Climategate: The World’s Biggest Story, Everywhere but Here
The biggest scandal of our times is a non-story to U.S media. Why are the London papers covering the Climategate collapse, but not ours?
February 21, 2010 - by Charlie Martin
It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers.
It’s no news at all if you read the U.S. mainstream media.
In the ninety days — three months exactly at the time of this writing — since the Climategate files story broke, there has been an amazing amount of breakout in the climate science story, with major error after major error being uncovered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report IV (AR4). There has been the discovery of suspicious conflicts of interest on the part of the chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, and the expanding story of the financial connections between the carbon trading cabal and the scientific climate clique in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has “stepped aside” while under investigation, after which the UK government said it appeared there may have been criminality in CRU’s refusal to fulfill Freedom of Information requests. Scientist members of the IPCC have resigned, not wishing to continue to be associated with the poor quality of work being revealed.
And the UN chief diplomat in charge of climate change matters, Yvo de Boer, resigned in a sudden move that shocked UN climate watchers.
But search the major U.S. papers. There is a story in the Washington Post that at least mentioned some of the recent problems, prompted by Senator James Inhofe’s recent floor speech. What do they have to say about the biggest scientific scandal? The Post quotes U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth, whose nonprofit group has highlighted the work of the IPCC, saying that the pirated e-mails gave “an opening” to attack climate science, and that the scientific work “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
That would, by the way, be the same Timothy Wirth who was the original negotiator of the Kyoto Protocol.
Still, they mentioned it, and did quote Roger Pielke Jr., if not his strong criticism of the IPCC results. The Los Angeles Times? The most recent piece ran on January 10:
So, is the massive dumping of snow from the Mid-Atlantic to New England proof positive that climate change is untrue, as doubters such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) have taken the opportunity to trumpet? (His family built an igloo, declared it Al Gore’s new home and put up signs asking people to honk if they liked global warming).
To be sure, the IPCC has been forced to acknowledge errors and unsubstantiated statements in one of its landmark 2007 reports. The irregularities had to do with predictions of the expected effects of warming. None of them, however, undermined the report’s consensus that the planet has warmed and that man’s activities have contributed to the warming.
Inhofe’s igloo? Yes. Biggest scientific scandal? Not so much.
The New York Times — can we still say “paper of record” with a straight face? — hasn’t covered the recent developments at all.
After the London papers covered the collapsing credibility of the IPCC, after the LA Times made fun of Inhofe’s igloo, after the Washington Post ran a story reassuring its readers that the climate science was still sound even if there were some procedural errors, the New York Times has run, apparently, nothing. What we do have is a piece in NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog on February 12, taken from “a prolonged exchange of e-mail messages Thursday with a heap of authors from past and future reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with some stray experts” that gives a lot of space to a prolonged fantasy of what science historians might say in 2210, that includes:
But this was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like the New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts. As we know, the repetition of allegations is sufficient to make them stick in the public’s mind, regardless of whether they are later shown (or could easily be shown at the time) to be untrue.
On February 10, we have the “Distracting Debate over Climate Certainty.” Quoting Andrew Kent:
I still have problems with this whole business of debating the levels of certainty associated with global warming science. My view is that ultimately it’s a waste of mental energy, since we’ve already got enough certainty to know that it’s a good idea to take out an insurance policy against the worst-case scenario — and by the time you’ve got the hindsight to have “no error bars,” it’s already too late to do anything about GHGs.
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of Information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period and even about climate science in general?
Not that I can find.
I contacted all three papers — the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — asking for comment, or for a pointer to the stories I had missed. Only one of the three replied, and they wouldn’t speak for attribution or on the record.
It’s truly a puzzle. This is a story that affects the future of human civilization, if some of the believers are right. It ties financially to people right up to the top of American politics, as well as major industries throughout the U.S. and the world. What’s more, the story would seem to be all wrapped up, ready for aggressive investigative reporters with the resources of the Times to expose. Some of the perpetrators have even begun to confess. Why wouldn’t the Times cover it at all?
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995 and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period, and even about climate science in general?
Thanks to Gerard Vanderleun of the American Digest blog — and his link to Tom Nelson, one of my new favorite climate aggregators — we might have an answer. Nelson ran into this audio recording (warning: 105MB mp3 file) of the first Shorenstein Center/Belfer Center seminar on news coverage of climate change. One of the speakers was Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. Here’s part of what Revkin had to say, transcribed by Tom Nelson:
One thing that’s interesting to note … in this administration shift is that all the coverage that I did of all those obfuscations, editing, censorship and stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times … Now, theoretically, should I be just as aggressively writing about these revelations? [nervous laugh]. There’s total … complete differences between what was going on then and some of the things you’ve heard about recently in terms of the scientific integrity of the IPCC … The bottom line is, there was a predisposition at my newspaper to say hey, that’s a great get; there’s a major front page story … when Phil Cooney … editing climate reports and all that stuff … it fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys. Shame on you, shame on you.
Could it possibly be that the Times would sit on a story of this magnitude simply because it doesn’t say “shame on you” to the right people?
There may be some some additional insight to be gained by reading two pieces from Columbia Journalism Review: “MIA on the IPCC,” published January 29, and and “U.S. Press Digs Into IPCC Story,” two weeks later.
The January 29 piece says, reasonably:
In the days after the story first broke, The New York Times and The Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.
Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the UK, India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.
It then runs through some of the other IPCC issues that had come to light by then, and concludes:
So, yes, an “old row” it is, but a very important one, to which the American press should pay more attention (taking a cue perhaps from the Guardian, which thought the flap between the Sunday Times, the IPCC, Ward, and Pielke was newsworthy enough). For, indeed, the row continues. Over the last week, Pielke has posted a number of entries on his blog revisiting his criticisms of the IPCC’s work on disaster losses and responding to Ward’s defense of the panel. … Today, he announced that next Friday he will debate Ward at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The event is titled, “Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?”
