dome – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:08:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png dome – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules https://grist.org/extreme-heat/the-science-behind-the-heat-dome-a-mosh-pit-of-molecules/ https://grist.org/extreme-heat/the-science-behind-the-heat-dome-a-mosh-pit-of-molecules/#respond Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:08:30 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=670696 From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110. 

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? 

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape. 

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishing few laws to protect them.

The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate-change-boosted event.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.


This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

]]> https://grist.org/extreme-heat/the-science-behind-the-heat-dome-a-mosh-pit-of-molecules/feed/ 0 545667 Eugene Doyle: Why Asia-Pacific should be cheering for Iran and not US bomb-based statecraft https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft-2/#respond Sat, 28 Jun 2025 06:36:33 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=116766 ANALYSIS: By Eugene Doyle

Setting aside any thoughts I may have about theocratic rulers (whether they be in Tel Aviv or Tehran), I am personally glad that Iran was able to hold out against the US-Israeli attacks this month.

The ceasefire, however, will only be a pause in the long-running campaign to destabilise, weaken and isolate Iran. Regime change or pariah status are both acceptable outcomes for the US-Israeli dyad.

The good news for my region is that Iran’s resilience pushes back what could be a looming calamity: the US pivot to Asia and a heightened risk of a war on China.

There are three major pillars to the Eurasian order that is going through a slow, painful and violent birth.  Iran is the weakest.  If Iran falls, war in our region — intended or unintended – becomes vastly more likely.

Mainstream New Zealanders and Australians suffer from an understandable complacency: war is what happens to other, mainly darker people or Slavs.

“Tomorrow”, people in this part of the world naively think, “will always be like yesterday”.

That could change, particularly for the Australians, in the kind of unfamiliar flash-boom Israelis experienced this month following their attack on Iran. And here’s why.

US chooses war to re-shape Middle East
Back in 2001, as many will recall, retired General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe, was visiting buddies in the Pentagon. He learnt something he wasn’t supposed to: the Bush administration had made plans in the febrile post 9/11 environment to attack seven Muslim countries.

In the firing line were: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, Gaddafi’s Libya, Somalia, Sudan and the biggest prize of all — the Islamic Republic of Iran.

One would have to say that the project, pursued by successive presidents, both Democrat and Republican, has been a great success — if you discount the fact that a couple of million human beings, most of them civilians, many of them women and children, nearly all of them innocents, were slaughtered, starved to death or otherwise disposed of.

With the exception of Iran, those countries have endured chaos and civil strife for long painful years.  A triumph of American bomb-based statecraft.

Now — with Muammar Gaddafi raped and murdered (“We came, we saw, he died”, Hillary Clinton chuckled on camera the same day), Saddam Hussein hanged, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad in Moscow, the genocide in full swing in Palestine — the US and Israel were finally able to turn their guns — or, rather, bombs — on the great prize: Iran.

Iran’s missiles have checked US-Israel for time being
Things did not go to plan. Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman pointed out this week that for the first time Israel got a taste of the medicine it likes to dispense to its neighbours.

Iran’s missiles successfully turned the much-vaunted Iron Dome into an Iron Sieve and, perhaps momentarily, has achieved deterrence. If Iran falls, the US will be able to do what Barack Obama and Joe Biden only salivated over — a serious pivot to Asia.

Could great power rivalry turn Asia-Pacific into powderkeg?
For us in Asia-Pacific a major US pivot to Asia will mean soaring defence budgets to support militarisation, aggressive containment of China, provocative naval deployments, more sanctions, muscling smaller states, increased numbers of bases, new missile systems, info wars, threats and the ratcheting up rhetoric — all of which will bring us ever-closer to the powderkeg.

Sounds utterly mad? Sounds devoid of rationality? Lacking commonsense? Welcome to our world — bellum Americanum — as we gormlessly march flame in hand towards the tinderbox. War is not written in the stars, we can change tack and rediscover diplomacy, restraint, and peaceful coexistence. Or is that too much to ask?

Back in the days of George W Bush, radical American thinkers like Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld created the Project for a New American Century and developed the policy, adopted by succeeding presidents, that promotes “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces”.

It reconfirmed the neoconservative American dogma that no power should be allowed to rise in any region to become a regional hegemon; anything and everything necessary should be done to ensure continued American primacy, including the resort to war.

What has changed since those days are two crucial, epoch-making events: the re-emergence of Russia as a great power, albeit the weakest of the three, and the emergence of China as a genuine peer competitor to the USA. Professor  John Mearsheimer’s insights are well worth studying on this topic.

The three pillars of multipolarity
A new world order really is being born. As geopolitical thinkers like Professor Glenn Diesen point out, it will, if it is not killed in the cradle, replace the US unipolar world order that has existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Many countries are involved in its birthing, including major players like India and Brazil and all the countries that are part of BRICS.  Three countries, however, are central to the project: Iran, Russia and, most importantly, China.  All three are in the crosshairs of the Western empire.

If Iran, Russia and China survive as independent entities, they will partially fulfill Halford MacKinder’s early 20th century heartland theory that whoever dominates Eurasia will rule the world. I don’t think MacKinder, however, foresaw cooperative multipolarity on the Eurasian landmass — which is one of the goals of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) – as an option.

That, increasingly, appears to be the most likely trajectory with multiple powerful states that will not accept domination, be that from China or the US.  That alone should give us cause for hope.

Drunk on power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has launched war after war and brought us to the current abandonment of economic sanity (the sanctions-and-tariff global pandemic) and diplomatic normalcy (kill any peace negotiators you see) — and an anything-goes foreign policy (including massive crimes against humanity).

We have also reached — thanks in large part to these same policies — what a former US national security advisor warned must be avoided at all costs. Back in the 1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran.”

Belligerent and devoid of sound strategy, the Biden and Trump administrations have achieved just that.

Can Asia-Pacific avoid being dragged into an American war on China?
Turning to our region, New Zealand and Australia’s governments cleave to yesterday: a white-dominated world led by the USA.  We have shown ourselves indifferent to massacres, ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression launched by our team.

To avoid war — or a permanent fear of looming war — in our own backyards, we need to encourage sanity and diplomacy; we need to stay close to the US but step away from the military alliances they are forming, such as AUKUS which is aimed squarely at China.

Above all, our defence and foreign affairs elites need to grow new neural pathways and start to think with vision and not place ourselves on the losing side of history. Independent foreign policy settings based around peace, defence not aggression, diplomacy not militarisation, would take us in the right direction.

Personally I look forward to the day the US and its increasingly belligerent vassals are pushed back into the ranks of ordinary humanity. I fear the US far more than I do China.

Despite the reflexive adherence to the US that our leaders are stuck on, we should not, if we value our lives and our cultures, allow ourselves to be part of this mad, doomed project.

The US empire is heading into a blood-drenched sunset; their project will fail and the 500-year empire of the White West will end — starting and finishing with genocide.

Every day I atheistically pray that leaders or a movement will emerge to guide our antipodean countries out of the clutches of a violent and increasingly incoherent USA.

America is not our friend. China is not our enemy. Tomorrow gives birth to a world that we should look forward to and do the little we can to help shape.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft-2/feed/ 0 541661 Eugene Doyle: Why Asia-Pacific should be cheering for Iran and not US bomb-based statecraft https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft/#respond Sat, 28 Jun 2025 06:36:33 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=116766 ANALYSIS: By Eugene Doyle

Setting aside any thoughts I may have about theocratic rulers (whether they be in Tel Aviv or Tehran), I am personally glad that Iran was able to hold out against the US-Israeli attacks this month.

The ceasefire, however, will only be a pause in the long-running campaign to destabilise, weaken and isolate Iran. Regime change or pariah status are both acceptable outcomes for the US-Israeli dyad.

The good news for my region is that Iran’s resilience pushes back what could be a looming calamity: the US pivot to Asia and a heightened risk of a war on China.

There are three major pillars to the Eurasian order that is going through a slow, painful and violent birth.  Iran is the weakest.  If Iran falls, war in our region — intended or unintended – becomes vastly more likely.

Mainstream New Zealanders and Australians suffer from an understandable complacency: war is what happens to other, mainly darker people or Slavs.

“Tomorrow”, people in this part of the world naively think, “will always be like yesterday”.

That could change, particularly for the Australians, in the kind of unfamiliar flash-boom Israelis experienced this month following their attack on Iran. And here’s why.

US chooses war to re-shape Middle East
Back in 2001, as many will recall, retired General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe, was visiting buddies in the Pentagon. He learnt something he wasn’t supposed to: the Bush administration had made plans in the febrile post 9/11 environment to attack seven Muslim countries.

In the firing line were: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, Gaddafi’s Libya, Somalia, Sudan and the biggest prize of all — the Islamic Republic of Iran.

One would have to say that the project, pursued by successive presidents, both Democrat and Republican, has been a great success — if you discount the fact that a couple of million human beings, most of them civilians, many of them women and children, nearly all of them innocents, were slaughtered, starved to death or otherwise disposed of.

With the exception of Iran, those countries have endured chaos and civil strife for long painful years.  A triumph of American bomb-based statecraft.

Now — with Muammar Gaddafi raped and murdered (“We came, we saw, he died”, Hillary Clinton chuckled on camera the same day), Saddam Hussein hanged, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad in Moscow, the genocide in full swing in Palestine — the US and Israel were finally able to turn their guns — or, rather, bombs — on the great prize: Iran.

Iran’s missiles have checked US-Israel for time being
Things did not go to plan. Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman pointed out this week that for the first time Israel got a taste of the medicine it likes to dispense to its neighbours.

Iran’s missiles successfully turned the much-vaunted Iron Dome into an Iron Sieve and, perhaps momentarily, has achieved deterrence. If Iran falls, the US will be able to do what Barack Obama and Joe Biden only salivated over — a serious pivot to Asia.

Could great power rivalry turn Asia-Pacific into powderkeg?
For us in Asia-Pacific a major US pivot to Asia will mean soaring defence budgets to support militarisation, aggressive containment of China, provocative naval deployments, more sanctions, muscling smaller states, increased numbers of bases, new missile systems, info wars, threats and the ratcheting up rhetoric — all of which will bring us ever-closer to the powderkeg.

Sounds utterly mad? Sounds devoid of rationality? Lacking commonsense? Welcome to our world — bellum Americanum — as we gormlessly march flame in hand towards the tinderbox. War is not written in the stars, we can change tack and rediscover diplomacy, restraint, and peaceful coexistence. Or is that too much to ask?

Back in the days of George W Bush, radical American thinkers like Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld created the Project for a New American Century and developed the policy, adopted by succeeding presidents, that promotes “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of US military forces”.

It reconfirmed the neoconservative American dogma that no power should be allowed to rise in any region to become a regional hegemon; anything and everything necessary should be done to ensure continued American primacy, including the resort to war.

What has changed since those days are two crucial, epoch-making events: the re-emergence of Russia as a great power, albeit the weakest of the three, and the emergence of China as a genuine peer competitor to the USA. Professor  John Mearsheimer’s insights are well worth studying on this topic.

