Steve Bull's Blog, page 44
April 30, 2024
Leaked New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”
Amid the internal battle over the New York Times’s coverage of Israel’s war, top editors handed down a set of directives.
The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Raging floods hit parts of Saudi Arabia
Trees and debris were seen being swept away by the raging floods.
Play Video – Raging floods hit Saudi Arabia
Flash floods have turned roads into rivers across parts of Saudi Arabia following torrential rainfall.
There’s a Sniper on the Roof of the School Where I Studied Authoritarianism
On student protests and principled defiance.
There are snipers on the roof of the school where I got my MA.
There are police beating students at the school where I got my PhD.
At each school, I studied authoritarian regimes and how they brainwash people into believing that state brutality is not only expected, but deserved.
* * *
At Indiana University, I wrote my master’s thesis on how the government of Uzbekistan invented a terrorist group, “Akromiya,” in order to justify their killing of over seven hundred protesters in the city of Andijon in May 2005.
I wrote parts of my thesis in the Indiana Memorial Union: a student center where I would drink coffee and work. A student center where there are now snipers on the roof, their weapons aimed at students on the ground.
Indiana University calls the IMU “the lifeblood of IU Bloomington”. I wonder how much lifeblood will be spilled. Matt Pierce, an Indiana state representative, warns that IU could become the next Kent State.
IU students are protesting Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. Since October 2023, the Israeli military has killed over 34,000 Palestinian civilians, about half of whom were children. Some Palestinian children died in bombings. Others were shot in the head by Israeli snipers.
Doctors in Gaza have noted the wildly disproportionate death toll, saying Israel’s focus on children is unlike anything they have seen.
“This is not a normal war,” says Canadian doctor Fozia Alvi. “The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Worst Time to Be Alive
The world has ended before.
Sure, the entire world has never ended before. Not all at once. Depending on how you define words like “world” and “end.”But…
There have been plenty of times in history where it sure tasted like the world was ending, where the future didn’t look so bright, where everything might as well have ended for lots and lots of people.
According to historians, the absolute worst time to be alive was 536-550 AD, when three different volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun across most of the planet. During the first one, the sky went dark for 18 months. It snowed in the summer. An ash sky lit a cycle of droughts and floods that upended agriculture. Crops failed all over the world, and then starvation began.
Societies collapsed.
Records from Rome to Japan reference the events. Archaeologists have found a layer of ash virtually everywhere. They’ve also discovered abnormalities in tree rings around the world during that period.
Nobody was spared.
Some historians argue that the years of winter changed the entire course of human history. It sent humanity into a downward spiral that would take a century to recover from. Wouldn’t you know, the first bubonic plague struck right in the middle of that cold, dark, awful era. In fact, historians believe the cooler temperatures brought about by the volcanic eruptions were precisely what facilitated the spread of the plague bacteria.
Historian David Keys was one of the first to connect the volcanic eruptions to pivotal shifts in history. According to his book Catastrophe, these disasters dissolved the ancient world and planted the seeds of medieval civilizations and religions. His claims faced skepticism at first, but more and more evidence has supported his arguments. Now they’re not so controversial. The year 536 basically changed everything.
In a way, the world really did end.
A new one began.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
EXCLUSIVE: New Documents Expose How NIH Misled the Public About Dangerous Virus Research at the Wuhan Institute of Technology
The NIH has ceased any pretense of overseeing risky virus research and now coordinates with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance on public relations.
A new set of documents raise further questions about statements made by the National Institutes of Health regarding papers showing they funded risky virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create dangerous chimeric viruses.
EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak notified NIH funders that EcoHealth Health Alliance planned to conduct risky virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in a June 2016 letter, many months before a pause on such research was lifted in 2017. When the NIH released some of this information in 2021, they assured Congress and the public that these chimeric virus studies could not have led to the COVID virus, but they did so in a public statement that cited research the NIH itself had funded at the WIV.
The documents also show that, after once making a pretense of overseeing EcoHealth Alliance’s grants, the NIH is now happy to coordinate messaging with Peter Daszak’s nonprofit.
“Please pass this information on to the people at NIAID who need to coordinate communications,” Daszak wrote to NIH official Erik Stemmy, attaching a draft of a May 2023 press release. “And I’m available this evening, all day Friday and any time over the weekend to discuss.”
The 611 pages of new documents were provided to The DisInformation Chronicle by the whistleblower nonprofit Empower Oversight, which has sued the NIH to gain access to public records. Neither NIH spokeswoman Renate Myles nor EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak returned numerous requests for comment.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Do U.S. Presidents Matter for Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reduction?
The answer is not what most people will expect
Rare glimpse of the Energy Policy control panel in the White House Situation RoomPop Quiz!
Before reading on, please provide your best guesses matching the presidential administration with with the annual rate of carbon dioxide emissions reductions over each president’s term in office — dating to 2005, which is the baseline year commonly used to assess U.S. emissions reduction progress.