That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the debate is in London, which probably means we’ll be hearing crickets in the U.S. media while coverage of this momentous topic continues elsewhere.
But by the 15th, CJR wrote:
Last Tuesday, The New York Times ran a front-page article by Elisabeth Rosenthal under the headline, “U.N. Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility.” On Wednesday, the Associated Press ran one over the wire headlined, “Scientists seek better way to do climate report.” The difference between the two headlines — the Times focused on the panel’s faults, the AP on its attempts to address them — is important. Each tells half the story, but it is the latter that should lead.
In two weeks, CJR has moved from saying that U.S. media should cover the controversy to specifying what the “right” lead should be. CJR continues:
Bearing this in mind, it is easy to see why — as Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm first pointed out — Rosenthal buried her lede in the ninth paragraph, which reads:
The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was “baseless.” The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.
That is something that needs to be mentioned in the first few paragraphs. From there, a reporter can explain that errors were nonetheless made, which should remind the world of three things: that the exact timing and scale of certain impacts of climate change are subject to a lot of uncertainty; that some scientists will behave defensively, even to the point of negligence, when they feel threatened; and that all quality control-systems sometimes fail. Thereafter, the question becomes: what is being done about these problems?
That is, the “correct” view is that these problems don’t call the science into question, and the “right” question is to ask “what can be done about these trivial little problems?”
This appears to be one of the rare occasions on which we can observe the “consensus narrative” being shaped.
The CJR observes, correctly, that “outlets in the U.K., India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis.” But it then concludes that there are no substantial problems; the “correct” view is that the scientific issues, and even more so the way that shoddy science was put together for political impact, aren’t particularly important and don’t call any of the conclusions into questions. Except, one assumes, the ones that have been determined to be false, like the impending doom of the Himalayan glaciers in 2035, or even the claim that the IPCC reports represented the best peer-reviewed science.
Which is, sure enough, the message being presented in the U.S. media. No scandal, no scientific misconduct, and certainly no actual fraud or criminality.
Motivations are slippery things, but consider just the facts: we have a mysterious lack of coverage of the repercussions and debate over Climategate in the world media.
Along with that, we have Revkin’s admission that for an environmental story to be of interest at the Times, it must ” … fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys.”
Finally, over the span of two weeks, the CJR — which may be less influential than it once was, but is still widely read between Harlem and Times Square — starts by saying that the U.S. media should be reporting this story, and moves to saying what the right reporting should be.
What the CJR has done, by accident, is answer its own question. The story has been covered the way it was, and to the small degree it was, because it doesn’t have a good guy to cheer and a bad guy to which the media can say “shame, shame.”
Or perhaps, it’s just that the wrong people have turned out to be the bad guys.
The biggest scandal of our times is a non-story to U.S media. Why are the London papers covering the Climategate collapse, but not ours?
February 21, 2010 - by Charlie Martin
It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers.
It’s no news at all if you read the U.S. mainstream media.
In the ninety days — three months exactly at the time of this writing — since the Climategate files story broke, there has been an amazing amount of breakout in the climate science story, with major error after major error being uncovered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report IV (AR4). There has been the discovery of suspicious conflicts of interest on the part of the chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, and the expanding story of the financial connections between the carbon trading cabal and the scientific climate clique in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has “stepped aside” while under investigation, after which the UK government said it appeared there may have been criminality in CRU’s refusal to fulfill Freedom of Information requests. Scientist members of the IPCC have resigned, not wishing to continue to be associated with the poor quality of work being revealed.
And the UN chief diplomat in charge of climate change matters, Yvo de Boer, resigned in a sudden move that shocked UN climate watchers.
But search the major U.S. papers. There is a story in the Washington Post that at least mentioned some of the recent problems, prompted by Senator James Inhofe’s recent floor speech. What do they have to say about the biggest scientific scandal? The Post quotes U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth, whose nonprofit group has highlighted the work of the IPCC, saying that the pirated e-mails gave “an opening” to attack climate science, and that the scientific work “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
That would, by the way, be the same Timothy Wirth who was the original negotiator of the Kyoto Protocol.
Still, they mentioned it, and did quote Roger Pielke Jr., if not his strong criticism of the IPCC results. The Los Angeles Times? The most recent piece ran on January 10:
So, is the massive dumping of snow from the Mid-Atlantic to New England proof positive that climate change is untrue, as doubters such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) have taken the opportunity to trumpet? (His family built an igloo, declared it Al Gore’s new home and put up signs asking people to honk if they liked global warming).
…
To be sure, the IPCC has been forced to acknowledge errors and unsubstantiated statements in one of its landmark 2007 reports. The irregularities had to do with predictions of the expected effects of warming. None of them, however, undermined the report’s consensus that the planet has warmed and that man’s activities have contributed to the warming.
Inhofe’s igloo? Yes. Biggest scientific scandal? Not so much.
The New York Times — can we still say “paper of record” with a straight face? — hasn’t covered the recent developments at all.
After the London papers covered the collapsing credibility of the IPCC, after the LA Times made fun of Inhofe’s igloo, after the Washington Post ran a story reassuring its readers that the climate science was still sound even if there were some procedural errors, the New York Times has run, apparently, nothing. What we do have is a piece in NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog on February 12, taken from “a prolonged exchange of e-mail messages Thursday with a heap of authors from past and future reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with some stray experts” that gives a lot of space to a prolonged fantasy of what science historians might say in 2210, that includes:
But this was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like the New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts. As we know, the repetition of allegations is sufficient to make them stick in the public’s mind, regardless of whether they are later shown (or could easily be shown at the time) to be untrue.
