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I appreciate the numerous emails thanking me for providing an understandable explanation of the global warming scenario. The book, Unprecedented Crime, about which I reported, caused me to start thinking more seriously about man-made global warming. I already was thinking about it, because capitalism owes its profits to the costs that it imposes on the environment, costs that are external to the capitalist entity. I have been thinking about this since I addressed “external costs” in my 2013 book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism. I am thinking that if man-made global warming is indeed in the cards, as the current evidence supports, the external costs of capitalism will far exceed the total value of all the goods produced over the course of the industrial revolution. Past material comforts will be paid for by future curtailment of life on Earth. Greed, gluttony, envy, lust, and pride will have proven to be the five of the seven deadly sins that were deadly for planet Earth.
I hope I can find the time and energy to get around to a book on the subject. For now, like you, I am learning. It struck me, as it strikes many of you, how a one or two degree rise in temperature can cause ice caps, glaciers, and the Greenland ice shelf to melt. We don’t think of the Artic or glaciers hovering on the temperature border of frozen and melting. It is not intuitive that small changes can make such large differences.
Like you, I also found it puzzling that as carbon dioxide is only a small part of the atmosphere, how its increase can have such dangerous effects.
While struggling to put what I learned into understandable language, I thankfully came across this explanation in Scientific American:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As I knew would happen, my review of the very serious and heavily documented book, Unprecedented Crime (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/10/26/global-warming-is-real-the-threat-is-real-ecocide-is-on-the-horizon/ ) resulted in condemnations from the fossil fuel industry’s trolls and from libertarians who think that global warming is a scheme for government to seize more power over private industry. Personally, I wish the fossil fuel trolls and libertarians were correct, but there is scant, if any, evidence on their side. I must say that I am discouraged that the oligarchs’ disinformation campaigns are again taking precedence over fact.
Global warming deniers, which includes honest, non-ideological people, say that the planet has been subjected to many warming and cooling periods, and that it is only natural that the cycles are contining. Climate scientists know this very well, and that is what disturbs them. The fact that the planet has warmed and cooled before does not mean that there is no danger.
Searching around for a simple explanation for readers, I found this report ( https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/06/world/two-degrees-question-ice-ages/index.html ) from a CNN meteorologist in 2015. (Note that the 0.85 centigrade rise in temperature in the report is, only 3 years later, up to 1.1C.)
The real question is: why are man-made greenhouse emissions since about 1880, the onset of the industrial era, more dangerous than those of the Milankovitch Cycles? The answer is: the speed of change.
Here is the gist of the CNN report:
Scientists understand the natural processes behind the previous warm and cold periods that lead to ice ages. They occur in regular patterns called Milankovitch cycles. These cycles occur because the Earth’s orbit around the sun is not constant.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Twitter has suspended noted anti-war commentator, economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts.
The suspension came without warning and was noted by journalist Caitlin Johnstone and others Thursday evening:
a vocal antiwar conservative. Can’t find any info about it yet.
Paul Craig Roberts has apparently had his Twitter account suspended.The censorship grows and worsens.
(I recognize that I’m now probably next since I’m tweeting this.)
Definitely suspended. Google links to @PaulCraigRoberts come up with this suspended notice.
Roberts, 79, served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1982. He was formerly a distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. Roberts maintains an active blog.
He’s also vehemently against interventionary wars around the world, and spoke with Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news in a Tuesday article – in which Roberts said that President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty was a handout to the military-security complex.
The former Reagan administration official clarified that he does not think “that the military-security complex itself wants a war with Russia, but it does want an enemy that can be used to justify more spending.” He explained that the withdrawing from the INF Treaty “gives the military-security complex a justification for a larger budget and new money to spend: manufacturing the formerly banned missiles.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey is unprecedented in its audacity. The response from Washington and the Canadian government is to sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia, weapons that are being used by the Saudis in their destruction of the Yemeni population. The Russian response, if the report I saw was not fake news, is to sell the Saudis the S-400 air defense system. https://on.rt.com/8pd0
What we can conclude from this is that armament profits take precedence over murder and genocide.
Genocide is what is going on in Yemen. I heard a report today on NPR that Yemeni are dying from starvation and from a cholera epidemic that has resulted from the Saudi destruction of the infrastructure in Yemen. The aid worker giving the report was obviously sincere and upset, but had difficulty connecting the high death rate to the Washington-sponsored war, blaming instead a 20% devaluation of the Yemen currency that raised food prices out of the reach of most Yemeni. She said that the solution to the crisis was to stabilize the currency!
