There were 281 climate-related and geophysical events recorded in the EM-DAT (International Disaster Database) in 2018. These caused deaths of 10 733 people and affected 61 million people across the world. There were a number of major disasters in certain regions, however, there were no mega-disasters which inflate yearly averages, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) who manages EM-DAT said. Earthquakes and tsunamis accounted for the majority of the 10 373 lives lost.
Notable features of the year were intense seismic activity in Indonesia, a string of disasters in Japan, floods in India, and a very eventful year in volcanic activity (which resulted in more deaths than have occurred in the previous 18 years combined) and wildfires. These events continued to occupy headlines, CRED said.
An ongoing trend of lower death tolls from previous years continued into 2018, potentially demonstrating the efficacy of improved standards of living and disaster management. However, it is critical to avoid complacency towards major gaps in data collection and reporting and resilience, particularly for climate-related disasters, which are forecasted to increase in both frequency and intensity.
Globally, Indonesia recorded nearly half the total deaths from disasters in 2018, while India recorded nearly half the total number of individuals affected. The following data are events recorded in EM-DAT. As estimations become more accurate over time, figures will be adjusted, particularly for economic losses.
The original file posted by CRED can be found at the following link.
Earthquakes and tsunamis (20 events)
Earthquakes and tsunamis have been the deadliest disaster in the 21st century and this trend continued in 2018. The concentration of the damage was in South-East Asia and Melanesia, specifically in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea respectively.
In the early months of the year, a string of earthquakes in Papua New Guinea left 181 dead, and affected over half a million people, many of whom lived in remote highlands which were difficult to reach by aid and rescue operations.
In Indonesia, the island of Lombok suffered multiple earthquakes, the deadliest being on August 5th, which killed 564 people. On September 28th, an earthquake triggered mudflows and a tsunami on the island of Sulawesi killing 3 400 people, making it the deadliest disaster of 2018.
Storms (84 events)
Every year, storms impact millions of people, and create billions of dollars (USD) in damage; 2018 was the same.
Two major storms struck the United States, while in Asia, China, India, Japan, and the Philippines faced extensive damage from multiple storms.
It is anticipated that storms, particularly due to hurricanes Florence (14 billion USD) and Michael (16 billion USD) and typhoon Jebi (12.5 billion USD), will be the costliest type of disaster of 2018.
EM-DAT is awaiting final data on the economic damage from these events.
Floods (108 events)
Overall, floods have affected more people than any other type of natural hazard in the 21st century, including 2018. Overall, there was a respite from floods in 2018, with Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam, which often face relentless floods reporting fewer events this year. However, major floods were reported in other countries.
In Somalia, which is already suffering from an ongoing conflict, over 700 000 people were affected by flooding, while in Nigeria, flooding cost 300 lives and impacted nearly four million people.
In Japan, heavy rains triggered the deadliest floods since 1982, killing 230 people.
The August flooding of India’s Kerala state was by far the largest flood event of the year, with 504 dead, and two-thirds of the state’s residents affected (over 23 million people).
Currently, CRED is undertaking an epidemiological study in this region to investigate the impacts of the flooding on gender and disease.
Volcanic activity (7 events)
Volcanic activity rarely makes headlines, and has had minimal impacts since the turn of the century; however, in 2018 this natural hazard resulted in more deaths than have occurred in the previous 18 years combined.
In June, the Volcán de Fuego Eruption in Guatemala killed over 400 people and affected over 1.7 million, while late in December, the eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed over 400 people on the islands of Sumatra and Java.
Droughts and extreme temperatures (39 events)
The direct impact of climate change on human populations will increasingly be felt through catastrophic phenomena, such as drought and extreme temperatures. The human repercussions of these events, as experienced by the EM-DAT team, are typically poorly reported, especially from low-income countries.
This is partly due to methodological difficulties in registering deaths and the severe consequences caused by droughts and extreme temperatures.
In 2018, three million people were affected by an ongoing drought in Kenya, while Afghanistan suffered a major drought that impacted 2.2 million people, causing the internal displacement of thousands.
In Central America droughts affected over 2.5 million people in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which coincided with international migration patterns. Across Europe, a hot and dry summer caused heatwaves and drought conditions that affected farmers and health systems in numerous countries.
Due to the privileged economic situation of many European countries, there are reduced impacts from persistent heat exposure and water shortages on the population.
With the growing impact of climate change, particularly in lower and lower-middle income countries, it is critical to improve the reporting on the human impact of droughts and extreme temperatures.
Wildfires (9 events)
Across the world, the trend of devastating wildfires continued from 2017 into 2018. In 2018, the Attica Fires in Greece, killed an estimated 126 people, making it the deadliest wildfire recorded in Europe within EM-DAT records, both this current and previous century.
In the United States, the California wildfire season was the deadliest and costliest on record, with Camp Fire killing 88 people, the highest wildfire death toll in the country since the 1920s, and causing an estimated 16.5 billion USD in damage, the costliest wildfire event on record.
For the statistics, go to the source: https://watchers.news/2019/01/25/2018-natural-disasters-statistics-cred/
In regard to difficult to accept and unpleasant truths, a picture is worth a thousand words. The photo images shown below were captured from NASA satellite sources, they are truly alarming. These images provide shocking and undeniable proof of the ongoing global climate engineering/geoengineering/solar radiation management assault on our planet and its life support systems. Highly toxic heavy metals and chemicals that are systematically sprayed into our atmosphere from jet aircraft as part of the geoengineering / solar radiation management (SRM) programs, are manipulated with extremely powerful radio frequency signals. These signals are transmitted from countless locations around the globe from various types of transmission platforms (ionosphere heater installations like HAARP, SBX radar, NEXRAD, etc.). The impact of the microwave transmissions on cloud formations is profound and highly visible (square cloud formations are created under some scenarios).
