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Thu, 30 Sep 2021
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Bad Guys

Climategate Junk Scientist Michael Mann Awarded Half a Million in Stimulus Cash

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© Unknown
Funds Should be Returned to U.S. Treasury, Says National Center for Public Policy Research

Washington, DC - In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

"It's outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he's under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury," said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind's activities are causing global warming.

Battery

Psychopaths Among Us - ABC Report

Click the play button to watch this 12 minute report by ABC News Australia


Is your boss manipulative? Intimidating? Totally lacking in remorse? Yet superficially charming? Then you could be working with a workplace psychopath. The latest figures suggest one in ten managers are psychopaths, and this week Catalyst goes deep inside their minds - what makes them tick, how do you spot them; and how do you avoid being crushed by them. We'll also run a handy test - tune in to find out if your boss is an office psychopath.

Attention

Cooked! US government's central role in fudging the data behind 'global warming'

Breaking News! Climategate comes to the United States! Meet the two men who have dug through several layers of computer codes to uncover manipulation of the world temperature data to support the claims of global warming. This is a major climate scandal involving United States government agencies.

John Coleman, KUSI Meteorologist


Better Earth

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

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A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Comment: How much more evidence do we need that rather than "blunders" it is deliberate fudging and misrepresentation of climate data that is behind the erroneous claims that our planet is heating up and that it is due to human-based carbon emissions


HAL9000

Doing its part for the empire: Google threatens to pull out of China 'over censorship'

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© Phillipe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton has called on Beijing to explain cyber-attacks originating from China against Google.
Beijing yet to respond to search engine's move apparently prompted by hacking of human rights activists' Gmail accounts

Google has thrown down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

The world's leading search engine said the decision followed a cyber-attack that it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists. It also cited a clampdown on the internet in China over the past year. Its statement raised the prospect of closing Google.cn and potentially its offices in China.

The Chinese government issued its first, cautious response several hours after the announcement, saying it was "seeking more information". In a statement published via the state news agency Xinhua, an unnamed official from China's state council information office ‑ the cabinet spokesman's office ‑ added: "It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows."

Comment: The idea that Google has donned the role of knights in shining armour and suddenly developed concern for "human rights" is risible given its unctious predatory market behaviour this past decade. Many governments, especially the US government, routinely monitor ALL emails with the help of its obedient assistants at Google. So what is really going on here?

It's important to realise that we're not looking at "human rights activists" in this case, but separatist groups like the Uighur World Movement, essentially a US intelligence operation to destabilise China (as we witnessed in the summer of 2009). With its headquarters in Germany and the US, it's little wonder that the Chinese government is keeping tabs on this trojan horse.

The last time a 'massive hack' was attributed to an East Asian country, it soon emerged that the Pentagon's new cyber-warfare unit had been testing its capabilities: the third party false-flag cyber-attack that blamed North Korea was traced to servers in the UK and was likely a trial run for attacks like yesterday's on China's largest search engine.

From our July installment of Connecting the Dots:
By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do CyberWar

Set against a background of media hystrionics about cybercrime and claims of multimillion-fold increases in 'cyberattacks' against American government and corporate websites, Team Obama announced the introduction of a new CyberSecurity Office within the White House, complete with Cyber Czar to coordinate policy. With its emphasis on 'defensive' strategy to counter the threat posed by those cybercriminals 'out there', we naturally wonder if the timing relates to the announcement earlier this summer of the Pentagon's new CyberCommand (CYBERCOM) unit, whose definition of the concept of 'defensive strategy' is somewhat more plastic. If past activities are anything to go by, we can expect the Pentagon to preemptively launch cyberwarfare against cyberterrorists by engaging in . . . cyberterrorism.

Never wanting to feel left out of imperial projects for total world domination, the UK followed up with an announcement of its own: "this [cyber security] work was previously handled by an office related to the security services, and it will now be widened out." In other words; we are making overt what we've been doing covertly for some time because the conditions are now suitable for us to come out and tell you that we hate you and seek to watch everything you do, say, buy and think in order to control you.

