Mar 14
Congo, like many African countries, has experienced years of political turmoil and violent uprisings.
In December the voters of Congo elected a new president, Felix Tshisekedi. Tshisekedi has signed a decree pardoning about 700 political prisoners.
The political prisoners were arrested and prosecuted by predecessors as “terrorists” and threats to “national security.”
Mar 14
The promotion of climate change hysteria is estimated to be a $2 trillion-per-year industry. Governments spend billions pushing global-warming ‘research’ grants on university professors. Government ‘data’ agencies invest additional billions adjusting data to match the theory behind the scheme. Environmentalist groups spend additional millions to promote the message.
Now, a subcommittee of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change appears to be preparing to launch efforts to embed climate change hysteria messaging into mainstream religious doctrines. See here.
Mar 11
Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine has documented the increasing anti-government opinions of Americans.
“In 1964, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that they “can trust the government in Washington always or most of the time.” By 2015, that figure stood at just 19 percent.”
A Gallup poll, conducted regularly since the ’60s, asks respondents whether “big government,” “big business,” or “big labor” is the “biggest threat to the country in the future.” “Big government” has always been the top response, but the margin of fear has grown far wider over time. In 1969, the fraction picking government was around 30 percent. By 2016, it had leaped to 67 percent.
Trust in Congress has steadily declined, from 42 percent in 1973, to 11 percent in 2018. The last time that number cracked 20 percent was in 2005. Confidence in the presidency has dropped from 52 percent in 1975—just a year after Watergate—to the low to mid-30s in recent years. “Imagine: More Americans trusted the presidency a year after Watergate than do now.”
Confidence in public schools has declined from 62 percent in the 1970s to the low 30s today.
And yet cynicism about government hasn’t diminished government. Over the last few decades, Washington’s size, scope, and spending have metastasized. . . . Over the last 50 years, federal spending on a per-capita basis nearly tripled, reaching about $12,000 in 2018. In 1970, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was 18 percent. Since 2008, it has never sunk below 20 percent, a level typically reserved for periods of major wars. . . . The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, federal outlays will average 22.4 percent of GDP annually.
Thus, according to Gillespie, critics of government are winning the battle but losing the war. Gillispie wonders if the decreasing trust in government has actually backfired: “A respectable and growing body of research shows that as societies move from relatively high to lower levels of trust, citizens counterintuitively call for greater and greater levels of government involvement in their lives. “Individuals in low-trust countries want more government intervention even though they know the government is corrupt,” summarize the authors of a 2010 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper.
Mar 09
The Pentagon publicly celebrates sacrifice and promotes a message of honor and tribute to military veterans and service members. Declassified documents show the Pentagon has secretly spent millions of dollars to promote pageantry surrounding the sacrifices of the troops.
Americans proudly stand in silence at NFL games and honor the troops with moments of silence at graduation ceremonies and other public events. (It has repeatedly been shown that many such flag-waving ceremonies are bought and paid for by secret payments of tax dollars.)
Now Business Insider has found that the U.S. Air Force simply dumps its dead service members in landfills by the hundreds.
Mar 05
For years, Google secretly spent millions on efforts to build a second internet–mostly for the Chinese government. The project–called “Dragonfly” was kept secret even within the halls of Google headquarters.
Google’s second internet was designed to be totally pro-government. It was designed to censor out forbidden topics or any content which is critical of government.
But insiders within Google kept blowing the whistle on the secret project. Human rights advocates inside the company said that the Dragonfly project was being designed so that the Chinese government could identify internet users who typed in forbidden questions. This would allow cops or death squads to round up, imprison or kill such users.
In response to rising human rights concerns, Google executives announced months ago that they were ending the project.
But now insiders say there are indications the company is secretly moving forward with the project.
Strands of code associating with the Dragonfly system continue to be modified and changed. See here.
