 31, 2021 17:29

#ParentRising Sept. 13: CHD Advocacy Team Organizes National Walk-Out Week to Protest Vaccine, Mask Mandates

CHD advocacy team has organized a nationwide Walk-Out Week, beginning Sept. 13.

By  Aimee Villella McBride Stephanie Locricchio

During the week-long event, beginning Sept. 13, parents and educators across the U.S. will engage in peaceful noncompliance activities to remind government officials that individuals should have the final say when it comes to their health.

 The Children’s Health Defense (CHD) advocacy team has organized a nationwide Walk-Out Week, beginning Sept. 13.

Parents and educators across the U.S. will participate in the coordinated week-long event focused on peaceful non-compliance, to remind government officials that individuals should have the final say when it comes to their health.

Participants in Walk-Out Week are urged to keep their children home from school and organize with like-minded parents to show up at local schools and state education departments in peaceful protest.

Parents can also work with other local parents to explore alternative schooling.

 Educators, teachers and staff members are urged to stay home from work and pressure unions to protect your right to choose

CHD’s advocacy team invites everyone to participate in the week-long walk-out and also to sign this pledge.

“Parents around the country are fed up with mask mandates imposed by schools, especially after a summer of normalcy in most states where children have been enjoying summer activities maskless,” said Aimee Villella McBride, CHD advocacy liaison.

“Teachers, educators and staff who prefer choice when it comes to masks, vaccines or weekly testing also are frustrated with their state government overreach and lack of support from their unions for choice,” McBride said.

As the  2021-2022 school year approaches, more states are mandating masks, even school districts that previously left it up to personal choice. There is disparity across the nation, while some states mandate, others — such as Texas, Florida and Arizona — are prohibiting mandates, while other states are leaving up to the discretion of each school.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/parentrising-sept-13-chd-national-walk-out-week-protest-vaccine-mask-mandates/

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Published on August 31, 2021 17:17

Clashes & arrests in Sydney, Melbourne as anti-lockdown protesters defy Australian police pledge to unleash ‘full force’

‘Literally fascism’: Australian man sentenced to maximum of 8 months in prison for organizing ‘unauthorized’ anti-lockdown protest

RTHeated protests erupted in Sydney and Melbourne as massive crowds took to the streets to decry ongoing lockdown measures, seeing clashes with Australian police, who responded with pepper spray, roadblocks and a string of arrests.

The demonstrations broke out on Saturday afternoon in the two major cities, with groups estimated in the hundreds protesting coronavirus lockdowns and curfew orders, chanting slogans and hoisting signs against the country’s Covid regime.


Thousands of protesters in Melbourne. @theage pic.twitter.com/wgaYUyDZgW


— Rachael Dexter (@rachael_dexter) August 21, 2021



Police have been forced to use pepper spray to block protesters after a heated clash. @theheraldsun pic.twitter.com/a2cTnrh0TA


— Suzan Delibasic (@suzandelibasic) August 21, 2021


Footage making the rounds online showed crowds making their way through Melbourne, at some points clashing with a heavy police presence deployed to block the march. Pepper spray was unleashed on the demonstrators in response.

[…]

The demos come soon after officials in New South Wales announced an extended Covid lockdown on Friday, set to put nearly half of Sydney’s 5 million residents under a nightly curfew until mid-September. A similar order is already in place in Melbourne, meaning more than a quarter of Australia’s population will remain under lockdown restrictions, which require residents to stay at home with a few exceptions.

[…]

Via https://www.rt.com/news/532690-australia-lockdown-protest-clashes-arrests/

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Published on August 31, 2021 13:51

Amazon, “Economic Terrorism” and the Destruction of Competition and Livelihoods

By Colin Todhunter

Offguardian

Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.

Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

Amazon’s corporate practices

In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.

Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services.

Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.

Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.

According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.

[…]

Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.

What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.

Bezos not welcome

Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever-greater profit.

Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns, which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020.

In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.

Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.

This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:

I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”

[…]

Via https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/30/amazon-economic-terrorism-and-the-destruction-of-competition-and-livelihoods/

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Published on August 31, 2021 13:35

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we willcall America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bringallour troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home fromSaudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to…

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Published on August 31, 2021 12:58

August 30, 2021

40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River, but It’s Drying Up Fast. What Happens Next?

Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected.

By Abrahm Lustgarten

Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected.

On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground.

There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, 3-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.

Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought.

On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40% full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub.

The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.

For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it.

Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.

Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected.

This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount.

The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.

Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow.

[…]

The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner.

The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming.

The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado.

Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992.

These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next?

Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.

California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/colorado-river-drying-up-emergency-water-shortage/

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Published on August 30, 2021 19:27

The Most Revolutionary Act

Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
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