Steve Bull's Blog, page 47
April 27, 2024
‘A serious risk’: Mexican villagers take on cartel-backed avocado farms as water dries up
Copyright AP Photo/Armando SolisAfter enduring years of drought and ‘invading’ fruit farmers in Mexico, these locals are taking matters into their own hands.
Desperate Mexican villagers are taking direct action on commercial avocado farms that are drying up streams while a severe drought drags on.
Rivers and even whole lakes are disappearing in the once green and lush state of Michoacan, in the mountains west of Mexico City. Drought has combined with a surge in the use of water for the country’s lucrative export crops, led by avocados.
In recent days, subsistence farmers and activists from the Michoacan town of Villa Madero organised teams to go into the mountains and rip out illegal water pumps and breach unlicensed irrigation holding ponds.
A potential conflict looms with avocado growers – who are often sponsored by, or pay protection money to, drug cartels.
Drought, food shortages and deadly heat: El Niño has ended but its impacts are still being feltMexico’s likely next president is a climate scientist, but she’s still backing fossil fuelsHow are Mexican residents taking on commercial farms?
Last week, dozens of residents, farmworkers and small-scale farmers from Villa Madero hiked up into the hills to tear out irrigation equipment using mountain springs to water avocado orchards carved out of the pine-covered hills.
The week before, another group went up with picks and shovels and breached the walls of an illegal containment pond that sucked up water from a spring that had supplied local residents for hundreds of years.
“In the last 10 years, the streams, the springs, the rivers have been drying up and the water has been captured, mainly to be used for avocados and berries,” said local activist Julio Santoyo, one of the organisers of the effort.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Russia To Seize $440 Million From JPMorgan
Seizing assets? Two can play at that game…
Just days after Washington voted to authorize the REPO Act – paving the way for the Biden administration confiscate billions in Russian sovereign assets which sit in US banks – it appears Moscow has a plan of its own (let’s call it the REVERSE REPO Act) as a Russian court has ordered the seizure of $440 million from JPMorgan.
The seizure order follows from Kremlin-run lender VTB launching legal action against the largest US bank to recoup money stuck under Washington’s sanctions regime.
As The FT reports, the order, published in the Russian court register on Wednesday, targets funds in JPMorgan’s accounts and shares in its Russian subsidiaries, according to the ruling issued by the arbitration court in St Petersburg.
The assets had been frozen by authorities in the wake of the western sanctions, and highlights some of the fallout western companies are feeling from the punitive measures against Moscow.
Specifically, The FT notes that the dispute centers on $439mn in funds that VTB held in a JPMorgan account in the US.
When Washington imposed sanctions on the Kremlin-run bank, JPMorgan had to move the funds to a separate escrow account. Under the US sanctions regime, neither VTB nor JPMorgan can access the funds.
In response, VTB last week filed a lawsuit against the New York-based group to get Russian authorities to freeze the equivalent amount in Russia, warning that JPMorgan was seeking to leave Russia and would refuse to pay any compensation.
The following day, JPMorgan filed its own lawsuit against the Russian lender in a US court to prevent a seizure of its assets, arguing that it had no way to reclaim VTB’s stranded US funds to compensate its own potential losses from the Russian lawsuit.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Houthis Launch Attack On US Cargo & Navy Ships Following Two Weeks Of Quiet
Yemen’s Iran-linked Houthis have announced new aggressive actions in the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea regions, saying late Wednesday that projectiles were launched against more US and Israeli-owned commercial vessels, and that a US warship was also targeted. This follows a period of relative quiet this month.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said in a video address that an antiship ballistic missile was launched against the Maersk Yorktown cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, resulting in a direct hit.
The US military subsequently confirmed the fresh attack on the “US-flagged, owned, and operated vessel with 18 US and four Greek crew members”; however, the statement indicated no casualties or damage. The projectile may have exploded near the ship without hitting it.
File image, Maritime Executive“There were no injuries or damage reported by US, coalition, or commercial ships,” US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in the statement, without indicating whether there was any level of an actual direct strike on the ship. Commenting further, Maritime Executive details:
They received a report from a vessel of an explosion in the water approximately 72 nautical miles southeast of the port of Djibouti. The statement only said that there had been an explosion “at a distance,” and that the crew and vessel were reported safe.
