Category: HACKwatch
With the release of its National Climate Assessment on Friday, the U.S. government has released a report—which states the current period is “now the warmest in the history of modern civilization”—that critics say directly and irrefutably undermines the climate denialism and inaction of President Donald Trump and his administration.
“Even as this report sounds the alarm, Trump’s team of climate deniers are twisting themselves into pretzels to justify blocking national and international climate action. If America’s leaders don’t start listening to scientists, the whole world is going to pay a truly terrible price.”
Mandated by law and released every four years, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (or NCA4) — which states that recent years have seen “record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes, and the last three years have been the warmest years on record for the globe”— concludes (with emphasis in the original) that “based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
“Rupert is a tremendous guy. I think Rupert [who for several years lived in the Trump building on 59th and Park Avenue in Manhattan] is one of the people I really respect and like. And I think Rupert respects what I’ve done.” But what about Murdoch’s grumpy Trump tweets? “When I got into the world of politics, that was a different realm for me and maybe he felt differently. But I think he respects what I’ve done and he’s a tremendous guy and I think we have a very good relationship.”
Extract from Michael Wolff @ the The Hollywood Reporter (01/06/16)
ps. here @ the interpretOr, we note that the ascendancy of both megalomaniacs was facilitated by the late, and by no means great, Roy Cohn, who arranged Murdoch’s first Oval Office meeting with President Ronald Reagan in 1983…
Between March 23 and April 2, 2016, Teaching Tolerance surveyed approximately 2,000 teachers, asking them how the presidential campaign was affecting their students and their teaching. The results indicated that the campaign is having a profoundly negative impact on schoolchildren across the country, producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported. Many educators fear teaching about the election at all.
A synthesis of our survey results make up the content of this report:The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation’s Schools. A complete listing of the 5,000 survey comment is available here.
excerpts:
“My students are terrified of Donald Trump,” says one teacher from a middle school with a large population of African-American Muslims. “They think that if he’s elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa.”
“A Portland, Oregon, middle school teacher reported that her principal had imposed a “gag order” on teachers, prohibiting them from talking about the election. But the order didn’t stop one of her students from telling an immigrant classmate, “When Trump wins, you and your family will get sent back.” On the survey she posed the question, “What does a teacher do? I can assure you that if a student says that loudly and brazenly in class, far worse is happening in the hallway.”
::: simply click cover pic above to access report in pdf @ teachingtolerance.org :::
“It’s like having a global 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year search warrant running on whole societies, including Australia.”
Senator Scott Ludlam
Australia accessed private internet data gathered by the NSA even more than Britain, according to a previously unreported document released by Edward…
With Australia enduring the mysery of Murdoch-Minion rule, and Fox News launching Bush III out of the US, we believe that now is the time to counter the mendacious mantras of perpetual war, sacred markets and Iraq revisionism with an evidence-based reality check.
To get the ball rolling, here’s a heads up from former CIA analyst, Paul R. Pillar, via Consortiumnews.com…
“Having escaped accountability for the Iraq War disaster, U.S. neocons are urging the use of more military force in the Mideast, in line with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand to block the Iran nuclear deal. From their important perches of power, these war hawks also twist the history of their catastrophic misjudgments…” writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
“Now the Republican presidential candidate who is the front-runner for the nomination among those whose name is not Trump has joined in the promoting of the Iraq War myth.”
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies.
A former CIA officer described as the latest victim of the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers has issued a scathing open letter to civil rights groups asking, “Where were you?”…
In the letter published at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, specifically calls out the NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Congressional Black Caucus, writing “I saw you when other black faces were either killed or mistreated.” But, to these civil rights groups, he writes, he is “invisible.”
In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.
He was given a 42-month sentence in May, which Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and coordinator of whistleblower advocacy organization ExposeFacts.org, described as “the continuation of a war on whistleblowing and journalism, to clamp down on the absolutely essential flow of information for democracy.”
::: click here or banner for piece in full @ CommonDreams :::
Glenn Greenwald, best known for his series in “The Guardian” detailing classified information about global surveillance programs based on top-secret documents provided by Edward Snowden, spoke at the University of Utah on Tuesday, April 7, 2015.
