The fault was our star’s radiation and our atmosphere

There is no doubt that trying to publish research results, which do not conform to accepted theories or mainstream beliefs, poses a challenge in today’s world of academic political correctness....Along with that model, too, came the corollary conclusion – the fault was our star’s radiation and our atmosphere, not the carbon emissions that the vast majority of researchers link to climate change.

Blatant criminal activity by US and New Zealand governments to serve big media companies

Kim Dotcom joins us for an unedited version of his unforgettable history. Often what you hear of Kim, the best parts are on the cutting room floor of "60 minutes" or what ever other lamestream media has interviewed him. Kim spends a good deal of time expounding on the parts that normally get left out. 

Provoking nuclear war by media

Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the "butcher of the Balkans" who was responsible for "genocide", especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against "this new Hitler". David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered by Milosevic's forces.

This was the justification for Nato's bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia's economic infrastructure.  It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious "peace conference" in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were "worth it"

CIA's continuing mentality that it isn't bound by US law

Comment:

the US unwittingly played into Soviet propaganda that the US was really no different than the Nazis themselves.

In addition, as Simpson make very clear, much of what these former Nazis fed the OSS and CIA as information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe turned out to be baseless, and in many cases their spy networks turned out to have been deeply compromised by the USSR. The spy networks consistently overestimated the actual military threat posed by the USSR. But as Simpson points out, these CIA paid assets had ever incentive to overstate the danger. They were on the payroll, and as long as the Soviet menace appeared imminent, they would remain so. But start to say that there was no threat and the gravy train might come to an abrupt halt. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

Finally, because they fed the CIA, which admittedly had few Company assets on the ground in Eastern Europe after the war, a steadily hawkish line about the USSR and its intentions, they helped to contribute to the shrill political hysteria that emerged. I don't want to be misunderstood: the Soviet Union was evil, its methods vile and I don't weep any tears for its demise. But in our fear and in our ignorance, we made serious policy errors in those post-war years, and in doing so, we relied to a significant degree on people we should have known better than to trust: a group of ex-Nazis and collaborators who we knew were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, as I have suggested here, we helped inculcate our national security apparatus with a view that the ends always justified the means, and that as intelligence gatekeepers, the CIA was not bound by US law or public policy, but merely by its own secret determination of what was in the country's best interests.

The unmaking of world order

The war on global jihad represents a greater threat to the liberal world order than the jihad networks themselves

Lars Erslev Andersen

"The rest of this article argues that the most serious threat to development of a liberal world order is the way in which liberal states have decided to wage the War on Terror and the different contradictions of the idea of a liberal world order. The article argues that the way in which liberal states, spearheaded by the US, have waged the War on Terror is a greater threat to a liberal world order than the threat from transnational and global Jihadists and terrorists."
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"It is true that the US President, Barack Obama, and the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, stopped referring to the war against the Sunni Muslim Jihad network as the War on Terror, but despite this, not least Obama has actually intensified the war considerably during his term of office."

Are Danish women the most abused women in Europe?

One in three women report physical or sexual abuse since age of 15, with largest number of victims in Denmark

• A total of 43,000 women were interviewed – 1,500 in Denmark.
•  One in three women reported having been the victim of physical and/or sexual abuse at some point in her life.
•  8% reported having been sexually assaulted by their partner, ex-partner or a third party within the last year, and 5% had been raped.
•  12% of all Danish women between the ages of 18 and 77 had been physically or sexually assaulted by their partner at some point, compared to an EU average of 8%.
•   Every second Danish women reported that she had been the abused or assaulted by her partner, ex-partner or a third party at some time in her life, compared to one in three in the EU in general.
•   4% of Danish women reported having been abused by a partner within the last year, compared with 3% in the EU in general.

Eco-fascism

Travis Rieder, assistant director for education initiatives at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR that bringing down global fertility by half a child per woman “could be the thing that saves us.”

"Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them"


His paper, “Population Engineering and the Fight Against Climate Change,” written with two Georgetown University professors, is scheduled to be published in October.



Sadly, what Reider misses, is that, unlike many of the world’s poor, it is highly likely that his daughter will be raised in a safe, nurturing environment with access to high quality education, plentiful energy and food, and someday may well find the cure to cancer. She is not a burden. The world will be better, not worse off, because of not in spite of her.

The New Global Financial Cold War

Suppose a country owes money to another nation’s government or official agency. How can creditors collect, unless there’s an international court and an enforcement system? The IMF and the World Bank were part of that enforcement system and now they’re saying: ‘We’re not going to be part of that anymore. We’re only working for the U.S. State Department and Pentagon. If the Pentagon tells the IMF it’s okay that a country doesn’t have to pay Russia or China, then now they don’t have to pay, as far as the IMF is concerned.’ 

The United States is ham-handed and brutal

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.
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Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States than the CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these armed assaults run into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked "Why do they hate us?" From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, "Who does not?"

Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from U.S. Counties.

greater exposure to the trade liberalization is associated with higher rates of death due to suicide and alcohol-related liver disease

"Long-term prediction of climate is not possible" IPCC

"In climate research and modelling we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled-nonlinear chaotic system and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible" IPCC 3rd Assessment Report (2001) Section 14.2.2.2 page 774.

Varoufakis: «Vote yes!» / Swiss basic income referendum

Star Trek or the Matrix?

Trials of mindfulness to improve mental health selectively report positive results

Power of positive thinking skews mindfulness studies

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. 