Hurricane suppression/manipulation is one aspect/agenda of the climate engineers. 85% of the hurricanes that impact the US originate from Africa. Low pressure systems migrate toward the west, off of Africa’s coast. A great deal of climate engineering/intervention takes place in this region, thus a number of the satellite images shown in this post were captured there. In the attempt to mask the climate intervention activity, the cyclone suppression occurring off the coast of Africa is officially blamed on “dust”. Of course there is no acknowledgement of the ongoing climate engineering atrocities. The quote below is an excerpt from a FOX news article.
Though some may feel that cyclone suppression is beneficial, such interference with Earth’s natural rhythms and systems has a long list of catastrophic downstream effects. Available data indicates that in other scenarios the climate engineers are actually augmenting and steering cyclones to serve their own agenda. “Hurricane Matthew” may be an example of weather warfare on an unimaginable scale. Is hurricane Matthew being heavily manipulated and steered by the climate engineers? The evidence continues to stack up. Below is a satellite photo clearly showing atmospheric “waves” surrounding hurricane Matthew. SpaceWeather.com has labeled these as “gravity waves”, but is that what these visible “waves” actually are? No. The satellite photos already shown in this post inarguably reveal heavy atmospheric manipulation from extremely powerful radio frequency/microwave transmissions and atmospheric aerosols. These transmissions leave a signature pattern on high level cloud formations that are saturated with electrically conductive heavy metal nanoparticles which are dispersed from jet aircraft as part of the ongoing climate engineering insanity.
Does the photo above really show “gravity waves” surrounding hurricane Matthew? Or does it show the signature pattern of extremely powerful radio frequency/microwave transmissions interacting with aircraft dispersed atmospheric aerosols? The latter is the case, both of these elements / factors are a core part of climate and storm manipulation and steering. Photo: SpaceWeather.com
For those that want to examine the most complete climate engineering presentation from Geoengineering Watch, view the video below.
The global power structure long ago made the choice to subject our planet (and the entire web of life that it supports, including the human race) to an unimaginably massive and destructive climate intervention/weather warfare assault. This decision was made without the knowledge or consent of global populations. If we stand by and allow the decimation from the climate engineering insanity to continue, very soon Earth’s life support systems will be beyond any recovery. This is not speculation, but a mathematical certainty. Help us with the most critical battle to expose and halt the climate intervention/weather warfare assault, all of us are needed in this fight. Sharing credible data from a credible source is key, make your voice heard. DW
May be freely reprinted, so long as the text is unaltered, all hyperlinks are left intact, and credit for the article is prominently given to geoengineeringwatch.org and the article’s author with a hyperlink back to the original story.
Betsy DeVos and the Privatizers She Backs Have Met Their Match
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
It took a week, but the public school teachers of Los Angeles won. Over 30,000 teachers and school staff, members of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union, went on strike for the first time in 30 years, demanding more resources for their classrooms, nurses and librarians in every school, smaller class sizes and higher wages. In rain and shine, they were joined on their picket lines by students, parents and other allies. On Tuesday, LAUSD, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the nation’s second-largest school system, with about three-quarters of its students Latino — agreed to meet the strikers’ demands. Classes resumed Wednesday. This major strike also joins a wave of similar labor actions around the country confronting the attempt by corporate interests to privatize public education.
“We went on strike, in one of the largest strikes that the United States has seen in decades,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said Tuesday night, after a supermajority of union members ratified the agreement. “The creativity and innovation and passion and love and emotion of our members was out on the street, in the communities, in the parks, for everyone to see.”
Arlene Inouye, a speech and language specialist with 18 years’ experience in the LAUSD, chaired the UTLA’s bargaining committee. “This was a historic agreement and gave us more than we expected,” Inouye said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. All of their principal demands, including a cap on charter schools to reverse the trend toward privatization, were met. Additionally, Inouye explained, “we were also able to bring in some non-mandatory subjects of bargaining into our schools … like green space on campus, stopping the criminalization of youth. We were able to bring in an immigrant defense fund. We’re making a statement of our values.”
Also speaking on “Democracy Now!,” investigative journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt,” said: “There have been reform currents within the UTLA for at least a decade … going back to the 2008 financial crisis, recession, the layoffs of a lot of teachers. In 2014, the Union Power caucus took charge … teachers like Arlene, with Alex Caputo-Pearl, brought in an organizing department, a research department, a political department, that the union didn’t have before. [They] actually voted to raise their own dues in order to … invest in really becoming a fighting, organizing union.
On the picket lines, teachers repeatedly brought up privatization. “Ultimately, this fight is about the privatization of schools,” teacher Marianne O’Brien told us. “Superintendent Austin Beutner is pushing to privatize schools. … Our students would be disproportionately hurt by that and not have access to a quality education, if all the funding for public school is pulled into charter schools.”
Beutner, a wealthy investment banker, has no background in education. The 2018 LAUSD school board election, Jaffe explained, “had $14.7 million in outside funding spent on it by charter school advocates, big-dollar hedge funds … they got a majority of pro-charter school candidates on there. They put Beutner in.” One of Beutner’s plans is to break up the LA Unified School District into 32 “portfolio” districts, copying efforts in cities like Detroit and Newark the UTLA says “are riddled with a patchwork of privatization schemes that do not improve student outcomes.”
Charter schools can not only fire teachers more easily than public schools can—they can fire students as well. By choosing high-performing students and rejecting those who have special needs or score poorly on standardized tests, charter schools drain resources from schools in poorer neighborhoods. Another teacher on the picket line, Lilit Azarian, told us, “This is about fighting for communities of color, because those are the communities that are affected by this privatization.”
A special election in March to fill a seat on the LAUSD school board, vacated when a member pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance violations, is being hotly contested between charter school advocates and the UTLA and other allies of traditional public schools. “If the teachers want Beutner gone, that’s going to be the way to do it,” Jaffe said.
A wave of teacher strikes swept the nation last year, but in largely Republican-controlled red states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona. Teachers and staff went on strike and achieved remarkable improvements, not only in pay and benefits but by directing more resources to schools and classrooms. Now the teachers are rising up in Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles. On Tuesday, as the UTLA declared victory, ending the strike, the teachers union in Denver, voted overwhelmingly to strike. Unionized teachers in Oakland, California, also are expected to strike, as are teachers in Chicago’s community colleges.
If the Los Angeles teachers are any indication of what’s to come, the privatizers and their champion in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump’s billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, may have met their match.
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Amy Goodman
Columnist
Amy Goodman is the co-founder, executive producer and host of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 900 public broadcast stations in North America.
Using some kind of microphone attached to her phone, a woman claims to have recorded the “voice” of sunflowers in her backyard.
A few online articles about this report that the woman posted it to Facebook and the video went viral, but it’s nowhere to be found, while republished versions of the video with nearly 100,000 views can in fact be found on Facebook. According to one article:
“With a microphone and her mobile phone, the woman records the vibration sound from the sunflowers which sounds like a high-pitched radio wave Impressed by the recording, she later shared the video on her Facebook and the video immediately became viral with hundreds of thousands of views so far.”
If this is real, the sound resembles some kind of angelic horn section, or a gentle trumpet.
Rigid skeptics might not be able to see the beauty in this, and it would be wise to question whether this is real or not, but plants using sounds to communicate is actually a well established scientific fact.
A study out of the University of Western Australia titled “Tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water,” published in the journal Oecologia proved that plants can acutely sense sound vibrations that emanate from running water, whether it’s in the soil or trickling through pipes, and sensing the sound helps plants move their roots closer to the source of water.
The study even went so far as to claim plants dislike certain sounds and will move their roots away from the source of some sounds. Apparently they communicate with “clicking” sounds.
Dr Monica Gagliano, a lead researcher in the study of UWA’s Centre of Evolutionary Biology at the School of Animal Biology noted that it makes sense plants would be capable of doing this, for the simple fact that they need water.
“We used the common garden pea plant (Pisum sativum) as the model for our study and put the plant into a container which had two tubes at the base, giving it a choice of two directions for the growth of its roots,” the researcher said.
“We then exposed the plant to a series of sounds, including white noise, running water and then a recording of running water under each tube, and observed its behaviour.”
They proved that based on nothing but the sound of running water, plants sent roots in the direction of it.
“It also was surprising and extraordinary to see that the plant could actually tell when the sound of running water was a recording and when it was real and that the plant did not like the recorded sound,” the lead researcher continued.
Does it seem ridiculous that a woman claims to have recorded the sound of a sunflower? Hopefully it doesn’t, because we need every excuse we can find to appreciate nature, and if that makes you cringe, maybe you should check what you hold dear in life.
As usual, do your research; make an informed decision.
The Ruling Elites Love How Easily We’re Distracted and Turned Against Each Other
Let’s say you’re one of the ruling elites operating the nation for the benefit of the oligarchy. What’s the best way to distract the populace from your self-serving dominance in a blatantly neofeudal system?
1. Provide modern-day versions of Bread and Circuses to distract the commoners from what actually matters: “the golden age of TV” and binge-watching; a cultural obsession with glorifying oneself via selfies posted on Facebook and Instagram; tweeting outrage and indignation on Twitter; a corporate-state media which magnifies insignificant events into social crises, political “leaders” who intentionally inflame polarization and conflict and so on.
Combine all these distracting circuses into one 24/7 system-overload, and what do you get? A populace so distracted, so stressed, so emotionally dazed that they are unable to focus on the predatory exploitation of the ruling elites, much less figure out how to change the neofeudal status quo.
2. Divide the populace with calculatedly divisive cultural issues and turn the commoner class against itself: with no middle ground and no shared class identity allowed, the populace is easily sliced and diced into angry, disaffected tribes who blame whomever media propaganda has targeted as “the other” for the nation’s woes.
Correspondent Jonathan Twombly recently posted a description of this divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling elites:
I eschew conspiracy theories because I don’t feel humans are smart enough or cohesive enough to pull them off. Usually self-interested people pulling in the same direction create the conditions that some people view as conspiracies.
With that preface stated, it seems to me that Right and Left elites, who share the common goal of making the world work for themselves, and who do not have to live with the consequences of their policies, have co-opted non-elite people with cultural and social issues meant to distract them from what’s going on economically.
Right elites take the bread out of the non-elites mouths by coopting non-elites on the right with the circuses of religion and nationalism. At the same time, the left elites have done the same by coopting left non-elites with the circuses of political correctness, multiculturalism, etc..
None of these things – religion, nationalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, anti-racism, etc. – are necessarily bad in themselves, particularly in moderation.
However, to distract people from having the economic wool pulled over their eyes, they need to be amped up into a public shouting match, which is what we see happening in media outlets controlled by, you guessed it, the elites.
The Old Left was concerned with bread and butter issues and extracting a bigger piece of the economic pie from the elites. The Old Right, in turn, was concerned with order and the stability of the system, and was prepared to give up some of the pie in order to stave off the pitchforks.
However, the stateless super-rich of the New Left-Right Elite Alliance no longer need to buy off the non-elites with money.
They have no fear of the pitchforks because they can flee behind bodyguards (private armies as in the Middle Ages are coming) or gated communities, or they can flee the country in an instant if they need to, taking with the large chunks of their wealth, which is now either offshore or mobile thanks to international banking. They have become insulated from the consequences of their policies.
The non-elites are mad as hell, but don’t know exactly where to direct their anger, because the social and cultural issues the elites have used to co-opt the non-elites are also incredibly effective at keeping the left and right non-elites in a constant state of anger at each other.
The Elite’s greatest fear is that left and right non-elites realize who their real enemies are, and that their fighting with each other over cultural issues is what the Elites want them to be doing.
Well said, Jonathan, thank you for the succinct summary of these control mechanisms.
We can see this is the rise of cultural, social, financial and political polarization:
Huxley spoke of loving our servitude: if we let the ruling elites distract and divide us, then we will in effect be choosing to love our servitude.
No wonder the ruling elites love how easily we’re distracted and divided against ourselves: it’s so easy to dominate a distracted, divided, blinded-by-propaganda and negative emotions populace.
Whether waiting for a bus, playing outside or walking the dog – during the colder winter season, everyone is looking for ways to stay warm. Luckily, the process your body uses to break down foods serves as an internal heater.But when the weather is cold, some defensive strategies are also necessary to prevent your body from losing its heat to the surrounding environment. As the temperature difference between your warm body and its frigid surroundings increases, heat is lost more quickly. It becomes more of a challenge to maintain a normal body temperature.
And two people with the same exact body temperature in the same exact environment may have very different perceptions. One may feel frozen while the other is completely comfortable.
But beyond the subjective experience of coldness, researchers do know that natural physiological responses to cold as well as behavioral adaptations – like bundling up! – can help keep your body around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and make sure you feel warm.
Some jobs necessitate being out in inclement weather, and your physiology has some defenses against cold conditions. U.S. Marine Corps/Lance Cpl. Cody Rowe, CC BY-NC
What your body does
Your blood courses through your body carrying nutrients, oxygen and other biological important substances. And this delivery system also brings heat produced in the muscles to the skin, where it’s released.
When you enter a cold environment, your body redistributes blood to the torso, protecting and maintaining the warmth of the vital organs there. At the same time, your body constricts blood flow to the skin. Narrowing the roads to the skin means less heat can make the journey, and so less is lost to the environment. And minimizing how much blood goes to the skin – which is in closest proximity to the cold – means you can hold onto more of your internal heat longer.
Another defensive strategy the body uses to stay warm is cranking up muscle activity. This in turn increases your metabolism and creates more heat. Think of a brisk winter walk when the mercury has really plunged – your teeth may chatter and your arms and legs may shake uncontrollably in shivers. This seemingly nonproductive use of the muscles is actually an effort to increase body temperature by breaking down more nutrients to stoke your internal furnace.
Differences in body size, body fatness and metabolic activity influence how different individuals experience cold. Smaller people with lower levels of body fat lose more heat to the environment than larger people with more body fat. A bigger individual may have increased muscle mass, which is a producer of heat, or elevated body fatness, which functions as an insulator to reduce heat loss. These differences are not easy to change.
Things you can do
In order to maintain a feeling of warmth, you can manipulate your clothing, your activity and your food.
The most common thing people do to stay warm is wear a coat, hat and gloves. Obviously increasing clothing thickness or piling on the layers helps. Winter clothes serve not to warm you up, but more as a means to keep the heat you are producing from dispersing to the surrounding environment.
Contrary to popular belief, the head is nota greater source of heat loss than any other adequately covered body part. If you were to wear a warm hat and no coat, your torso would contribute the most to heat loss, thanks to how your body redistributes its blood in cold conditions. If you can keep your torso warm, you’ll maintain blood flow to your limbs and can often keep the arms, legs, hands and feet warm.
Secondly, being physically active causes your muscles to contract, breaking down more nutrients, which generates additional heat. This additional heat production can help maintain body temperature and the feeling of warmth. Maybe you’ve noticed this in your own life if you’ve run in place for a bit or done a quick set of jumping jacks when you’re out in the cold.
Unfortunately, physical activity or layers of clothing can tip the balance past what you need to offset heat losses. In that case, you’ll experience an increase in body temperature – and your body will start sweating in an effort to cool down. This is a bad outcome, because the evaporation of sweat will lead to greater rates of heat loss.
Finally, eating increases the body’s production of heat. The process of breaking down food is going to slightly increase body temperature. Sometimes campers will have a snack before bed in an effort to stay warmer through the night. While the metabolic impact of a small snack may not be huge, the tipping point between heat balance and heat loss is pretty small.
You may also notice the urge to urinate – what physicians call cold diuresis. It’s a side effect of constricting blood vessels and the resulting increase in blood pressure as the same amount of blood has a smaller space available to travel through your body.
And if you’re the type who tends to feel cold and leave your coat on even inside, you might want to rethink the habit. Your skin will be flush with blood as your body tries to dissipate excess heat inside. Worst of all, you may start to sweat. Once you head back out the door, you might feel even colder initially than you would have as the cold air saps the heat from your skin and your sweat evaporates. To stay comfortable, your best bet is dressing appropriately, whether inside or outdoors this winter.
YouTube said Friday it will stop recommending conspiracy videos such as those claiming the Earth is flat, or promoting alternative theories about the September 11, 2001 attacks.
We’ll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines. To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.
While this shift will apply to less than one percent of the content on YouTube, we believe that limiting the recommendation of these types of videos will mean a better experience for the YouTube community. To be clear, this will only affect recommendations of what videos to watch, not whether a video is available on YouTube. As always, people can still access all videos that comply with our Community Guidelines and, when relevant, these videos may appear in recommendations for channel subscribers and in search results. We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users.
This change relies on a combination of machine learning and real people. We work with human evaluators and experts from all over the United States to help train the machine learning systems that generate recommendations. These evaluators are trained using public guidelines and provide critical input on the quality of a video.
While the former is a psyop — the Earth obviously isn’t flat and is a spheroid — the latter is the more worrying contention, since to this day there are still valid questions about 9/11. For information on 9/11 that doesn’t quite add up, you only need to watch two of James Corbett’s YouTube documentary films: 9/11 War Games and 9/11 Trillions: Follow The Money.
This also follows the news that a NYC Federal Grand Jury has been empaneled to investigate the claims made by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which will look into the evidence of the World Trade Towers being a controlled demolition operation with thermite.
This YouTube algorithm and policy change further comes as a mysterious group The Dark Overlord (TDO) has claimed to hack “the truth behind 9/11,” by breaching numerous different insurers and legal firms, claiming specifically that it hacked Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, Lloyds of London, and Silverstein Properties. While not much has come out of the hack, there was one curious document alluding to military intervention in Flight 93, which if you remember was said to have been civilians who brought down the plane in a heroic move, not military intervention.
Activist Post previously reported that YouTube was planning to combat conspiracy-driven videos by introducing informative debunking boxes linking back to Wikipedia and other sources. Although it seems that’s not enough, and now they have to remove “conspiracy videos” from suggested videos as well.
We also reported that since Google was heading towards targeting critical thinkers — demonized as “Conspiracy Theorists” — who ask the difficult questions in its rating guidelines, YouTube wouldn’t be too long to follow those actions. It seems we were right!
Considering that the origination of the word “Conspiracy Theorist” comes from the CIA, I would say using a derogatory word to discuss those who think is dangerous. More modernized, in fact, it is also straight out of the JTIRG playbook that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed.
Misinformation is plaguing the Internet, but who is to decide what is and isn’t misinformation? The readers themselves need to, because policing thought and opinion opens a door to the avenue of a Truth Council and information oversight where admins (the purveyors of truth) decide what is and isn’t fact. What happens when one of these people doesn’t dig deep enough and just dismisses something without looking at the evidence, due to lack of information or understanding? Censorship of not only ideas but also people as a whole who are effectively removed from the discussion.
As discussed in this reporter’s last article entitled “YouTube Purge: The End Of Freedom Of Expression Or The Great Awakening For Alternatives?” – questioning is healthy; and as writer Naomi Wolf exposed, you should think before it’s illegal to do so. “It’s no longer crazy to assess news events to see if they are real or not real,” she stated in the video below. As history has shown through declassified documents (overthrow of Mossadegh), leaked diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, and reporting by murdered journalist Michael Hastings who exposed propaganda used against the Senate and Congress, “all over the world, it’s well-established, the State Department intelligence agencies engage in theatre, and it’s what they do, it’s spycraft, to create spectacles and events that people may not realize are spectacles and events…,” Naomi says.
Hastings exposed the use of propaganda to get into Afghanistan in his report entitled: “The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read.” The article was surrounding a leaked unclassified Pentagon report. The report took the shroud off the U.S. military’s psyops operation command revealing several techniques the group uses in psychological warfare to manipulate the public, including but not limited to fake intelligence information, lack of information and social media manipulation, according to Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. The kicker is that not only were those tactics used against the American people but the tactics were used against Senators.
It is an extremely worrying fact that the Military Industrial Complex would manipulate elected officials with fake news, especially considering that propaganda wasn’t legalized in America again until 2012. Previous legislation had been passed to protect citizens during the Church Committee hearings as part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses during the mid-1970s, amended by the Smith-Mundt Act. Smith-Mundt was repealed in 2012 under Obama, as Business Insiderreported, “The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public.”
As Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright stated, VOA, Radio Free Europe, and many others “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”
This is extremely dangerous; one perspective might see things in a different way because one person has acquired information, while the other lacks that information. For example, the U.S. government (specifically the CIA) used documented propaganda on the public and uses foreign propaganda against other countries. It’s not just the CIA, other nations’ intelligence services do it too.
While one person might feel that is insane, (and it quite literally is) the other person might know of the previous existence of Operation Mockingbird, which used CIA-employed journalists to produce fake stories during the Cold War-era 1950s through 1970s. They also funded student and cultural organizations and magazines as front organizations. This CIA operation became known as Operation Mockingbird and was mentioned in the infamous CIA Family Jewels collection.
The U.K. smaller equivalent to Operation Mockingbird was known as Operation Mass Appeal. It was allegedly run by MI6 during 1997–98 and exaggerated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, according to former U.N. chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter. That claim was further exaggerated just a few years later in 2003 when the U.K. government Downing St. produced a fake Iraq war memo that was exposed as being based on academic papers. It is a claim that would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for a doctor named David Kelly, one of the lead scientists who called the Iraq dossier a sham. Kelly was later found in the woods, and his death remains a mystery to this day.
Another example is how the media as a whole portrayed a video that was claimed to be from Syria (known as the “Syrian boy hero”) as real but was later revealed by Norwegian filmmakers to have been faked. As a result, the media had to backpedal their story issuing retractions.
Years later, in an unrelated incident, five people were arrested for using children in staged Aleppo videos, showing how dangerous it is to report any information out of Syria, as well as how important it is to have independent free thinkers.