On February 10, we have the “Distracting Debate over Climate Certainty.” Quoting Andrew Kent:
I still have problems with this whole business of debating the levels of certainty associated with global warming science. My view is that ultimately it’s a waste of mental energy, since we’ve already got enough certainty to know that it’s a good idea to take out an insurance policy against the worst-case scenario — and by the time you’ve got the hindsight to have “no error bars,” it’s already too late to do anything about GHGs.
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of Information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period and even about climate science in general?
Not that I can find.
I contacted all three papers — the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — asking for comment, or for a pointer to the stories I had missed. Only one of the three replied, and they wouldn’t speak for attribution or on the record.
It’s truly a puzzle. This is a story that affects the future of human civilization, if some of the believers are right. It ties financially to people right up to the top of American politics, as well as major industries throughout the U.S. and the world. What’s more, the story would seem to be all wrapped up, ready for aggressive investigative reporters with the resources of the Times to expose. Some of the perpetrators have even begun to confess. Why wouldn’t the Times cover it at all?
Are there any mentions of Professor Phil Jones’ admission in a BBC interview that he isn’t good at keeping records, that his notes were so disorganized that he couldn’t comply with the Freedom of information requests, that there had indeed been no statistically significant warming since 1995 and that there was still significant uncertainty about the Medieval Warm Period, and even about climate science in general?
Thanks to Gerard Vanderleun of the American Digest blog — and his link to Tom Nelson, one of my new favorite climate aggregators — we might have an answer. Nelson ran into this audio recording (warning: 105MB mp3 file) of the first Shorenstein Center/Belfer Center seminar on news coverage of climate change. One of the speakers was Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. Here’s part of what Revkin had to say, transcribed by Tom Nelson:
One thing that’s interesting to note … in this administration shift is that all the coverage that I did of all those obfuscations, editing, censorship and stuff that the Bush administration got involved in was a no-brainer getting that on the front page of the New York Times … Now, theoretically, should I be just as aggressively writing about these revelations? [nervous laugh]. There’s total … complete differences between what was going on then and some of the things you’ve heard about recently in terms of the scientific integrity of the IPCC … The bottom line is, there was a predisposition at my newspaper to say hey, that’s a great get; there’s a major front page story … when Phil Cooney … editing climate reports and all that stuff … it fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys. Shame on you, shame on you.
Could it possibly be that the Times would sit on a story of this magnitude simply because it doesn’t say “shame on you” to the right people?
There may be some some additional insight to be gained by reading two pieces from Columbia Journalism Review: “MIA on the IPCC,” published January 29, and and “U.S. Press Digs Into IPCC Story,” two weeks later.
The January 29 piece says, reasonably:
In the days after the story first broke, The New York Times and The Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.
Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the UK, India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.
It then runs through some of the other IPCC issues that had come to light by then, and concludes:
So, yes, an “old row” it is, but a very important one, to which the American press should pay more attention (taking a cue perhaps from the Guardian, which thought the flap between the Sunday Times, the IPCC, Ward, and Pielke was newsworthy enough). For, indeed, the row continues. Over the last week, Pielke has posted a number of entries on his blog revisiting his criticisms of the IPCC’s work on disaster losses and responding to Ward’s defense of the panel. … Today, he announced that next Friday he will debate Ward at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The event is titled, “Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?”
That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the debate is in London, which probably means we’ll be hearing crickets in the U.S. media while coverage of this momentous topic continues elsewhere.
But by the 15th, CJR wrote:
Last Tuesday, The New York Times ran a front-page article by Elisabeth Rosenthal under the headline, “U.N. Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility.” On Wednesday, the Associated Press ran one over the wire headlined, “Scientists seek better way to do climate report.” The difference between the two headlines — the Times focused on the panel’s faults, the AP on its attempts to address them — is important. Each tells half the story, but it is the latter that should lead.
In two weeks, CJR has moved from saying that U.S. media should cover the controversy to specifying what the “right” lead should be. CJR continues:
Bearing this in mind, it is easy to see why — as Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm first pointed out — Rosenthal buried her lede in the ninth paragraph, which reads:
The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was “baseless.” The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.
That is something that needs to be mentioned in the first few paragraphs. From there, a reporter can explain that errors were nonetheless made, which should remind the world of three things: that the exact timing and scale of certain impacts of climate change are subject to a lot of uncertainty; that some scientists will behave defensively, even to the point of negligence, when they feel threatened; and that all quality control-systems sometimes fail. Thereafter, the question becomes: what is being done about these problems?
That is, the “correct” view is that these problems don’t call the science into question, and the “right” question is to ask “what can be done about these trivial little problems?”
This appears to be one of the rare occasions on which we can observe the “consensus narrative” being shaped.
The CJR observes, correctly, that “outlets in the U.K., India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis.” But it then concludes that there are no substantial problems; the “correct” view is that the scientific issues, and even more so the way that shoddy science was put together for political impact, aren’t particularly important and don’t call any of the conclusions into questions. Except, one assumes, the ones that have been determined to be false, like the impending doom of the Himalayan glaciers in 2035, or even the claim that the IPCC reports represented the best peer-reviewed science.
Which is, sure enough, the message being presented in the U.S. media. No scandal, no scientific misconduct, and certainly no actual fraud or criminality.
Motivations are slippery things, but consider just the facts: we have a mysterious lack of coverage of the repercussions and debate over Climategate in the world media.
Along with that, we have Revkin’s admission that for an environmental story to be of interest at the Times, it must ” … fit a very comfortable theme that all environmental stories for the longest period of time had, which is there’s bad guys and good guys.”
Finally, over the span of two weeks, the CJR — which may be less influential than it once was, but is still widely read between Harlem and Times Square — starts by saying that the U.S. media should be reporting this story, and moves to saying what the right reporting should be.
What the CJR has done, by accident, is answer its own question. The story has been covered the way it was, and to the small degree it was, because it doesn’t have a good guy to cheer and a bad guy to which the media can say “shame, shame.”
Or perhaps, it’s just that the wrong people have turned out to be the bad guys
Austin suicide pilot jointly leased hanger with manager of air defense systems manager
Joe Stacks Intriguing Connections With Defense Contractors, Intelligence Agencies 230210top2
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com [1]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Austin suicide pilot Joe Stack kept some very interesting company as far as the client list for his software programming company is concerned, including a defense contractor with NSA and Homeland Security connections that ironically dealt with air defense systems.
The Georgetown Airport hanger in which Stack’s ill-fated Piper Cherokee was kept was jointly leased by Stack and a man called John Podolak, records show [2].
The Of Goats and Men blog highlights the fact [3] that Podolak was appointed in 2004 [4] to manage L-3 Avisys’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Counter-MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) initiative.
L-3 Avisys is a defense contractor with its main headquarters based in Austin Texas which sells products and works closely [5] with the Department of Defense and unnamed “U.S. Government intelligence agencies”.
Podolak was hired to “oversee a strong team of more than 10 IRCM defense suppliers who will perform research studies and lead the transition of the team’s proposed CAPS (Commercial Airliner Protection System) technology to the airline industry.”
L-3 was also a key client for Stack’s software programming business. Stack helped develop a GPS-based Fight Management System for IEC, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of L-3.
L-3 was also investigated by the SEC for its role in the suspicious number of “put options” on United and American Airlines [6], speculation that a company’s stock will fall, in the days before 9/11.
Joe Stacks Intriguing Connections With Defense Contractors, Intelligence Agencies 190110banner4 [7]
Indeed, former NSA official Wayne Madsen wrote [8] in September 2008 that, “A long-time L-3 Communications consultant for the National Security Agency (NSA) was, according to our source, one of the very few recipients of the live video stream that caught the first plane hitting the North Tower.”
“Other clients on the list such as DMC Stratex Networks and Sorrento Electronics also are defense contractors and probably a closer examination of these and other corporations on Stack’s client list will reveal more interesting details,” notes the blog.
The blog also highlights transponder flight tracking records [9] of Stack’s plane which show that its last journey took place on August 6, 2009, and not on February 18 last week when the aircraft was slammed into the Echelon building.
One poster on the Prison Planet forum speculates “This plane may still be in a hanger at GTU.”
Could Stack’s lightweight Piper Cherokee really have caused such drastic damage to the facade of the Echelon building when compared with other small planes that have crashed into buildings like that of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle? [11]
The huge fireball reported by eyewitnesses could well have been as a result of extra fuel canisters Stack had loaded onto the plane to inflict maximum damage, but this has yet to be confirmed by authorities.
Intimate ties with defense contractors, not just through his software company, but on a personal level with L-3’s John Podolak will only serve to deepen the intrigue surrounding the motivation behind Stack’s attack on the IRS building, with scant details having emerged since the tragic incident last week.
Another startling contradiction comes in the form of Stack’s last words, which were reported by the media and apparently confirmed by audio from air traffic control tapes to be, “Thanks for your help, have a good day.”
However, audio taken from radio scanners who also recorded Stack’s last words is slightly different from that being forwarded as the official version. The second version of the audio, Stack’s final words are, “I’m definitely checking out, have a good day.”
While one eyewitness described seeing no pilot in the cockpit, another told WeAreAustin.com [13], “The pilot looked like he was in a comatose state; leaning back and going on in.”
Another interesting discrepancy to have emerged is the fact that Stack’s daughter told the Associated Press [14] that Stack’s suicide note did not sound like it was written by him.
“It’s not him. The letter itself sounds like it’s coming from a different person. It didn’t sound like it came from him,” Samantha Dawn Bell told the AP.
Austin suicide pilot jointly leased hanger with manager of air defense systems manager
Joe Stacks Intriguing Connections With Defense Contractors, Intelligence Agencies 230210top2
A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.
"In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards," says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.
"The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials," Mr. Gage adds.
The technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers has prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.
He is particularly disturbed by Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in "pure free-fall acceleration." He also says that more than 100 first-responders reported explosions and flashes as the towers were falling and cited evidence of "multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph" and the "mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking."
There is also evidence of "advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the World Trade Center dust," Mr. Gage says. The group's petition at www. ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress.
"Government officials will be notified that 'Misprision of Treason,' U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act," Mr. Gage says. "The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial."
that Beck is a shill for the bankers and the elite
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, February 26, 2010
Glenn Beck has failed to respond to a firestorm of reaction to his comments made during a February 21st interview with USA Weekend magazine in which he completely reversed his position on climate change by revealing that he believed in man-made global warming.
As we reported earlier this week, Beck appeared to stab his conservative audience in the back when he told USA Weekend magazine that man-made climate change was occurring in an article entitled Don’t judge Beck by his cover.
In the article, Beck tells interviewer Dennis McCafferty, “You’d be an idiot not to notice the temperature change.”
“He also says there’s a legit case that global warming has, at least in part, been caused by mankind,” writes McCafferty, under the sub headline, “He believes in global warming.”
“The blogosphere is on fire with reaction to McCafferty’s USA Weekend piece,” according to World Net Daily’s Chelsea Schilling, who pointed out that posters on the prominent conservative forum Free Republic were furious at Beck for seemingly performing a huge flip-flop on the issue.
“Seems like the rose-colored glasses are beginning to fall off those who used to view Mr. Beck with good approval?” wrote one.
“OK, final straw for Beck with me,” added another.
