Trinity College Dublin
Phys.orgMon, 10 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC
FILE PHOTO
The world is waking up to the fact that human-driven carbon emissions are responsible for warming our climate, driving unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and placing us on course for the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history.
However, new research publishing this week in leading international journal PNAS, sheds fresh light on the complicated interplay of factors affecting global climate and the carbon cycle — and on what transpired millions of years ago to spark two of the most devastating extinction events in Earth's history.
Using chemical data from ancient mudstone deposits in Wales, an international team involving scientists from Trinity College Dublin discovered that
periodic changes in the shape of Earth's orbit around the Sun were partly responsible for changes in the carbon-cycle and global climate during and in between the Triassic-Jurassic Mass Extinction (around 201 million years ago, when around 80% of the species on Earth disappeared forever) and the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (around 183 million years ago).
Comment: As you'll see in the links below even mainstream science is no longer able to deny that the global warming agenda is unsupported by both past and present data:
And there's more to the story:
Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle
Also check out SOTT radio's:
© AP
The U.S. military is preparing to report
a more than 50% jump in cases of traumatic brain injury stemming from Iran's missile attack on a base in Iraq last month, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement, said there were over 100 cases of TBI,
up from the 64 previously reported last month.
The Pentagon declined to comment, but in the past had said to expect an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms can take time to manifest and troops can sometimes take longer to report them.
No U.S. troops were killed or faced immediate bodily injury when Iran fired missiles at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport on Jan. 3.
© Unknown
SOTU Address: President Donald Trump • VP Mike Pence • Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Barely into the New Year, 2020 vision has brought many revelations into better focus, making several ongoing observations perfectly clear. Although there are those who've been watching the dots of The Matrix assemble into the big picture for decades now,
the election of Donald Trump has increasingly exposed what was hidden in plain sight for so long.
The awakening for many Americans could be compared to that of actor Jim Carrey's character in the 1998 film
The Truman Show. In that narrative, the unsuspecting star of a global reality television program came to the realization his entire worldview was formed within a bubble; a literal bubble that generated
bubblevision in Carrey's character as all of those around (and above) him performed right on cue.
Truly, it feels like that now in America. The times have become surreal.
Vanessa Beeley
RTSat, 08 Feb 2020 12:33 UTC
Screenshot from the trailer for For Sama (2019) PBS distribution.
Oscar-nominated '
For Sama' is a gritty, well produced "documentary" claiming to present the reality of the five-year siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Just how deceptive is this portrayal?
The 90-minute video directed by UK Channel 4's Waad Al-Kateab and English filmmaker Edward Watts has been unanimously praised in the mainstream media and it might win this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. But does the film present a truly unbiased picture of the Syrian conflict or, rather, just the side of the story that fits the Western narrative about the war?
© REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, February 4, 2020
© Eneas De Troya/CC BY 2.0
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's president
While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered,
Mexico's new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a
press conference on Jan. 6, he said
the neoliberal model had failed; private banks were not serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the
United Kingdom's left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn,
with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico's 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century.
Called Mexico's "first full-fledged left-wing experiment," AMLO's election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book
A New Hope for Mexico,
"In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers.... Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites."
Danielle Ryan
RTSun, 09 Feb 2020 19:55 UTC
© Reuters / Phil Noble
Polls have closed in Ireland's general election and, with no party securing a strong lead, confusion abounds as voters wait to see which parties will agree to do business with each other to form a coalition.
An Ipsos MRBI exit poll published by Ireland's state broadcaster RTE at 10pm shows FG
[Fine Gael], SF
[Sinn Fein] and FF
[Fianna Fail] tied with a statistically insignificant (given a margin of error of 1.3 percent) difference of 22.4, 22.3 and 22.2 percent of the vote respectively.
A Sinn Fein surge in the run up to election day looks to have translated into votes at the ballot box, allowing party leader Mary Lou McDonald to head into post-election discussions with some serious clout - and possibly even form a coalition either with another major party, or with the Green Party, the Social Democrats and independents - though the 'grand left coalition' still looks like one of the least-likely outcomes.
Comment: It'll be a few days before results are counted, but so far Sinn Fein actually appear to be doing better than even the exit poll suggested, approaching 25% of the popular vote as of 22:00 CET this Sunday February 9th.
Ironically, Sinn Fein themselves apparently didn't believe they were going to do this well, as they didn't field enough candidates to translate their large vote share into a corresponding number of seats!