The three pillars of multipolarity
A new world order really is being born. As geopolitical thinkers like Professor Glenn Diesen point out, it will, if it is not killed in the cradle, replace the US unipolar world order that has existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Many countries are involved in its birthing, including major players like India and Brazil and all the countries that are part of BRICS.  Three countries, however, are central to the project: Iran, Russia and, most importantly, China.  All three are in the crosshairs of the Western empire.

If Iran, Russia and China survive as independent entities, they will partially fulfill Halford MacKinder’s early 20th century heartland theory that whoever dominates Eurasia will rule the world. I don’t think MacKinder, however, foresaw cooperative multipolarity on the Eurasian landmass — which is one of the goals of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) – as an option.

That, increasingly, appears to be the most likely trajectory with multiple powerful states that will not accept domination, be that from China or the US.  That alone should give us cause for hope.

Drunk on power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has launched war after war and brought us to the current abandonment of economic sanity (the sanctions-and-tariff global pandemic) and diplomatic normalcy (kill any peace negotiators you see) — and an anything-goes foreign policy (including massive crimes against humanity).

We have also reached — thanks in large part to these same policies — what a former US national security advisor warned must be avoided at all costs. Back in the 1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “The most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran.”

Belligerent and devoid of sound strategy, the Biden and Trump administrations have achieved just that.

Can Asia-Pacific avoid being dragged into an American war on China?
Turning to our region, New Zealand and Australia’s governments cleave to yesterday: a white-dominated world led by the USA.  We have shown ourselves indifferent to massacres, ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression launched by our team.

To avoid war — or a permanent fear of looming war — in our own backyards, we need to encourage sanity and diplomacy; we need to stay close to the US but step away from the military alliances they are forming, such as AUKUS which is aimed squarely at China.

Above all, our defence and foreign affairs elites need to grow new neural pathways and start to think with vision and not place ourselves on the losing side of history. Independent foreign policy settings based around peace, defence not aggression, diplomacy not militarisation, would take us in the right direction.

Personally I look forward to the day the US and its increasingly belligerent vassals are pushed back into the ranks of ordinary humanity. I fear the US far more than I do China.

Despite the reflexive adherence to the US that our leaders are stuck on, we should not, if we value our lives and our cultures, allow ourselves to be part of this mad, doomed project.

The US empire is heading into a blood-drenched sunset; their project will fail and the 500-year empire of the White West will end — starting and finishing with genocide.

Every day I atheistically pray that leaders or a movement will emerge to guide our antipodean countries out of the clutches of a violent and increasingly incoherent USA.

America is not our friend. China is not our enemy. Tomorrow gives birth to a world that we should look forward to and do the little we can to help shape.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/28/eugene-doyle-why-asia-pacific-should-be-cheering-for-iran-and-not-us-bomb-based-statecraft/feed/ 0 541660 Trump announces $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield; UK, European Union sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank violence – May 20, 2025 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025-2/#respond Tue, 20 May 2025 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=8b9351487e9802f431afb6d210c5fdc0 Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

The post Trump announces $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield; UK, European Union sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank violence – May 20, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.


This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025-2/feed/ 0 534039 Trump announces $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield; UK, European Union sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank violence – May 20, 2025 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025/#respond Tue, 20 May 2025 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=8b9351487e9802f431afb6d210c5fdc0 Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

The post Trump announces $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield; UK, European Union sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank violence – May 20, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.


This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/20/trump-announces-175-billion-golden-dome-missile-shield-uk-european-union-sanction-israel-over-gaza-west-bank-violence-may-20-2025/feed/ 0 534038 Guess Who’s Benefitting From Trump’s "Golden Dome" Idea #politics #elonmusk #trump https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/08/guess-whos-benefitting-from-trumps-golden-dome-idea-politics-elonmusk-trump/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/08/guess-whos-benefitting-from-trumps-golden-dome-idea-politics-elonmusk-trump/#respond Thu, 08 May 2025 19:22:31 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=49a05f99aa1f129c3cc3d0c90dbb1eae
This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/08/guess-whos-benefitting-from-trumps-golden-dome-idea-politics-elonmusk-trump/feed/ 0 531885 Iron Dome Technology: Elon Musk’s License to Steal Taxpayers’ Dollars https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/iron-dome-technology-elon-musks-license-to-steal-taxpayers-dollars/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/iron-dome-technology-elon-musks-license-to-steal-taxpayers-dollars/#respond Wed, 23 Apr 2025 05:54:18 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=361511 Donald Trump and Elon Musk are making corruption and graft the main business of the US government. They have fired all the cops who might try to rein them in and attacked any of the judges, politicians, or reporters who object to them stealing everything in sight. In this vein, it was entertaining to see reports that More

The post Iron Dome Technology: Elon Musk’s License to Steal Taxpayers’ Dollars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

]]>

Photo Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are making corruption and graft the main business of the US government. They have fired all the cops who might try to rein them in and attacked any of the judges, politicians, or reporters who object to them stealing everything in sight.

In this vein, it was entertaining to see reports that Elon Musk has plans to bid on, and presumably get, the contract for building Donald Trump’s “Iron Dome” system for the United States. Before discussing Elon Musk’s latest scheme for getting richer, it is worth noting that there is no obvious need for an Iron Dome-type system in the United States.

Donald Trump may not have noticed, but we have not had a problem of missiles raining down on the United States from other countries. But that’s okay in Donald Trump’s MAGAland. We also didn’t have a problem of pet-eating migrants in Springfield, Ohio, but that didn’t stop Trump and Vance from putting this “crisis” at the center of their campaign.

Donald Trump’s solutions don’t have to bear any relationship to real world problems. He assumes that his supporters will be just fine with spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a weapon system we don’t need, and at least for Republican members of Congress, he is probably right. Needless to say, the “Department of Government Efficiency” won’t be bothered by this waste.

But the potential waste here is even more than it first appears. In Musk’s scheme he won’t be selling the US government the Iron Dome system, he will be “licensing” it. That would mean that Musk maintains ownership of the system, allowing him to sell it to others, and just charges us an annual fee for its use.

There are obvious political issues with this scheme. For example, will Musk shut it down if we have a government that is not sufficiently far-right for his tastes? Suppose the government decides to let trans athletes compete in high school sports; will Musk take away its missile defense system?

But the issues go beyond just political considerations. There is a serious economic issue at stake. There is not currently a mass market for continent-wide anti-missile systems. If Trump decides to pay for the development of one, it will give it developer access to a potentially very valuable technology. It is hard to see how anyone with any business sense at all would hand that asset over to Elon Musk or anyone else.

There are actually some precedents for this sort of transfer of valuable ownership rights. The most famous is when IBM contracted with Bill Gates to design an operating system for its computers in 1981.

At that time IBM was by far the world’s leader in producing personal computers and the computer industry more generally. Microsoft was still a relatively small start-up. But because IBM allowed Gates to maintain ownership of the operating system, Microsoft quickly catapulted past IBM in profitability and market value. It is unlikely Microsoft ever would have become one of the largest companies in the world, if IBM had made ownership of the system a condition of its deal with Microsoft.

To take a more recent example, after the COVID pandemic hit the United States, the government initiated “Operation Warp Speed” to develop vaccines and treatments for the disease. One of the first deals arranged by the program was with Moderna to develop a mRNA vaccine to protect against COVID. Under the contract, the government paid for the research needed to develop the vaccine; it then paid for the clinical trials needed to establish its safety and effectiveness.

However, despite paying the bulk of its development and testing costs, the government handed control over the vaccine to Moderna, which subsequently made tens of billions of dollars selling it in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Instead of making the vaccine a generic that would likely sell for around $5 a shot, Moderna was charging up to $130 a shot for its boosters. Yeah, that deal was signed by Donald Trump.

So, paying for the development of technology, and then giving it away, is not something new for Trump, but the sums involved are likely to be at least an order of magnitude higher for the missile defense system designed by Musk’s team. The economy and financial markets have looked very shaky lately with Donald Trump’s stop/go tariffs, as well as his mass firings and cancellations of government contracts. But there is still at least one investment that is secure in MAGA America: a payment to Donald Trump.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Iron Dome Technology: Elon Musk’s License to Steal Taxpayers’ Dollars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/23/iron-dome-technology-elon-musks-license-to-steal-taxpayers-dollars/feed/ 0 528870 Trump Demonstrates His Ignorance in Ordering Development of “Golden Dome” Missile Defense https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trump-demonstrates-his-ignorance-in-ordering-development-of-golden-dome-missile-defense/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trump-demonstrates-his-ignorance-in-ordering-development-of-golden-dome-missile-defense/#respond Wed, 26 Mar 2025 06:00:29 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=358353 Impressed with the success of Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense against a attack by Iranian missiles and drones, President Trump has ordered the US war department to begin research on developing what he calls a ”Golden Dome” defense system like it to supposedly protect the entire US from a nuclear attack. The problem is, the More

The post Trump Demonstrates His Ignorance in Ordering Development of “Golden Dome” Missile Defense appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Impressed with the success of Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense against a attack by Iranian missiles and drones, President Trump has ordered the US war department to begin research on developing what he calls a ”Golden Dome” defense system like it to supposedly protect the entire US from a nuclear attack.

The problem is, the only reason Israel’s “Iron Dome” system worked as well as it did (and not perfectly), is that it was defending against slow-moving Iranian drones and short-range ballistic missiles that only move at speeds of well under 20,000 mph. A nuclear attack such as would be launched by Russia, China of even North Korea, would involve intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads arriving at speeds of 13-14,000 miles per hour.

Trump (a man so ignorant of science that during the Covid Pandemic he proposed curing people by having them drink bleach, shine ultra-violet light into their stomachs, and take Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine, not an anti-viral drug), was clearly unaware of and incurious about how the Israeli missile and drone system works.

The thing is, Israel’s vaunted  ‘Iron Dome’ system doesn’t even try to knock down or destroy in flight every incoming. missile or drone. Rather, it uses sophisticated radar to plot the target of each incoming missile. If a projectile is heading for empty desert or is going to hit something that is unlikely to harm anyone on the ground, a defensive missile is not wasted on it. Ignoring those errant warheads allows the available defensive missiles to be devoted to missiles or drones that look like they represent genuine threats.

This strategy works because the relatively small chemical blasts from missiles that are allowed to pass are too small to do collateral damage. If they had been carrying nuclear warheads however, the damage and number of deaths caused by even wildly off-course delivery systems would be staggering. No nuclear tipped missiles can be ignored. Given that Russia,  with over 2000 nukes mounted on missiles and China with 300 nuclear-tipped missiles,  would in the event in any attack on the US, launch everything, under the “use ‘em or lose ‘em “logic” of nuclear war, and no current or imagined missile defense could knock even all of China’s ICBMs or close-to-ground level hypersonic missiles down.

Trump’s “Golden Dome” fantasy, like its White House promoter,  is simply nuts.

Back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan excited his equally uneducated electoral base by ordering research into a Strategic Defense Initiative, inspired no doubt by his having watched the heroes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo of the early “Star Wars” films obliterating Darth Vader’s fleet of Tye-Fighters and their Death Star home base. The funding came from a pliant Congress,  and he imagined project, if completed, would have cost over $750 billion according to Pentagon projections (which are always low-balled). But in the event, it was deemed to be unworkable, though not before tens of billions of dollars had been wasted on it. Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan was quietly dropped after the Pentagon had wasted $209 billion (back when a billion dollars was a lot of money!).