The growth and decline of cryonics

Abstract

Cryogenic storage has become known as an alternative to burial. While a substantial fraction of the public finds cryonics acceptable, enrollment remains miniscule. One of the greatest unknowns is whether cryonics companies will be able to operate continuously until reanimation of those in storage becomes possible. Two failure modes are considered; organizational decline and political attack. The cryonics industry has adopted a strategy that implicitly targets atheist millionaires and alienates women. This is a result of neglecting science in its marketing efforts. American cryonics organizations have also incurred an avoidable political risk by refusing to use the funeral industry as a sales channel. Two alternative strategies are suggested that could minimize failure risk by reversing the stagnation of the industry. A “repackaging” of cryonics could accelerate growth and improve services, as well as the political position of the industry. This repackaging includes a restructuring of the channels for funding cryonics. Integration with the mainstream assumes using the funeral industry as a sales channel. While both political experiences and research results have made the need for these developments apparent, pioneers of the industry have resisted them.

Public Interest Statement

The search for a “fountain of youth” has occupied mankind since the beginning of human history. Cryonics (freezing at death) offers one of the latest solutions. Revival with a regenerated body is seen as possible, assuming technology has become sufficiently advanced. However, cryogenic storage must be maintained, probably for hundreds of years. This paper was written to alert cryonicists of the need for greater organizational robustness, if there was to be any hope that this experiment would succeed. Literature on organizational failure and on barriers to enrollment were reviewed. Two strategies for restarting growth were presented. Unfortunately, industry leadership refused to accept that there were problems and even censored earlier versions of this paper. While cryonicists consider themselves to be taking a scientific approach to life extension, this response to criticism suggests religious fanaticism. An analysis of leadership attitudes and behavior indicates that cryonics has become a religion for many.

The growth and decline of cryonics (Full article)

Unrealistic technological optimism inhibits technological progress

"A regenerative medicine specialist has called for a crackdown on the increasing number of doctors offering unproven stem cell treatments, as skepticism about the practice threatens a potentially groundbreaking clinical study."

Another newspaper story describes the details:

World-first Australian stem cell marvel that regrows damaged cartilage could make joint surgery unnecessary.

These headlines speak for themselves. Premature application of breakthrough medical technology can result in legal complications that may slow down the research. If the research area is discredited by premature application, future funding for the area may become more limited. 

Unfortunately, this same dynamic is seen in the life-extension area. In particular, cryonics has been promoted for a long time as a potential method to extend life. However, those in favor of a truly scientific approach feel that current methods discredit serious researchers. 

Kenneth Hayworth comments:

A rush to human application may sound humanitarian, but I believe it will only result in further delaying the eventual, inevitable embracing of cryonics (and other methods of brain preservation) by mainstream science and medicine. Simply put, rushing to human application will, in my opinion, only result in many more lives lost over the long run.

Admissions of Lack of Consensus by prominent “alarmists” in the climate change debate

Even prominent “alarmists” in the climate change debate admit there is noconsensus. Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, when asked if the debate on climate change is over, told the BBC, “I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view” (BBC News, 2010). When asked, “Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860–1880, 1910–1940 and 1975– 1998 were identical?” Jones replied, Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below). I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
Finally, when asked “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming” he answered “yes.” Jones’ replies contradict claims made by IPCC.

Mike Hulme, also a professor at the University of East Anglia and a contributor to IPCC reports, wrote in 2009: “What is causing climate change? By how much is warming likely to accelerate? What level of warming is dangerous? – represent just three of a number of contested or uncertain areas of knowledge about climate change” (Hulme, 2009, p. 75). He admits “Uncertainty pervades scientific predictions about the future performance of global and regional climates. And uncertainties multiply when considering all the consequences that might follow from such changes in climate” (p. 83). On the subject of IPCC’s credibility, he admits it is “governed by a Bureau consisting of selected governmental representatives, thus ensuring that the Panel’s work was clearly seen to be serving the needs of government and policy. The Panel was not to be a self-governing body of independent scientists” (p. 95). All this is exactly what IPCC critics have been saying for years. 

Richard "Selfish Gene" Dawkins has increased the religious belief that he makes a business of opposing

Paul states that greater social and economic instability is expected to produce greater religiosity. He points to the neo-liberal policies of Thatcher and Reagan. These economic policies have been used to transfer wealth to the rich. 

Richard "Selfish Gene" Dawkins developed a following of libertarians pushing social darwinism as their religion. While the term "Selfish Gene" itself is not used in the professional literature, the individualism implied has played a major role in, for example, the debates about group selection in evolutionary theory, in Friedman's and related economic theories, in certain lines of research in artificial intelligence, such as genetic algorithms, etc. So, the concept has served as a lens through which many of the “soft” science questions have been viewed over the last thirty years. Therefore, it is Dawkins' devotion to extreme individualism that has led to the increase in religious belief that he makes a business of opposing.  

See the book "Unto others" for support of group selection on an intro. level.

For a more advanced treatment, see for example:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100825/full/news.2010.427.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7310/full/nature09205.html

"I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told Detroit News

"The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.

Although Ford later renounced his antisemitic writings, he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The following month, a senior executive for General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar medal for his "distinguished service to the Reich."


Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."

Three More Global Warming Stories Media Don't Want You To See

First is a peer-reviewed paper showing that only 36% of 1,077 geoscientists and engineers surveyed believe in the man-made global warming crisis as defined by the United Nations' Kyoto model.