Feb 27
A new survey by the Columbia Journalism Review in partnership with Reuters/Ipsos has found that the public’s trust in mainstream news media is lower than the public’s trust in any other institution, including even Congress.
“For decades, we’ve known that Americans don’t trust the press. What we haven’t known is how people view the makings of journalism, from the use of fact checkers and anonymous sources to the question of whether money skews journalistic decision-making. This new national poll for CJR answers those questions, and points to how big the trust gap remains.”
60 percent of respondents are under the impression that sources pay for stories. Their belief is supported by mountains of evidence that high-level mainstream reporters are secretly paid by government entities such as the CIA and FBI. Even those who are not paid are rewarded by government officials with scoops and leaks.
Congressional investigations and declassified documents have revealed that government agencies have secretly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on mainstream news reporters.
In practice, many government officials cultivate reporters who will report almost anything the government wants–whether true or false.
And since almost all mainstream journalists are Democrats who inherently look to expansive government as a benevolent source of warmth and comfort, their role as stenographers for the government may come easy.
Significantly, the new poll found that only a minority, 42 percent, of Democrats believe the media isn’t biased. (Just 10 percent of Republicans said the same.)
Feb 26
MAINSTREAM MEDIA SILENT
A decade ago, folks in northern states such as South and North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho were watching large swaths of their pine forests die off due to invasive pine beetles. The pine beetles bored beneath the bark of pine trees and introduced a fungus and larvae which weakened and then killed the trees.
Millions of pine trees were killed, prompting state and federal government agencies to link the invasive beetles to catastrophic-manmade-global-warming-by-carbon dioxide and to spend millions of dollars to mitigate the effects of the beetles.
But five years of harsh winters have mostly killed off the beetles in the north woods. Most foresters declared the end of the beetle epidemic around 2017. Almost no one seemed to link the end of the epidemic to earlier claims regarding a link to the CO2 apocalypse.
Now the State of South Dakota has $700,000 remaining in a ‘pine beetle fund’ which was never used. Last week the South Dakota legislature debated about what to do with the excess money.
Feb 23
Weather data agencies have repeatedly been caught adjusting temperature records to make the past appear colder than it was measured–and the present seem warmer by comparison.
In the U.S. the officials in NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have altered the data to make U.S. temperatures appear to have risen 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.
Now there is evidence that Australian record keepers have also been altering temp records. See here.
It appears that the temperature records for Darwin, Australia have been steadily altered to make the past seem colder than it was measured. Now the records show average temps for Darwin have risen 1.8 degrees Celsious!
Feb 18
For years, NASA’s websites provided much basic science information. One such web page stated the common-sense point that the Sun was the primary driver of the earth’s climate.
But such basic science contradicts the current propaganda narrative of the government’s scientist-activists.
The current NASA message is that carbon dioxide–a trace gas in the atmosphere–is the primary driver of the earth’s climate.
Recently, the NASA web page has been removed or hidden. See here.
Feb 18
Gallup has asked Americans what they felt was the most important problem facing the country since 1939. Prior to 2001, the highest percentage mentioning government was 26% during the Watergate scandal.
Not only is distrust of government at an all-time high in the recent Gallup poll. But very few problems have ever registered such a high percentage of mentions under the ‘greatest problem’ category.’
Since 2001, few issues have matched or exceeded the 35% currently mentioning the government.
“In the immediate months after the 9/11 attacks, mentions of terrorism topped the list as the most important problem, peaking at 46% in October 2001.”
Iraq was named as the biggest problem by 38% of respondents as U.S. involvement in Iraq escalated in 2007.
“In the year leading up to and after the global financial crisis of 2008, the percentage of Americans naming “the economy” reached record heights for any mention on Gallup’s list, reaching 58% in November 2008.” (And mentions of unemployment/jobs as the greatest problem peaked at 39% in September 2011, in the wake of the financial crisis.)
Additionally, both Democrats and Republicans are now naming government as the greatest problem in their lives at roughly the same percentages.