This means that the two establishment parties, if they hinder Sinn Fein efforts to form a coalition government this time around, will almost certainly lose more seats to them if another election were held later this year.
Ireland still has some way to go before its fractured polity of multiple small parties and independent candidates reunite under strong leadership, as in the 1918 election when (old) Sinn Fein won the vast majority of seats, but something historic may indeed be in motion here.
One thing is certain: Ireland's current leader, Leo Varadkar, is out.
Daniel J. Levy
HaaretzSun, 03 Feb 2019 19:59 UTC
© Reuters
A fighter from the Free Syrian Army's Al Rahman legion carries a weapon as he walks towards his position on the front line against the forces of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in a Damascus suburb
In his final days as the Israel Defense Forces' Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot confirmed, on the record, that
Israel had directly supported anti-Assad Syrian rebel factions in the Golan Heights by arming them.
This
revelation marks a direct break from Israel's previous media policy on such matters. Until now, Israel has insisted it has only provided humanitarian aid to civilians (through field hospitals on the Golan Heights and in permanent healthcare facilities in northern Israel), and has consistently denied or refused to comment on any other assistance.
In short, none other than Israel's most (until recently) senior serving soldier has admitted that up until his statement, his country's officially stated position on the Syrian civil war was built on the lie of non-intervention.
Comment: This article was published almost exactly one year ago. What a change since then. Syria has regained two-thirds of its territory, and with Russian support, is well on the way to pushing Turkey's terrorist proxies out of Idlib. Unfortunately, the US is still squatting in the resource-rich north-east of the country and at the Al-Tanf border crossing with Iraq, but (probably on Russia's advice) Idlib must be dealt with first. Regaining the illegally-occupied Golan Heights is a distant goal still, but it's unlikely Syria will give up on it. All in all, not the picture Israel was hoping for a year ago.
© SouthFront
Recombination technology has been in use in molecular virology since the 1980s. The structure of the 2019-NCoV virus genome provides a very strong clue on the likely origin of the virus.
Unlike other related coronaviruses,
the 2019-nCoV virus has a unique sequence about 1,378 bp (nucleotide base pairs) long that is not found in related coronaviruses.
Looking at the phylogenetic tree recently published, derived using all the full genome sequence, we see the 2019-nCoV virus does not have clear monophyletic support given the bootstrap value of 75 (Fig 1).
© jameslyonsweiler.com
Close-up on Bootstrap value of 75 for available 2019-nCoV from Lu et al., 2020
The Lancet article [
Full Text]
There is no doubt that
there is a novel sequence in 2019-nCoV; we confirmed this via sequence alignment. Here's the DOT plot:
Comment: It's still only a theory, but if it's in the ballpark, then this outbreak could yet be chalked up to madcap vaccine science...
The author posted the following
update to his website on February 2nd, 2020:
Dr. Marc Wathelet commented that he was puzzled about my report of a spike protein gene homologous to part of the pShuttle-SN vector, given that spike glycoproteins are found in bat coronavirus. He urged me to analyze the homology (sequence similarity) of the SARS-like spike protein element I reported with other spike proteins, saying that any scientist working on coronaviruses would be surprised if there were not a spike protein.
I replied in comment that I, too, would expect protein sequence level homology due to shared conserved domains, but assured him that I would undertake further genome sequence-level (nucleotide) analysis as the location of the novel sequence relative to the other spike proteins is certainly of interest.
A few recent publications (sent to me by followers/readers) contained further bat coronavirus accession numbers, and SARS accession numbers, so I procured the spike protein coding sequence (CDS) of these from NCBI's nucleotide database and aligned them using Blast, with the sequence from the first 2019-nCoV protein as the anchor. (Oddly, that Genbank entry does not label the S protein CDS as a spike glycoprotein, instead annotating it only as a "structural protein").
The resulting massive alignment confirms a major unique inserted element in 2019-nCoV not found in other bat coronaviruses, nor in SARS in the homologous genomic position:
© jameslyonsweiler.com
Blasting the novel sequence region against all non-viral sequences (to pick up vector technology) again results in pShuttle-SN (no surprise) but now this time is also picked up a recombinant coronavirus clone Bat-SRBD spike glycoprotein gene from UNC, USA, (Genbank entry) and other synthetic constructs.
As I published earlier, before anyone points fingers at the Chinese, note that recombinant viruses have been in play in laboratories all across the world in many nations.