Trump’s idea would certainly cost vastly more in R&D,  testing and construction costs than SDI, and would not work either, since evasive technologies to protect attackers are always easier to come up with than new defensive systems to defeat the evasive techniques.

Trump’s “Golden Dome” idea is the nuclear defense version of his Covid Pandemic defense idea of drinking bleach.

Come to think of it, maybe President Trump should just suggest that as a defense against possible nuclear attack, all Americans be supplied with a half gallon of household bleach for families to drink.  That way, like the doomed survivors of nuclear war waiting for the cloud of deadly fallout to arrive in Australia in the cautionary 1957 Cold War  novel On The Beach, who were each given a little pill to kill them so they wouldn’t have to die slow deaths from radiation poisoning, survivors of a future nuclear war cold end their lives quickly.

The post Trump Demonstrates His Ignorance in Ordering Development of “Golden Dome” Missile Defense appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trump-demonstrates-his-ignorance-in-ordering-development-of-golden-dome-missile-defense/feed/ 0 521525 Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trumps-star-wars-revival-the-golden-dome-antimissile-fantasy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trumps-star-wars-revival-the-golden-dome-antimissile-fantasy/#respond Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:41:47 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=156917 Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much like a previous dotty one […]

The post Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much like a previous dotty one advanced by President Ronald Reagan, known rather blandly as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In its current iteration, it is inspired by the Israeli “Iron Dome” multilayered defensive shield, a matter that raised an immediate problem, given the trademark ownership of the name by the Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Given the current administration’s obsession with all things golden, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has dubbed this revived endeavour “Golden Dome for America”. The renaming was noted in a February 24 amendment to request for information from industry. Much sniggering is surely in order at, not only the name itself, but the stumbling.

Reagan, even as he began suffering amnesiac decline, believed that the United States could be protected by a shield against any attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. The technology intended for that endeavour, much of it requiring a space component, was thin on research and non-existent in development. The envisaged use of laser weapons from space and terrestrial components drew much derision: the President had evidently been too engrossed by the Star Wars films of George Lucas.

The source for this latest initiative (“deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield”) is an executive order signed on January 27 titled “The Iron Dome for America”. (That was before the metallurgical change of name.) The order asserts from the outset that “The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles and other advanced aerial attacks remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” It acknowledges Reagan’s SDI but strikes a note of disappointment at its cancellation “before its goal could be realized.” Progress on such a system since the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 had been confined to “limited homeland defense” efforts that “remained only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.”

The Secretary of Defense is also directed, within 60 days, to submit to Trump “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.” Such a shield would defend the US from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and the other next-generation attacks from peer, near-peer and rogue adversaries.” Among some of the plans are the accelerated deployment of a hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer; development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors and the development and deployment of capabilities that will neutralise missile assaults “prior to launch and in the boost phase”.

The original SDI was heavy on the intended development and use of energy weapons, lasers being foremost among them. But even after four decades, US technological prowess remains unable to deploy such weapons of sufficient power and accuracy to eliminate drones or missiles. The Israelis claim to have overcome this problem with their Iron Beam high energy laser weapon system, which should see deployment later this year. For that reason, Lockheed Martin has partnered with Israeli firm Rafael to bring that technology into the US arsenal.

To date, Steven J. Morani, currently discharging duties as undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, has given little away about the herculean labours that have been set. “Consistent with protecting the homeland and per President Trump’s [executive order],” he told the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington earlier this month, “we’re working with the industrial base and [through] supply chain challenges associated with standing up the Golden Dome.” He admitted that this was “like the monster systems engineering problem” made even more difficult by being “the monster integration problem”.

The list of demerits to Golden Dome are many, and Morani alludes to them. For one, the Israeli Iron Dome operates across much smaller territory, not a continent. The sheer scale of any defence shield to protect such a vast swathe of land would be, not merely from a practical point but a budgetary one, absurd. A space-based interceptor system, a point that echoes Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy, would require thousands of units to successfully intercept one hefty ballistic missile. Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a calculation: a system of 1,900 satellites would cost somewhere between US$11 and US$27 billion to develop, build and launch.

A study for Defence and Peace Economics published this year goes further. The authors argue that, even if the US had appropriate ballistic missile defence technology and a sufficient number of interceptors to be distributed in a two-layer defence with an efficiency return of 90%, 8 times more would have to be spent than the attacker for a bill between US$60 and US$500 billion. If it was assumed that individual interceptor effectiveness was a mere 50%, and the system could not discriminate against decoys, the cost would be 70 times more, with a staggering bill of US$430 billion to US$5.3 trillion.

The most telling flaw in Golden Dome is one long identified, certainly by the more sober members of the establishment, in the annals of defence. “The fundamental problem with any plan for a national missile defense system against nuclear attack,” writes Xiaodon Liang in an Arms Control Association issues brief, “is that cost-exchange ratios favor the offense and US adversaries can always choose to build up or diversify their strategic forces to overwhelm a potential shield.” As Liang goes on to remark, the missile shield fantasy defies a cardinal rule of strategic competition: “the enemy always gets a vote.”

Monster system; monstrous integration issues. Confusion with the name and trademark problems. Strategically misguided, even foolish. Golden Dome, it would seem, is already being steadied for a swallow dive.

The post Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/26/trumps-star-wars-revival-the-golden-dome-antimissile-fantasy/feed/ 0 521515 How Israeli propaganda filters into NZ media – drop it, says Mediawatch https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/16/how-israeli-propaganda-filters-into-nz-media-drop-it-says-mediawatch/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/16/how-israeli-propaganda-filters-into-nz-media-drop-it-says-mediawatch/#respond Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:19:02 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=110955 COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Mediawatch on RNZ today strongly criticised Stuff and YouTube among other media for using Israeli propaganda’s “Outbrain” service.

Outbrain is a company founded by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military and its technology can be tracked back to a wealthy entrepreneur, which in this case could be a euphemism for a megalomaniac.

He uses the metaphor of a “dome”, likening it to the dome used in warfare.

Outbrain, which publishes content on New Zealand media, picks up what’s out there and converts and distorts it to support Israel. It twists, it turns, it deceives the reader.

Presenter Colin Peacock of RNZ’s Mediawatch programme today advised NZ media to ditch the propaganda service.

Outbrain uses the media in the following way. The content user such as Stuff pays Outbrain and Outbrain pays the user, like Stuff.

“Both parties make money when users click on the content,” said Peacock.

‘Digital Iron Dome’
The content on the Stuff website came via “Digital Iron Dome” named after the State of Genociders’ actual defence system. It is run by a tech entrepreneur quoted on Mediawatch:

“Just like a physical iron dome that scans the open air and watches for any missiles . . . the digital iron dome knows how to scan the internet. We know how to buy media. Pro-Israeli videos and articles and images inside the very same articles going against Israel,” says the developer of the propaganda “dome” machine.

Peacock said the developer had stated that the digital dome delivered “pro-Jewish”* messages to more than 100 million people worldwide on platforms like Al Jazeera, CNN — and last weekend on Stuff NZ — and said this information went undetected as pro-Israel material, ensuring it reached, according to the entrepreneur: “The right audience without interference.”

According to Wikipedia, Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, officers in the Israeli Navy. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million. Lahav worked at an online shopping company acquired by eBay in 2005.

The company is headquartered in New York with global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Cologne, Gurugram, Paris, Ljubljana, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, São Paulo, Netanya, Singapore, and Sydney.

Peacock pointed out that other advocacy organisations had already been buying and posting content, there was nothing new about this with New Zealand news media.

But — and this is important — the Media Council ruled in 2017 that Outbrain content was the publisher’s responsibility: that the news media in NZ were responsible for promoted links that were offered to their readers.

“Back then publishers at Stuff and the Herald said they would do more to oversee the content, with Stuff stating it is paid promoted content,” said Peacock, in his role as the media watchdog.

Still ‘big money business’
“But this is also still a big money business and the outfits using these tools are getting much bigger exposure from their arrangements with news publishers such as Stuff,” he said.

He pointed out that the recently appointed Outbrain boss for Australia New Zealand and Singapore, Chris Oxley, had described Outbrain as “a leader in digital media connecting advertisers with premium audiences in contextually relevant environments”.

The watchdog Mediawatch said that news organisations should drop Outbrain.

“Media environments where news and neutrality are important aren’t really relevant environments for political propaganda that’s propagated by online opportunists who know how to make money out of it and also to raise funds while they are at it, ” said Peacock.

“These services like Outbrain are sometimes called ‘recommendation engines’ but our recommendation to news media is don’t use them for the sake of the trust of the people you say you want to earn and keep: the readers,” said Peacock.

Saige England is a journalist and author, and member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

* Being “pro-Jewish” should not be equated with being pro-genocide nor should antisemitism be levelled at Jews who are against this genocide. The propaganda from Outbrain does a disservice to Palestinians and also to those Jewish people who support all human rights — the right of Palestinians to life and the right to live on their land.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/16/how-israeli-propaganda-filters-into-nz-media-drop-it-says-mediawatch/feed/ 0 513950 UN’s High Ideals Brought down by American Legislation https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/uns-high-ideals-brought-down-by-american-legislation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/uns-high-ideals-brought-down-by-american-legislation/#respond Wed, 09 Oct 2024 14:21:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=154082 After a full year of unbridled genocide in Gaza, escalating slaughter in the West Bank, and now similar crimes inflicted on the Lebanese, Britain’s brand-new prime minister Keir Starmer made this astounding announcement the other day: “We stand with Israel.” He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing […]

The post UN’s High Ideals Brought down by American Legislation first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> After a full year of unbridled genocide in Gaza, escalating slaughter in the West Bank, and now similar crimes inflicted on the Lebanese, Britain’s brand-new prime minister Keir Starmer made this astounding announcement the other day: “We stand with Israel.”

He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

‘Strongly in sync’

Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

So it really is a cosy setup.

Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

Sheer bribery

Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

QME’s collision with international law

He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

The post UN’s High Ideals Brought down by American Legislation first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/09/uns-high-ideals-brought-down-by-american-legislation/feed/ 0 496959 Listen Now: American Scandal: Teapot Dome https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/listen-now-american-scandal-teapot-dome/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/listen-now-american-scandal-teapot-dome/#respond Mon, 24 Jun 2024 04:00:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=1817287379b99d62ffd5d5843e8c7b30 Every scandal begins with a lie. But the truth will come out. And then comes the fallout and the outrage.

Scandals have shaped America since its founding. From business and politics to sports and society, we look on aghast as corruption, deceit and ambition bring down heroes and celebrities, politicians and moguls. And when the dust finally settles, we’re left to wonder: how did this happen? Where did they trip up, and who is to blame? From the creators of American History Tellers, Business Wars and Tides of History comes American Scandal, where we take you deep into the heart of America’s dark side to look at what drives someone to break the rules and what happens when they’re caught. Hosted by Lindsay Graham.

Listen now: Wondery.fm/AS-Gaslit 


This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/06/24/listen-now-american-scandal-teapot-dome/feed/ 0 480825 Victims and survivors of nuclear testing honoured in Marshall Islands https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/victims-and-survivors-of-nuclear-testing-honoured-in-marshall-islands/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/victims-and-survivors-of-nuclear-testing-honoured-in-marshall-islands/#respond Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:57:57 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=97583 World Council of Churches

Today is Remembrance Day — marking the 70th anniversary of the largest US nuclear test detonation, Castle Bravo, which took place over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 March 1954.

As one Marshallese resident noted: “It’s not the middle of nowhere to those who call it home.”

When Castle Bravo was detonated over Bikini Atoll, the immediate radioactive fallout spread to Rongelap and Utrik atolls and beyond.

“The impacts of that test, and the 66 others which were carried out above ground and underwater in Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, left a legacy of devastating environmental and health consequences across the Marshall Islands,” said World Council of Churches (WCC) programme executive for human rights and disarmament Jennifer Philpot-Nissen.

“The UK and France followed the US and also began a programme of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the final such test taking place as recently as 1996.”

Philpot-Nissen noted that the consequences of the testing across the Pacific had largely remained invisible and unaddressed.

“Very few people have received compensation or adequate assistance for the consequences they have suffered,” she said.

Advocated against nuclear weapons
The WCC has consistently advocated against nuclear weapons.

In 1950, the WCC executive committee declared that

“[t]he hydrogen bomb is the latest and most terrible step in the crescendo of warfare which has changed war from a fight between men and nations to a mass murder of human life.

Man’s rebellion against his Creator has reached such a point that, unless staved, it will bring self-destruction upon him.”

The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches.

At the WCC 6th Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju made a speech during the Pacific Plenary, sharing that the radioactive fallout from the 67 nuclear tests was more widespread than the US had admitted, and spoke of the many unrecognised health issues in the Marshall Islands.

During a WCC visit in 2023, this speech was referred to as the moment in which the Marshallese found their voice to speak out about the continuing suffering in their communities due to the nuclear testing legacy.

Climate change link
Philpot-Nissen also noted the nexus with climate change and the environment.

“When the US ended the 12 years of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, they buried approximately 80,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste under a concrete dome on Runit island, Enewetak Atoll,” she said.

“In addition, 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site were also deposited in the dome.”

Scientists and environmental activists around the world are concerned that, due to rising sea levels, the dome is starting to crack, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.

“In the Marshall Islands, the human-caused disasters on climate change and nuclear-testing converge and compound each other,” said Philpot-Nissen.

“While the Pacific islanders are faced with the remnants of a vast and sobering nuclear legacy — they have faced this with great resilience and dignity.

“The young people of the Pacific particularly are now leading the calls for an apology, for reparations, compensation, and for measures to be taken to address the damage which was done to their lands, their waters, and their people.”

Republished from WCC News.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/01/victims-and-survivors-of-nuclear-testing-honoured-in-marshall-islands/feed/ 0 461536 Israel’s arms and spyware: Used on Palestinians, sold to the world https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/20/israels-arms-and-spyware-used-on-palestinians-sold-to-the-world/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/20/israels-arms-and-spyware-used-on-palestinians-sold-to-the-world/#respond Thu, 20 Jul 2023 14:14:48 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=90928 Journalist and critic of Israeli apartheid Antony Loewenstein wrapped up his New Zealand tour with another damning address in Auckland last night but was optimistic about a swing in global grassroots sentiment with a stronger understanding of the plight of the reoressed 5 million Palestinians. He says that for more than a half century the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable military experience in “controlling” a population.   

By Antony Loewenstein

The Israeli defence industry inspires nations across the globe, many of which view themselves as under threat from external enemies.

The Taiwanese foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that: “Every aspect of the Israeli fighting capability is amazing to the Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese government.”

Wu explained that he appreciated how Israel protected its own country because, “basically, we [Taiwan] have barely started. The fighting experiences of Israel are something we’re not quite sure about ourselves. We haven’t had any war in the last four or five decades, but Israel has that kind of experience”.

Wu also expressed interest in Israeli weapons, suggesting his country had considered their usefulness in any potential war with China.

“Israel has the Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s defence system against short-range missiles. “We should look at some of the technology that has been used by the Israelis in its defence. I’m not sure whether we can copy it, but I think we can look at it and learn from it.”

It isn’t just Taiwan imagining itself as akin to Israel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in April 2022 that his vision for his nation was to mimic “the Jewish state“.

Two months after Russia’s illegal invasion of its territory, Zelensky, who is a long-time supporter of Israel, argued that “our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

Zelensky went on to explain that what he meant was the need in the future to have “representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas; there will be people with weapons.”

The Women's Bookshop's Carole Beu with author Antony Loewenstein
The Women’s Bookshop’s Carole Beu with author Antony Loewenstein at his book signing in Auckland last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

The Palestine laboratory
This admiration for Israel is both unsurprising and disturbing. The praise for Israel almost always completely ignores its occupation of Palestinian territory — one of the longest in modern times — and the ways in which this colonial project is implemented.

When Taiwan, Ukraine or any other country looks to Israel for innovation, it’s a highly selective gaze which completely disappears the more than five million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Palestine Laboratory book cover
The Palestine Laboratory . . . uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs.

The appeal of the Palestine laboratory is endless. I’ve spent the last years researching this concept and its execution in Palestine and across the globe.

My new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs when developing tools of repression, from drones to spyware and facial recognition to biometric data, while maintaining an “enemy” population, the Palestinians, under control for more than half a century.

Israel has sold defence equipment to at least 130 countries and is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. The US is still the dominant player in this space, accounting for 40 percent of the global weapons industry.

Washington used its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a testing ground for new weapons. During the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has been a vital “beta test” for new weapons and sophisticated forms of surveillance and killing.

But Israel has a ready-made population of occupied Palestinians over which it has complete control. For more than five decades, Israeli intelligence authorities have built an NSA-level system of surveillance across the entire occupied Palestinian territories.

Nowhere is completely immune from listening, watching or following.

In the last decade, the most infamous example of Israeli repression tech is Pegasus, the phone hacking tool developed by the company NSO Group. Used and abused by dozens of nations around the world, Mexico is its most prolific adherent.

I spoke to dissidents, lawyers and human rights activists in Togo, Mexico, India and beyond whose lives were upended by this invasive, mostly silent tool.

Israeli state and spyware
However, missing from so much of the western media coverage, including outrage against NSO Group and its founders who were Israeli army veterans, is acknowledgement of the close ties between the firm and the Israeli state.

NSO is a private corporation in name only and is in fact an arm of Israel’s diplomacy, used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad to attract new friends in the international arena. Despite being blacklisted by the Biden administration in November 2021, the company still hopes to continue trading.

Unregulated Israeli spyware
Unregulated Israeli spyware . . . a global threat.

My research, along with that of other reporters, has shown a clear connection between the sale of Israeli cyberweapons and Israel’s attempts to neuter any potential backlash to its illegal occupation.

From Rwanda to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to India, Israeli spyware and surveillance tech are used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.

Beyond Pegasus, many other similar tools have been deployed by newer and lesser-known Israeli companies, though they’re just as destructive. The problem isn’t just Pegasus — it could close down tomorrow and the privacy-busting technology would transfer to any number of competitors — but the unquenchable desire by governments, police forces and intelligence services for the relatively inexpensive Israeli tech that powers it.

India is even looking for alternatives to NSO Group with a less controversial history.

The Palestine laboratory is so successful because nobody wants to seriously regulate the fruits of its labours.

Ideological alignment
The extent of Israeli collusion with 20th and 21st century repression is overwhelming.

Perhaps the most revealing was the deep relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It wasn’t just about arms trading, but an ideological alignment between two states that truly believed that they were fighting for their very existence.

In 1976, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World War, to visit Israel. His tour included a stop at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Israel's then-President Reuven Rivlin (R) welcomes his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte at the presidential compound in Jerusalem on 4 September 2018 (AFP)
Israel’s then President Reuven Rivlin (right) welcomes his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte at the presidential compound in Jerusalem on 4 September 2018. Image: MEE/AFP

When Vorster arrived in Israel, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.

Israel and South Africa viewed themselves as under attack by foreign bodies committed to their destruction. A short time after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same issue: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

A love of ethnonationalism still fuels Israel today, along with a desire to export it. Some arms deals with nations, such as Bangladesh or the Philippines, are purely on military grounds and to make money.

Israel places barely any restrictions on what it sells, which pleases leaders who don’t want meddling in their actions. Pro-Israel lobbyists are increasingly working for repressive states, such as Bangladesh, to promote their supposed usefulness to the West.

Israel and the global far right
But Israel’s affinity with Hungary, India and the global far right, a group that traditionally hates Jews, speaks volumes about the inspirational nature of the modern Israeli state. As Haaretz journalist Noa Landau recently wrote, while explaining why Netanyahu’s government defended the latest arguably antisemitic comments by Elon Musk about George Soros:

A Palestinian flag at the Auckland venue for author Antony Loewenstein's address about his new book The Palestine Laboratory
A Palestinian flag at the Auckland venue for author Antony Loewenstein’s address about his new book The Palestine Laboratory last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

“The government’s mobilisation in the service of stoking antisemitism is not surprising. It is the fruit of a long and consistent process in which the Netanyahu government has been growing closer to extreme right-wing elements around the world, at the expense of Jewish communities it purports to represent.”

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this undeniable reality. Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, regardless of the long-term consequences for the safety and security of Jews around the world.

Israel has thrived as an ethnonationalist state for so long because the vast bulk of the world grants it impunity. European nations have been key supporters of Israel, willing to overlook its occupation and abuse of Palestinians.

According to newly declassified documents from the files of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1967 and 1990 it’s clear that West Germany was becoming more critical of Israel’s settlement project in Palestine, but the main concern was protecting its own financial interests in the region if a regional war broke out.

In a document written on 16 February 1975 to the deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western Europe, Nissim Yaish, before Israel’s Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s visit to West Germany, Yaish explained the thinking in his country’s diplomatic bureaucracy:

“There is unanimity that this time such a war will have a far-reaching impact on all its affairs internally and externally and that it could wreak a Holocaust on the German economy. Based on this attitude, West Germany is interested in rapid progress toward a [peace] agreement.”

Western silence
But there has rarely been any serious interest in pursuing peace, or holding Israel to account for its blatantly illegal actions, because the economic imperative is too strong. Even today, when another Nakba against Palestinians is becoming more possible to imagine, there’s largely silence from Western elites.

Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalised any solidarity with the Palestinian people. Germany is also keen to buy an Israeli missile defence system, confirming its priorities.

This is why Israeli apartheid and the Palestine laboratory are so hard to stop; countless nations want a piece of Israeli repression tech to surveil their own unwanted populations or election meddling support in Latin America or Africa.

Without a push for accountability, economic boycotts and regulation or banning Israeli spyware — the EU is flirting with the idea — Israel can feel comfortable that its position as a global leader in offensive weapons is secure.

This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/20/israels-arms-and-spyware-used-on-palestinians-sold-to-the-world/feed/ 0 413209 Nearly 120 Million People in US Under Extreme Weather Alerts as Heat Dome Descends, Summer Danger Season Off to Brutal Start https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/14/nearly-120-million-people-in-us-under-extreme-weather-alerts-as-heat-dome-descends-summer-danger-season-off-to-brutal-start/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/14/nearly-120-million-people-in-us-under-extreme-weather-alerts-as-heat-dome-descends-summer-danger-season-off-to-brutal-start/#respond Fri, 14 Jul 2023 14:25:31 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/nearly-120-million-people-in-us-under-extreme-weather-alerts-as-heat-dome-descends-summer-danger-season-off-to-brutal-start

For the first time this year, nearly 120 million people in the United States and its territories, are threatened by what the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has deemed “Danger Season”—the time roughly from May through October in the Northern Hemisphere when climate change impacts in the United States are at their peak and increasingly likely to collide with one another.

Aided by El Niño, large swaths of the U.S. South, West and Southwest regions are already experiencing extreme heat, with temperatures slated to rise even further in that part of the country and extend further east as a heat dome expands this weekend and into next week. Some places may see the heat index, or “feels like” temperature, set records by exceeding 120 degrees Fahrenheit, threatening people’s health and lives while also placing tremendous pressure on the electric grid as people increase their air conditioning use.

While this heat will affect roughly one-third of people living in the United States, those experiencing poverty or homelessness, people (often people of color) living in urban heat islands, elderly adults, small children, people with cardiovascular and other health conditions, outdoor workers, and people facing electricity shut-offs are at particularly grave risk. Additionally, parts of the Northeast remain flooded from abnormally heavy rains earlier this week and some southern states are still under flood alerts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that this June was the hottest on record globally and, according to the United Nations, the hottest global average temperature ever was experienced in the first week of July. Ocean temperatures, including in the Atlantic, are also off-the-charts high with the danger to coral reefs proving particularly acute, and sea ice is at record lows, especially in the Antarctic. Furthermore, climate change-driven extreme heat, flooding and wildfires are being experienced by billions of people around the world.

To be extremely clear: this is not normal. Decades of dependence on fossil fuels, decades of deception and obstruction on the part of the fossil fuel industry, and decades of inaction by policymakers who have been in their thrall have landed us where we are today. This has to stop.

For more information, check out UCS’ Danger Season map, which tracks heat, wildfire weather, storm and flooding alerts. Since May 1, 43% of the extreme heat alerts were made more likely by climate change. The map also shows that nearly 34% of the people who are today under extreme weather alerts live in areas designated as disadvantaged. Climate extremes are intersecting with long-standing socioeconomic challenges and racial inequities to further heighten mounting risks.

With extreme heat on the rise because of climate change, it is critical that policymakers and regulators take steps to ensure our communities are protected and our infrastructure is more resilient to extreme weather; that fossil fuels are quickly and sharply phased down while we rapidly transition to clean energy; and fossil fuel companies are held accountable for the damage their products have caused. The United States must also take responsibility for its role in driving the climate crisis as the largest historical emitter by providing adequate climate financing and addressing loss and damage in low-income nations facing crushing climate extremes.

Below are UCS experts available to discuss current and anticipated extreme weather events in the United States; their impact on the grid; and relevant local, states, national, and international policies needed to address the climate crisis:

  • Dr. Rachel Cleetus, the policy director and lead economist in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS. She is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to view her biography.
  • Dr. Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist at UCS. She is based in San Francisco, California. Click here to view her biography.
  • Dr. Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at UCS. He is based in Washington, D.C. and is fluent in English and Spanish. Click here to view his biography.
  • Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science and a senior climate scientist at UCS. She is based in Washington, D.C. Click here to view her biography.
  • Michael Jacobs, a senior energy analyst. He is based in the Boston area. Click here to view hisbiography.
  • Julie McNamara, a deputy policy director in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS. She is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to view her biography.
  • Erika Spanger-Siegfried, the director of strategic analytics in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS. She is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to view her biography.
  • Shana Udvardy, a senior climate resilience policy analyst at UCS. She is based in Washington, D.C. Click here to view her biography.

Contact UCS Climate and Energy Media Manager Ashley Siefert Nunes via email at asiefert@ucsusa.org or by phone at +1 952-239-0199 to speak with a UCS scientist or analyst.

Additional UCS Resources and Analyses:

  • A 2022 peer-reviewed study “Too Hot to Work,” which found that without global action to reduce heat-trapping emissions, climate change is projected to quadruple U.S. outdoor workers’ exposure to hazardous heat conditions, jeopardizing their health and placing up to $55.4 billion of their earnings at risk between now and 2065. For the interactive mapping tool, click here.
  • A 2019 peer-reviewed study “Killer Heat,” which found that without global action to reduce heat-trapping emissions, the number of days per year when the “feels like” temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit would more than double from historical levels to an average of 36 across the United States by midcentury and increase four-fold to an average of 54 by late century. To get the results for a specific city or county, use the online widget. For the interactive mapping tool, click here.
  • A 2019 report titled “US Military on the Frontlines of Extreme Heat,” which found that over the next three decades military installations in the contiguous United States could average an extra month of days each year when the “feels like” temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • A 2019 UCS report titled “Farmworkers at Risk,” which evaluated the risks pesticide exposure and heat stress can pose to U.S. farmworkers’ safety.
  • A fact sheet on the science connecting extreme weather events, like extreme heat, and climate change.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/14/nearly-120-million-people-in-us-under-extreme-weather-alerts-as-heat-dome-descends-summer-danger-season-off-to-brutal-start/feed/ 0 411832 Oregon County Sues Big Oil for Climate Damages Caused by Heat Dome, Wildfires https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/22/oregon-county-sues-big-oil-for-climate-damages-caused-by-heat-dome-wildfires/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/22/oregon-county-sues-big-oil-for-climate-damages-caused-by-heat-dome-wildfires/#respond Thu, 22 Jun 2023 21:15:03 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/oregon-county-sues-big-oil-for-climate-damages-caused-by-heat-dome-wildfires Oregon’s most populous county today filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that seeks to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for decades of climate deception and pollution that fueled the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome and other extreme weather events.

Multnomah County’s lawsuit, filed in Oregon state court, is part of a growing nationwide wave of climate accountability lawsuits that seek to make fossil fuel companies pay for climate damages they knowingly caused. It charges some of the world’s biggest climate polluters — including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, Koch Industries, and Total — as well as industry trade groups and consultants such as the American Petroleum Institute, Western States Petroleum Association, and McKinsey & Company, with defrauding the public for decades about the harm caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

It is the first such lawsuit filed in response to the 2021 heat dome, which killed 69 county residents, placed enormous strain on municipal resources, and scientists say “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” Multnomah County is the first local government to sue oil majors for climate damages since the U.S. Supreme Court this spring declined requests from the fossil fuel industry to intervene in similar lawsuits in seven other states. Those cases are now advancing toward trial in state court.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, released the following statement:

“Multnomah County has joined the growing ranks of local governments that are standing up to Big Oil and fighting to make these polluters pay for the catastrophic damage they knowingly caused and lied about for decades. While other communities are seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for the costs of hurricanes, rising seas, and wildfires, Multnomah County is the first to demand that oil companies stand trial for fueling the devastating 2021 heat dome, which claimed lives and wreaked havoc across the Pacific Northwest. Communities should not be forced to pay the price for these catastrophic climate damages while the companies that caused the crisis perpetuate their lies and rake in record profits. The people of Multnomah County deserve their day in court to hold Big Oil accountable.”

Background on Climate Accountability Lawsuits Against Big Oil:

Since 2017, the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia, as well as municipal governments in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico have filed lawsuits to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for deceiving the public about their products’ role in climate change. Two cases — from Honolulu and Massachusetts — are already in pretrial discovery, with others close behind.

To date, six federal appeals courts — including the Ninth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Oregon — and 14 federal district courts have unanimously ruled against the fossil fuel industry’s arguments to prevent these lawsuits from moving forward in state courts. In March, the U.S. Justice Department added its support for the communities. In April and May, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Big Oil petitions to consider the industry’s appeals of those lower court rulings.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/22/oregon-county-sues-big-oil-for-climate-damages-caused-by-heat-dome-wildfires/feed/ 0 406174 Hui Muslims and police clash in China’s Yunnan over mosque dome demolition | Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/30/hui-muslims-and-police-clash-in-chinas-yunnan-over-mosque-dome-demolition-radio-free-asia-rfa/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/30/hui-muslims-and-police-clash-in-chinas-yunnan-over-mosque-dome-demolition-radio-free-asia-rfa/#respond Tue, 30 May 2023 22:00:11 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=b6375b47adb613372dcd5ae5605d7a04
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/30/hui-muslims-and-police-clash-in-chinas-yunnan-over-mosque-dome-demolition-radio-free-asia-rfa/feed/ 0 399556 Hui Muslims and police clash in China’s Yunnan over mosque dome demolition https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/yunnan-mosque-05302023145532.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/yunnan-mosque-05302023145532.html#respond Tue, 30 May 2023 19:01:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/yunnan-mosque-05302023145532.html Police in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan have detained more than 30 people following clashes over the weekend between hundreds of armed police and Hui Muslims trying to prevent the demolition of a dome on a major mosque.

Authorities in the mostly Muslim town of Nagu started arresting people for public order violations after clashes on Saturday, when a government demolition team toppled the minarets and dome roof of the historic Najiaying Mosque.

It is part of the "sinicization" of religion under President Xi Jinping that ushered in a nationwide crackdown on Muslim, Christian and Tibetan Buddhist religious activities and venues in 2017.

The mosque, run by Hui Muslims, had recently expanded its minarets and dome, a move that was ruled illegal by a local court, al-Jazeera reported, amid concerns that further clashes look likely when authorities move to demolish a dome in nearby Shadian on Friday.

Social media footage posted by Twitter user Ismail Ma showed hundreds of police in full riot gear forming a blockade outside the mosque gate on Saturday. They prevented members of the public from entering, with some members of the crowd trying to push through the phalanx of officers and throwing what appeared to be paving slabs at police amid angry shouting.

In another clip, a crowd faces off with ranks of riot police in a city street, shouting "Allahu Akbar," according to Ma.

"According to the live video obtained so far, there are a lot of plainclothes policemen mingling among the people," Ma tweeted. "There are non-local people around who aren't Muslims, and whose accents aren't local, so watch out for ... plotting and framing."

An officer who answered the phone at the Nagu county police department declined to comment when contacted by Radio Free Asia on Monday.

"I don't know about this – you need to wait for an official announcement," the officer said. 

‘Disrupting social order’

On Sunday, the Tonghai county prosecutor and police issued a joint statement calling on anyone involved in the clashes to turn themselves in, saying they had "seriously disrupted social order."

Anyone who does so by June 6 and gives a truthful confession will be dealt with more leniently, the statement said, calling on others to inform on their fellow protesters to get a lighter sentence.

ENG_CHN_YunnanMosque_05302023.2.jpg
A crowd faces off with ranks of riot police in Nagu in the Chinese province of Yunnan. Credit: majuismail1122 Twitter

A Hui Muslim resident of Yunnan who gave only the surname Yang said the authorities have been demolishing mosque domes across the region in recent years, pointing to the "sinicization" program under Xi.

"Islam in China is to be de-Arabized," Yang said. "This is totally evil – there's no freedom of religion at all."

Wlodek Cieciura, assistant professor in the department of Sinology, Islam and Muslims in China and the Sinophone World at the University of Warsaw, said via Twitter that the Nanjiaying mosque was "once of the most famous centers of Islamic learning and culture in China.” 

He added that "the situation in Shadian town, some 90 km to the south is said to be even more charged."

Cieciura cited a Hui friend as saying that Shadian and Najiaying were "the last bastions of dignity for Chinese Muslims," and "This might be our final stand."

Shadian saw a major resistance among Hui Muslims to the Cultural Revolution smashing of religious venues and artifacts under late supreme leader Mao Zedong, suffering a major massacre in 1975, Cieciura said, adding that there are plans to similarly "renovate" the Shadian Mosque on June 2.

Targeting churches as well

A Christian believer from the eastern province of Anhui who gave only the surname Wang said the "sinicization" program had earlier targeted church crosses around the country in recent years, particularly in the eastern province of Zhejiang.

"They've removed pretty much all of the cross from churches now, and now they're moving on to other religions," Wang said. "The removal of domes from mosques is similar to the removal of crosses."

"They are moving on to rectify religions other than Christianity," he said.

In a May 27 tweet, Ciecura cited comments from Muslims on social media as "declaring their readiness to defend the mosques to the end."

The Shadian resistance movement erupted in 1964 in response to nationwide political witch hunts targeting religious believers, and continued until at least 1975, culminating in the massacre of around 1,600 Muslims in an orgy of violence that the government blamed on disgraced former premier Lin Biao, and later on the Gang of Four.

The atheist Chinese Communist Party regards religious beliefs as a dangerous foreign import that could destabilize the regime, and deploys an army of “religious affairs” officials to micromanage and suppress faith organizations around the country.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/yunnan-mosque-05302023145532.html/feed/ 0 399538 Teapot Dome Redivivus: How Clinton and Gore Opened the Alaskan Arctic to Oil Drilling https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/teapot-dome-redivivus-how-clinton-and-gore-opened-the-alaskan-arctic-to-oil-drilling/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/teapot-dome-redivivus-how-clinton-and-gore-opened-the-alaskan-arctic-to-oil-drilling/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2023 05:59:50 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=276806

An exploratory drilling camp at the proposed site of the Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope in 2019. Photo: ConocoPhillips.

Imagine building 70 new coal-fired power plants that will emit 9 million metric tons of carbon pollution a year (the same as two million gas-powered cars) and more than wipe out all emissions savings from renewable energy projects on U.S. public lands by 2030. Imagine constructing hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines, two airstrips, a gravel mine and a big processing plant on tundra and wetlands where the permafrost is already melting so quickly that it will have to be artificially-refrozen to keep the whole enterprise from collapsing.

That’s basically what you’re getting with the Willow Project, the massive oil drilling operation just approved on Alaska’s North Slope by Biden’s Interior Department. This grotesque operation prompted Al Gore to waddle forth with a rare rebuke of a fellow New Democrat: “The proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling in Alaska is recklessly irresponsible. The pollution it would generate will not only put Alaska native and other local communities at risk, it is incompatible with the ambition we need to achieve a net zero future. We don’t need to prop up the fossil fuel industry with new, multi-year projects that are a recipe for climate chaos. Instead, we must end the expansion of oil, gas and coal and embrace the abundant climate solutions at our fingertips.”

Gore makes a lot of sense here, except for one major blind spot: It was his own administration which first opened the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to drilling. He and Bruce Babbitt both lent their environmental credentials (such as they were) to drilling on the very same North Slope tundra into which Conoco-Phillips now plans to drill 200 oil wells. Here’s how it happened. –JSC

Forget the favors to Lippo. Forget those nightly rentals of the Lincoln bedroom. By far the biggest scandal in town, entirely unreported, is the new Alaskan oil rush. It is a multibillion-dollar giveaway reminiscent of the Teapot Dome fiasco, when Albert Fall, President Warren Harding’s Interior Secretary, secretly leased off a naval oil reserve north of Casper, Wyoming, to oilman Harry Sinclair. For his efforts, Fall received as much as $400,000 from Sinclair and a year in the federal penitentiary.

How is this contemporary version of the Teapot Dome being brokered? Following the standard script for the Clinton Administration, it is a story of special access and special rights, greased by well-placed lobbyists, secured by corporate campaign disbursements and involving the transference-on an almost unfathomable scale–of public wealth into private hands. At the center of this drama is the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a glorious, fragile wilderness, the largest expanse of undeveloped public land in North America. In the wings is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whose opening to oil leasing has been the decade-long goal of ARCO, British Petroleum and Exxon, the three major players in the state. Already, a couple of deregulatory curtain-raisers suggest the course of acts to come.

In the spring of 1996, amid a sphinx-like silence from the press, the Clinton Administration handed the oil industry a gigantic favor worth billions of dollars. It overturned the twenty-three-year old ban on the export of Alaskan crude oil. From the beginning, the opening of Alaska’s North Slope to drilling–and the construction of the leaky 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline to transport the crude from the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez–was sanctioned by Congress only because the oil was intended to buttress America’s energy independence. At the time, however, Senator Walter Mondale warned that the oil companies would eventually have the export ban overturned. They envisioned a “Trans-Alaska-Japan pipeline,” he said, an opening to export large shipments of Alaskan crude to Asia in order to keep winter heating fuel prices high in the Midwestern states.

He turns out to have been right. Of course, the oil companies explain their intentions somewhat differently. Back in 1994, still at the nadir of public esteem because of the Exxon Valdez disaster and unsuccessful in efforts to whip up fears of an oil shortage that might open the Wildlife Refuge to drilling, they announced that the problem wasn’t a shortage at all, but a glut. Suddenly, they said, there was more oil in Prudhoe Bay than anyone had previously imagined, but because of laws prohibiting the sale of Alaskan oil to lucrative foreign markets–Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China–the companies might have to scale back production and lay off hundreds of workers.

The winning strategy to lift the export ban was hatched by Tommy Boggs, the Rasputin of American lobbyists, whose firm, Patton Boggs, represents a thick portfolio of oil companies, including Exxon, Mobil, Shell and ARCO. In this instance, Boggs was the advance man for Alyeska, an oil consortium that operates the pipeline and supervises drilling on the North Slope. In an August 1995 memo to a prospective client, Boggs, a golfing pal of Bill Clinton, boasts of “having led the private-sector effort to get exports of Alaskan North Slope oil approved by the 104th Congress and signed by President Clinton.” Boggs’s typical price tag is a robust $550 per hour–or $22,000 for a forty-hour week.

Barely had Clinton signed the order lifting the ban before he handed the oil cartel another amazing gift: the Federal Oil and Gas Simplification and Fairness Act. The name is signal enough that dirty work was afoot. And indeed it was.

Approved by Congress on the last day of the 1996 summer session, the law places a seven-year limit on federal audits of oil company records of income from drilling on public lands. It turns over many auditing responsibilities concerning drilling on federal lands to the states. It permits the oil companies to sue the federal government to collect interest on royalty “overpayments,” and it allows those same companies to set the “market price” of the crude oil upon which the royalty payments to the government are based. In other words, the bill legalizes a scam Big Oil has been running for decades, underpaying billions in royalties on crude oil extracted from federal lands.

As he shoveled a mountain of cash to the oil companies, Clinton cast the measure as a simple matter of streamlining. “Many Americans don’t know it, but a significant percentage of the oil and natural gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands,” he declared. “Until today, regulatory red tape and conflict in court rulings had discouraged many companies from taking full advantage of these resources,” which he said he was now unleashing to increase domestic energy production.

Map of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Credit: Alaska Audubon.

The next public intimation that the Clinton Administration is among the federal properties leased by ARCO and Exxon came in the vulgar surroundings of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on lands formerly owned by the Rockefeller clan. Here, Clinton played host to a platoon of oil company moguls, who took the opportunity to brief him on an even grander scheme to boost domestic oil production: open the National Petroleum Reserve to oil leasing. And here’s where we find Teapot Dome redivivus.

West of Prudhoe Bay lies the 23-million-acre reserve, set aside in 1923. Back then it was under the control of the Navy, the oil held in store against a national calamity. For decades, even during the fraught hours of World War II and the frenzied days of the energy crisis, the admirals fought off the oil companies and their allies in the Interior Department who lobbied to open the reserve to private exploitation under the guise of national security. In late 1980, Jimmy Carter gave the Interior Department the authority to sell the Navy’s oil. This was the fatal move, for Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt then quickly geared up to open the reserve to the oil barons. He was held off by a lawsuit brought by Eskimo elders, who argued that drilling would damage their subsistence rights to hunt and fish. Bill Clinton and Bruce Babbitt are now set to accomplish what Reagan and Watt could not.

Students of the political economy of the Clinton White House are correct in assuming, as this narrative unfolds, that the billions handed over by Clinton to the Alaskan oil cartel were predicated on a substantial river of cash flowing the other way. After all, ARCO the largest producer on the North Slope and likely to be the prime benefactor of the new Alaskan oil bonanza–is one of the pre-eminent sponsors of the American political system. In the 1996 election cycle, ARCO’s political action committee handed out more than $352,000. Over the same period, ARCO pumped soft money into the tanks of the Republican and Democratic national committees ($764,000 and $486,000, respectively).

On October 25, 1995, Robert Healy, ARCO’s director of governmental relations, attended a White House kaffeeklatsch with Vice President A1 Gore and Marvin Rosen, finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. A few days before the session, Healy himself contributed $ 1,000 to the Clinton/Gore reelection campaign. Before the month was out, his company had put $32,000 into the D.N.C.

A man who does much of ARCO’s political dirty work in Washington is Charles Manatt, former chairman of the Democratic Party. Manatt runs a high-octane lobbying shop called Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, formerly the lair of Mickey Kantor. The lobbyist attended a White House coffee with Clinton on May 26, 1995. In 1993 and 1996, Manatt alone doled out $117,150 in hard and soft money. Members of Manatt’s family threw in $4,500, his law firm $24,500 and the firm’s PAC another $81,099. Inside the Clinton Cabinet, Manatt’s former partner, Kantor, became the most strident voice for lifting the export ban on Alaskan oil, promoting it as a vital element in the Administration’s Asian trade policy.

Lodwrick Cook, ARCO’s former C.E.O., is a personal friend of Bill Clinton. In 1994, Cook celebrated his birthday at the White House. The President himself presented the towering cake. Cook traveled with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown on a trade junket to China in August 1994. During that trip, Cook and Brown negotiated ARCO’s investment in the huge Zhenhai refinery outside Shanghai. The refinery is now ready to process Alaskan crude, which suggests that at least two years before Clinton’s executive order allowing Alaskan oil exports, ARCO had inside knowledge of what was to come.

A key role in this affair has also been played by Alaska’s Governor, Tony Knowles, known by some Alaskans as the Governor of ARCO. Knowles, who proudly asserts that in his youth he was a “roughneck” in the oilfields of West Texas, is the first Democrat to run the state in many years, and his 1994 campaign received more than $30,000 from ARCO. In recognition of this munificence, Knowles lobbied the Clinton Administration to open more federal land in Alaska to oil development. High on the list was the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. However, as a pledge to the eco-lobby, Clinton had vowed to veto any measures to open the 17-million acre Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. At that point, as the Anchorage Daily News regularly reported, Knowles countered that if the refuge was off limits, the Administration had to unlock the National Petroleum Reserve.

This was almost certainly the message that Tony Knowles delivered to Clinton when he slept at the White House in January of 1995, and was underscored by his Lieutenant Governor, Fran Ulmer, at a morning coffee in the Map Room on February 28, 1996. In his State of the State address this year, Knowles boasted, “Just five years ago, they said we’d be turning off the lights on the industry with one of the state’s largest payrolls. Now our motto should be that old bumper sticker: `DEAR LORD, PLEASE LET THERE BE ONE MORE OIL BOOM, AND I PROMISE WE WON’T WASTE IT.”‘ His prayers were soon answered by the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt. On February 7, Babbitt announced that he was ordering an environmental impact statement on the leasing of the reserve. Babbitt went further, saying that “oil leasing is absolutely the goal of the environmental studies.”

That statement indicates the utter lawlessness of the crowd now running the country. As the National Environmental Policy Act stipulates, environmental review comes first, and a decision second. For Babbitt, it’s the other way around. He rationalizes this effrontery by gesturing toward a new consensual politics that does not require the pesky corsets of legal obligation: “We’d like to break away from the adversarial style and see if we can put together some new way of doing business with the oil industry. I think we’ve got lots of possibilities.”

Babbitt says he will go to Alaska this summer to hike over the 23 million acre reserve. “I want to get out on the ground and I want to look at every square inch of the National Petroleum Reserve. My plans now are to fly to Anchorage, change planes for Barrow, and then I want to disappear into the N.P.R. for as much time as I need, to understand every geological structure, every lake, every wildlife issue so that I will be prepared to be a meaningful participant in this process.” Perhaps he will come across the bones of Hale Boggs, the former oil Congressman from Louisiana, whose plane disappeared in the Alaskan outback in 1972. It would be an appropriate discovery. Boggs navigated the original Alaskan oil-drilling bill through Congress at the start of the seventies as a favor to his friend Edward Patton, the Exxon executive who became the C.E.O. of Alyeska, now represented in Washington by Hale Boggs’s son Tommy.

What kind of place is the National Petroleum Reserve? This 36,000 square-mile expanse of Arctic land is crossed by the Colville River, which sweeps in a giant arc from its headwaters in the Noatak National Park across the Anuktuvuk plateau to its delta at the icy Beaufort Sea. Grizzlies gather at the river in astounding numbers to feast on grayling, Arctic char and whitefish. As the river makes its final bend toward the Arctic Ocean, it slides along a sixty-mile palisade of cliffs, eroding away at the base to reveal mastodon tusks and the fossilized bones of dinosaurs. Two hundred feet up in these limestone bluffs nest peregrines, gyrfalcon and rough-legged hawks, making the Colville drainage the most prolific raptor habitat in the Arctic. It is this escarpment that the oil companies cherish most.

Arctic Caribou crossing the Kobuk River. Photo: USFWS.

By far the region’s most dominant ecological force is the Western Arctic caribou herd, which roams across the reserve on migratory routes unimpeded for millennia. The 500,000-head herd is the largest in Alaska, three times the size of the famous Porcupine herd in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In the wake of the caribou come the wolves, ravens, wolverines and native hunters, feeding on the detritus of this massive rush of life.

David van der Berg, a carpenter from Fairbanks, is one of the few people to have floated the 450-mile course of the Colville. “The Colville country is unquestionably the wildest place in North America,” he says. “The oil companies have occupied nearly every other tract in northern Alaska. True wilderness is now so much scarcer than oil.”

The National Petroleum Reserve encompasses an area the size of Indiana, yet the entire region is home to fewer than 6,000 people, most of whom live on its peripheries. On its eastern border is the hamlet of Nuiqsut, a village of 450 people built on the site of an ancient Eskimo settlement. By the early sixties many of the Eskimo had been moved off their traditional lands and relocated to the town of Barrow. In 1974, however, twenty-seven families decided to reclaim their lands at the mouth of the Colville. Back in Barrow, their neighbors shook their heads, thinking they would surely perish that first winter living in tents. But they finally built the village at Nuiqsut, which this year is celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

Now ARCO has come to Nuiqsut looking for help in gaining entry into the reserve. It has promised money and jobs. And, indeed, the villagers would like the money, but fear the cultural and environmental repercussions of an enormous oilfield development over which they would have no control.

Consider what’s already happened on the North Slope. The 500-plus wells in Arctic Alaska produce 840,000 gallons of waste each year. In 1985 and 1986 the Alaska Department of Conservation recorded 953 spills involving oil and other liquids. The contents of more than 250 pits, each filled with 13 million gallons of toxic pollutants, are pumped onto gravel roads or the open tundra. A January 1997 report by the Alaska Forum for Environmental Responsibility disclosed that a contractor for British Petroleum had been illegally injecting hazardous waste, including oil, solvents, paints and hydraulic fluid, into its wells on Endicott Island, one of the most productive oilfields in Alaska. When an oil worker refused to dispose of the waste in this manner, he was told by his superiors that illegal dumping didn’t matter because “no one lives on the North Slope anyway.”

From Nuiqsut on a clear day it is possible to see the foul haze of the operations at Prudhoe Bay sixty miles away. The industrial sprawl surrounding the bay is the best reason to keep the oil companies out of the petroleum reserve. These days Prudhoe Bay is something of a toxic armed encampment, entry to the area being totally controlled by the security forces of the oil companies.

As for the pipeline, it has leaked almost from the day the crude began to flow. In 1976 it was learned that one of Alyeska’s contractors had falsified X-rays of faulty welding on much of the pipeline. In 1979, one of the welds broke and more than 235,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Atigun River. Now the pipeline averages a major incident every ten days. Many of these problems have been brought to the attention of the company and federal officials by Alyeska employees. The oil company’s response has been to go after the whistleblowers.

“In 1990, Alyeska hired Wackenhut security to conduct an industrial espionage campaign to identify and harass whistleblowers,” says Richard Fineberg, an oil policy consultant to the Alaska Forum. “When the company’s espionage escapades came to light, Alyeska issued a public apology and settled lawsuits brought by six Alaskans who were targets of the spying effort.”

How much oil is buried beneath the tundra? According to explorations in the early seventies by Navy geologists, the Alaskan reserve may harbor as much as 35 billion barrels, worth nearly a trillion dollars if drilled to the last drop. The estimate is almost certainly conservative. ARCO knows more precisely the subterranean wealth at stake, because it has done extensive testing in the area and has just struck a 300 million-barrel oilfield on the reserve’s eastern border, near Nuiqsut. In fact, the oil companies have been poaching crude off the reserve for years, siphoning its hidden resources by slant drilling within the two-mile buffers established in 1923 by the Navy. But ARCO which swallowed up old Harry Sinclair’s oil company in 1969, the same year it struck oil in Alaska–says that to divulge what it knows about the oil in this public property would be to reveal proprietary information.

“Some conservationists might be tempted to trade off the largely unknown ecological treasures of the National Petroleum Reserve for a delay in the leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” warns Sylvia Ward of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center in Fairbanks. “That would be a tragic miscalculation. In Alaska we’ve come to learn that the oil companies won’t stop until they have it all.” A few days later, British Petroleum and Chevron announced their intention to sink exploratory wells within two miles of the Wildlife Refuge.

This story is adapted from Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/17/teapot-dome-redivivus-how-clinton-and-gore-opened-the-alaskan-arctic-to-oil-drilling/feed/ 0 380054 Activists call for US apology, ‘justice’ over Marshall Islands nuclear tests https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/22/activists-call-for-us-apology-justice-over-marshall-islands-nuclear-tests/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/22/activists-call-for-us-apology-justice-over-marshall-islands-nuclear-tests/#respond Sun, 22 Jan 2023 21:22:25 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=83322 By Susana Suisuiki, RNZ Pacific journalist

More than 100 activist groups, including Greenpeace, Veterans for Peace, and the Arms Control Association have signed a letter calling on US President Joe Biden to apologise for nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands.

The letter urges Biden to deliver on promises his administration has made regarding justice for those affected by the tests.

And it said this should be done before the Compact of Free Association with Washington is signed by all parties.

So far, Palau and the Marshall Islands have signed memorandums of understanding that outline the frameworks for what will become their third Compact of Free Association, while the Federated States of Micronesia has yet to sign up.

“The US government clearly has an ongoing moral obligation to help address the adverse impacts of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands,” the letter states.

“We do not believe that any new Compact of Free Association can be considered fair or equitable without fully addressing these issues in a way that is acceptable to the Marshallese people.”

Between 1946 and 1958, 23 nuclear tests were carried out on Bikini Atoll and forty-four near Enewetak Atoll. The weapons tested had an estimated explosive yield equivalent to one-point-seven times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Crippling impact
Executive director Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association said the US needs to acknowledge the crippling impact of these tests.

“It’s important to remember the past legacy of US nuclear weapons testing,” he said.

Executive Director of the Arms Control Association Daryl Kimball
Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball . . . “The United States an enormous debt to pay for the devastating effects of the 67 United States nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands.” Image: RNZ Pacific

“We feel we have in the United States an enormous debt to pay for the devastating effects of the 67 United States nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands.”

Kimball said the effects of the tests are still present within the Marshallese community today.

“The nuclear testing has led to serious illnesses over time such as radiation poisoning, elevated cancer rates, birth defects, and the contamination of food and water sources continues to this day,” he said.

Runeit Dome built by the US on Enewetak Atoll to hold radioactive waste from nuclear tests.
Runit dome built by the US on Enewetak Atoll to hold radioactive waste from nuclear tests. Image: Tom Vance/RNZ Pacific
Runit Dome
A close up of Runit dome. Image: RNZ Pacific

“One of the islands — Runit Island, where waste from the past nuclear test is contained within a dome — has become completely uninhabitable.

“Many of the islands in the Marshall Islands are still contaminated and some may not be able to be fully restored. We have to remember that these islands are low-lying, they’re being affected by climate change and being battered by a number of different forces.”

Actions called for
The activist groups’ letter states that before the Compact can be renewed a number of actions should be taken including:

  • Compensation claims of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal;
  • Expanding access to health care, especially for those with illnesses associated with radiation exposure; and
  • Prompt declassification of all documents relating to the relocation of displaced Marshallese people.

“When the first compact was signed in 1986 it was not clear the extent of the devastation of the damage,” Kimball said.

“The United States has not been as forthcoming as it needs to be about the information to declassify a lot of the records that were late, and frankly the Marshallese people — because of the economic hardships created in large part by the history of the testing — they themselves don’t have the technical capacity to deal with these issues and so we see these issues persisting.

“New efforts need to be taken, additional resources need to be provided to recompense for the damage to health, culture and the economy.”

Kimball said that an apology could not make up for the lives lost and the damage created by the nuclear tests, but “it’s the right thing to do”, he said.

“It would recognise the wrongs that were committed and teach future generations that these wrongs can never be and should never be created.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/22/activists-call-for-us-apology-justice-over-marshall-islands-nuclear-tests/feed/ 0 366392 ‘Absolute Madness’: Record-Shattering Heat Dome Hits Europe https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/02/absolute-madness-record-shattering-heat-dome-hits-europe/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/02/absolute-madness-record-shattering-heat-dome-hits-europe/#respond Mon, 02 Jan 2023 23:44:31 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/europe-record-temperatures-january

As Europe closed the books on its warmest year ever recorded, an exceptionally potent winter heat dome descended on much of the continent over the holiday weekend, with thousands of daily and monthly high-temperature records shattered from Spain to Russia.

"The intensity and extent of warmth in Europe right now is hard to comprehend," meteorologist Scott Duncan toldThe Times of London. "There are too many records to count. Literally thousands. Overnight minimum temperatures are like summer."

The Times reported:

Bilbao in northern Spain reached 24.9°C, the hottest temperature recorded for the city in January and more akin to a summer's day than the start of the year. Records were broken throughout Germany, including Dresden in the east where it was 13.5°C. Temperatures in Switzerland were at 20°C. The Czech Republic recorded a January national record of 19.6°C at the town of Javornik.

The Washington Postnoted that at least seven countries—Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland—recorded their warmest January temperatures ever.

Poland's Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW) said Sunday that "the average daily temperature for Słubice was 15.3°C for the last day, and 15°C in Warsaw and Wrocław."

"This means that we have a one-day thermal summer in the middle of winter," IMGW added. "The thermal anomaly is over 15°C. This is an unprecedented situation in our climate."

Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who specializes in extreme weather, called the temperatures "totally insane" and "absolute madness."

It's "the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” Herrera told the Post. "Nothing stands close to this."

As the Post noted:

This exceptional wintertime warmth comes on the heels of the warmest 2022 in many parts of Europe, including in the U.K., Germany, and Switzerland. Extreme heat visited Europe in waves throughout the year and was intensified by a historically severe summer drought. The combination helped push the United Kingdom to 104°F (40°C) for the first time on record in July.

Climatologists said that while weather conditions caused the heat dome currently over Europe, there is a proven link between the continued burning of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures.

"The record-breaking across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change," Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto told The Times, "just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter."


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/02/absolute-madness-record-shattering-heat-dome-hits-europe/feed/ 0 361557 Heat dome over California to begin easing; Queen Elizabeth dies at age 96; New Biden military aid package for Ukraine: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – September 8, 2022 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/heat-dome-over-california-to-begin-easing-queen-elizabeth-dies-at-age-96-new-biden-military-aid-package-for-ukraine-the-pacifica-evening-news-weekdays-september-8-2022/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/heat-dome-over-california-to-begin-easing-queen-elizabeth-dies-at-age-96-new-biden-military-aid-package-for-ukraine-the-pacifica-evening-news-weekdays-september-8-2022/#respond Thu, 08 Sep 2022 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=33ee8744de7fbed36f9c6b65b4cac022
This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/heat-dome-over-california-to-begin-easing-queen-elizabeth-dies-at-age-96-new-biden-military-aid-package-for-ukraine-the-pacifica-evening-news-weekdays-september-8-2022/feed/ 0 331252 The Bellyfeel of Paradise: Inside the Media Dome https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/21/the-bellyfeel-of-paradise-inside-the-media-dome/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/21/the-bellyfeel-of-paradise-inside-the-media-dome/#respond Thu, 21 Apr 2022 18:48:04 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=128967 All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. — (Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer but there is little evidence of this.  See: Quote Investigator) Sometimes I hear sounds in my roof that tell me that the birds are trying to get in […]

The post The Bellyfeel of Paradise: Inside the Media Dome first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
— (Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer but there is little evidence of this.  See: Quote Investigator)

Sometimes I hear sounds in my roof that tell me that the birds are trying to get in and make a nest in the attic. I crawl to the point where the joists meet the rafters and I can see the light coming in from the outside. It is at this point, at the extremity of the house and when I am on my belly because of the pitch of the roof, that I am reminded of the Flammarion engraving.

A traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament in the original (1888) printing of the Flammarion wood engraving.

Flammarion engraving

The Flammarion engraving is a nineteenth century depiction of the sky as a dome where a traveller goes to the edge of the world puts his head through to see the greater universe outside. The safe, comforting world of a static blue vault of fixed stars gives way to a modern dynamic view that the earth is moving in space. It is interesting that it is a traveller that is depicted, the type of person who goes beyond local boundaries of mental and physical limitations to achieve understanding.

The concept of a dome was also used in the film The Truman Show (1998), a ‘reality’ show where Truman Burbank is followed and watched 24 hours a day without realising it. Truman’s slowly developing consciousness that all is not right in his perfect world begins when strange things start happening to him. There is a glitch in the radio and he hears his own route being discussed. He becomes suspicious and tries to catch people off guard. He runs into an office and discovers the elevator is not real but a set. He gradually becomes aware that he is surrounded by actors who even advertise the goods that he consumes in various forms of product placement. Eventually he resolves to leave and has to use deceptive means to escape the prying eyes of the cameras that watch him night and day. He overcomes his fear of water and sails away from his artificially constructed hometown of Seahaven Island.

Truman crashes into the dome

Despite an artificial storm created by Christof (his godlike father, the show’s creator and executive producer) Truman sails to the edge of the dome where he crashes into the sky and cloud painting of the wall of the dome itself. He has reached the boundary of his world and now has to decide whether or not to leave his comfortable life behind and face reality outside the dome. Christof tries to dissuade him but Truman takes his destiny into his own hands and disappears through a door in the dome.

Inside the Media Dome

Truman’s dome is symbolic of the media dome we are all encapsulated in today by the prevalence of a monopolising mass media. Like The Truman Show, everything inside the media dome appears to be perfect. The right causes are matched with the right emotions and arguments, and everybody agrees. It has the right ‘bellyfeel’, a neologism which George Orwell used in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) implying blind, enthusiastic acceptance. Outside of the comfort of the dome there lies only a fantastical, fictional world full of propaganda, hoaxes and conspiracy theories.

The idea that the media dome may be some form of sinister manipulation has been depicted in many films such as They Live (1988). A homeless drifter (another traveler), Nada, finds a pair of sunglasses which reveal the ‘true’ meanings of the advertisements which surround us. He “discovers that the sunglasses make the world appear monochrome, but also reveal subliminal messages in the media to consume, reproduce, and conform.” The manipulation is attributed to aliens who are “enslaving the population and keeping them in a dream-like state.”

They Live (1988) by John Carpenter, based on the 1963 short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’

In the real world subliminal messages in advertising have ranged from words and images briefly flashing in between frames of film (usually at one tenth of a second) to subtle uses of visual design. Thus, subliminal messages “are visual or auditory stimuli that the conscious mind cannot perceive, often inserted into other media such as TV commercials or songs. This kind of messaging can be used to strengthen or heighten the persuasiveness of advertisements, or to convey an altogether different message entirely.”

Aliens also feature in the film Men in Black (1997). The MIB is a secret organization that monitors and polices extraterrestrial lifeforms who live on Earth and hide their existence from ordinary humans. Lowell Cunningham, the writer of the original The Men in Black comic book got the idea after a friend of his introduced him to the concept of government “Men in black” riding the streets in a black van.

Cunningham’s narrative satirises State secretive organisations whose activities are kept hidden from much of the global population. Thus, the Agents of the MIB keep the people safe from ‘alien’ concepts and activities.

In the Matrix series of films the idea of a secret world of mass media manipulation is taken a step further and depicted as a simulated reality that is also protected by a team of Agents and police. A computer programmer Thomas Anderson, ‘Neo’, is taken to meet Morpheus, a ‘terrorist’, who offers him a choice between two pills: red to reveal the truth about the Matrix, and blue to forget everything and return to his former life. Neo takes the red pill and learns that humanity is enslaved by intelligent machines. In the Matrix films people have the opportunity to see beyond their simulated reality (like Nada) but choose to stick with their comfortable lives instead (unlike Truman). In fact, Morpheus warns Neo, “many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Allegory of the Cave

Of course, the concept of people preferring a way of life that is ultimately against their own best interests is not new. Plato discussed such an idea over two thousand years ago in his Allegory of the Cave in his work The Republic. In the cave, prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets of men and other living things. The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them, they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. These shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else. Plato then discusses the freedom of one prisoner. He writes: “the freed prisoner would turn away and run back to what he is accustomed to (that is, the shadows of the carried objects), he would escape by turning away to the things which he was able to look at, and these he would believe to be clearer than what was being shown to him.”

Plato’s allegory of the cave by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna

The implications of the new reality outside the cave are so enormous and so threatening to his fixed way of life that the prisoner chooses his accustomed way of life over dramatic changes and a new consciousness. The active manipulation of his perceptions does not enter into his consciousness, after all, somebody has to chain him, keep the fire lit and carry the “vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall.” All he thinks about is returning to the way of life he was used to, watching the show but never questioning who was producing it.

The Media Loop

The idea of media manipulation and protection from ‘alien ideas’ (read ideologies) is extended further in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to include supporting the war agendas of the state. Support for the ‘right’ side in each war is guaranteed by provoking hate and fear in equal quantities for each new ‘enemy of the state’. Orwell writes:

And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army–row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice. Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other.

In reality, the enemy of the state is also decided according to the war agenda of the state even if the war does not benefit the people themselves. Because of the whipping up of emotion and hatred, the people do not notice that they actually have no reason to be at war. Each new enemy, even ones they had good diplomatic relations with, becomes an enemy if they stand in the way of the state or threaten the power of the state by their actions to gain some autonomy from the state. The media becomes an ideological loop where it is decided who is good or bad according to the views of the elites of the state and not the people, while alternative ideas or ideologies are kept out.

Thus the media dome controls every factor of the peoples lives, from what to think, what to buy, and who to go to war with.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) screenshot

Of course, in the real world there are leaks (like Truman’s radio) that provoke questioning of the whole structure of the dome, that maybe something is artificially keeping the paradise going. Some respond to glitches in the system with outright refusal to believe that everything they know may not be true and they get very angry. Others are suspicious and take a skeptical attitude, basing their thinking on contradictions they have already noticed themselves. Still others take a critical attitude and actively seek different narratives to explain the reality that surrounds them.

While all this is happening alternative forms for questioning and understanding are being shut down and censored. Aspects of the media that allowed for analysis and discussion are disappearing because they too, like the mass media in general, are owned by megacorporations.

However, like in the Flammarion engraving, the comforting world of a static blue vault of fixed stars will always be contradicted by the massive energies outside the dome, and the inquisitive traveller will return with stories that are at first ridiculed, then opposed, before eventually being perceived as obvious.

The post The Bellyfeel of Paradise: Inside the Media Dome first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

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