Becks Failure To Retract Global Warming Advocacy Provokes Online Firestorm 190110banner4
“When an unflattering quote comes out about someone, anyone, they all say, “I was misquoted.” Everyone does it. The people who were actually misquoted take legal action if a retraction/correction isn’t printed. In fact, that’s why newspapers print retractions/corrections. If Beck doesn’t sue USA Weekend, then it tells me his protestations ring hollow,” writes another.
Other respondents said they thought the article was a hit piece and that Beck’s comments on global warming had been misreported. However, Beck’s reaction to the controversy suggests otherwise.
Following the outcry, Beck responded by accusing McCafferty of inventing four of the ten beliefs attributed to him in the article, but since Beck made no mention whatsoever of it, we can only assume that his global warming comment wasn’t one of them.
“Beck had plenty of criticism of the USA Weekend story… he didn’t raise any objections to the article’s portrayal of his environmental views,” remarks Mother Jones’s Kate Sheppard.
Since Beck changes his tune every time the wind blows (he was for the bailout before he was against it), we can only assume that increasing suspicion from conservatives over his global warming comments will force Beck to back peddle and issue some form of retraction.
However, for some this will only confirm the fact that Beck is a shill and a performing circus clown who cries on cue while hoodwinking millions of conservatives into supporting policies which represent the antithesis of true conservatism, like a national sales tax (an idea also embraced by Nancy Pelosi), while attacking people who espouse real conservative principles without constantly flip-flopping, like Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters, who he smeared as potential terrorists.
During a Friday press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she was running the most ethical Congress ever.
CNSNews.com reported Friday:
When a reporter prefaced a question about Rangel by noting that Pelosi had promised to run the "most ethical and honest Congress in history" she interrupted him to say: "And we are." Despite the absurdity of this remark, CNSNews.com and Fox News were by themselves amongst major press outlets in finding it newsworthy (readers are cautioned to stow fluids as well as sharp items, and make sure their mouths are free of food or liquid before proceeding to the hysterical video embedded below
Once again, despite the absurdity of her comment, it didn't get a lot of press coverage.
According to LexisNexis, on television, only Fox News reported this statement: once on Friday's "Your World" and again on "Hannity."Although CNN did cover this press conference during the 5PM "Situation Room" Friday, her comment, "And we are" was not addressed.Many newspapers also reported the press conference, but according to LexisNexis, not one mentioned her reply to the reporter about being most ethical.
Not one.Wireservices also covered the press conference, but didn't mention her absurd comment either.
Of course, carrying the press's water were conservative bloggers - as usual. A Google blog search found the country's citizen journalists all over this story.Hot Air's Allahpundit reported just how preposterous this comment was:
As of early January, "the most ethical Congress ever" hadn't punished a single congressman for ethics violations. Not one, despite the many, many imbroglios in which, to take a not-so-random example, Pelosi crony Jack Murtha was involved. In fact, seven more congressmen were exonerated of ethics charges just today despite their ties to the PMA lobbying group.
Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft was also all over this:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) insisted on Friday that she is running the most ethical and honest Congress in history. At the same time, however, she indicated she will not ask House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.) to resign his chairmanship-at least for now. Democrook Charlie Rangel was found guilty of ethics violations yesterday. But, at least he wasn't caught stashing $90,000 of cold hard cash in his freezer like crooked democrat William Jefferson who was recently sent to the slammer for 13 years.
By contrast, "real" journalists predictably boycotted Pelosi's comment.
Exit question: Can you imagine the kind of coverage former Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) would have gotten if he made such a remark while he was Speaker?
The president would have the power to safeguard essential federal and private Web resources under draft Senate cybersecurity legislation.
According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.
The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.
Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country's Web infrastructure.
Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.
Rockefeller and Snowe's forthcoming bill would establish a host of heretofore absent cybersecurity prevention and response measures, an aide close to the process said. The bill will "significantly [raise] the profile of cybersecurity within the federal government," while incentivizing private companies to do the same, according to the aide.
Additionally, it will "promote public awareness" of Internet security issues, while outlining key protections of Americans' civil liberties on the Web, the aide continued.
Privacy groups are nonetheless likely to take some umbrage at Rockefeller and Snowe's latest effort, an early draft of which leaked late last year.
When early reports predicted the cybersecurity measure would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," online privacy groups said they felt that would endow the White House with overly ambiguous and far-reaching powers to regulate the Internet.
The bill will still contain most of those powers, and a "vast majority" of its other components "remain unchanged," an aide with knowledge of the legislation told The Hill. But both the aide and a handful of tech insiders who support the bill have nonetheless tried to dampen skeptics' concerns, reminding them the president already has vast — albeit lesser-known — powers to regulate the Internet during emergencies.
It is unclear when Rockefeller and Snowe will finish their legislation. And the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, financial regulatory reform, jobs bills and education fixes could postpone action on the floor for many months.
Both lawmakers heavily emphasized the need for such a bill during a Senate Commerce Committee cybersecurity hearing on Wednesday.
"Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure," Rockefeller said. "We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat."
Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.
When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn’t rhetoric, it’s an historical fact.)
Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.
It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?
Weapons of Mass Prescription
What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? The way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.
And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines.
Here’s another interesting fact: If you examine what’s in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you’ll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.
Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it’s not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.
Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.
Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry — an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people’s mouths as “silver fillings” (which actually contain more mercury than silver).
There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry — especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.
These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That’s why I call them ‘Weapons of Mass Prescription.’
Why pharmaceuticals might be called Weapons of Mass Prescription 190110banner4
Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens
If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals.
Antidepressants, for example, cause diabetes and obesity. Cancer drugs cause neurological disorders. Some arthritis drugs actually promote arthritis!