Every cyberwar needs good cyberwarriors. If soldiers are hired killers, then the Pentagon's virtual warfare requires hired hackers. Profiteers in death like Raytheon are only too happy to step up to the plate and announce its recruitment drive:
"President Obama recently announced that cyber security is one of our country's most urgent national security priorities," reads the ad. "Raytheon is answering that call by hiring more cyber warriors this year to help fight the digital cyber war."

Raytheon also has positions available for something called "media sanitation specialists."

The latter probably refers to workers skilled at erasing data from hard drives and other storage.
Lest there be any doubt as to the 'defensive' nature of these new weapons of mass disruption, the military makes it quite clear that it will be 'taking the battlefield to the enemy':
The Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries [...] designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed,

Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that:
The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)
Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

In other words, should an "individual theatre commander" desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation's electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead!
These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations.
Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.
And the best part about it is. . . CyberCommand will be placed in the capable hands of the NSA, that same ubiquitous behemoth super-spy agency responsible for spying on millions of American citizens during the Bush years. It becomes apparent that Obama's Cyber Czar office for cyber crimes is really political cover for the entrenchment of everything illegal the media created a false hoopla over towards the end of Bush's reign.

'Cyberterrorists' conveniently christened the new regime by hacking websites in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack we are told continued for several days. Sites affected were located in South Korea and the US, the most high-profile of which was the White House website, hit on July 4th no less. While a US government spokesman reassured us on the one hand "that these types of Internet attacks happen everyday on government networks", that government sites were unaffected and that it was premature to say whodunnit, South Korea's intelligence agency immediately fingered North Korea as the source.

As we noted at the time,
the nature of global IT systems are such that 'cyber attacks' can be made to appear to come from any source. Given the benign effects this attack produced, we think it more probable that this was an 'in-house' test of operational capabilities, especially coming so soon after the White House announcement that CYBERCOM is operational and will soon be interfering with internal affairs in a country near you.

Furthermore, framing North Korea conveniently fits its current role as useful bogeyman and deflects attention from certain other countries currently deploying cyber attacks in geo-political hotspots.
Well the Americans got one thing right when they said it was premature to identify the source of the attacks, because an investigation later found the source to be the UK:
We found a master server located in UK which controls all of the 8 C&C servers to make a series of cyber-attack last week. So the source of the attacks has been identified to be in UK. The existence of master server has never been reported before.

there have been 166,908 zombies from 74 countries around the world that have been used for the attacks.
Remember what was said above:
Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.
This appears to be how this 'false-flag cyber operation' was executed.
And yesterday's cyber-attack looks like another such operation. The first red flag to note is that the hacks into the Gmail accounts of the "human rights activists" took place in December. Is it just an amazing coincidence that the day before Google Inc. should declare "cyberwar" on behalf of so-called "human rights activists" (but really on behalf of its Pentagon masters), China's Google equivalent - Baidu - is knocked off line? Not only that, but the attack is made to look like it came from Iran!

Baidu, China's Largest Search Engine, Hacked by "Iranian Cyber Army"

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© Budi Putra
Screenshot of Baidu (China's most popular internet search engine) after it was hacked by ... ahem, "Iranian Cyber Terrorists"
Accused of "censorship" and 'being anti-free speech', these two countries, China and Iran, are in fact defending their networks from the Pentagon's cyber-warfare" in the form of DDoS attacks and directed propaganda coming through sites like Google and Twitter.


Alarm Clock

Insouciant Americans

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© Unknown
Comment: From the Free Dictionary:'insouciant' [ɪnˈsuːsɪənt], adjective: carefree or unconcerned; light-hearted

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility.

How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is the most conspicuous of all? Umar Farouk Mutallab had a one-way ticket, no luggage, no passport, and his father, reportedly a CIA and Mossad asset, had reported him to the CIA and Mossad. Does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would choose as an airliner bomber a person waving every red flag imaginable?

This obvious question has escaped the U.S. media, a collection of salespersons marketing full body scanning machines for airports.