CENTCOM further described that within hours of the attack on the Maersk Yorktown, US forces “successfully engaged and destroyed” four drones over Yemen.
The government of Greece this week also said it has been engaged in fresh counter-Houthi actions:
The Greek Ministry of National Defense said on Thursday that one of the country’s military ships serving in the European Union’s naval mission to counter the Houthis in the Red Sea intercepted two drones launched towards a commercial ship from Yemen.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Lancet Publishes CDC Studies on Misinformation, Hoping You Forgot The Lancet and CDC Spread Pandemic Misinformation
Censorship academic Claire Wardle helps guide the journal’s descent into authoritarian, censorship hell.
Medical authorities and like-minded charlatans address public failure with several strategies. One method is to deny error, feign outrage at critics pointing to the screwup, and shroud yourself in the holy mantle of science. When caught lying about the science on masks and the possibility he funded a lab accident in Wuhan, Anthony Fauci famously deployed this strategy by first denying what he had said, and then striking back at his critics, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”
The second strategy science academics and kindred con artists deploy is to ignore their blunder, blunder onward while feigning expertise, and hope the public has the mental capacity of goldfish who forget their entire world every 15 minutes. After being humiliated several times for publishing COVID misinformation, The Lancet has landed on this second tactic, inverting reality to assert authority on misinformation—the very same topic they fucked up in the recent past.
But a few were not fooled. The Lancet’s announcement that they were publishing two papers warning about medical misinformation set off howls of laughter and merry disbelief on social media.
“You guys may want to sit this one out,” quipped conservative commentator, Tracy Beanz.
“Misinformation you say?” tweeted another, linking to news deriding a bogus study by a company called Surgisphere that the Lancet was forced to retract.
“By publishing falsehoods like the surgisphere fraud and the Lancet commission whitewash of lockdown failure and harms, the @Lancet was among the worst contributors to public misinformation during the covid era,” tweeted Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
America’s plastic catastrophe
China stopped taking our plastic waste. Now we’re drowning in it.
Americans produce 40 million tons of plastic waste each year. And it has to go somewhere. Carl Godfrey for BIAmerica has long had a plastic problem. It’s an urgent question — what do we do with the 40 million tons of plastic waste we produce annually? One year of plastic waste is roughly enough to smother the entirety of Manhattan a meter deep, and it has to go somewhere. For years, the answer was simple: Make a lot of it, dump most of it in the landfill, and make the rest of it someone else’s problem — the US regularly exported 7 million tons a year to China alone. Some of it was melted into lesser plastic; the rest was incinerated or buried.
But then, in 2018, China cut off plastic imports.
Now, America is coming to terms with a hard truth: Plastic was never designed to be recycled and there’s no profitable way to recycle 91% of it. The environmental impacts have been disastrous. About 430 million tons of plastic are produced globally every year, accounting for 14% of global oil demand. The refinement of plastic alone emits up to 235 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. Most of that plastic breaks down into microplastics that make their way into the air, rain, and our bodies. Almost 95% of America’s water supply contains plastic fibers.
While the US, the UK, and other European countries responded to China’s ban by sending their waste to places like Thailand and Malaysia, those countries then followed China in cutting off waste imports. The message was clear: The Global South would no longer be a dumping ground for the West.
For decades, America sent its plastic waste to countries like China and Indonesia. Kartik Byma/AFP/Getty Images…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Big Tech Sponsors Event With Canadian Pro-Censorship Justice Minister Advocating Online Censorship
Canada’s government, represented by “captain of censorship” Arif Virani – the country’s justice minister and attorney general, will use an upcoming event as the opportunity to once again push for more speech-restrictive legislation, allegedly solely in order to deal with online “harm and hate speech.”
No surprise there, but the list of the sponsors of the event – dubbed, “Where Online Harms Have Real World Consequences: The Case for Legislating Against Harm and Hate” – is interesting. It includes Meta, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
There could be different interpretations of this, one being that the giants want online speech regulated “to entrench their positions and keep out dissenting views” – as Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski put it.