Now, a UN panel (with little media attention) has revealed that the infamous White Helmets in Syria, the subjects of an Oscar-winning documentary, were engaged in criminal activity including but not limited to organ theft, staging rescues, and stealing from civilians. As a further fun fact, the leader of the White Helmets, Raed Salah, was denied entry into the U.S. at Washington’s Dulles International Airport and deported, due to “extremist connections” while on his way to receive a humanitarian relief award at a gala dinner hosted by USAID.
Really none of this should come as a surprise since White Helmets are connected to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which in turn is connected to AlQaeda and Al-Nusra.
Perhaps a better example, and one that doesn’t involve propaganda, which more people can relate to is the situation in Flint, Michigan where water was poisoned due to negligence that was attempted to be covered up by the local government. YouTube as a medium allowed those citizens to have a voice and show the carelessness by their government officials. Further, the government even removed the citizens’ power to sue the state of Michigan over the lead contamination of its water supply.
For a moment imagine that this was called fake; these people would have been ignored far more than they were by the national mainstream media. Policing information is outright reckless and could endanger lives.
Then there is the spraying of carcinogenic chemicals on unknowing residents in the U.S. and Canada by the Army under Operation DEW and Operation Large Area Coverage (LAC) during the Cold War in testing linked to weaponry involving radioactive ingredients meant to attack the Soviet Union. Which, if I am being frank, sounds absolutely bonkers; but if you study history, you will see that this is the least that was done during that time frame, i.e. the infamous program known as Project MKUltra. During that covert program, people all over the place were tested with various experiments, many times against their own will.
So to say that YouTube will link to one source that can be edited by anyone and claim it as the moral high ground of “truth” is crazy, but to then introduce a recommendation block on “conspiratorial information” is outright insanity, which suppresses research efforts.
It doesn’t matter what your views are or what you think about a particular subject YouTube is aiming to censor the free flow of information, and this could be dangerous for a democratic society. This means that channels promoting free thinking and questioning of news events will now face further demoting within YouTube’s algorithms. These actions endanger a free and open society; no one should be able to decide what a user can and can’t search for no individual platform should be able to decide what is and isn’t the truth for their users. While in the same respect no one should be able to decide who does and doesn’t have a voice. (That’s the silencing of freedom of opinion and expression.)
YouTube is walking us straight into George Orwell’s nightmare 1984 through its proposed actions to silence free thinkers deemed “conspiracy theorists.” I will be the first one to tell you some theories are bat shit crazy such as the theory of flat Earth. But that doesn’t mean I want to censor the content. As another example, the rise of an anonymous insider who has been wrong more times then I can count on two hands: Q. However, again I don’t want YouTube as a corporate giant to have the ability to censor anyone who speaks about the Quidiot conspiracy. Because if you give them an inch they will take a mile and begin censoring other topics or even individuals as they already have including Activist Post‘s own YouTube channel.
If someone wants to promote a ridiculous theory they should be free to do so. After all, it’s their own credibility at stake. A democratic society is free and open and full of debates; and while YouTube wants to promote that theories about 9/11 are ludicrous, there are far more dots that don’t add up than they or the general public care to see or admit. (I won’t go into the topic as it would take far too long to dive into, but I’ll make a few quick suggestions of names and events to research – Michael Riconisciuto, John Patrick O’Neill, Bill Cooper, Able Danger, dancing Israelis, WTC7, bombs on George Washington bridge, et al.)
It’s particularly worrying that they single out theories of 9/11 — one of the worst tragedies in American history shrouded in mystery — in the blog post. Since, again, there is more that doesn’t add up than makes sense in regards to 9/11. There are several holes such as the various war game drills that James Corbett goes into in detail within his documentary War Games. We may never know what happened on 9/11, but there is way more to it than the official government narrative, and we the people have a right to know or at the very least seek out potential answers.
While YouTube wants you to think the governments of the world aren’t involved in any sort of corruption, “conspiratorial plots,” or cover-ups, history has proven quite the opposite. All of this information now risks being censored under YouTube’s policy and algorithm changes a scary and worrying prospect. It seems as though they want to protect the establishment rather than allow people to freely think for themselves. This is about the human right not to be indoctrinated with information, but rather to make up our own minds. Even if we are wrong about a particular subject (such as those of you who think the Earth is flat), this allows for healthy debate among individuals and the stopping of tyranny or tyrannical rule by dictatorships
For now, at the very least, we can be thankful that YouTube is stating that it will not outright ban all content it designates as a conspiracy theory (yet), despite the recent purge of dozens upon dozens of accounts that are connected to free speech and free thought. There are also always alternatives such as DTube, BitChute, and many others for uploading content. We need to ask ourselves is the YouTube purge the end of freedom of expression or the great awakening for alternatives?
YouTube’s moves against free thinkers could backfire for the company quite severely, because truth is stranger than fiction. Although this writer can agree with YouTube that the world is a spheroid, definitely not flat or completely round for that matter, it is important to have free independent thought and speech. Even if that means I have to share the planet with flat-Earthers or people who believe every crazed murder spree is a false flag attack (granted some might be because Operation Northwoods against Cuba and a memo suggested a false flag attack against Russia during the Cold War using civilians as cannon fodder, so it’s not that insane to suggest.)
The rapid changes we are witnessing with the main drivers of Internet perception has even drawn the attention of one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He noted in an open letter that “What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.” Do we really want those dominant platforms telling us their exclusive version of the truth?
Back in October of 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted something bizarre passing through our solar system and they named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for scout or messenger. ‘Oumuamua was the first interstellar object to ever be detected in our solar system.
One year later, in October of 2018, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department co-wrote a paper examining the object’s acceleration, which they described as “peculiar.” The two, Harvard professor Avi Loeb and Harvard postdoctoral fellow Shmuel Bialy, suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” That’s quite the claim and the pair instantly received significant backlash for their controversial theory.