+ 26 chapters of the TPP still secret…
Published on May 13, 2015
Scott speaks about the scope creep of data retention contained in the Australian Border Force Bill 2015, which sees the regime expanding just weeks after originally being passed through Parliament. For a transcript visit http://bit.ly/1AYiWj1
“Every time an agency sticks its hand up, either overtly or covertly, to be able to access the private records of ordinary people I am going to make an absolute point of pointing it out and putting it on the record so that maybe the government, once they are safely back in opposition, or the Australian Labor Party might want to rethink what they did to all Australian citizens when they waved through the data retention legislation upon all of us…”
POPULAR
CONGRESS TELLS COURT THAT CONGRESS CAN’T BE INVESTIGATED FOR INSIDER TRADING
HOW TO KEEP NSA COMPUTERS FROM TURNING YOUR PHONE CONVERSATIONS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT
U.S. GOVERNMENT DESIGNATED PROMINENT AL JAZEERA JOURNALIST AS “MEMBER OF AL QAEDA”
U.S. GOVERNMENT: WE CAN CLASSIFY ANYTHING AND JUDGES CAN’T STOP US
SENATORS WANT TO “BLOW ISIS OUT OF THE WATER” WITH “FANCY MEMES”
Rupert Murdoch Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible. (07/01/15)
Big jihadist danger looming everywhere from Philippines to Africa to Europe to US. Political correctness makes for denial and hypocrisy. (10/01/15)
As Australia picked up its shameful fourth Fossil of the Day award at the Lima climate talks Thursday (11/12/14), Climate Action Tracker (CAT) released a new analysis showing that creative accounting and years of diplomatic manoeuvring are allowing Australia to increase emissions while still meeting its minimum five per cent reduction commitment. CAT says in real terms Australia’s emissions are likely to be 26 per cent above 2000 levels by 2020, and a huge 47-59 per cent above its original Kyoto pledge.
Yet while its actual emissions are soaring, Australia can still meet its already lax commitments with barely any action thanks to being selective on baseline emission sources, and its creative approach to accounting for land use change and forestry. Australia has now taken to making threats if it is not allowed to use these favourable rules, which would allow it to emit a further six per cent more carbon on top of its already worst-in-show per capita emissions.
Australia’s status as a climate wrecker at last years UN climate meeting in Warsaw (COP19) is deteriorating even further this week, with the gulf between the Abbott government’s actions on climate change and its rhetoric growing wider and more confusing by the day.
The Government was planning to not send a minister to the latest climate meeting in Lima (COP20), until Foreign Minister Julie Bishop forced the issue in cabinet. Her request was approved on the proviso Trade Minister Andrew Robb “chaperoned” the trip due to “the significant economic and investment matters involved”. This statement is totally at odds with the Government’s fight to stop climate change being discussed at the G20 given it was an “economic meeting”. Allegedly leaked talking points from the Prime Minister’s office show that it is spinning its grudging allowance of Bishop to attend COP20 with Robb in tow as a sign of its “commitment to dealing with climate change”, but the attendance of the Foreign Affairs and Trade ministers instead of the Environmental Minister has also been dubbed an attempt to set up the climate talks to fail. Either way, the move appears to again be for show, not action, with the Government refusing to contribute to the Green Climate Fund when even conservative buddies Canada and New Zealand are.
Australia has already won two Fossil of the Day awards, and with it being named the worst performing industrial economy on climate change and Julie Bishop talking down unprecedented moves by China to cap coal use and emissions as “business as usual to 2030″, it is quite likely it could see a repeat of the five fossil awards it picked up at COP19.
‘A treasurer under siege, a foreign minister in a sulk and a defence minister about to be forced to walk the plank.
he’s as creepy as ever…
“And I know that you will agree with me that standing up for Australia also means standing up for the God, who has so blessed our land. I believe this country hungers for a spiritual revival. I believe it longs to see traditional values reflected in public policy again.”
ERIC(K) ABETZ, Address to the Australian Christian Lobby Conference, Brisbane, May 2013.