Or it could be that Canada’s relentless policies damaging these companies’ business interests in the process of restricting speech are motivating the likes of Meta and Amazon to try to stay on the authorities’ good side, including through sponsorships.
And, two wrong things get to be true at the same time, so we may be witnessing some combination thereof.
In any case, the Empire Club, where the gathering is to be held, announced it by saying participants will be able to learn about the government’s plans to “tame some of the worst excesses of life online, and protect the rights of all Canadians who wish to express themselves without fear.”
All Canadians, that is, except those Virani would like to be put under house arrest or cut off their internet access as a kind of dystopian “preventive measure” – namely, when there is “fear” they might commit whatever’s designated as hate propaganda or crime, at some point in the future.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
April 26, 2024
Yemen’s Houthis target MSC ship in Gulf of Aden
The Ghetto-ization of American Life
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized.
Consider the defining characteristics of a ghetto:
1. The residents can’t afford to live elsewhere.
2. Everything is a rip-off because options are limited and retailers / service providers know residents have no other choice or must go to extraordinary effort to get better quality or a lower price.
3. Nothing works correctly or efficiently. Things break down and aren’t fixed properly. Maintenance is poor to non-existent. Any service requires standing in line or being on hold.
4. Local governance is corrupt and/or incompetent. Residents are viewed as a reliable “vote farm” for the incumbents, even though whatever little they accomplish for the residents doesn’t reduce the sources of immiseration.
5. The locale is unsafe. Cars are routinely broken into, there are security bars over windows and gates to entrances, everything not chained down is stolen–and even what is chained down is stolen.
6. There are few viable businesses and numerous empty storefronts.
7. The built environment is ugly: strip malls, used car lots, etc. There are few safe public spaces or parks that are well maintained and inviting.
8. Most of the commerce is corporate-owned outlets; the money doesn’t stay in the community.
9. Public transport is minimal and constantly being degraded.
10. They get you coming and going: whatever is available is double in cost, effort and time. Very little is convenient or easy. Services are far away.
11. Residents pay high rates of interest on debt.
12. There are few sources of healthy real food. The residents are unhealthy and self-medicate with a panoply of addictions to alcohol, meds, painkillers, gambling, social media, gaming, celebrity worship, etc.
13. Nobody in authority really cares what the residents experience, as they know the residents are atomized and ground down, incapable of cooperating in an organized fashion, and therefore powerless.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
1 in 5 samples of pasteurized milk had bird flu virus fragments, FDA says
Matt Rourke / AP file
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that traces of the bird flu virus have been found in 1 in 5 samples of pasteurized milk, providing a more detailed picture of how much of the milk supply has been affected.
The tested milk came from a nationally representative sample, with more of the positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds of dairy cows, the FDA said. A spokesperson declined to say how many samples were tested.
As of Thursday, bird flu had been detected in 33 herds in eight states: Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Ohio and Texas.
Richard Webby, an influenza virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, said the number of positive samples is consistent with numbers he’s reviewed from smaller sample sets.
“But the number does seem high if the number of infected farms is indeed only 30-odd,” Webby wrote in an email. “Clearly there are more infected animals out there than being reported.”
The FDA first said Tuesday that it had found viral fragments in commercially sold milk, triggering the Agriculture Department to issue a federal order mandating that all dairy cows be tested for bird flu before they are transported between states.
Health officials maintain — and experts agree — that pasteurized milk is safe to drink. The FDA detected small pieces of the virus in milk, not live, infectious virus.
Dengue fever is surging in Latin America
The number of people who succumb to the disease has been rising for two decades
photograph: getty imagesFor the second time in five years, Brazil’s army is building field hospitals in the capital, Brasília. The tents are accommodating a surge of patients from swamped emergency departments, as millions of Brazilians succumb to dengue fever that is spreading across the country. As with covid-19, the last disease to prompt the construction of field hospitals, many dengue infections are asymptomatic. The one-in-four people who do fall ill can suffer for several weeks with a painful condition known as break-bone fever. Unlike covid-19, the virus causing this wave of illness is carried by mosquitoes. As the climate warms, their range is expanding and the number of people they infect is increasing (see charts).
chart: the economist