Source: US EIA, April 2024I’ll provide the answers after sharing some data. The figure below shows overall U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 to 2025 (with 2024 and 2025 estimated in April 2024, via the outstanding U.S. Energy Information Agency).
Source: US EIA, April 2024You can see that over the past two decades U.S. emissions have declined very steadily, with notable departures in 2009 (Global Financial Crisis, GFC) and 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic) only to snap back more or less on trend. The steadiness of the decline is remarkable given that these two decades saw two U.S. presidents who championed emissions reductions (Obama and Biden) and two who did not (Bush and Trump).
This raises a question: How much do U.S. presidents matter for the annual pace of emissions reductions?
To get a better sense of the answer to this question, let’s look at annual rates of changes in emissions, shown in the figure below.
Source: US EIA, April 2024The biggest year-on-year changes were the years of the GFC and COVID-19, and respective bounce backs in the years following. The overall growth rate is negative, which is why U.S. emissions have decreased since 2005. But of note, there is no trend at all in the rate of change in that decline. There is no evidence of an acceleration in emissions reductions, due to policy or anything else, and no such indication is expected in the data before 2026.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
April 29, 2024
The Impossible Heat Wave Era is Upon Us
Photo by Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
At the end of March and into the early days of April, the Sahel region of Africa experienced an unprecedented heat wave. Extreme temperatures descended upon Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad. One city in Mali recorded a temperature of 48.5 degrees Celsius (over 119 degrees Fahrenheit). The heat wave was impossible.
Or, it would have been impossible without the 1.2 degrees Celsius that humans have already baked into the global climate system. That’s the conclusion from scientists with World Weather Attribution, a group that makes rapid assessments of climate change’s influence on extreme weather events. They use various modeling and observational techniques to establish a “fingerprint” of warming on a given event; in this case, it simply wouldn’t have happened in a normal world.
Death tolls from heat waves often don’t become clear until months later, but there are early indications of its severity. One hospital in Mali’s capital Bamako recorded 102 deaths just between April 1st and April 4th. That same hospital recorded 130 deaths over all of April 2023. Many areas affected by the heat had power cuts at the same time, exacerbating the problem.
The otherwise-impossibility of these events is going to more or less become the norm. Most of World Weather Attribution’s results suggest increased odds, incrementally juiced temperatures, higher likelihood of that much rain, and so on. In virtually every event now (they do occasionally find that climate change had little influence), warming’s effect is clear and dramatic — but there is something viscerally different about events that would not have just been rare but literally could not have happened without the blanket of greenhouse gases humans have tucked around the planet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Recession Watch: Why isn’t “inevitable” becoming “imminent”?
Because “fiscal dominance”…
So that recession I keep whining about still hasn’t arrived. What’s going on out there to keep “inevitable” from becoming “imminent”?
It might be as simple as a government borrowing insane amounts of money and giving it to arms makers, banks, and AI companies.
This “fiscal dominance” strategy invokes some serious unintended consequences, including stubborn inflation and rising interest rates. New car loans, for instance, are now more expensive than they were prior to the 2008-2009 crash:
While bank credit is falling into pre-crash territory:
Offices are emptying out:
But unemployment is ridiculously low. With everyone working, how can growth possibly turn negative? Well, if everyone is working multiple part-time jobs and still unable to make ends meet, that might do it:
Meanwhile, lots of under-the-surface stats support the gloom-and-doom thesis. The next chart compares the stock prices of a major shipper and a major pawn shop chain:
According to financial analyst Danielle DiMartino Booth, we might already be in a recession:
Let’s Talk About the Moon: Was Apollo 11 a Hoax?
The night that Neil Armstrong was one small step for (a) man from the lunar surface I was taking my first airplane flight to a hockey camp near Toronto. I remember gazing out the window of the jet as a fourteen year old in July 1969 and imagining the Apollo craft on its impossible and miraculous journey to the very moon which I and countless others had marveled at and regarded as forever out of reach.
Yet reach it we did — we being the all-powerful United States of America, then simultaneously wielding its might in the jungles of a faraway country with perverse ferocity and with the sacrifice of American youngsters in the service of the hazy ideal of protection against Communism.
For many years, while cognizant of the endless warpath trodden by the country of my birth AFTER it had emerged as the glowing victor of World War II, bursting with economic and creative energy and bestriding the rest of the globe as the Colossus, I consoled myself and others with that magnificent and scarcely imaginable achievement of lunar landings.
Placing a man on the moon, that pure and nearly snow-white surface as far removed from the heat and grime of the napalmed Vietnamese jungles, somehow unified humanity in praise and deference, and established the United States as the artificer of miracles. In so doing it also lent a burnished sheen of intimidating and awe-inspiring power to an America whose tradition of can-do individualism was seen to have vanquished its socialistic rival, Russia.
The eyes of humankind for as long as it has trodden this precious Earth have looked heavenward and followed the glowing and bright and changeable Moon with a plethora of dreams and wishes and sighs…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Dark Origins of the Davos’ Great Reset
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.
Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included
The Club of Rome;
the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF);
the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference;
the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth;
and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family…
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