Virtually all pharmaceuticals cause nutritional deficiencies. Most of them also contribute to long-term organ damage that affects the liver, heart, brain and kidneys. Pharmaceuticals are synthetic chemicals which are inherently incompatible with human biology. Whatever “therapeutic effects” appear to be present from pharmaceuticals are really just poisoning side effects that temporarily appear to be therapeutic but are actually disruptive to human biology.
Many pharmaceuticals are, in fact, blatant poisons to begin with. Popular blood-thinning drugs, which are usually just rebranded warfarin chemicals, are molecularly identical to rat poison. (Warfarin is actually used as rat poison. It’s true. This is not an urban legend.)
Chemotherapy chemicals are extremely poisonous, and cancer patients frequently die from the toxicity of these drugs. Those who don’t die often suffer from “chemo brain” — a severe loss of cognitive function routinely experienced by victims of chemotherapy.
Poisoning the environment with chemical weapons
Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of prescription medications being used on civilian populations is resulting in the mass contamination of public water supplies with HRT drugs, painkiller drugs, cholesterol medications and other Big Pharma chemicals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025994.html) It’s so bad now that even the fish that swim near major cities are contaminated with medications. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p…)
At some point, all the chemical contamination with pharmaceuticals brings the obvious question to mind: Are Big Pharma’s drugs actually Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Is the U.S. civilian population being targeted in a cover chemical war that accomplishes the same thing as dropping bombs on Hiroshima, only more slowly and covertly?
And if so, what would be the purpose of such a chemical war on the American people?
Reshaping the human gene pool — clever!
Population control is the obvious answer… not only because pharmaceuticals kill so many people but also because pharmaceuticals cause widespread infertility. By dumping so many chemicals onto civilian populations, the population can be suppressed in the long term through chemically-induced infertility.
Now here’s an interesting advantage in all this: If all these mainstream consumer chemicals cause infertility, they’re only causing it among those mainstream consumers who are stupid enough to keep eating, drinking and swallowing all these synthetic chemicals in the first place. And that means this “population control” measure, if it actually does exist, is theoretically causing the greatest infertility in those who have the least intelligence. It’s potentially a way to achieve a significant shift in the gene pool of the human race by eliminating the genetic futures of those who are stupid enough to poison their own bodies (and therefore compromise their own genetic code) through mass exposure to synthetic chemicals.
As I’ve often said, there are a huge number of people in western nations right now (such as the USA, Canada, UK, etc.) who are collectively winning the Darwin Award by removing themselves from the human gene pool. And pharmaceuticals, it turns out, are the perfect WMDs to allow those who most deserve to be removed from the human gene pool to accomplish exactly that.
The future of the human race belongs solely to those who can protect the integrity of their genetic code.
And that, my friends, is not accomplished by contaminating your body with synthetic chemicals. That’s why prescription drugs may actually be Weapons of Mass Genetic Deterioration. Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.
When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn’t rhetoric, it’s an historical fact.)
Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.
It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?
Weapons of Mass Prescription
What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? The way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.
And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines.
Here’s another interesting fact: If you examine what’s in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you’ll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.
Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it’s not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.
Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.
Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry — an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people’s mouths as “silver fillings” (which actually contain more mercury than silver).
There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry — especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.
These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That’s why I call them ‘Weapons of Mass Prescription.’
Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens
If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals.
Antidepressants, for example, cause diabetes and obesity. Cancer drugs cause neurological disorders. Some arthritis drugs actually promote arthritis!
Virtually all pharmaceuticals cause nutritional deficiencies. Most of them also contribute to long-term organ damage that affects the liver, heart, brain and kidneys. Pharmaceuticals are synthetic chemicals which are inherently incompatible with human biology. Whatever “therapeutic effects” appear to be present from pharmaceuticals are really just poisoning side effects that temporarily appear to be therapeutic but are actually disruptive to human biology.
Many pharmaceuticals are, in fact, blatant poisons to begin with. Popular blood-thinning drugs, which are usually just rebranded warfarin chemicals, are molecularly identical to rat poison. (Warfarin is actually used as rat poison. It’s true. This is not an urban legend.)
Chemotherapy chemicals are extremely poisonous, and cancer patients frequently die from the toxicity of these drugs. Those who don’t die often suffer from “chemo brain” — a severe loss of cognitive function routinely experienced by victims of chemotherapy.
Poisoning the environment with chemical weapons
Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of prescription medications being used on civilian populations is resulting in the mass contamination of public water supplies with HRT drugs, painkiller drugs, cholesterol medications and other Big Pharma chemicals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025994.html) It’s so bad now that even the fish that swim near major cities are contaminated with medications. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p…)
At some point, all the chemical contamination with pharmaceuticals brings the obvious question to mind: Are Big Pharma’s drugs actually Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Is the U.S. civilian population being targeted in a cover chemical war that accomplishes the same thing as dropping bombs on Hiroshima, only more slowly and covertly?
And if so, what would be the purpose of such a chemical war on the American people?
Reshaping the human gene pool — clever!
Population control is the obvious answer… not only because pharmaceuticals kill so many people but also because pharmaceuticals cause widespread infertility. By dumping so many chemicals onto civilian populations, the population can be suppressed in the long term through chemically-induced infertility.
Now here’s an interesting advantage in all this: If all these mainstream consumer chemicals cause infertility, they’re only causing it among those mainstream consumers who are stupid enough to keep eating, drinking and swallowing all these synthetic chemicals in the first place. And that means this “population control” measure, if it actually does exist, is theoretically causing the greatest infertility in those who have the least intelligence. It’s potentially a way to achieve a significant shift in the gene pool of the human race by eliminating the genetic futures of those who are stupid enough to poison their own bodies (and therefore compromise their own genetic code) through mass exposure to synthetic chemicals.
As I’ve often said, there are a huge number of people in western nations right now (such as the USA, Canada, UK, etc.) who are collectively winning the Darwin Award by removing themselves from the human gene pool. And pharmaceuticals, it turns out, are the perfect WMDs to allow those who most deserve to be removed from the human gene pool to accomplish exactly that.
The future of the human race belongs solely to those who can protect the integrity of their genetic code.
And that, my friends, is not accomplished by contaminating your body with synthetic chemicals. That’s why prescription drugs may actually be Weapons of Mass Genetic Deterioration.
On March 1, Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, accused the government of plotting to destroy the open and freedom-loving internet. Readers of Infowars and Prison Planet have known this for some time, but it is nice to know a quasi-establishment publication is now telling the truth and warning its readers about the threat to liberty posed by the government.
“The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence,” writes Singel. “McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.”
The former intel boss, now vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation (notorious for connections to 9/11 and a key DARPA client), has been trotted out to sell “Cybaremaggedon” (as Singel appropriately characterizes it) to the American people. McConnell insists the internet needs to be re-engineered:
We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
“He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Administration can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded,” writes Singel. “Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.”
McConnell says the government needs to create a new Cold War, “one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects.”
Not directed against Muslims in remote backwater caves, mind you, but the real enemy — the American people who are increasingly aroused, thanks in large part to the internet.
The Bush era intel boss hyped the overblown Chinese hacker threat in “breathless” stories published in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec have downplayed the story. Singel points out that such fear-mongering is almost completely void of facts.
The anti-open internet echo chamber includes a speech delivered by Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Commerce Secretary:
In fact, “leaving the Internet alone” has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”
This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.
Now? The Pentagon wants to take out enemies with the online equivalent of ICBMs in order to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations (and, of course, take out the real threat — the alternative media overshadowing the staid establishment corporate media).
(“As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it,” writes Singel. “But there are creeping signs of danger.”
The primary creeping sign is the cybersecurity bill now in the Senate under the direction of the renown internet hater, senator Jay Rockefeller. If passed, Obama would have the ability to initiate “network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a counterattack of unprecedented scope,” according to Tony Romm of The Hill.
“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” Rockefeller said. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat.”
Rockefeller and the government have but one serious adversary — the American people who are circumventing establishment propaganda via the internet.
The recently passed House cybersecurity bill and the Senate’s version now under considered are peddled as urgent action against Russian and Chinese hackers hellbent on taking down the power grid and the smart phone network.
In fact, all the fear-mongering is a smoke screen for the real purpose of this legislation — to close down the free and open internet and viciously attack those who dare tell the truth and organize opposition to a predatory and dictatorial government.
My decision to drop out of Medicaid was a very difficult decision for me emotionally, as I was very connected to my patients. Now, if the current plan for government-run health care reform passes, we are facing an unprecedented expansion of Medicaid by 10-15 million more people. But who is going to take care of them if the networks are already overwhelmed and facing further cuts?
Back in 2005, with my office overflowing with patients, I made the decision to drop out of Medicaid. I wasn't alone. At the time a national survey revealed that a full half of America's practicing physicians weren't accepting Medicaid. It was a necessary business decision. Medicaid was only paying me $30 for a new patient, $8 for a follow-up. Many of my elderly patients had Medicaid for a secondary insurance, and this 20% of the bill amounted to less than $2. At a time when my offices expenses were skyrocketing, it simply wasn't worth the time to ask my office biller to fill out and submit the Medicaid bills.
Nevertheless, it was a very difficult decision for me emotionally, as I was very connected to my patients. Rather than ask them to see another doctor, I decided to keep seeing them for free, or at a markedly reduced rate. My patient Marcus, a mentally challenged 40-year-old man with severe constipation, who worked part-time as a janitor, always came with his mother; I kept seeing him and she insisted on paying me $50 per visit. At the same time, I had several disabled patients who I was glad to see for their Medicare payments alone, and many elderly patients who would pay a small fraction of the 20% that Medicare didn't cover.
Overall I was much happier, as were my patients, and I had no urge to turn back the clock when Medicaid raised its rates slightly. Still, a significant problem remained. As more and more doctors dropped out of Medicaid, I found fewer specialists I could refer patients like Marcus to see.
When his constipation worsened and he needed a gastroenterologist, I ended up referring him to Bellevue Hospital, where I had trained, and where he received good care from the G.I. residents in the clinic.
But Medicaid payments to hospitals have been cut drastically by the states, threatening the networks of residents and attending who take care of these patients. States have cut Medicaid payments both to universities (Graduate Medical Education that pays for residents), and to public hospitals themselves by many millions of dollars. In New York City, for example, last year Health and Hospital Corporation (which includes Bellevue) was cut by $105 million. This year the state is on the verge of cutting $370 million from the city's public hospitals (including $70 million in Medicaid reimbursements).
At the same time, if the current plan for government-run health care reform passes, we are facing an unprecedented expansion of Medicaid by 10-15 million more people. But who is going to take care of them if the networks we already have established are overwhelmed as it is and facing further cuts?
As it is, Medicaid is an insurance that is too easily overused. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, an accounting research firm, has determined that Medicaid patients are twice as likely to use the Emergency Room unnecessarily than the uninsured. This overuse generates expense, and Medicaid, like Medicare, is driving the country into bankruptcy.
But rather than address this problem, we are on the verge of adding many millions of more patients to this costly dysfunctional system.
Marc Siegel M.D. is an associate professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is a Fox News Medical contributor.
"There’s a difference between compromise and surrender"
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Democratic Congressman has stated that he will refuse to vote yes on the
pending health care reform bill, declaring that the legislation represents a
vastly bloated giveaway to insurance companies and big pharma.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) asserts that the Senate bill bankrolls the very
companies that president Obama says are taking advantage of the American
people.