The Australian government took its strategy of fighting the future to a whole new level this week, with ministers lining up to attack the ANU’s decision to abandon many of its fossil fuel investments, and Prime Minister Tony Abbott taking the coal industry’s PR line to claim that coal is “good for humanity” and has a “bright future” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
We know that we cannot burn the majority of our fossil fuel reserves, the international community is preparing for a low carbon future, and it costs more to mine and ship Australian coal than it can be sold for. Couple this with China imposing a new 6 per cent coal import tariff, its steel industry being close to peak production, and forecasters saying the decline in prices will continue as China moves away from imported coal; it’s clear to see why the Abbott government’s vocal protection and support for coal has been dubbed a “suicide strategy”.
- The notion that “coal is good for humanity” ignores not only its severe impact on health, the environment and global warming, it is based on the misleading idea that it is the cheapest form of energy. Burning Australian coal willseverely increase the cost of electricity for poor Indian consumers; while in the EU onshore wind is cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear energy when external factors like air quality, human toxicity and climate change are taken into account. Prime Minister Abbott has bought into the Coal Industry’s PR offensive, but coal is not the answer to energy poverty, and no amount of “sham”, misleading PR pushes will change this.
- Tony Abbott’s declaration that coal use should go “up and up and up in the years and decades to come” demonstrates that the government has zero interest in climate action or the security threats burning fossil fuels create. It also shows just how disconnected it is from market developments and international moves towards a low carbon economy.
- The Government may want coal to be king, but the Australian people are increasingly voting with their wallets by switching to renewable power anddivesting from risky fossil fuel investments. Those impacted by fossil fuel burning are also increasingly standing up, with Pacific Islanders moving to blockade Australian coal exports, and other international protests of Australian coal firms appearing.
“Stop whinging, get on with it and prove them all wrong.”
With ‘leaders’ (sic), puppets and stooges meeting for the G20 meeting in Brisbane this week, the role of coal in development and poverty alleviation is being relentlessly talked up, with Australian politicians from the Prime Minister down running coal industry PR lines.
However, while Tony Abbott insists that coal is the “foundation of prosperity”, a new report from The Australia Institute shows that while the industry talks a big game on fighting poverty, it doesn’t even use coal to help the energy poor in the developing world.
The report All talk, no action: the coal industry and energy poverty finds that on the few occasions coal companies have spent money to help the energy-poor, they ironically tended to use distributed, off-grid renewables or hydro power at best. At worst, G20 sponsor Peabody Coal literally did nothing to help the energy poor other than push a website and PR campaign designed to influence public policy and opinion.
What is it like to be a billionaire in the United States? According to billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins, wealth is a burden made “unbearable” by people of lesser incomes when they demand equality. That was the narrative published by the corporate news machine at the Wall Street Journal.
Taking time away from maintaining the world’s largest luxury yacht, Perkins compared progressive movements seeking social and economic justice to the horrific persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. Sensible people were quick to denounce such ludicrous comparisons with the Holocaust.
But Perkins’s fellow oligarchs continue endorsing the narrative of a “hard-working” class of wealthy people “under siege” by a “lazy” class of poor people. According to billionaires like Sam Zell and Wilbur Ross, they are being targeted by poor people jealous of what they have and incapable of working as hard as they do.
These billionaire oligarchs offer a simple suggestion: stop whining, get educated, and work hard like they do. Never mind how they greatly exaggerate their work ethic, or how little education matters to employers paying wages lower than our grandparents’ wages.
Ignore the institutional advantages allowing the wealthy people to thrive following the 2007 Wall Street created economic collapse. Just follow the billionaires’ example and maybe you can enjoy celebrating extreme wealth and special privilege at everyone else’s expense.
These cries of “persecution” might be considered more thoroughly if they were not so woefully ignorant of reality. Oligarchs like Perkins are quick to label poor people as lazy, jealous “takers” feeding off their hard work, but the reality is oligarchs receive more government subsidies than food stamps and housing assistance combined.
They tell us they deserve such government support for paying the most taxes, yet conveniently ignore the fact that they pay a smaller proportion of income in taxes than the rest of us. Their self-proclaimed status as “job creators” is a common excuse for paying less taxes, but even their fellow capitalists dispute such fantasies. It is hard to take their complaints of “oppression” seriously when Wall Street oligarchs are caught celebrating their wealth and privilege while laughing at the struggles of an economy they helped ruin.
The myth of the downtrodden super-rich is not just the delusion of a few old white men. Wealthy people are often so isolated from the rest of us, many of them have forgotten how rich they really are. So when the general public speaks out against social or economic inequality, plutocrats like Perkins perceive this as unjust “vilification” of a wealthy class deserving of their fortune. Their perception is unequivocally false, but it creates real consequences for everyone else
– See more at OCCUPY.com
- Frances Abbott accepted a $60,000 ‘chairman’s scholarship’ for her course at the Whitehouse Institute of Design
- Liberal supporter Les Taylor sits as chairman on the board of governors at the school
- Students claim ‘more deserving’ candidates than PM’s daughter
Ms Abbott, 22, accepted a ‘chairman’s scholarship’ for her Bachelor of Design course from the Whitehouse Institute of Design, where Liberal supporter Les Taylor sits as chairman on the board of governors.
The news came on Wednesday, the same day that thousands of students protested across Australia about the cuts to tertiary education funding, announced in Mr Abbott’s federal budget.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2636121/Classmates-Tony-Abbotts-daughter-outraged-Frances-awarded-60-000-scholarship-deserving-students.html#ixzz3BS5vOKbv
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
“Media reports that I have drawn or believe
there is a link between abortion and breast
cancer are incorrect…”
Eric Abetz.com … Friday, 08 August 2014 09:58
Panel members said phone data had limited role preventing terrorism in testimony before Senate judiciary committee
- Spencer Ackermanin Washington
- com,Tuesday 14 January 2014 21.44 GMT
excerpt…
The members of president Barack Obama’s surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program’s potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel said that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.
Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.
“If the information that the federal agencies had at the time had been shared among the agencies, then one of them, the FBI, could have gone to the Fisa Court and could have in a very timely manner gotten a warrant to monitor” US-based al-Qaida conspirators, Clarke told the Senate judiciary committee…
“And I know that you will agree with me that standing up for Australia also means standing up for the God, who has so blessed our land. I believe this country hungers for a spiritual revival. I believe it longs to see traditional values reflected in public policy again.”
ERIC(K) ABETZ, Address to the Australian Christian Lobby Conference, Brisbane, May 2013.
This is a record of a supposed ‘native title’ meeting staged by the iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG).
ps. greetings to our Washington DC based followers – Hisham, Nancy, Eric, Jonathan F, Dan, Bob G. et al…Good luck with the Abbott Junta invasion…we’d rather not have him back…any room for him @ Guantanamo?
A direct consequence of Rupert Murdoch installing a former News Ltd employee as PM of Australia, is that we the people are being harassed, berated and bullied by a sneering, lying, balding, misogynist, monarchist called Tony, who has just handed down a budget so draconian that it would make even a Thatcherite blush.
We the people are being royally screwed by this Murdoch-minion and his cabinet of reptilian sociopaths. To add insult to injury, these faux moralising conservative thugs are parroting Murdoch mantras, such as that old chestnut, THE AGE OF ENTITLEMENT IS OVER!
Well, Rupert Murdoch could be tasting a bloody great dose of his own medicine in the not too distant, as United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO), lifts the lid on some pretty questionable entitlements of his own…
United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO):
Highlights of GAO-09-157, a report to Financial Privacy Jurisdictions
INTERNATIONAL TAXATION
Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with
Subsidiaries in Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens.
Number and location(s) of subsidiaries in jurisdictions
listed as tax havens or financial privacy jurisdictions:
News Corporation
Belize (1), Bermuda (1), British Virgin Islands (62), Cayman Islands (33),
Cyprus (1), Hong Kong (21), Ireland (1), Latvia (4), Luxembourg (4), Marshall Islands (1), Mauritius (15), Panama (1), Singapore (5), Switzerland (2)
the interpretOr 