The overlap occurs at the 3′ end of the novel region (search restricted from 21600-22350 bp in the query) 2019-nCoV sequence originally blasted against the other coronavirus CDS. It could arguably merely be that I selected too large a region; I chose the region visually to include the fully potentially inserted sequence including any homologous vector elements at the 5′ or 3′ end.
It is worth pointing out that due to the length of overlap, the sequence strength is considered moderately strong: highly significant E-value, high %identity, but short sequence length. These findings cannot be considered strong validation for obvious reasons: produced by the same analyst, using (part) of the same data. Spike proteins determine receptor binding for entry into cells, and 2019-nCoV appears to, like some bat species SARS coronavirus, target ACE2 receptors.1
For those tracking closely, I confirmed that the novel inserted sequence in the large alignment above is the same as the novel sequence I reported a few days ago. The sequence of interest is here.
inserted-portion
1. Hou et al., 2010. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) proteins of different bat species confer variable susceptibility to SARS-CoV entry Arch Virol 155:1563-1569
These results do show, however, that the novel sequence is not likely present in other coronaviruses.
Thus, it still seems prudent that this inserted sequence in 2019-nCoV become the focus on urgent research, and that laboratory sources be included in the search for the origins of 2019-nCoV and potential targets for treatments and expected pathophysiology in patients infected with 2019-nCoV.
I am grateful to Dr. Wathelet for this inquiries and requests for additional clarification.
Santiago Mayor, Andrew Korybko
One WorldTue, 04 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC
This is the full English-language original version of the interview that Andrew Korybko gave to Argentinian journalist Santiago Mayor, who then published a shortened form of it in the Buenos Aires newspaper "Tiempo Argentino":
1. In your book about the theory of the Hybrid War, you review the different American geopolitical theories throughout history to arrive at
the current project of the "Eurasian Balkans" and "peripheral chaos". What does Washington's geopolitical project consist of and how is it linked to the current multipolar world?
The US aims to retain its hegemony over Eurasia so as to indefinitely perpetuate its preeminent role over International Relations, to which end
it's employing a divide-and-rule strategy over the supercontinent via the external exploitation of identity conflicts for geopolitical ends. Many Eurasian states are very diverse, so it's comparatively easier to meddle in their affairs through information warfare, NGOs, and other more "traditional" activities of its intelligence agencies. This takes the form of provoking Color Revolutions and civil wars, sometimes through the use of terrorist-driven means. The resultant chaos destabilizes the targeted state and thus enables the US to compel it into undertaking envisaged political concessions that work out to America's supreme benefit. On a larger level, employing this policy in several states at once creates a chain reaction of chaos all along the Eurasian periphery that the US tries to channel for "containment" purposes against Russia, China, Iran, and others, but sometimes it loses control of the chaotic processes like in Syria where this scheme ultimately backfired to a large extent by creating the conditions for Russia's game-changing anti-terrorist intervention which led to Moscow challenging Washington's influence in the Mideast.
Danielle Ryan
RTTue, 04 Feb 2020 21:14 UTC
© Getty Images North America / Scott Olson via AFP
An app supposedly meant to ensure quick reporting of the Iowa caucus results was developed by a firm deeply tied to the Democratic establishment and went kaputt at the crucial moment. What are the chances?
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but Americans can be excused for their distrust of the system after what happened in 2016 - and the facts that have been dug up on the group behind the failed Iowa app won't do much to quell their suspicions.
The firm in question, rather ironically, is called Shadow Inc. — and, according to Federal Election Commission filings, it was paid thousands of dollars by Pete Buttigieg's campaign for "software rights and subscriptions" in July 2019.
Comment: That's American democracy for you.
Remember, the whole premise of Russiagate is that Russian intelligence is supposed to have hacked the DNC in 2016, publicly revealing that the Democratic Party's nomination that year was rigged for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders.
Here we are 4 years later and the DNC is
again conspiring to rig the Democratic Party nomination against Sanders, in favor of an AMERICAN naval intelligence officer.
You couldn't make this up!
See also:
Comment: As you'll see in the links below even mainstream science is no longer able to deny that the global warming agenda is unsupported by both past and present data:
- Global cooling to replace warming trend that started 4,000 years ago - Chinese scientists
- Professor Valentina Zharkova explains and confirms why a "Super" Grand Solar Minimum is upon us
- Expert says new sun-driven cooling period of Earth 'not far off'
And there's more to the story: Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet CycleAlso check out SOTT radio's: