‘Continuation of civilisation is in your hands,’ Attenborough tells world leaders – video
The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.
The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.
As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
“Do you not see what is going on around you?” asks one young man in a video message played as part of a montage to the delegates. “We are already seeing increased impacts of climate change in China,” says a young woman. Another woman, standing outside a building burned down by a wildfire, says: “This used to be my home.”
Attenborough said: “The world’s people have spoken. Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. Leaders of the world, you must lead. The continuation of civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.”
Attenborough urged everyone to use the UN’s new ActNow chatbot, designed to give people the power and knowledge to take personal action against climate change.
The COP24 summit was also addressed by António Guterres, the UN secretary general. “Climate change is running faster than we are and we must catch up sooner rather than later before it is too late,” he said. “For many, people, regions and even countries this is already a matter of life or death.”
Guterres said the two-week summit was the most important since Paris and that it must deliver firm funding commitments. “We have a collective responsibility to invest in averting global climate chaos,” he said.
He highlighted the opportunities of the green economy: “Climate action offers a compelling path to transform our world for the better. Governments and investors need to bet on the green economy, not the grey.”
A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck off the coast of Oregon on Wednesday. The quake, which occurred 188 miles west of the town of Bandon is sparking fears that the Cascadia subduction zone will slip causing a major apocalyptic tsunami.
The quake was recorded at a depth of about 10 km, according to the USGS website and there was no tsunami warning issued. Robert Sanders said people as far away as Portland reported feeling the tremblor. No injuries or damage has been reported.
All seems well and quiet on the West Coast. For now. But scientists still warn that the Cascadia subduction zone could cause a major event if the Juan de Fuca ocean plate, which goes under the North American continental plate causes a “slip” and a massive 9.0 earthquake.
FEMA is already preparing for that exact scenario too. Although the San Andreas Fault in southern California gets more headlines, it is important to remember that the Cascadia Subduction Zone is a much larger threat by far. This fault zone is where the Juan de Fuca plate meets the North American plate, and it stretches approximately 700 miles from northern Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.
If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake were to strike, the immense shaking and subsequent tsunami would cause damage on a scale that is hard to even imagine right now. Perhaps this is why FEMA feels such a need to get prepared for this type of disaster because the experts assure us that it is most definitely coming someday. The following comes from the official website of the “Cascadia Rising” exercise (FEMA’s operation to plan for a major quake):
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) and the resulting tsunami is the most complex disaster scenario that emergency management and public safety officials in the Pacific Northwest could face. Cascadia Rising is an exercise to address that disaster.
June 7-10, 2016 Emergency Operations and Coordination Centers (EOC/ECCs) at all levels of government and the private sector will activate to conduct a simulated field response operation within their jurisdictions and with neighboring communities, state EOCs, FEMA, and major military commands.
According to a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University, the Cascadia Subduction Zone has the potential to create an earthquake “almost 30 times more energetic” than anything the San Andreas Fault can produce.
The Indus Valley civilization was wiped out 4,350 years ago by a 900-year-long drought, scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT-Kgp) have found. Evidence gathered during their study also put to rest the widely accepted theory that the said drought lasted for only about 200 years.
The study will be published in the prestigious Quaternary International Journal by Elsevier this month.
Researchers from the geology and geophysics department have been studying the monsoon’s variability for the past 5,000 years and have found that the rains played truant in the northwest Himalayas for 900 long years, drying up the source of water that fed the rivers along which the civilization thrived. This eventually drove the otherwise hardy inhabitants towards the east and south, where rain conditions were better.
The IIT-Kgp team mapped a 5,000-year monsoon variability in the Tso Moriri Lake in Leh-Ladakh – which too was fed by the same glacial source – and identified periods that had continuous spells of good monsoon as well as phases when it was weak or nil.
“The study revealed that from 2,350 BC (4,350 years ago) till 1,450 BC, the monsoon had a major weakening effect over the zone where the civilization flourished. A drought-like situation developed, forcing residents to abandon their settlements in search of greener pastures,” said Anil Kumar Gupta, the lead researcher and a senior faculty of geology at the institute.
These displaced people gradually migrated towards the Ganga-Yamuna valley towards eastern and central UP; Bihar and Bengal in the east; MP, south of Vindhyachal and south Gujarat in the south, Gupta added.
The model used for dating the origin of human civilization is bound to the presupposition that human history has progressed in a linear fashion from the time of tribal hunter-gatherers. As established institutions hold firm to this view, evidence contradicting the accepted model continues to grow. This data is difficult to collect and is immediately discredited by the “credible” scientific community.
In this inaugural episode, Graham Hancock discloses his evidence that suggests cataclysmic events brought a dramatic end to an advanced human civilization which predates recorded history by thousands of years in this presentation originally webcast February 9, 2015.
Graham Hancock is the author of the international bestsellers The Sign and The Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror. His public lectures, radio and TV appearances have put his ideas before audiences of millions. He is recognized as an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity’s past. Although best known for his non-fiction writings his most recent books are novels: Entangled: The Eater of Souls, War God: Nights of the Witch and War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent.
As the solar minimum continued, subfreezing temperatures and snowfalls were still breaking records in February. Canada and the US experienced another arctic blast from the now split ‘polar vortex’, pushing temperatures in Canada to -62°C and covering much of the northern, central and eastern U.S. with heavy snow. The cold blast also descended to Europe and parts of Asia. This ‘Beast from the East’ brought heavy snow to much of Europe with some parts colder than the Arctic!
China was hit by heavy snow, disrupting transportation and flights, while Japan had one of its worst winters in decades. Snow also blanketed unusual places like the UAE and Morocco.
Heavy rain caused destructive floods in Indonesia, New Zealand, Cyprus and deadly mudslides in South America, while seventy rivers overflowed from the Great Lakes to Texas. Record-breaking size hail pounded Argentina, while California and Saudi Arabia were pounded by hailstorms that caused damage and disrupted traffic for hours.
The Ring of Fire continued with increased activity, volcanoes and mud volcanoes that had been dormant for decades awoke with a vengeance, triggering evacuations and disrupting the flights of thousands of travelers. Taiwan, Papua New Guinea and Mexico were also shaken this past month by significant earthquakes as the the cosmic ray grand maximum approaches.
Dry tides are becoming more common all around the world, while mass fish deaths and strandings continue to baffle scientists.
Meteor fireballs put on quite a show again this month, while the reports of unexplained loud “booms” increased all over the world.
To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it’s taking place now: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.
Check out previous installments in this series – now translated into multiple languages – and more videos from SOTT Media here, here, or here.
You can help us chronicle the signs by sending your video suggestions to sott@sott.net
Cold and snow records were broken around the world last month, but the US got the worst of it, with all 50 states having snow on the ground even before winter had officially begun. Northern Mexico and East Asia are experiencing their harshest winter in decades, while some parts of Australia were startled by snow in summer.
Floods continued to wreak havoc in the Philippines and Indonesia, with thousands displaced, while heavy rain in Albania flooded thousands of homes and tore down roads and bridges.
California was scorched by widespread wildfires that burned up to 280,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, with the Thomas Fire becoming the largest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. With an ‘atmospheric river’ and downpours predicted for the 1st week of January 2018, things are looking gloomy for the Sunshine State.
A high level of volcanic activity was seen around the world in December, while a deadly 6.5 earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Java.
Meteors sightings increased in December, with more and more reports of accompanying “mysterious loud booms”, very likely the space rocks exploding overhead.
Atmospheric phenomena, including iridescent clouds and “strange lights in the sky,” continued to impress people from Sweden to Eastern Russia, but such events are likely evidence of a distinct cooling of the atmosphere, one of many signs of the possible onset of a new ice age.
To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it’s taking place now: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.
Check out previous installments in this series – now translated into multiple languages – and more videos from SOTT Media here, here, or here.
You can help us chronicle the signs by sending your video suggestions to sott@sott.net
As the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico recover from devastating natural disasters, Trump has promised to give them a multi-million-dollar photo-op.
The United States Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are witnessing historic damage as millions of people recover from the devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria—but President Trump’s promise of a multi-million-dollar photo-op, is the opposite of what the ravaged islands actually need.
When Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, it left nearly the entire island without power, 60 percent without drinking water, and it destroyed 80 percent of the island’s crop value. The U.S. Virgin Islands also experienced historic tragedy as two category 5 hurricanes—Irma and Maria—hit in just 12 days, destroying 70 percent of the island’s buildings.
While both territories are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, the U.S. government is receiving heavy criticism for its lack of an adequate response. Not surprisingly, President Trump is at the center of that criticism, as he took to Twitter to call for a boycott of the National Football League, and to call out players who dared to kneel during the National Anthem—a song that has only been played before football games since 2009, when the Department of Defense began “paying for Patriotism” to increase support for war.
Then it finally happened—Trump heard the anger of the public, and he decided it was time to get involved, and to give them what they wanted. He pledged his support to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and he said he is planning to visit the ravaged territories next week.
“Puerto Rico is very important to me and Puerto Rico—the people are fantastic people,” Trump said. “I grew up in New York so I know many people from Puerto Rico. I know many Puerto Ricans. These are good people and we have to help them. The island is devastated.”
While the estimated cost of this visit has not been publicized, there is no doubt that it will be in the millions. The task of taking a disaster-stricken island with no power, no running water and scarce resources, and establishing the means necessary to accommodate the president, possibly First Lady Melania, and their entire staff and secret service team is no easy or inexpensive feat.
Presidential travel is a highly complex logistical operation involving hundreds of people, dozens of planes, cars, military vehicles, and more.
As a result, it easy to see how the bill can skyrocket very quickly. According to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch, the VC-25A cost a whopping $206,000 an hour to operate. The flight time from Washington D.C. to Puerto Rico is about 4 hours. The plane flight alone will cost taxpayers upwards of 2 million—only if he goes directly there and back.
That is just the plane. When the president travels, he uses several military aircraft, including Air Force One, carrying the president, his entourage and guests, cargo planes packing motorcade limousines and other equipment, and aircraft to transport personnel who conduct security sweeps before the president arrives.
A conservative estimate of Trump’s trip to Puerto Rico will be upwards five or six million dollars—hardly a just expense for a photo op.
However, Trump’s presence in Puerto Rico seems to be what the public and the mainstream media crave. They want the money shot of him kissing some random baby, or serving food to a family who has just lost all of their possessions. Don’t mind the outrageous cost of the trip, or the fact that the residents of Puerto Rico would be better off if the government just took the estimated cost of such a visit, and wrote a check for the same amount in aid.
Six million dollars could pay power companies to restore electricity, buy food for those in need, purchase clean water, or any number of other helpful ways. But not this time. Instead, the six million dollars will go to six minutes of propaganda.
The term “presidents are puppets” can be applied in a number of situations, but in this one, it is painfully evident. Trump’s trips to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands will be nothing more than a multi-million-dollar photo-op used to cover up the government’s negligence in providing proper aid to millions of American citizens, while it wastes billions of dollars on foreign aid programs in countries run by dictators.
Tothe Residents of Barbuda, part of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda, where a Governor-General representing Queen Elizabeth is head of state; the French-ruled St. Martin and the island’s Dutch half of St. Maarten; British Virgin Islands (BVI); French-ruled St. Barts; the British colony of Anguilla, the British territory of Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI); and the US-ruled St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John,
What is wrong with you people? Grab some pitch forks and rid yourselves of them parasite-colonialists now!
Neo-Colonialism and Disaster Relief: an Unholy Duo
The Caribbean colonies of four neo-colonialist powers, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States, have discovered the hard way where they stand with their colonial masters when faced with an extreme natural disaster. In the wake of hurricane Irma, a Category 5 mega-storm, the populations of the island territories of the four colonial powers, as well as Barbuda, a dominion of Queen Elizabeth’s “Commonwealth,” were relegated to second- and third-class status when it came to the receipt of urgent assistance in the wake of Irma.