“We’ve paid the ransom, but at the end of the day the insurance companies
are still holding the hostages,’’ Lynch said in an interview with The Boston Globe yesterday.
“This is a very good bill for insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. It might be good for Nebraska, I don’t know. Or Florida residents. But it’s not good for the average American, and it’s not good for my district. Or for Massachusetts.’’ Lynch added.
“The insurers still rule,” Lynch said. “Were just pumping subsidies into the current system, but that won’t drive down costs.”
The Congressman says he also opposes the way in which the House Democrats intend to pass the legislation, bypassing a traditional vote and opting for the so called Slaughter rule of "Deem and Pass".
Lynch, has said that the parliamentary move would be “disingenuous” and would fundamentally harm the credibility of Congress.
He added that the move “may be unconstitutional.”
“It’s a stretch,” Lynch said. “I think it hurts our credibility to try to pull a prank like that. We should stand up and tell voters where we stand.”
As we reported yesterday, president Obama glossed over questions surrounding the process, stating "I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate."
Unlike his Democratic colleague from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, Lynch has stuck to his guns despite a meeting with Obama.
"The president was courteous and generous with his time," Lynch said. "The president asked me if there was anything he could do that I should tell him, and I told him, 'I have been over this bill and I still wasn't satisfied.' "
"I continue to be opposed to the bill," he said.
Kucinich had said he opposed the bill, citing the exact same points as Lynch, however, a 40 minute jaunt on board Airforce One with the president, in addition to veiled threats directed his way by Obama swayed Kucinich to change his mind.
“There doesn’t appear to be any way to put reform into this bill,” Lynch said. “It’s a very poor bill.”
"If they put reform back in the health reform bill, that would change my position," he told reporters yesterday.
When reminded yesterday of Senator Ted Kennedy’s advice to not let the “perfect be the enemy of the good,’’ Lynch told reporters: “There’s a difference between compromise and surrender, right? And this is a complete surrender of all the things that people thought were important to health care reform.’’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team, as well as Obama himself are intensely lobbying individual representatives before Sunday’s anticipated vote as they seek to win the 216 votes needed to pass the measure. According to reports, the Democrats are still six votes short.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Deeply concerned as it is by the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel has never even hinted at using atomic weapons to forestall the perceived threat.
But now a respected Washington think tank has said that low-radioactive yield "tactical" nuclear warheads would be one way for the Israelis to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment plants in remote, dug-in fortifications.
Despite the 65-year-old taboo against carrying out -- or, for that matter, mooting -- nuclear strikes, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says in a new report that "some believe that nuclear weapons are the only weapons that can destroy targets deep underground or in tunnels."
But other independent experts are on record warning that such a scenario is based on the "myth" of a clean atomic attack and would be too politically hazardous to justify.
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In their study titled "Options in Dealing with Iran's Nuclear Program," CSIS analysts Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman envisage the possibility of Israel "using these warheads as a substitute for conventional weapons" given the difficulty its jets would face in reaching Iran for anything more than a one-off sortie.
Ballistic missiles or submarine-launched cruise missiles could serve for Israeli tactical nuclear strikes without interference from Iranian air defenses, the 208-page report says. "Earth-penetrator" warheads would produce most damage.
Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East's sole atomic arsenal. Israeli leaders do not comment on this capability other than to underscore its deterrent role; President Shimon Peres has said repeatedly that "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region."
A veteran Israeli defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said preemptive nuclear strikes were foreign to the national doctrine: "Such weapons exist so as not to be used."
A fixture of NATO and Soviet arsenals, tactical nuclear weapons are designed to deliver focused devastation with less contamination than city-killing bombs like those the United States dropped on Japan to end World War Two.
That damage containment would, in theory, off-set diplomatic fallout for whichever country were to use such arms on a foe.
FALLOUT
There has been speculation that the United States -- which, like Israel, has not ruled out military force to deny Iran atomic arms -- could itself resort to tactical nuclear strikes.
The Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which was leaked to the media, spoke of the need to develop new "mini-nukes" for defeating bunker systems. The review cited Iran among potential enemies that might eventually warrant a U.S. nuclear deployment.
Yet Toukan and Cordesman think it "very unlikely that any U.S. president would authorize the use of such nuclear weapons, or even allow ... a strong ally such as Israel to use them, unless another country had used nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its allies."
They say the United States would be central to any diplomatic solution to the Iranian standoff and is the only country that could launch a successful military strike on Iran.
International experts who contributed essays to the 2003 book "Tactical Nuclear Weapons" mostly shied from hawkishness.
"Who could predict what might happen next if (the) taboo on the use of nuclear weapons were to be broken?" wrote former CIA director Stansfield Turner. "Getting tactical nuclear weapons under control, rather than attesting to their use by building new ones, should be our goal."
Princeton University physicist Robert Nelson assailed the idea that tactical nuclear weapons, detonated below ground, would pose tolerable risks for civilians and the environment.
"This is a dangerous myth. In fact, shallow buried nuclear explosions produce far more local fallout than air or surface explosions of the same yield," he argued.
Sam Gardiner, a retired U.S. air force colonel who runs wargames for various Washington agencies, said an Israeli decision on using non-conventional weapons against Iran would come down to how far its nuclear program was to be retarded.
Israel supports efforts by world powers to rein in Iran -- which denies seeking the bomb -- through sanctions, and some experts say any pre-emptive Israeli strike would aim to jolt international diplomats into finally knuckling down on Tehran.
"If a 3-to-5 year delay were the Israeli objective, I expect it would drive their target people to say the only way it could be done is with tactical nuclear weapons," Gardiner said.
"I expect the Israeli objective to be more like a year. That is doable without tactical nuclear weapons."
(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by William Maclean)