It is difficult to understand why in the Western media and among Western politicians there is so much demonization of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, China, and Russia. It is not these demonized countries that are murdering people in their embassies, conducting wars of aggression (war crimes under the Nuremburg Standard), and embargoing food and medical supplies to the populations that are being bombed. These crimes are being done by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States and its NATO vassals.
Obviously, the Yemeni, like the Palestinians, don’t count. Their slaughter doesn’t cause a moral ripple in the West.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It has taken the US military/security complex 31 years to get rid of President Reagan’s last nuclear disarmament achievement—the INF Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev achieved in 1987.
The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified by the US Senate on May 27, 1988 and became effective a few days later on June 1. Behind the scenes, I had some role in this, and as I remember what the treaty achieved was to make Europe safe from nuclear attack by Soviet short and intermediate range missiles, and to make the Soviet Union safe from US attack from short and intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Europe. By restricting nuclear weapons to ICBMs, which allowed some warning time, thus guaranteeing retaliation and non-use of nucular weapons, the INF Treaty was regarded as reducing the risk of an American first-strike on Russia and a Russian first-strike on Europe, strikes that could be delivered by low-flying cruise missiles with next to zero warning time.
When President Reagan appointed me to a secret Presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA, he told the members of the secret committee that his aim was to bring the Cold War to an end, with the result that, in his words, “those God-awful nuclear weapons would be dismantled.” President Reagan, unlike the crazed neoconservatives, who he fired and prosecuted, saw no point in nuclear war that would destroy all life on earth. The INF Treaty was the beginning, in Reagan’s mind, of the elimination of nuclear weapons from military arsenals. The INF Treaty was chosen as the first start because it did not substantially threaten the budget of the US military/security complex, and actually increased the security of the Soviet military. In other words, it was something that Reagan and Gorbachev could get past their own military establishments. Reagan hoped that as trust built, more nuclear disarmament would proceed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Societal Collapse awaits in the wings if climate change and nuclear war don’t finish us off first
The Cheney-Bush and Obama regimes destroyed due process, with the result that American citizens were detained in prison indefinitely without evidence and murdered without evidence or trial. In violation of US and international laws, the US government used torture to produce “terrorists,” who were not terrorists, in order to justify Washington’s wars, wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with “fighting terrorism.”
The Democratic Party’s Identity Politics’ successful demonization of white heterosexual males has made American universities unsafe for white heterosexual males. Any woman can accuse them of rape, and despite the absence of any evidence, and even in the face of complete evidence to the contrary, the university, in total violation of all known rules of due process, can convict the accused—indeed, conviction on accusation alone is mandatory in American universities—and destroy the reputation of the accused along with his ability to continue his education.
In the article below federal courts confronted with these mandatory university convictions of white males have overturned them, ruling against the universities’ violations of due process. The corrupt university administrations are serving Identity Politics, not justice.
Just imagine that if the Democrats, who in their glory represented the working class, were to achieve political power and appoint federal judges. No white heterosexual male would be safe. Under the Democrats’ Identity Politics, white heterosexual males are automatically guilty. Due process is not needed. By definition, white heterosexual males are racists, misogynists, and rapists. No evidence is needed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
One of the reasons that countries fail is that collective memory is continually destroyed as older generations pass away and are replaced by new ones who are disconnected from what came before.
Initially, the disconnect was handled by history and by discussions around family tables. For example, when I was a kid there were still grandparents whose fathers had fought for the Confederacy. They had no slaves and owned no plantations. They fought because their land was invaded by Lincoln’s armies. Today if Southern families still know the facts, they would protect their children by not telling them. Can you imagine what would happen to a child in a public school that took this position?
Frustrated by the inability of the Union Army to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia led by West Point graduate Robert E. Lee, Lincoln resorted to war criminals. Generals Sherman and Sherridan, operating under the drunken General Grant, were the first modern war criminals who conducted war against civilian women and children, their homes and food supply. Lincoln was so out of step with common morality that he had to arrest and detain 300 Northern newspaper editors and exile a US Congressman in order to conduct his War for Empire.
Today this history is largely erased. The court historians buried the truth with the fable that Lincoln went to war to free the slaves. This ignorant nonsense is today the official history of the “civil war,” which most certainly was not a civil war.
A civil war is when two sides fight for control of the government. The Confederacy was a new country consisting of those states that seceded. Most certainly, the Confederate soldiers were no more fighting for control over the government in Washington than they were fighting to protect the investment of plantation owners.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Israeli expert on terrorism and covert assassination procedures explains that the alleged Russian GRU attack on the Skripals with a supposedly deadly nerve agent is a completely obvious hoax to anyone who knows anything at all. https://russia-insider.com/en/skripals-are-mi6-hoax-not-worthy-ladies-detective-novels-israeli-expert-demolishes-uk-case/ri24912
The official story, says the expert, is “stupidity on stupidity.”
I agree with him.
The question is: Why did the British government think that they could get away with such an obvious hoax? The answer is that the people in Western countries don’t know anything about anything. They live in a world in which their reality is a product of the propaganda fed to them by “news organizations” and Hollywood movies. They only receive controlled explanations. Therefore, they know nothing about how anything really functions. Read the account by the Israeli expert to understand the vast difference between the British government’s hoax and the reality of how an assassination is conducted.
The Israeli expert got me to wondering why the British government thought anyone would fall for such a transparently false story. Having just read David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth’s new book, 9/11 Unmasked, and David Ray Griffin’s 2017 book, Bush and Cheney: How They Runed America and the World, the answer became obvious. The British government had watched the idiot Western populations fall for the official 9/11 conspiracy story in which a few Saudi Arabians, who could not fly airplanes and without the support of any intelligence agency, caused the entire security apparatus ot the United States to fail utterly, and no one was held responsible for the total failure. The British government concluded that anyone who could possibly believe such an obviously false story would believe anything.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In my September 24 column, “Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes,” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/24/truth-is-evaporating-before-our-eyes/ I used the destruction of the CBS news team that broke the Abu Ghraib story and the story of President George W. Bush’s non-performance of his Texas Air Force National Guard duties to demonstrate how accusations alone could destroy a Peabody Award winning, 26 year veteran producer of CBS News, Mary Mapes, and the established news anchor Dan Rather.
I have many times written that it was President Bill Clinton who destroyed the independent US media when he permitted 90 percent of the US media to be concentrated in six mega-corporations that were in the entertainment and other businesses and not in the news business. This unprecedented concentration of media was against all American tradition and destroyed the reliance that our Founding Fathers placed on a free press to keep government accountable to the people.
Until I read Mary Mapes book, Truth and Duty (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), I was unaware of how this monopolization of the media in violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act and American tradition had proceeded to destroy honest reporting.
Here is what happened. The Texas Air National Guard was a place the elite placed their sons to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Copies of documents written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian describing George W. Bush’s ability to jump the large waiting list hoping to avoid the war, Bush’s non-compliance with National Guard requirements and Bush’s unauthorized departure to another state were given to CBS. The CBS team worked for many months to confirm or discredit the documents. The information in the documents proved to be consistent with the interviews of people acquainted with George W. Bush’s time in the Texas National Guard.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
My Generation is the last one to have known privacy and to have lived out most of our lives in freedom.
I remember when driving licenses did not have photos and most certainly not fingerprints. A driving license was issued on proof of birth date alone.
Prior to the appearance of automobiles IDs did not exist in democratic nations. You were who you said you were.
The intrusive questions that accost us every day, even when doing something simple as reporting a telephone or Internet connection being out or inquiring about a credit card charge, were impermissible. I remember when you could telephone a utility company, for example, have the telephone answered no later than the third ring with a real person on the line who could clear up the problem in a few minutes without having to know your Social Security number and your mother’s maiden name. Today, after half an hour with robot voices asking intrusive questions you might finally get a real person somewhere in Asia who is controlled by such a tight system of rules that the person is, in effect, a robot. The person is not permitted to use any judgment or discretion and you listen to advertisements for another half hour while you wait for a supervisor who promises to have the matter looked into.
The minute you go online, you are subject to collection of information about yourself. You don’t even know it is being collected.
According to reports, soon our stoves, refrigerators, and microwave ovens will be reporting on us. The new cars already do.
When privacy disappears, there are no private persons. So what do people become? They become Big Brother’s subjects.
We are at that point now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For some time I have pointed out the paradox of the American liberal/progressive/left being allied with the CIA, FBI, military/security complex and deep state. Now leftist Ann Garrison has noticed the paradox of this alliance. She concludes that the left has lost its mind. https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-love-the-cia-or-how-the-left-lost-its-mind/5653450
Indeed, it has.
Out of its hatred of Trump the left has united with the forces of evil and war that are leading to conflict with Russia. The left’s hatred of Trump shows that the American left has totally seperated from the interests of the working class, which elected Trump. The American left has abandoned the working class for the group victimizations and hatreds of Identity Politics. As Hillary put it, the working class comprises the “Trump deplorables.” The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, represents the ruling oligarchy.
I have explained that the leftwing lost its bearings when the Soviet Union collapsed and socialism gave way to neoliberal privatizations. The moral fury of the leftwing movement had to go somewhere, and it found its home in Identity Politics in which the white heterosexual male takes the place of the capitalist, and his victim groups—blacks, women, homosexuals, illegal immigrants—take the place of the working class.
The consequences of the leftwing’s alliance with warmongers and liars is the leftwing’s loss of veracity. The left has endorsed a CIA orchestration—“Russiagate”—for which there is no known evidence, but which the left supports as proven truth.
The purpose of “Russiagate” is to prevent President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. In these times when so many Americans are hard pressed, normal relations could adversely impact the budget and power of the military/security complex by reducing the “Russian threat.” If there is no real Russian threat, only an orchestrated perceived one, the question arises: why does the military/security complex have a taxpayer-supported annual budget of $1,000 billion dollars?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Recently I have been receiving a number of requests for my opinion of the Jewish holocaust. These requests are a puzzle to me as it is a topic unrelated to my commentaries on economics, law, current foreign affairs, and a looming showdown between Washington and Russia in Syria. I don’t know whether to be flattered that readers think that I know everything about everything, or whether these requests are efforts to set me up as a “Holocaust Denier,” a charge that can be used to discredit and close down my website.
The holocaust that I am interested in is the one that Washington’s aggression against Russia, aggression aided by Europe, is preparing for our future. This would not be a holocaust of a few million people but of a few billion and perhaps the entirety of planet Earth. I haven’t the time or energy to investigate the holocaust associated with the Second World War, but Ron Unz, a remarkable person and a Jew, whose website you should daily visit—http://www.unz.com — has, as an objective outsider, had a good look, and you can read it here: http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/
He has also posted this early work on the subject: http://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz__the-hoax-of-the-twentieth-century/
I am focused on trying to make people aware that Washington’s belligerence toward Russia is driving the world to nuclear war, and that Washington has used various false flag events, dating from September 11, 2001, to destroy the US Constitution and to accumulate all power over the American people in the executive branch.
This task exhausts my time and my energy. I cannot take on more controversies. As I have said in my defense of Noam Chomsky, who many denounce for not disputing the 9/11 official story, no person who has taken on so many controversial issues as Chomsky can afford to take on yet another.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Facebook Is An Intolerant Authoritarian Organization That Suppresses Free Speech
Facebook, Twitter, Google are information monopolies that intentionally violate the US Constitution’s protected First Amendment right. These organizations are evil and they are destroying the public’s right to know. These organizations should be nationalized without compensation and put under the governance of known and committed defenders of the First Amendment. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are inconsistent with a free society. They are functionaries in Big Brother’s police state.
If an investigative journalist looked into these organizations, I believe many links to the CIA and deep state would be found.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/technology/inside-facebook-employees-political-bias.html
Read more:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/29/social-media-giants-enter-nato-service.html
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/04/30/how-facebook-etc.-suppress-key-truths.html
The Russian Government and President Putin are coming under pressure not from US sanctions, which are very good for Russia as they force Russia into independence, but from Russian patriots who are tiring of Putin’s non-confrontational responses to Washington’s never-ending insults and military provocations. Russian patriots don’t want war, but they do want their country’s honor defended, and they believe Putin is failing in this job. Some of them are saying that Putin himself is a West-worshipping Atlanticist Integrationist.
This disillusinonment with Putin, together with Putin’s endorsement of raising the retirement age for pensions, a trap set for him by Russia’s neoliberal economists, have hurt Putin’s approval ratings at the precise time that he will again be tested by Washington in Syria.
In many columns I have defended Putin from the charge that he is not sufficiently Russian. Putin wants to avoid war, because he knows it would be nuclear, the consequences of which would be dire. He knows that the US and its militarily impotent NATO allies cannot possibly conduct conventional warfare against Russia or China, much less against both. Putin also undersrtands that the sanctions are damaging Washington’s European vassals and could eventually force the European vassal states into independence that would constrain Washington’s belligerence. Even with Russia’s new super weapons, which probably give Putin the capability of destroying the entirety of the Western World with little or no damage to Russia, Putin sees no point in so much destruction, especially as the consequences are unknown. There could be nuclear winter or other results that would put the planet into decline as a life-sustaining entity.
So, as I have suggested in many columns Putin is acting intelligently. He is in the game for the long term while protecting the world from dangerous war.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