Long a domain of rich and famous part-time residents and offshore shell corporations, the permanent residents of the islands of the northeast Leeward Islands are merely looked upon as tourism employees and clerical staff for offshore banks and law offices catering to money launderers and tax evaders. When these victims of Irma cried out for basics – water, food, and medicines, they were initially ignored by neo-colonial offices in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC.
What is being practiced by the neo-colonialist governments of France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States is a form of disaster politics. The governing authorities appeared to largely ignore the initial recovery needs of Irma-affected islands as a way of punishing them for earlier calls for increased autonomy and, in a few cases, independence.
Residents of Barbuda, part of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda, where a Governor-General representing Queen Elizabeth is head of state; the French-ruled St. Martin and the island’s Dutch half of St. Maarten; British Virgin Islands (BVI); French-ruled St. Barts; the British colony of Anguilla, the British territory of Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI); and the US-ruled St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John ran low on food, water, fuel, and medicines after Irma struck the island with intense fury. The colonial powers overseeing these island territories are all governed by pro-corporate conservative governments that were initially sanguine about rushing in disaster relief assistance and supplies. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Theresa May, and US President Donald Trump waited for days after Irma struck before sending military planes and ships to the islands. Many island leaders feel the assistance was too little and too late. They are correct.
The colonialist powers were anxious to rush in public security forces to affected islands but the food, water, and other supplies came later. The security forces rushed in to protect the part-time homes of billionaires was a hat-tip by the governments in London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Washington to the billionaires who support them politically. The welfare of the full-time and poor residents, who were among the most adversely affected by Irma, was assigned a much-lower priority by the corporate vipers, vampires, and vultures controlling the French, British, Dutch, and American governments.
Residents of St. Martin/St. Maarten were forced to scavenge partially-destroyed food ships for anything in the way of sustenance and nutrition, including bottled water, crackers, candy, and rotting fruit. The corporate media called the scavengers “looters.” In situations where white tourists collected water and food under similar circumstances, they were called “scavengers.”
The Cuban government, which has prioritized disaster relief as a matter of national policy and is an international model for disaster recovery, quickly rushed in food, water, and other supplies to its hurricane-ravaged northern coast, including the city of Matanzas and isles such as Cayo Romano and Cayo Coco in the Camaguey archipelago.
Over 1000 residents of 62-square mile Barbuda, most of whom were evacuated to Antigua, are worried about unscrupulous billionaire developers moving on to their island to lay claim to their properties for tourist complexes. Land ownership has been prohibited on the island, a law that has led to some calls for Barbuda to break away from its larger neighbor, Antigua, and opt for independence.
Antigua Prime Minister Gaston Browne announced that to prevent attempts by foreign interests to seize properties on Barbuda, the government will provide a crown grant of one dollar for Barbudians to obtain legal ownership over their current land parcels. The resale of the properties can only occur with the agreement of the Barbuda Council, the local governing authority on the island. However, Browne has also negotiated a deal with the Wahhabist-dominated United Arab Emirates for it to install an 800-megawatt solar power facility and a modern medical clinic on Barbuda. Such deals with either Emiratis or Saudis usually come with significant strings attached, including opening non-Muslim countries like Barbuda to Wahhabist religious infiltration of education systems and religious institutions.
St. Martin — both the French and Dutch parts — the Dutch-ruled islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, Anguilla, TCI, BVI, the US Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos have all demanded, to varying degrees, more autonomy from their colonial masters. Saba and St. Eustatius, without the consent of their residents, were turned into “public entities” of the Netherlands after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2011. Rather than receiving more autonomy, these colonial territories were relegated to the status of municipalities of the Netherlands. The same situation exists in French St. Martin. Dutch St. Maarten is an “autonomous country” governed by the Dutch King, another neo-colonialist contrivance. On September 5, 2017, just before Irma struck the Dutch Caribbean islands, leaders of St. Eustatius and Bonaire, the latter unaffected by the hurricane, complained to the Dutch parliament that attempts by the Dutch to totally annex their islands “violated their self-determination and human rights.”
While British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a Trump-like dolt of a political leader, was slow in responding to assistance requests from BVI, TCI, and Anguilla, most local leaders stood fast. BVI Premier Orlando Smith said, “We are a proud nation” and would bounce back from massive devastation of its islands and capital of Road Town on Tortola. London neo-colonialists do not see territories like BVI as “nations,” but merely extra-territorial conveniences for offshore shell corporations and tax evaders.
TCI’s Grand Turk, Salt Cay, South and Middle Caicos were also devastated by Irma. TCI Premier Sharlene Cartwright-Robinson, who, unlike some of her predecessors who demanded independence for TCI, is a compliant puppet of the British government and its appointed governor, was criticized for being too lackadaisical in the wake of Irma. In fact, she was forced to visit Grand Turk and the TCI capital of Cockburn Town on a Cayman Islands police helicopter. A local TCI pastor on Providenciales, clearly annoyed at the slow response of the British governor and TCI premier, told Caribbean News Now, “A British warship that will only come here for a photo shoot? We have lost a day already. Let us not waste any more time.”
Officials of Anguilla, which has a rich history of unsuccessfully declaring independence from Britain, called the response of May and Johnson to the plight of Anguilla “disgraceful.” Josephine Connor, a former government adviser to the Chief Minister of Anguilla, told SkyNews, “We in the territories feel like third-class citizens because I’d rather wager that if there were something coming like that, of the same magnitude, to the mainland U.K., I suspect that there would be far more attention being paid.” It was estimated the HMS Ocean, on deployment in the Mediterranean, would take up to 14 days to reach Anguilla. Anguilla Chief Minister Victor Banks expressed concern over the lack of financial aid from Britain for the island to rebuild from its massive devastation.
Similarly, officials in virtually bankrupted Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands lashed out at initial inattention to Irma’s destruction on their islands from the Trump administration. Residents of St. John, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Culebra, and Vieques, stunned by the ferocity of Irma, were then faced with rampant thirst and hunger due to the lack of fresh water and food. Many islanders felt abandoned by the United States. The Marriott Corporation, which chartered a ship to evacuate its hotel guests from St. Thomas after the hurricane, refused to evacuate to Puerto Rico non-guest children and elderly residents even though plenty of empty space was available on the vessel.