Would al-Qaida, with its extensive knowledge of explosives, have armed Umar with a "bomb" that experts say couldn't have blown up his own seat?

Igloo

Ice Age Cometh: Death toll rises to 22 as Britain braces for coldest night yet

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© Neodaas / University of Dundee
Nasa satellite picture of Britain doused in snow received by the University of Dundee
The death toll from Britain's biggest freeze for decades reached 22 today as the country prepared for its coldest night so far, bringing the promise of even more treacherous conditions.

Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed and travellers have faced chaos as the weather hit roads, rail services and airports over the last two days. The disruption is estimated to have cost businesses around £700 million.

Councils continued to struggle with a growing salt emergency as police warned drivers in many areas not to travel unless their journey was essential.

The AA expect to have attended 20,000 breakdowns today - compared with about 9,000 for a normal Thursday - and warned that conditions were expected to remain "treacherous".

Meanwhile, the shutdown of an offshore Norwegian gasfield pushed Britain's gas infrastructure into emergency mode, forcing the closure of industrial companies in the north of England in order to preserve supplies to homes, shops and offices.

Although major airports stayed open, some air passengers had long waits for their flights, particularly at Gatwick, on the outskirts of south London, where more than 130 flights were cancelled. EasyJet had to axe more than 100 flights and British Airways was among other carriers that had to cancel some services.

The body of Philip Hughes, 45, from Slough, was recovered from beneath ice at the Lakeside Country Club in Surrey where he was watching the world darts championship. A spokesman said it appeared to have been a "tragic accident".

Igloo

Ice Age Cometh: US braced for more heavy snow, wind chills as low as 50 below zero

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© Associated Press / Nati Harnik
Vehicles travel in white out conditions caused by blowing snow on Interstate 80 west of Omaha, Neb., Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010. A storm system with sub-freezing temperatures and high winds is traveling through the Midwest.
Des Moines - Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn't see across intersections and a North Dakota snowblower repair shop was overwhelmed with business as residents braced Thursday for heavy snow and wind chills as low as 50 below zero.

Frigid weather also was gripping the South, where a rare cold snap was expected to bring snow and ice Thursday to states from South Carolina to Louisiana. Forecasters said wind chills could drop to near zero at night in some areas.

Dangerously cold wind chills were anticipated in the Midwest overnight, including as low as 35 below in eastern Nebraska, minus 45 in parts of South Dakota and negative 50 in North Dakota, according to National Weather Service warnings.

Another 10 inches of snow was expected in Iowa, buried in December by more than 2 feet of snow, while up to 9 inches could fall in southeast North Dakota that forecasters warned would create hazardous zero-visibility driving conditions. Wind gusts of 30 miles per hour were expected in Illinois - along with a foot of snow - while large drifts were anticipated in Nebraska and Iowa.

Igloo

Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across the planet

Arctic Cold
© AP
A boy walks with his yak after fresh snowfall in Kufri, outskirts of Shimla, India
Arctic air and record snow falls gripped the northern hemisphere today, inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the US plains.

There were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralysed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze, Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, Italy dug itself out of snowdrifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus 25C (-13F).

The heaviest snow yesterday hit northeastern Asia, which is suffering its worst winter weather for 60 years. More than 25 centimetres (10in) of snow covered Seoul, the South Korean capital - the heaviest fall since records began in 1937.

Igloo

Britain Freezes Over: 'No end in sight'

Big Ben snow
© Getty Images
Britain's big freeze showed no sign of easing tonight as heavy snow again brought swathes of the country to a standstill.

Hospitals cancelled operations, the Army was drafted in to rescue motorists and emergency moves to ease the gritting crisis were demanded as a further 1.5ft (47cm) of snow fell in some parts.

Crucial transport networks went into meltdown during heavy flurries across the south while hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed an extension to their holidays after school closures.

With millions unable to get into work on a day estimated to have cost businesses £690 million, forecasters warned the misery will continue into next week.

After striking Scotland and the north of England, the heavy snowfall moved south to the home counties and London - where it was set to continue falling over night.

Comment: Gas Supplies Running Out as Britain Shivers