Loeb said of the potential for making contact with alien civilization:
“As soon as we leave the solar system, I believe we will see a great deal of traffic out there. Possibly we’ll get a message that says, ‘Welcome to the interstellar club.’ Or we’ll discover multiple dead civilizations — that is, we’ll find their remains.”
In a recent interview in The New Yorker, Loeb attempts to shed on some light on the object, the paper he co-authored and the controversial theory that his paper presented.
So what’s so unusual about ‘Oumuamua anyway? Loeb explains that astronomers can calculate the rate at which rocks are ejected in space and how that calculation leads one of many peculiar facts about ‘Oumuamua:
“When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.”
The object was observed spinning every eight hours while it’s brightness changed significantly, leaving the astronomers puzzled.
“When it was discovered, we realized it spins every eight hours, and its brightness changed by at least a factor of ten. The fact that its brightness varies by a factor of ten as it spins means that it is at least ten times longer than it is wide. We don’t have a photo, but, in all the artists’ illustrations that you have seen on the Web, it looks like a cigar. That’s one possibility. But it’s also possible that it’s a pancake-like geometry, and, in fact, that is favored.“
‘Oumuamua is shaped like a pancake, another bizarre and significant observation. Why a pancake and why is that abnormal? Objects that orbit the sun have a shape influenced by the gravitational force of the sun, the same force that results in their orbit. Deviation from that rule happens in objects like comets. Evaporation of ice from the surface of a comet creates gasses that push it, sort of like a rocket, and also cause the tail of evaporated gas that most stargazers are familiar with. ‘Oumuamua doesn’t have one of those.
“We don’t see a cometary tail here, but, nevertheless, we see a deviation from the expected orbit. And that is the thing that triggered the paper. Once I realized that the object is moving differently than expected, then the question is what gives it the extra push.“
‘Oumuamua is unlike any comet we have ever seen in our solar system, so it probably isn’t one. Could it be an asteroid?
“Its brightness varies by a factor of ten, and the maximum you typically observe is a factor of three. It has a much more extreme geometry, and there is some other force pushing it.”
So the question remains, what is making ‘Oumuamua move?
“The only thing that came to my mind is that maybe the light from the sun, as it bounces off its surface, gives it an extra push. It’s just like a wind bouncing off a sail on a sailboat. So we checked that and found that you need the thickness of the object to be less than a millimeter in order for that to work. If it is indeed less than a millimeter thick, if it is pushed by the sunlight, then it is maybe a light sail, and I could not think of any natural process that would make a light sail. It is much more likely that it is being made by artificial means, by a technological civilization.”
Loeb, who has long been interested in “long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life,” according to The New Yorker, took the opportunity to elaborate on just that:
“I should say, just as background, I do not view the possibility of a technological civilization as speculative, for two reasons. The first is that we exist. And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop. If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone.“
If ‘Oumuamua does originate from an alien civilization, it didn’t come from our solar system, according to Loeb, it would have originated from somewhere in our galaxy instead, but there’s a chance “that the civilization is not alive anymore.”
“Imagine another history, in which the Nazis have a nuclear weapon and the Second World War ends differently. You can imagine a civilization that develops technology like that, which would lead to its own destruction.”
Loeb insists the point is simple:
“[T]his is the very first object we found from outside the solar system. It is very similar to when I walk on the beach with my daughter and look at the seashells that are swept ashore. Every now and then we find an object of artificial origin. And this could be a message in a bottle, and we should be open-minded. So we put this sentence in the paper.”
In response to those criticizing his paper and in summary of why ‘Oumuamua is worth paying attention to, Loeb had this today:
“The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don’t see the gas around it, we don’t see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn’t detect any heat from it and that it’s much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.”
Speaking of the facts, Loeb drew a grand distinction between his curiosity of and the facts surrounding ‘Oumuamua and popular ideas such as the multiverse and extra dimensions:
“The multiverse is a mainstream idea—that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. And I think that is not scientific, because it cannot be tested. Whereas the next time we see an object like this one, we can contemplate taking a photograph. My motivation, in part, is to motivate the scientific community to collect more data on the next object rather than argue a priori that they know the answer. In the multiverse case, we have no way of testing it, and everyone is happy to say, “Ya!”
Another mainstream idea is the extra dimension. You see that in string theory, which gets a lot of good press, and awards are given to members of that community. Not only has it not been tested empirically for almost forty years now but there is no hope it will be tested in the next forty years.“
In the end, Loeb’s questioning is simply a part of science:
“We have seen an object from outside the solar system, and we are trying to figure what it is made of and where it came from. We don’t have as much data as I would like. Given the data that we have, I am putting this on the table, and it bothers people to even think about that, just like it bothered the Church in the days of Galileo to even think about the possibility that the Earth moves around the sun. Prejudice is based on experience in the past. The problem is that it prevents you from making discoveries. If you put the probability at zero per cent of an object coming into the solar system, you would never find it!”
In conclusion: “If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them.”
Airbnb is having more and more of its hosts hiding security cameras in rooms, and it doesn’t seem to be worried about the practice if innkeepers are disclosing the cameras and they aren’t in the bathrooms or bedrooms, according to a report by Fast Company.
“If you find a truly hidden camera in your bedroom or bathroom, AirBnB will support you. If you find an undisclosed camera in the private living room, AirBnB will not support you,” Jeffrey Bigham, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University told Fast Company.
Bigham blogged about his recent experience at an Airbnb where he found cameras in his “private living room,” writing in a blog post, “A Camera is Watching You in Your AirBnB: And, you consented to it.”
“I just assume that there will be camera constantly recording when I stay in airbnb, or anywhere really. They way I never have to worry about whether it exist or not. As recording technology becoming more and more advance, it’s less and less reasonable to expect privacy. I rather adapt my life to fit this new culture,” Bigham wites.
Airbnb argued that since one single camera was visible in pictures advertising the rooms, the owner of the Airbnb rooms for rent disclosed the security cameras.
Airbnb has since apologized and has given Bigham a refund, according to CNET. A spokesperson provided the publication with the following statement:
Our community’s privacy and safety is our priority, and our original handling of this incident did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves. We have apologized to Mr. Bigham and fully refunded him for his stay. We require hosts to clearly disclose any security cameras in writing on their listings and we have strict standards governing surveillance devices in listings. This host has been removed from our community.
However, Bigham is far from the only Airbnb customer to find cameras in a room they rented; and while Bigham found his in a “private living quarters,” others have found them in more private places like the bathroom and bedrooms.
Another case happened last September in Toronto, Canada, where a couple — Dougie Hamilton and his girlfriend — rented an Airbnb flat and discovered hidden cameras in their bedroom, News.com.au reported.
Hamilton told the Daily Record:
We were only in the place for 20 minutes when I noticed the clock. We’d had a busy day around the city and finally were able to get to the Airbnb and relax.
I just happened to be facing this clock and was staring at it for about 10 minutes. There was just something in my head that made me feel a bit uneasy.
It was connected to a wire like a phone charger which wasn’t quite right. The weirdest thing was, I’d seen a video on Facebook about cameras and how they could be hidden and they had a clock with one in it, too.
Last fall, a couple on a Florida vacation found a camera hidden in a smoke detector in the bedroom of their Longboat Key condo.
Another less recent case was posted on Reddit four years ago claiming a couple found a camera from a Dropcam, a connected home security system by Google’s Nest. The couple found the camera hidden in a mesh basket before unplugging it, according to the post.
According to Airbnb’s rules, the company states:
Our Standards & Expectations require that all members of the Airbnb community respect each other’s privacy. More specifically, we require hosts to disclose all surveillance devices in their listings, and we prohibit any surveillance devices that are in or that observe the interior of certain private spaces (such as bedrooms and bathrooms) regardless of whether they’ve been disclosed.
So how does one determine if there are potentially hidden cameras in a room? While there is no foolproof method for discovering hidden cameras in a room, there are ways that you can try to find them. Start off by shining a flashlight from your phone in the dark. Look for a light that bounces off a camera lens. According to Digital Trends, this will help you spot lenses that are otherwise hidden to the human eye in the shadows or built into objects such as clocks, walls, bureaus, and other furniture.
Other places that cameras can be hidden include:
Motion sensors
Smoke detectors
Alarm clocks
Wall clocks
Plug in air fresheners (especially if they don’t give off any scent)
Stuffed animals
Books on a shelf (where a camera is embedded in the spine of a fake book)
Cooking canisters and spice racks
The next way to find hidden surveillance devices has to deal with scanning for WiFi-enabled cameras on the local network. Motherboard has provided a relatively easy shell script to not only find the cameras but to disable them.
However, Julian Oliver explains that it may be illegal to run the script due to changes made by the FCC.
If you do find cameras, Airbnb adds that you can cancel your reservation for a full refund if the cameras aren’t disclosed or are found in an unreasonable area such as the bathroom or bedrooms. This is troubling and it’s not only affecting Airbnb but other services like it, such as VRBO and HomeAway. Both companies also have similar policies; VRBO says cameras are never to be placed in an area where guests “can reasonably expect privacy.” However, the problem is that some owners don’t follow those rules, so you must only trust yourself.
According to an article in The Car Connection, the state of Michigan just approved Reviver Auto’sdigital license plates called the “Rplate.”
Reviver Auto boasts that a total of five states have already approved their digital license plates.
Our innovative, multi-functional digital license plate, the Rplate Pro, will be on the road in California, Florida, Arizona and Texas in 2018. (Source)
George Orwell could never have dreamed of a world where license plates became a tool for more government surveillance.
Digital license plates are a privacy nightmare for motorists.
No longer will law enforcement have to run your license plate to see if you paid your taxes and insurance, because now your license plate will display a big “X” notifying everyone that you are a violator.
Digital license plates are the epitome of Big Brother surveillance
According to an article in WIRED, Rplates will turn vehicles into rolling Big Brother billboards that display Amber Alerts and much more.
It lets you update the registration stickers on your car through an app instead of dealing with the DMV. It can display Amber Alerts. It can be used as a miniature, knee-level billboard. If someone steals the car, it can read $NDHLP! or the more serious Stolen Vehicle. It can double as your E-Z Pass, FasTrak, or whatever RFID-based device you use to pay tolls. It can track your car’s location, so you can keep tabs on your teenager.
According to Reviver Auto, motorists have to pay a $99 annual subscription fee and a monthly $8.00 LTE fee for the privilege of being surveilled.
Who does not want to pay for the privilege of having a license plate that tracks your every movement and displays government approved messages?
But that is not all digital license plates can do.
The true purpose of using digital license plates that track your whereabouts is corporate greed.
The Car Connectionarticle warns that corporations will use digital license plates to send “targeted messaging” to other drivers.
Another feature that may raise eyebrows is targeted messaging, which is a way to display advertisements on the license plate. The plate’s numbers can be minimized to leave more room for an ad when the car is parked. It’s not clear if Michigan would allow vehicle owners to opt into or out of ads, however.
How is that for creepy? License plates that send targeted advertising based on your location?
Make no mistake, digital license plates are nothing more than Big Brother/corporate surveillance devices.