The neo-colonial powers will be sure to exact a terrible price from their Caribbean colonies for the meager amount of assistance they are receiving. The first victim will be any notion of autonomy or self-determination previously enjoyed by the islanders. The first rebuilding will of be the luxurious hotel and yacht club compounds of the filthy rich. The native islanders will be lucky to catch a few crumbs of assistance.
An online countdown says there are just days left till the alleged apocalyptic event predicted by author and doomsayer David Meade for September 23. The prediction, involving the so-called Planet X smashing into Earth, has been repeatedly debunked by NASA.
Meade wrote a book called “Planet X” in which he predicts that the planet, which is also called Nibiru, crashes into Earth in October. Recent events, including Hurricane Harvey and the solar eclipse, have caused him to move the date forward by a few weeks.
Meade cites Bible passages from Luke 21:25 and 26 as proof that these recent events are signs of an impending apocalypse.
His belief that the world will end is based on another Bible verse called The Woman and the Dragon from the Book of Revelation.
Evangelical Christian publication “Unsealed” tells the story of the verse in a four-minute YouTube video called “September 23, 2017: You Need to See This.” It uses animation from the planetarium software Stellarium showing constellations Virgo and Leo setting with the Sun. It is superimposed over the landscape of Jerusalem.
The theory has sparked feverish speculation online, with numerous conspiracy theory videos emerging on YouTube. A countdown clock has even been created to, supposedly, mark our planet’s final moments.
NASA has repeatedly stated that Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an internet hoax and there is no factual basis for these claims.
The space agency say that if a planet was on a collision course with Earth, astronomers would have been tracking it for the last decade and it would be visible to the naked eye by now.
“After searching hundreds of millions of objects across our sky, NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up no evidence of the hypothesized celestial body in our solar system commonly dubbed ‘Planet X,’” it previously said in a statement.
Senior NASA scientist David Morrison also debunked the claim in a video titled “The truth about Niburu”.
“It’s not real, Niburu doesn’t exist, we can’t see it we can’t detect its gravity and we don’t see a signature of its previous passages because there weren’t any,” Morrison said.
As Hurricane Harvey lashed Texas, Naomi Klein wasted no time in diagnosing the “real root causes” behind the disaster, indicting “climate pollution, systemic racism, underfunding of social services, and overfunding of police.” A day after her essay appeared, George Monbiot argued that no one wants to ask the tough questions about the coastal flooding spawned during Hurricane Harvey because to do so would be to challenge capitalism—a system wedded to “perpetual growth on a finite planet”—and call into question the very foundations of “the entire political and economic system.”
Of the two choices, I vote for Monbiot’s interpretation. Nearly forty years ago, the historian Donald Worster in his classic study of one of the worst natural disasters in world history, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, wrote that capitalism, which he understood as an economic culture founded on maximizing imperatives and a determination to treat nature as a form of capital, “has been the decisive factor in this nation’s use of nature.”
Care must be taken not to imagine capitalism as a timeless phenomenon. Capitalism has a history and that history is important if we are to properly diagnose what happened recently in Texas and is about to happen as Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida. What we need to understand is how capitalism has managed to reproduce itself since the Great Depression, but in a way that has put enormous numbers of people and tremendous amounts of property in harm’s way along the stretch from Texas to New England.
The production of risk began during the era of what is sometimes called regulated capitalism between the 1930s and the early 1970s. This form of capitalism with a “human face” involved state intervention to ensure a modicum of economic freedom but it also led the federal government to undertake sweeping efforts to control nature. The motives may well have seemed pure. But the efforts to control the natural world, though they worked in the near term, are beginning to seem inadequate to the new world we currently inhabit. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built reservoirs to control floods in Houston just as it built other water-control structures during the same period in New Orleans and South Florida. These sweeping water-control exploits laid the groundwork for massive real estate development in the post–World War II era.
All along the coast from Texas to New York and beyond developers plowed under wetlands to make way for more building and more impervious ground cover. But the development at the expense of marsh and water could never have happened on the scale it did without the help of the American state. Ruinous flooding of Houston in 1929 and 1935 compelled the Corps of Engineers to build the Addicks and Barker Dams. The dams combined with a massive network of channels—extending today to over 2,000 miles—to carry water off the land, and allowed Houston, which has famously eschewed zoning, to boom during the postwar era.
The same story unfolded in South Florida. A 1947 hurricane caused the worst coastal flooding in a generation and precipitated federal intervention in the form of the Central and Southern Florida Project. Again, the Corps of Engineers set to work transforming the land. Eventually a system of canals that if laid end to end would extend all the way from New York City to Las Vegas crisscrossed the southern part of the peninsula. Life for the more than five million people who live in between Orlando and Florida Bay would be unimaginable without this unparalleled exercise in the control of nature.
It is not simply that developers bulldozed wetlands with reckless abandon in the postwar period. The American state paved the way for that development by underwriting private accumulation.
Concrete was the capitalist state’s favored medium. But as the floods mounted in the 1960s, it turned to non-structural approaches meant to keep the sea at bay. The most famous program along these lines was the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) established in 1968, a liberal reform that grew out of the Great Society. The idea was that the federal government would oversee a subsidized insurance program for homeowners and in return state and local municipalities would impose regulations to keep people and property out of harm’s way.
At the same time that the U.S. government launched the NFIP, a Keynesian crisis that would extend over the course of the next decade and a half began to unfold. Declining corporate profits were brought on by rising wages, mounting class conflict, escalating competition from Japan and western Europe, and increased consumer and environmental regulation. The profit squeeze combined with stagflation and widespread fiscal problems to produce major economic dislocation.
A new form of capitalism began to slowly emerge as business responded to the crisis. Major institutional change occurred in the global economy, in the relationship between capital and labor, and most important for our concerns here, in the state’s role in economic life. In the early 1970s the Business Roundtable was established as a corporate lobbying group. Among its tasks was to undermine various forms of consumer and environmental regulation.
This was the context for the assault on the liberal flood insurance program. By the 1990s, under the Clinton Administration, the pretense of regulating land use on the local level was all but dismissed in favor of a policy that simply encouraged localities to do the right thing to ensure the safety of people and property. It is not an accident that one of the worst-hit developments in Houston—southern Kingwood—was built in the last years of the twentieth century and the aughts right in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s designated 100-year floodplain.
Nor is there anything the least bit natural in how cities in the postwar United States have functioned as profitable sites for capital accumulation. Developers have been able to derive profits from capitalist urbanization in coastal locations because of what was effectively a giant subsidy by the American state.
Flirtation with disaster is in a sense the essence of neoliberal capitalism, a hyperactive form of this exploitative economic order that seems to know no limits. Some might find comfort in the words of Alexander Cockburn: “A capitalism that thrives best on the abnormal, on disasters, is by definition in decline.”
Others, myself included, worry that the current organization of this market economy to benefit the interests of capitalists, with its blind, utopian faith in the price mechanism, is likely to head in precisely the direction that the economic historian Karl Polanyi predicted in 1944. An institutional arrangement organized around a “self-adjusting market,” he warned, “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”
In preparation for Hurricane Irma, residents have been instructed to make the necessary arrangements to ensure their safety and the the safety of their loved ones. But in Polk County, if you’re a fugitive of the law, the directive is to turn yourself into the police instead of ensuring your safety. Should those with outstanding warrants no matter the reason, turn up at a shelter, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd is threatening arrest and a transfer to the county jail.
The sheriff, who is known for his outspoken comments, made the threat in a series of posts to Twitter.
“If you go to a shelter for #Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail,” Judd tweeted to his nearly 66,000 followers on Twitter.
Judd also posted that officers would be at every shelter checking IDs and that sex offenders and sex predators would not be allowed inside.
When checking IDs, if an officer sees that someone has a warrant, that person will be taken into custody, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Carrie Horstman said.
Horstman added officers don’t have a way of seeing what crime the warrant is for, so it’s possible those with non-violent misdemeanor offenses could be arrested.
This means if someone does not wish to be separated from a loved one, many will take the unnecessary risk of attempting to go a different shelter, or not seeking shelter at all.
“Officers are legally obligated to take a person into custody if they have a warrant,” she said.
Judd said in preparation for the hurricane, fugitives should turn themselves into the jail because “it’s a secure location.”
Horstman said the posts were made ahead of the storm to give people ample time to prepare.
“We cannot and we will not have innocent children in a shelter with sexual offenders and predators. Period,” Judd posted to his Twitter, @PolkCoSheriff.
Horstman said since there’s a possibility children will be in the shelters, sex offenders and sex predators are not allowed inside. She said they had a similar policy during the 2004 hurricane season. It’s unclear if any arrests were made at shelters due to warrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said Judd should “focus on preparing for Irma, not burnishing your Joe Arpaio-style ‘tough cop’ credentials with irresponsible tweets.”
Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona, was found guilty of criminal contempt after denying a court order to halt stopping immigrants because of suspicion they were in the country illegally. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump last month.
The nonprofit says most people with outstanding warrants are low-level offenders and pose no threat in a shelter.
Judd’s comments “send the message that these individuals must choose between facing a natural disaster without aid and shelter or going to jail over things like unpaid traffic tickets,” a statement from ACLU reads.
Asked if supported Judd’s actions, Gov. Rick Scott said, “I haven’t seen that. My expectation is that everyone needs to follow the evacuation orders and get to safety. I’d have to look at exactly what was said.’’
Horstman said undocumented immigrants will not be affected by the policy. She also said that the policy will help the county keep a log at the shelter, which she said is important during a natural disaster.
“We aren’t sitting there looking for people to arrest,” she said “We are sitting there to keep people safe.”
The article continues:
But State Representative Carlos Smith said the practice of checking IDs of evacuees seeking refuge unfairly targeted undocumented immigrants.
“The message has already been received by the 18,000 undocumented persons in Polk County,” Smith said. “This is not the message we need to be sending out with a disaster upon us.”
Smith added that if anyone in Polk County felt threatened to go to shelters in Polk County, “they can absolutely come to Orange County and Orlando.”
While it is comforting that those with outstanding warrants will have somewhere to go, they should not be made to make the choice between their safety and risking arrest. Many will not be alone and will be taking that risk with children or elderly in tow.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think that Sheriff Grady Judd has the citizen’s best interest in mind, or do you think he is excessively exerting his power to vulnerable people in a time of need?
“The current President and CEO of the American Red Cross (since 2008) is Gail J. McGovern, whose total yearly compensation for 2010 was about $1,037,000 (considerably higher than the $651,957 figure mentioned above) and for 2011 was about $561,000.” Source (Snopes)
Though the Red Cross has a historical reputation for providing relief to victims of natural disasters and other emergencies, the organization’s practices have tarnished its name over the last few years.
HOUSTON, TX – AUGUST 28: Volunteers get a briefing at the George Brown Convention Center that has been turned into a shelter run by the American Red Cross to house victims of the high water from Hurricane Harvey on August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas. Harvey, which made landfall north of Corpus Christi late Friday evening, is expected to dump upwards to 40 inches of rain in areas of Texas over the next couple of days. (Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)
Do you remember the time when #redcross admitted that they didn’t know where the $500 million collected fund relief for Haiti really go to (Read Here: https://goo.gl/TZB6ka)? Same happening now for #HurricaneHarvey donations.
Though the Red Cross has a historical reputation for providing relief to victims of natural disasters and other emergencies, the organization’s practices have tarnished its name over the last few years.
Amid the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the Red Cross reportedly accepted nearly $500 million in relief money but built only six homes with the funds even though they claimed they had provided homes to 130,000 people. These failures prompted some Haitians to advise the world against donating funds to the Red Cross.
The organization was accused of diverting resources and supplies to bolster its public image during Hurricane Sandy. As an investigation by NPR and ProPublica found:
“The Red Cross national headquarters in Washington ‘diverted assets for public relations purposes.’ A former Red Cross official managing the Sandy effort says 40 percent of available trucks were assigned to serve as backdrops for news conferences.”
The outlets reported that “[d]istribution of relief was ‘politically driven instead of [Red Cross] planned,’” noting many organizational failures.
Further, a report released last year by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley found that 25% of funds donated to aid in relief for victims of the earthquake was actually spent on internal costs. That amounted to roughly $124 million.
Now, amid the hurricane in Texas, the Red Cross is admitting it currently doesn’t know how the funds it’s receiving are being spent. NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed Red Cross executive Brad Kieserman to ask how the funds will be distributed. Kieserman said that as of Wednesday morning, “had spent $50 million on Harvey relief, mainly on 232 shelters for 66,000 people.”
“Through donations, how much of every dollar goes to relief?” NPR’s Ailsa Chang asked him.
But he responded without actually providing an answer to her question:
“Yeah, I don’t think I know the answer to that any better than the chief fundraiser knows how many, how much it costs to put a volunteer downrange for a week and how many emergency response vehicles I have on the road today. So I think if he was on this interview and you were asking how many relief vehicles in Texas, I don’t think he’d know the answer and I don’t know the answer to the financial question I’m afraid.”
She pressed him about the Red Cross’ previous failures and misallocation of resources. According to NPR’s transcript:
“Is that still happening? Such a substantial percentage of donations going to internal administrative costs, rather than to relief?
“Kieserman: It’s not something I would have any visibility on. I can talk about what it costs to deliver certain relief services.
“Chang: Yeah.
“Kieserman: But the way the internal revenue stream works, uhh …
“Chang: You don’t know what portion of that amount.
“Kieserman: Not really.
“Chang: You don’t know what portion of that total amount is for relief.
“Kieserman: No, I really don’t. I wish I could answer your question, but it’s not something I have visibility on in the role that I play in this organization.
The executive ultimately claimed that “The folks I work for are very, very attentive to cost effectiveness and cost efficiencies in making sure that as much as every dollar that we spend on an operation is client-facing.”
Slate reporter Jonathan Katz also reported the organization declined to disclose how much money they had spent or raised so far. Katz ultimately urged readers not to contribute to the Red Cross.
The Red Cross continues to face criticism and urgings for individuals who want to help to take their donations elsewhere. The Independentreports that over the weekend, Dan Gillmor, author and professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, advised against donating to the Red Cross. Many other social media users have expressed similar sentiments.
Despite the Red Cross’ failings, however, there are still many organizations doing important work.
The group A Just Harvey Recovery lists a number of local efforts accepting contributions. The Cajun Navy, a volunteer effort that previously rescued victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Louisiana floods last year, has also been working round the clock in Texas and is accepting donations. There are many organizations and shelters working locally to provide relief and essential services. If you would like to contribute or volunteer, you can find some of them here, here and here.
WeatherWar101 Published on 30 Aug 2017 There are countless ways to see Harvey is not “Mother Nature,” but watching it disappear and refuel with massive Water Vapor Bursts three days in a row (at exactly the same time of day and from exactly the same areas), proves beyond any reasonable doubt, that this catastrophe is entirely manmade. I knew that I would be able to show four days of exactly the same refueling process (if I waited until this morning), but after 16 straight hours of work on this video (and 6 hours to render it) I was simply too exhausted to wait, and needed to get this video posted.More than that, it irrefutably illustrates that not only is it manmade, the inflicted misery is far beyond intentional. Even after the first night of Harvey’s landfall, the complete destruction of Rockport, and two feet of flooding is Houston, the perpetrators were far from satisfied with the devastation they caused.If the perpetrators had any semblance of mercy or human decency, they simply would have allowed Harvey to dissipate as it was already doing (illustrated in the first satellite series in this video), and allowed the victims of this disaster to begin trying to recover their lives.Instead, they deliberately refueled this storm system with massive On-Land Water Vapor Generation (illustrated and proven by the tell-tale Raid Evaporation Bursts which are uncontestably manmade), causing the worst night of flooding in Houston for the entire event.
If the perpetrators had any semblance of mercy or human decency, they simply would have allowed Harvey to dissipate on the second night as it was already doing (illustrated in the second satellite series in this video), and allowed the twice victimized community some relief from their nightmare.
Instead, they deliberately refueled this storm system for a second time with massive On-Land Water Vapor Generation, as well as Massive Water Vapor Generation streaming from the Rapid Evaporation “Firehose” in the Gulf. As is always the case, the streaming water vapor made pushing it past saturation (for the third round of torrential downpour) easy, which you can plainly see by the explosion of deluge, as soon as it hit the On-Land Water Vapor Generators.
If the perpetrators had any semblance of mercy or human decency, they simply would have allowed Harvey to dissipate on the third night as it was already doing, but not only did they not want it to end, they wanted to re-strengthen it. Although I didn’t have time to include it (and I certainly have the satellite imagery to prove it), they “gently” pushed Harvey BACK out to the Gulf using a series of Generated Gravity Waves – giving the all but collapsed rotation an opportunity to survive and strengthen. Unsurprisingly (hopefully you are beginning to see the pattern) they once again simultaneously refueled this storm with Massive On-Land and Gulf “Firehose” Water Vapor Generation (Tell-Tale Rapid Evaporation), for the fourth straight night of unimaginable suffering for the people of Houston and Eastern Texas.
On and on it goes. Exactly the same refueling process happened last night, and exactly the same refueling process will happen tonight. As Harvey is now making its THIRD landfall – this time in Louisiana (uncoincidentally on the Anniversary of Katrina landfall) the perpetrators still intend to cause as much death, destruction, and suffering to the people of this country – as they possible can. Know for a fact – they will not stop fueling this system, until conditions make it no longer possible. If human suffering is a factor at all, it can only be interpreted as a desired outcome.
“Tornados, wildfires, water spouts, whirlpools, dust storms, volcanic eruptions, weird animal activity, and much more, made this May just one more extremely alarming month on planet earth.”
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the environment on our planet seems to be mirroring the extreme levels of chaos and violence playing out at the human level. This May, massive (and often ‘unprecedented’) flooding once again caused widespread devastation across the planet.
Extremely late snow fall from the USA to Europe to China caused serious problems for people and the food on which they rely, as did large and damaging hail storms.
Tornados, wildfires, water spouts, whirlpools, dust storms, volcanic eruptions, weird animal activity, and much more, made this May just one more extremely alarming month on planet earth.
To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it’s taking place now: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.
Check out previous installments in this series – now translated into multiple languages – and more videos from SOTT Media here, here, or here.
You can help us chronicle the signs by sending your video suggestions to sott@sott.net
Planetary environmental chaos continued unabated this April.
After Peru was inundated in March, Columbia was next in line for massive rainfall and flooding which provoked deadly landslides in the city of Mocoa. Major flooding and landslides also hit India, Indonesia, the USA and China, while
Wildfires once again struck the US state of Florida while very late snow saw many European nations blanketed, with many crops destroyed.
Meteor/fireballs were also spotted from one end of the planet to the other and a comet made a special appearance.
Music used: ‘Escape from the Temple’ by Per Kiilstofte. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it’s taking place now: Check out our book “Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.”
You can help us chronicle thesigns by sending your video suggestions to sott@sott.net
No Mr. Hawking, we should not do that. If this species cannot get its act together by then, it should not survive but go into extinction. What? Export our inhumanity, our cruelty, to other worlds? I don’t think so. We deserve extinction.
Upcoming series set to show that “Prof. Hawking’s ambition isn’t as fantastical as it sounds”
Home sweet home? A computer-generated view depicts part of Mars. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/flickr/cc)
If the human species is to avert extinction, it’s got just 100 years to leave Earth and colonize a new planet.
That’s according to noted theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who makes the prediction in the upcoming BBC series “Expedition New Earth,” set to air later this year as part of its reignited Tomorrow’s World programming.
“Professor Stephen Hawking thinks the human species will have to populate a new planet within 100 years if it is to survive. With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics, and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious,” a BBC press statement announcing the documentary says.
The show will explore “if and how humans can reach for the stars and move to different planets” and will take viewers on a global journey that “shows that Prof. Hawking’s ambition isn’t as fantastical as it sounds—that science fact is closer to science fiction than we ever thought,” BBC writes.
It’s not the first time Hawking has given time frames for getting off of Earth; still, the century deadline marks a more dire prediction than the scientist made just last year, when he gave humanity 1,000 years to find a new planet to call home.
Speaking in November at the Oxford Union, he said: “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”
This is to all warmongers out there who salivate at the thought of war, especially WW3. Dingbat eejits, you have not thought this through, have you? Do you really think humanity would survive a nuclear war between the USA and Russia?
World War III Nuclear Explosion Coming Soon Near Your Living Room Window
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945
Planetary environmental chaos continued unabated this month. Several spectacular fireballs were seen from one end of the world to the other. Wildfires ravaged several mid-West states while unusually strong winds hit Illinois and New York. Madagascar got slammed by a ferocious storm as did Brazil, New Zealand and France.
Severe flooding hit several parts of the globe, but the worst affected was Peru where dozens of people died and hundreds of thousands have been left with no homes. With freak tidal waves from Iran to South Africa, strange ‘gas’ explosions in the UK and methane gas leaks in Russia, not to mention snow off the coast of Africa and lightning scoring direct strikes on cars, March was a pretty intense month for the planet and its inhabitants.
To understand what’s going on, check out our book explaining how all these events are part of a natural climate shift, and why it’s taking place now: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.
Check out previous installments in this series – now translated into multiple languages – and more videos from SOTT Media here, here, or here.
You can help us chronicle the signs by sending your video suggestions to sott@sott.net
The information in this article is not even a scratch in the surface of the true magnitude of this nuclear disaster. The radiation will bio accumulate in the ocean and atmosphere for centuries to come. Mankind is staring our very extinction in the face.
anonews.co
March 11, 2017
March 11, 2011: A massive earthquake of 9.0 magnitude struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a devastating tsunami, which left parts of the country in utter shambles.
Official reports claim that 15,891 people lost their lives, 6,152 were injured and 2,584 were reported missing.
This was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the world, since modern record keeping began in 1900.[1]This earthquake was so intense in magnitude, that it shifted Honshu, the main island of Japan by an estimated eight feet and actually shifted the Earth’s axis by between four and ten inches![2]
Japan is a nation containing many nuclear reactors which produce roughly 30% of the nation’s electricity.[3] The majority of operable nuclear reactors are right along the coast, in one of the most seismically active areas on the entire planet!
Map which shows the locations of Japan’s, reactor sights. Notice how they are along the coast, in perhaps the most seismically active location on the entire planet.
The powerful tsunami caused complete devastation of three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, the cores of which melted within the first three days. In November 2011, the Japanese Science Ministry reported that radioactive cesium had contaminated 11,580 square miles of the land surface of Japan,[4] with an additional 4,500 square miles contaminated.[5]
The destroyed reactor sites have been dumping hundreds of tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean, every single day for the past four years and the devastating results are now becoming plainly obvious. Radioactive cesium (an alkali metal) rapidly contaminates an ecosystem and poisons the entire food chain, and this waste offshoot has been detected in Japanese foodstuffs over a 200 mile radius of the Daiichi facility.[6]
Cesium and other radioactive waste products are bioaccumulative, meaning that they accumulate in an organism at a rate faster than the organism can eliminate it. Of course the Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) have blatantly lied about the amount of radioactive waste that has been leaking into the Pacific, however, the devastating results have been impossible to ignore.
I’ve wondered since the beginning of this disaster-which has already shown to be far worse that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine, in 1986-why the world’s top, leading scientists have not come together to figure out how to stop the leaking radiation. The reason is because no one knows how to deal with this catastrophe.
In March of 2015, it was reported in the Times of London, that Akira Ono, the chief of the Fukushima power station admitted that the technology needed to decommission the three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed.[7]
More recently, Naohiro Masuda, the decommissioning chief of the Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning Company, also stated that the technology does not exist to remove the highly radioactive debris from the damaged reactors:
Ono also claimed that decommissioning the plant by 2051 may be impossible without huge leaps in technological advancement.[8] It’s also been estimated that plutonium fallout has been 70,000 times greater than atomic bomb fallout in Japan![9]
Japan has also seen a skyrocketing of childhood Cancer rates, particularly, thyroid Cancer.[10] As of August, 2013, TEPCO admitted that between “20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels[11] of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the disaster.”[12] Since it’s been shown over and again, that TEPCO repeatedly lied and covered up the true extent of the disaster, that number is most likely far greater.
While official sources keep claiming that there is no danger from the leaking radiation, sea life all along the west coast of the US has been dying in alarming numbers, and many fish and sea creatures tested off the west coast have shown extremely high amounts of radioactivity, that far exceeds safe limits. In actuality though, there really are no “safe” limits of radiation.
The Japan Times reported on Feb 25th, 2015, that cesium and other radioactive waste was pouring from the reactor one site, directly into the ocean.[13] TEPCO did nothing to prevent the leak and simply ignored the problem for close to a year![14]
There has been a massive die-off of marine life along the west coast of the US, which has scientists “baffled.” Do you mean to tell me that scientists studying this death of the Pacific haven’t taken into account the possibility that it could be caused by the hundreds of tons of nuclear waste that has been pouring into the Pacific each day for the last four years? So few dare to admit the extent of damage caused by this disaster or the fact that it is forcing us to face the possibility of our own extinction. What happens when the planet’s largest body of water is rendered lifeless on a planet made up mostly of water? What happens when the radiation accumulates in the atmosphere and is spread throughout the world by the jet stream?
Massive die-off of sea lions along the west coast has left scientists “baffled.” Might it have something to do with the hundreds of tons of radioactive waste that has been pouring into the Pacific each day for four years?
In 2013, the Huffington Post reported that massive amounts of krill washed up along the west coast in a 250 mile stretch from Oregon to California.[15] Krill is an essential part of the ocean’s food chain. When marine life on the low end of the food chain dies off, the larger animals that feed on that marine life starve to death. Carcasses of dead sea lions and seals that were examined revealed high doses of radiation,[16] and yet, mainstream scientists remain “baffled.”
This dead sea lion showed extremely high levels of radiation near its heart and liver. The Pacific Ocean is dying at an alarming rate, and no one seems to notice it, or, they simply put on the blinders and embrace abject denial.
It has also been widely reported that massive amounts of starfish have appeared along the west coast that have literally turned to mush. USA Today reported on this,[17] and of course they claim that no one knows why; it’s a mystery. Might it have something to do with the fact that the Pacific has become a toxic, nuclear waste dump? Of course not, that’s just crazy, paranoid, tin-foil-hat talk. The level of cognitive dissonance that ensnares the minds of most people is truly staggering to me.
USA Today headline from Dec, 2013. No one knows why? Might it have something to do with the fact that the Pacific Ocean has become the world’s largest, toxic waste dump?
It’s also been reported that 98% of the sea floor of the Pacific is covered with dead sea life.[18] Not surprisingly, mainstream scientists blame this massive death of the Pacific on global warming.
“In the 24 years of this study, the past two years have been the biggest amounts of this detritus by far,” said marine biologist Christine Huffard, who works at the research station off of California. “Multiple other stations throughout the Pacific have seen similarly alarming increases.”[19]
The feeble efforts of TEPCO and the Japanese government to stop the radioactive leaks, with ice walls, dams, and other paltry, makeshift remedies have been in vain. Nobody knows how to contain the radioactive leaks, so the Japanese govt. and TEPCO do the next best thing; they lie about it and downplay the dangers. Business as usual!
The head of the National Cancer Research Center in Japan, reported in Feb, 2015, that Cancer rates have skyrocketed by 6,000% and that it was being “swept under the rug.”[20] It must be global warming causing this unprecedented rise in Cancer rates eh? In Jan, 2015, Japan’s nuclear regulator approved TEPCO’s ingenious plan to simply drain waste-water into the ocean.[21]
In Nov, 2014, Ken Buesseler, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution claimed:
“My biggest concern is what’s going on in Japan today, and how that might make its way across to our coast. We know it’s still leaking because we’re measuring higher levels off Japan to this day. Even just the basic question, ‘How much radioactivity was released at Fukushima?’ I can’t answer that today. We may never be able to because of the lack of sampling, particularly in the ocean.”[22]
An experienced, veteran sailor by the name of Ivan Macfadyen, who has sailed the Pacific taking part in races, stated in an interview that:
“It’s dead…for thousands of miles there was nothing [between US and Japan] like sailing in a dead sea…everything’s all gone. Just talking about it makes me feel like I want to cry. No birds, no fish, no sharks, no dolphins, no turtles, nothing.”[23]
This is the legacy that humanity is leaving for their posterity; a dead world. Humanity has allowed itself to be ruled by a ruthless, psychopathic gang of parasites whose greed and insatiable lust for power knows no bounds. There really is no one to blame but ourselves. The information in this article is not even a scratch in the surface of the true magnitude of this nuclear disaster. The radiation will bioaccumulate in the ocean and atmosphere for centuries to come. Mankind is staring our very extinction in the face. This is an opportunity for humanity to face the force of our own destructiveness, and to come together as one family. Unfortunately, the average person’s thoughts seem to be firmly fixated on the sports scores, who’s blowing who in the latest, celebrity scandal or the latest pop culture fad. Unfortunately, the world’s masses suffer from a serious condition known as, Rectal-Cranial Inversion!
Let us also not forget the Deepwater Horizon disaster that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010. Massive amounts of oil leaked into the gulf, and in the subsequent cleanup attempt, the well was capped which caused a crack in the seabed, causing extreme amounts of oil to pour into the gulf, killing marine life in droves and destroying the fishing industry in that region. A highly toxic and controversial dispersant called Corexit was dumped into the sea, and the results have been catastrophic.
Fishermen have reported sea creatures being caught in the gulf that had lesions on their bodies and all sorts of other anomalies including mutated sea life, eyeless shrimp and ulcers[24]
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
Comment: See also: