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Authored by Richard C Cook via ScheerPost.com,

Read Part 1 of this series here.

Why is the U.S. refusing to call a halt to the Ukraine madness? Why can’t an era of “Peaceful Coexistence” in Europe and the world be declared or at least sought? How about détente with Russia? With Russia and China? What is wrong with that?

We’ll start peeling the onion by looking at the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Of course, President Eisenhower warned us against the MIC over 60 years ago in his “Farewell Address” of January 20, 1961. Among other remarks he said:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.  

The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov. 

Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce. 

We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.   

Added to the above are members of Congress who vote on military budgets and make the laws that protect the MIC from accountability, lobbyists who pressure those members to cast votes favorable to their MIC clients, private sector financial service employees who handle the retirement accounts of the MIC multitude, foreigners who are employed at overseas bases, and various scoundrels and hangers-on. I would include in the latter category the multitude of MIC cheerleaders from Hollywood who produce trashy spectacles like Top Gun. 

On top of everything else, there are millions of retirees drawing annuities in excess of what most working-class Americans earn, many of these retirees double- or triple-dipping with lucrative jobs in business or government.

Each of the above individuals supports multiple family members, workers, and vendors within the civilian economy who, with the ripple effect and velocity of money, keep entire towns, cities, states, regions, and industries afloat. An example is building the F-35 that has workers assembling it in 350 congressional districts. It is probably no exaggeration to say that given the vast exiting of civilian U.S. factories and jobs over the last half-century to cheap-labor countries abroad, the MIC is probably the principal economic engine of the U.S. as a whole.

So are we going to tell what adds up to tens of millions of people, sorry, your services are no longer needed? Good luck with that. And isn’t it obvious that all these people, especially the higher echelons, are going to do everything within their power to persuade us that their jobs are so essential that without them we will shortly be overwhelmed and eaten alive by every “enemy” on the planet? 

If you doubt what I am saying, ask any retired colonel or general who has hired himself out as a talking head to CNN or MSNBC. It’s also why DoD has formally declared Russia and China our two “adversaries,” because, after all, you have to point the finger at someone and blame them for your own dysfunctional society.

But as I witnessed personally in my NASA days, many MIC personnel never do a lick of honest work, or are mainly occupied with paper shuffling or other busywork, especially with work-at-home now the vogue, with many spending their days surfing the internet, or worse, while drawing a level of pay that puts most civilian workers in the shade. 

Not to mention stay-at-home mothers, teachers and caregivers, first responders, law enforcement personnel, food service employees, or the unemployed, underemployed, or homeless. Yet many of these people, while working hard for low pay, if any, have a sense of fulfillment and self-worth that surpasses the swarms of MIC bureaucrats who can’t help but feel degraded in their superfluous and often pointless vocational stagnation. 

Is all this enough to create an imperative for World War III? You tell me. It certainly has to be a contributing factor. Plus it saps the nation’s natural strength. We could even say that the U.S. war machine is a cancerous tumor that has metastasized throughout the entirety of American society, polluting and corrupting every aspect of life, including the body politic, the environment, the entertainment industry, the mass media, education, scientific research, etc. 

It was the military, for example, that supported planning for the U.S. lockdowns during the COVID so-called pandemic, as documented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in his monumental indictment of Big Pharma/MIC collusion in his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. 

A subset of the question whether the MIC could drive us to war for its own selfish reasons is whether a president, a political party, or the Deep State itself could use the MIC to generate a war to save their own sorry asses at a time of scandal or possible election loss, along the lines of the movie Wag the Dog? 

We’ll leave that an open question for now. At least Tucker Carlson seems to think so in his forecast that the Biden administration will spark a hot war with Russia before the 2024 election. Of course, we can’t know what they are really planning, because they hide behind billions of classified documents and imprison those who dare to lift the veil of secrecy. We are vaguely aware that the top dogs have their own “continuity of government” plans with hidden bunkers, an “underground Pentagon,” caches of MREs that can last decades, etc. Just don’t ask to see any of this.

Every war the U.S. has fought since Korea, including the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been an MIC bonanza. Then there’s the simple fact that if you are an individual possessing a weapon of any kind, whether a military pistol or an ICBM, despite the protocols that govern their use, you still fantasize about using that weapon on somebody. This alone creates a societal imperative towards war. Plus I have had the wife of an MIC worker tell me straight up that she favored war because otherwise how would their family eat? 

Another way to look at it is that we have a deeply entrenched system of military socialism. I happen to think it’s very corrupt, very inefficient, and very dangerous. 

IS BRICS+ VS. THE WEST DECIDING THE PARAMETERS OF THE CONFLICT?

This brings us to the subject of economics. The national level of expenditure on the MIC and its role as the central tent pole of the U.S. economy certainly point to economic motives in any stampede to war. But wealth depends on resources and their exploitation. In fact, the seizure of the world’s resources had become a finely-honed specialty of the European powers, with the U.S. joining in the later stages, during the entire era of colonization. Even today, the populations of former Western colonies continue to work the farms, plantations, mines, and transport facilities of Western owners.

Of course, the Europeans and Americans have been justifying their expropriation of the resources of other countries for centuries by virtue of ideologies like “right of conquest,” “survival of the fittest,” “white man’s burden, etc.,” always proclaiming shock at native resistance. During the 19th century, such resistance was decisively subdued by the invention of the Maxim machine gun. 

The U.S. gained early experience in grabbing the land and its bounty through dispossession of Native Americans and the massive growth of slave-worked plantation agriculture. Westward expansion brought the taking of land for gold and silver prospecting. By the time the U.S. began to gain colonies, the rich soil of Hawaii offered wealth to pineapple growers. A prime motive of the Spanish-American War was confiscation of Cuban sugar plantations. In Central America it was bananas and coffee. In Chile it was copper. 

At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. bankers lent money to the British to aid them in fighting the Boers in order to secure the incredible deposits of diamonds and gold beneath the surface in South Africa. We also know that U.S. bankers saw a great business opportunity in the chance to lend money to Britain and France in order for them to prosecute World War I against Germany. After that war, the Rockefeller oil empire began its expansion into the Middle East. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is suspected to have baited Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor because there was nothing better than a good war to boost employment after failing to create a full-employment economy during the Great Depression. When the “War on Terror” commenced, the chief topic on the agenda at President George W. Bush’s staff meetings was the takeover of Iraq’s oil fields. 

Today, the MIC has one overriding mission: protect the overseas interests of big U.S. banks, investment and hedge funds, and multinational corporations. The biggest U.S. defense firm is Lockheed, which itself is largely owned by three giant hedge funds: State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock. The CIA is there to control foreign governments, overthrow them as needed, and keep foreign leaders and journalists on the payroll while quaking with fear for their careers or even lives. The paradigm is most egregious in Europe, which the Anglo-Americans view as vassals, with the E.U. a policeman. NATO is an enforcement mechanism for U.S./U.K. control, not to defend against Russia, which today has no discernible interest in political control over Europe, even if it were capable of making such a move, which it isn’t.

Rather than defend against a non-existent Russian threat, the West would love to get its hands on Russian oil, gas, and mineral resources, as it began to do in the 1990s before Putin took over and fostered a nationalistic revival. The U.S. had long been targeting the Caspian Basin and Central Asia, which now seemed vulnerable with the separation from Russia of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. These countries are still in play for the West, as are the microstates of the Caucasus. 

The 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup in Ukraine was partly for acquisition of Ukrainian land and resources, including the fertile farmland of the steppes. Big players are Cargill, ADM, and BlackRock, along with numerous E.U. companies. Despite global warming and professions of getting rid of fossil fuels, trying to get hold of hydrocarbons worldwide remains a matter of Western urgency. 

But with the current situation, another dimension is “dollar hegemony.” This brings us to BRICS. Perhaps the biggest threat to Western economic imperialism is the formation of the economic compact consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. As the Ukraine conflict deepens, BRICS expansion has become of particular importance to Russia, as it is obviously a means of outflanking the West and beating it at its own geopolitical game. 

At the South African BRICS summit of August 22-24, 2023, six new nations were added: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, leading to BRICS+. Added to the earlier rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the effects of BRICS and its expansion are seismic. Additional nations that have expressed an interest in BRICS are Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and at least a dozen others. 

The potential of BRICS is the inclusion of half or more of the world’s population. BRICS economies had overtaken G-7 economies by 2012, and the gap between BRICS and G-7 economies is widening irreversibly.

GDP is not a viable measure of economic performance for “reserve currency” nations like the U.S. that can print money “out of thin air.” But there is a linear relationship between real goods production and energy. Thus a much more reliable economic performance evaluation can be inferred from electricity generation, as the following chart illustrates:

The following can be noted:

• The BRICS economies overtook G-7 economies in 2012, with the gap increasing steadily since.

• G-7 economies have not witnessed any growth since the 2008-2009 “Great Financial Crisis.”

• G-7 economies have shrunk by 6 percent since their peak in 2007.

• BRICS economies were 50 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.

• BRICS+ economies (BRICS plus six candidate countries) were 60 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.

The graph also explains why the BRICS nations are not pursuing aggressive policies, despite Western propaganda, as they view time as being on their side. Naturally they refuse the “reserve currency” prerogative which allows G-7 countries to siphon hard earned wealth from the rest of the world. The most worrying aspect for the U.S. is the obvious intention of BRICS to foster trade exchanges in local currencies, bypassing the primacy of the dollar, and secondarily the Euro. 

According to Stephen Jen, CEO of Eurizon SLJ Capital Ltd. and former IMF/Morgan Stanley economist, “The dollar share in foreign reserves has lost about 11 percent since 2016. The decisive event has been Western sanctions and the freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves.” He adds: “Taking purchasing power into account the BRICS nations currently account for 32 percent of global economic output, compared to 30 percent covered by the G7 countries.” This differential is bound to worsen as new nations are added to BRICS.

As BRICS, ASEAN and other countries increasingly trade in national currencies in lieu of Western reserve currencies, this results in weakening of those Western currencies, as evidenced by the drop in their purchasing power, aka inflation. Over time, the standards of living commensurate with the production of tradable goods will result in growing poverty in the U.S. and the EU that will result in social instability. But the damage will fall largely to the lower income echelons, resulting in growth in an already unsustainable wealth disparity, with the GINI factor for wealth distribution in the U.S. reaching 0.85 in 2020. 

This explains several observations:

1. Why BRICS do not find it necessary to issue a new currency: Trade in national currencies will bring an end to the wealth siphoning mechanism of U.S. dollar hegemony. 

2. Why Russia and China are trying to maintain non-confrontational policies despite provocations: As trade away from the U.S., UK, and EU increases with growing use of national currencies, political instability, particularly in the most de-industrialized Western nations, will result. Social discontent and political instability can already be witnessed throughout the West. This will only increase as impoverishment spreads due to depreciating currencies, leading to eventual implosion of the neoliberal political system. Thus Russia, China, and other sovereign nations have adopted a policy of “wait it out” rather than risk a kinetic war which would result in the deaths of millions. Nevertheless, these countries are embarking on an accelerated program of military development, along with strengthened alliances, in case war is inevitable. 

3. Why the West is embarking on highly aggressive policies: The neoliberal cabals in control of the West realize that the changes occurring in the world, particularly as regards the monetary and financial global architecture, spell their doom, and hence are increasingly acting hysterically, fomenting conflict and chaos wherever they can. 

It is dollar hegemony, dating back to the World War II-era Bretton Woods Agreements and the Nixonian removal of the international currency gold peg, that has allowed the U.S. to attempt overcoming its massive trade deficit and its public debt at $33.1 trillion and growing. Only by selling trillions of dollars of Treasury bonds to foreign countries, especially China, Japan, and Korea, has the U.S. been able to straddle the globe with the hundreds of military bases and other facilities it relies on to secure a world order friendly to its interests. For decades, foreign countries have needed dollars to trade in petroleum and other commodities. But with BRICS, that imperative may end sooner rather than later. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has said this will never happen, but other policy makers are seeing the writing on the wall. 

Are the prospects of BRICS so serious that the U.S. could launch World War III against its main powers, Russia, China, and now Iran, as a last-ditch act of desperation as its entire world order veers toward collapse? 

It hardly bodes well that these three nations, along with North Korea, have been identified by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee as the new “axis of evil.” She speaks for much of the U.S. political class. 

*  *  *

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Authored by John Murawski via RealClear Wire,

As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change skeptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back. 

This summer the International Monetary Fund summarily canceled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views.  

Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after negative coverage in legacy media. The move was decried by another prominent climate dissenter, Roger Pielke Jr., as “one of the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen” – criticism muffled because the academic says he has been blocked on Twitter (now X) by reporters on the climate beat. 

The climate dissenters are pressing their case as President Biden, United Nations officials, and climate action advocates in media and academia argue that the “settled science” demands a wholesale societal transformation. That means halving U.S. carbon emissions by 2035 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 to stave off the “existential threat” of human-induced climate change. 

In response last month, more than 1,600 scientists, among them two Nobel physics laureates, Clauser and Ivar Giaever of Norway, signed a declaration stating that there is no climate emergency, and that climate advocacy has devolved into mass hysteria. The skeptics say the radical transformation of entire societies is marching forth without a full debate, based on dubious scientific claims amplified by knee-jerk journalism.  

Many of these climate skeptics reject the optimistic scenarios of economic prosperity promised by advocates of a net-zero world order. They say the global emissions-reduction targets are not achievable on such an accelerated timetable without lowering living standards and unleashing worldwide political unrest.  

“What advocates of climate action are trying to do is scare the bejesus out of the public so they’ll think we need to [act] fast,” said Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”  

“You have to balance the certainties and uncertainties of the changing climate – the risks and hazards – against many other factors,” he adds. 

These dissenters don’t all agree on all scientific questions and do not speak in a single voice. Clauser, for example, is a self-styled “climate denialist” who believes climate is regulated by clouds, while Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, acknowledge humans are affecting the climate but say there is sufficient time to adapt. The dissenters do, however, agree that the public and government officials are getting a one-sided, apocalyptic account that stokes fear, politicizes science, misuses climate modeling, and shuts down debate.  

They also say it is a troubling sign for scientific integrity that they are systematically sidelined and diminished by government funding agencies, foundation grant-makers, academic journals, and much of the media. Delving into their claims, RealClearInvestigations reviewed a sampling of their books, articles, and podcast interviews. This loose coalition of writers and thinkers acknowledges that the climate is warming, but they typically ascribe as much, if not more, influence to natural cycles and climate variability than to human activities, such as burning fossil fuel.  

Among their arguments:  

• There is no climate crisis or existential threat as expressed in catastrophic predictions by activists in the media and academia. As global temperatures gradually increase, human societies will need to make adjustments in the coming century, just as societies have adapted to earlier climate changes. By and large, humans cannot control the climate, which Pielke describes as “the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.” 

• Global temperatures are increasing incrementally, and have been for centuries, but the degree of human influence is uncertain or negligible. Climate skeptics themselves don’t agree on how much humans are contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels, and how much is caused by natural variability from El Niño and other cycles that can take centuries to play out. “The real question is not whether the globe has warmed recently,” writes Koonin, “but rather to what extent this warming is being caused by humans.” 

• Rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewables and electricity by mid-century would be economically risky and may have a negligible effect on global warming. Some say mitigation decrees – such as phasing out the combustion engine and banning gas stoves – are not likely to prevent climate change because humans play a minor role in global climate trends. Others say mitigation is necessary but won’t happen without capable replacement technologies. It’s unrealistic, they say, to force societies to rely on intermittent energy from wind and solar, or wager the future on technologies that are still in experimental stages.   

• The global political push to kill the fossil fuel industry to get to “net zero” and “carbon neutrality” by 2050, as advocated by the United Nations and the Biden administration, will erase millions of jobs and raise energy costs, leading to a prolonged economic depression and political instability. The result would be that developing regions will pay the highest price, while the biggest polluters (China and India) and hostile nations (like Russia and Iran) will simply ignore the net-zero mandate. This could be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease.  

• Despite the common refrain in the media, there is no evidence that a gradually warming planet is affecting the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, storms, droughts, rainfall, or other weather events. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has expressed low confidence such weather events can be linked to human activities. Still, “it is a fertile field for cherry pickers,” notes Pielke.  

• Extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, are not claiming more human lives than previously. The human death toll is largely caused by cold weather, which accounts for eight times as many deaths as hot weather, and overall weather-related mortality has fallen by about 99% in the past century. “People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before,” statistician and author Bjørn Lomborg has said. 

• Climate science has been hijacked and politicized by activists, creating a culture of self-censorship that’s enforced by a code of silence that Koonin likens to the Mafia’s omerta. In her 2023 book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk,” climatologist Judith Curry asks: “How many skeptical papers were not published by activist editorial boards? How many published papers have buried results in order to avoid highlighting findings that conflict with preferred narratives? I am aware of anecdotal examples of each of these actions, but the total number is unknowable.” 

• Slogans such as “follow the science” and “scientific consensus” are misleading and disingenuous. There is no consensus on many key questions, such as the urgency to cease and desist burning fossil fuels, or the accuracy of computer modeling predictions of future global temperatures. The apparent consensus of imminent disaster is manufactured through peer pressure, intimidation, and research funding priorities, based on the conviction that “noble lies,” “consensus entrepreneurship,” and “stealth advocacy” are necessary to save humanity from itself. “One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic,” Pielke predicts.  

• The warming of the planet is a complicated phenomenon that will cause some disruptions but will also bring benefits, particularly in agricultural yields and increased vegetation. Some climate skeptics, including the CO2 Coalition, say CO2 is not a pollutant – it is “plant food.”  

Curry, the former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expresses a common theme among the climate refuseniks: that they are the sane, rational voices in a maelstrom of quasi-religious mania.  

“In the 1500s, they used to drown witches in Europe because they blamed them for bad weather. You had the pagan people trying to appease the gods with sacrifices,” Curry said. “What we’re doing now is like a pseudoscientific version of that, and it’s no more effective than those other strategies.’ 

The climate change establishment occasionally concedes some of these points. No less an authority than the newly appointed head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged the climate community to cool its jets: “If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” Jim Skea recently said to German media. “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees [centigrade]. It will however be a more dangerous world.”  

In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee in June, Pielke said human-caused climate change is real and “poses significant risks to society and the environment.” But the science does not paint a dystopian, catastrophic scenario of imminent doom, he added.  

“Today, there is general agreement that our current media environment and political discourse are rife with misinformation,” Pielke testified. “If there is just one sentence that you take from my testimony today it is this: You are being misinformed.” 

Still, the overwhelming impression conveyed is one of impending disaster, with the menace of global warming rhetorically upgraded in July by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to “global boiling.” Climate scientists announced in July that the planet is the hottest it’s been in 120,000 years, an old claim that gets recycled every few years. Meanwhile, three vice-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of mass starvation, extinction, and disasters, saying that if the temperature rises 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels, “children under 12 will experience a fourfold increase in natural disasters in their lifetime, and up to 14% of all species assessed will likely face a very high risk of extinction.”  

Many of these predictions are based on computer models and computer simulations that Pielke, Koonin, Curry, and others have decried as totally implausible. Koonin’s book suggests that some computer models may be “cooking the books” to achieve desired outcomes, while Pielke has decried faulty scenarios as “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first  century thus far.” Curry writes in her book that the primary inadequacy of climate models is their limited ability to predict the kinds of natural climate fluctuations that cause ice ages and warming periods, and play out over decades, centuries, or even millennia.  

Another critique is the use of computer models to correlate extreme weather events to multi-decade climate trends in an attempt to show that the weather was caused by climate, a branch of climate science called climate attribution studies. This type of research is used to bolster claims that the frequency and intensity of heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events could not have happened without climate change. An example is research recently cited by the BBC in an article warning that if the global temperature rises another 0.9 centigrade, crippling heat waves that were once exceedingly rare will bake the world every two-to-five years.  

One question looms: Does a warming climate contribute to heat records and heat waves, such as those that were widely reported in July as the hottest month on record and taken as overwhelming proof that humans are overheating the planet? The United States experienced extreme heat waves in the 1930s, and the recent spikes are not without precedent, climate dissenters say. Pielke, however,  concedes that IPCC data signal that increases in heat extremes and heat waves are virtually certain, but he argues that the societal impacts will be manageable.  

Koonin and Curry say that the global heat spikes in July were likely caused by a multiplicity of factors, including an underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic explosion last year that increased upper atmosphere water vapor by about 10%, a relevant fact because water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas. Another factor is the warming effect of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which has shifted to an active phase recently.  

Koonin says that greenhouse gas emissions are a gradual trend on which weather anomalies play out, and while it’s tempting to confuse weather with climate, it would be a mistake to blame July’s heat waves on human influence.  

“The anomaly is about as large as we’ve ever seen, but not unprecedented,” Koonin explained on a podcast. “Now, what the real question is, why did it spike so much? Nothing to do with CO2 – CO2 is … the base on which this phenomenon occurs.” 

Climate dissent comes with the occupational hazard of being tarred as a propagandist and stooge for “Big Oil.” Pielke was one of seven academics investigated by a U.S. Congressman in 2015 for allegedly failing to report funding from fossil fuel interests (He was cleared). A New York Times review of Lomborg’s 2020 book, “False Alarm,” described it as “mind pollution.” 

Climate advocates see climate skepticism as so dangerous that Ben Santer, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, publicly cut ties with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory two years ago after the federal research facility invited Koonin to discuss his skeptical book, “Unsettled.” Santer, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, said allowing Koonin’s views to go unchallenged undermined the credibility and integrity of climate science research. For similar reasons, the IMF postponed Clauser’s July presentation so that it could be rescheduled as a debate.  

Another critique: scientists arbitrarily forcing the facts to fit a prescribed catastrophic narrative, often by ignoring plausible alternative explanations and relevant factors. That’s what climate scientist Patrick Brown said he had to do to get published in the prestigious journal Nature, by attributing wildfires to climate change and ignoring other factors, like poor forest management and the startling fact that over 80% of wildfires are ignited by humans. Brown publicly confessed to this sleight-of-hand in a recent article in The Free Press.  

“This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers,” Brown wrote. “When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets.” 

These frustrations serve as a reminder that the world has entered what the United Nations and climate advocates call the make-or-break decade that will decide how much the Earth’s temperature will rise above pre-industrial levels. This decisive phase is “unfolding now and will intensify during the next several years,” according to Rice University researchers. “Accordingly, what happens between now and the late 2020s, in all likelihood, will fundamentally determine the failure or success of an accelerated energy transition.” 

In response to this call for global action, political leaders in Europe and North America are vowing to reengineer their societies to run on wind, solar, and hydrogen. In this country, California is among a dozen states that have moved to ban the sale of new gasoline-engine cars in 2035, while states like Virginia and North Carolina have committed to carbon-free power girds by mid-century.  

In the most detailed net-zero roadmap to date, the International Energy Agency in 2021 identified more than 400 milestones that would have to be met to achieve a net-zero planet by mid-century, including the immediate cessation of oil and gas exploration and drilling, and mandated austerity measures such as reducing highway speed limits, limiting temperature settings in private homes, and eating less meat.  

In the IEA’s net zero scenario, global energy use will decline by 8% through energy efficiency even as the world’s population adds 2 billion people and the economy grows a whopping 40%. In this scenario, all the nations of the world – including China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia – would have to commit to a net-zero future, generating 14 million jobs to create a new energy infrastructure. Nearly half the slated emissions reductions will have to come from experimental technologies currently in demonstration or prototype stages, such as hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture, and modular nuclear reactors. Reading this bracing outlook, one could almost overlook the IEA’s caveat that relying on solar and wind for nearly 70% of electricity generation would cause retail electricity prices to increase by 50% on average and destroy 5 million jobs, of which “many are well paid, meaning structural changes can cause shocks for communities with impacts that persist over time.”  

A critique of the IEA’s scenario issued this year by the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a think tank that specializes in oil, gas, and petroleum products, warned of “massive supply shocks” if oil supplies are artificially suppressed to meet arbitrary net zero targets. The report further stated that “if the world stays committed to net zero regardless of high costs – the recession will turn into an extended depression and ultimately impose radical negative changes upon modern civilization.” (Disclosure: The report was commissioned by the RealClearFoundation, the nonprofit parent of RealClearInvestigations.) 

Already, societies have fallen behind their emissions reduction targets, and it’s widely understood that fast-tracking net zero is an unattainable goal. Transforming existing energy infrastructures within several decades would require installing the equivalent of the world’s largest solar farm every day, according to the International Energy Agency. Carbon-free energy accounts for only 18% of total global consumption, and fossil fuels are still increasing, according to a recent analysis. The IEA reported this year that investments in oil exploration and drilling have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, while global coal demand reached an all-time high last year. Globally nations are spending more on clean energy than on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are still vital to economic growth; for instance, the IEA noted that 40 gigawatts of new coal plants were approved in 2022, the highest figure since 2016, almost all of them in China.  

“We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science,” Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist and policy analyst, told The New York Times last year. “People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic.” 

A government push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting back on livestock farming has led to public protests in the Netherlands, a conflict over resources that Time magazine predicts will spread elsewhere: “This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.”  

Climate dissidents say what happened in the Netherlands is a foretaste of the political backlash that is inevitable when net-zero policies start becoming implemented and people have to travel across state lines to buy a gasoline-powered car.  

“The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets,” Curry said. “The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.” 

To Koonin, these challenges indicate that the catastrophic climate narrative will collapse when put to the test of practicality and politics. The more sensible route, he said, is a slow-and-steady approach.  

“There’s going to be a deep examination of science and the cost-benefit issues,” he said. “We will eventually do the right thing, but it’s going to take a decade or so.” 

John Murawski reports on the intersection of culture and ideas for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace policies to the practice of medicine.

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

There's no climate emergency. And the alarmist messaging pushed by global elites is purely political. That's what 1,609 scientists and informed professionals stated when they signed the Global Climate Intelligence Group's "World Climate Declaration."

"Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific," the declaration begins. "Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures."

The group is an independent "climate watchdog" founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and Marcel Crok, a science journalist. According to its website, the organization's objective is to "generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change as well as the effects of climate policy." And it does so by objectively looking at the facts and engaging in scientific research into climate change and climate policy.

The declaration's signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide. And when a select few were asked by The Epoch Times why they signed the declaration stating that the "climate emergency" is a farce, they all stated a variation of "because it's true."

"I signed the declaration because I believe the climate is no longer studied scientifically. Rather, it has become an item of faith," Haym Benaroya, a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers University, told The Epoch Times.

"The earth has warmed about 2 degrees F since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but that hardly constitutes an emergency—or even a crisis—since the planet has been warmer yet over the last few millennia," Ralph Alexander, a retired physicist and author of the website "Science Under Attack," told The Epoch Times.

"There is plenty of evidence that average temperatures were higher during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (centered around the year 1000), the Roman Warm Period (when grapes and citrus fruits were grown in now much colder Britain), and in the early Holocene (after the last regular Ice Age ended)."

The climate emergency is "fiction," he said unequivocally.

The 'Climate Emergency'

Human activities and the resulting greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Specifically, the IPCC says that in 1750, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were 280 parts per million (ppm), and today, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations are 420 ppm, which affects temperature.

The IPCC is the U.N. body for assessing the "science related to climate change." It was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environment Programme to help policymakers develop climate policies.

Edwin Berry, a theoretical physicist and certified consulting meteorologist, said that one of the IPCC's central theories is that natural CO2 has stayed constant at 280 ppm since 1750 and that human CO2 is responsible for the 140 ppm increase.

This IPCC theory makes human CO2 responsible for 33 percent of today's total CO2 level, he told The Epoch Times.

Consequently, to decrease temperatures, the IPCC says, we must reduce human-caused CO2—thus, the current push by lawmakers and climate activists to forcibly transition the world's transportation to electric vehicles, get rid of fossil fuels, and generally reduce all activities that contribute to human-caused CO2. 

That entire premise, according to Mr. Berry, is problematic.

"The public perception of carbon dioxide is that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there," Mr. Berry said. "They think it just accumulates. But it doesn't."

He explained that when you look at the flow of carbon dioxide—"flow" meaning the carbon moving from one carbon reservoir to another, i.e., through photosynthesis, the eating of plants, and back out through respiration—a 140 ppm constant level requires a continual inflow of 40 ppm per year of carbon dioxide, because, according to the IPCC, carbon dioxide has a turnover time of 3.5 years (meaning carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years).

"A level of 280 ppm is twice that—80 ppm of inflow. Now, we're saying that the inflow of human carbon dioxide is one-third of the total. Even IPCC data says, 'No, human carbon dioxide inflow is about 5 percent to 7 percent of the total carbon dioxide inflow into the atmosphere,'" he said.

So, to make up for the lack of necessary human-caused carbon dioxide flowing into the atmosphere, the IPCC claims that instead of having a turnover time of 3.5 years, human CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years.

"[The IPCC is] saying that something is different about human carbon dioxide and that it can't flow as fast out of the atmosphere as natural carbon dioxide," Mr. Berry said. "Well, IPCC scientists—when they've gone through, what, billions of dollars?—should have asked a simple question: 'Is a human carbon dioxide molecule exactly identical to a natural carbon dioxide molecule?' And the answer is yes. Of course!

"Well, if human and natural CO2 molecules are identical, their outflow times must be identical. So, the whole idea where they say it's in there for hundreds, or thousands, of years, is wrong."

Mr. Berry said that means nature—not humans—caused the increase in CO2. And consequently, attempts to decrease human CO2 are pointless.

"The belief that human CO2 drives the CO2 increase may be the biggest public delusion and most costly fraud in history," Mr. Berry said.

He pointed out that in science, the scientific method says that you can't prove that a theory is 100 percent true—only that the data supports it—but you can prove that it's false. Providing an example, Mr. Berry said that Sir Isaac Newton's gravity law was the preeminent theory for a long time, but then Albert Einstein made a correction that disproved Newton's theory.

Smoke rises from a steel factory in Inner Mongolia, China, on Nov. 3, 2016. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

"Go back to the scientific method: IPCC proposed a theory, and if we can prove it's wrong, we win. And I proved, in that case, their theory is wrong,” he said.

Mr. Berry took his research a step further and calculated the human carbon cycle using the IPCC's own carbon cycle data.

"The prediction from the same model doesn't give humans producing 140 ppm. It comes out closer to 30 ppm. Which essentially means the IPCC is wrong," he said.

He said that using the IPCC's data, nature is responsible for about 390 ppm of CO2, and humans are only responsible for about 30 ppm—not 140 ppm.

"Now, someone could ask, 'Well, is the IPCC data correct?' My answer is, 'I don't know.' But I don't have to know because IPCC has used this very data to deceive the world. I want to show that their logic is incorrect using their data," he said.

"The IPCC was not set up as a scientific organization."

Mr. Berry said that the IPCC doesn't engage in skepticism of its theories and, therefore, the scientific method that governs all science.

"They were set up as a political organization to specifically convince the public that carbon dioxide was causing problems," he said.

When asked why there's a push to declare a "climate emergency," Mr. Berry said it's all about money and control. 

"That's the only real reason for it. There's no climate emergency," he said.

Mr. Berry makes all his research, and research and correspondence from colleagues trying to disprove his theories, available to the public.

Politics and Climate Models

Like Mr. Berry, Mr. Alexander says that science has become more political than scientific.

"It's simply not true that the Earth's climate is threatened. That claim is far more political than scientific," he said.

"Science is based on observational evidence, together with logic, to make sense of the evidence. Very little, if any, evidence exists that human emissions of CO2 cause rising temperatures. There is a correlation between the two, but the correlation isn't particularly strong: The Earth cooled, for example, from about 1940 to 1970, while the atmospheric CO2 level continued to go up. Computer climate models are all that connects global warming to CO2."

When asked why CO2 was singled out as the cause of the climate emergency, Mr. Alexander said it goes back to James Hansen, an astrophysicist and the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013, and an ardent environmentalist.

"Hansen developed one of the first computer climate models and began to make highly exaggerated predictions of future warming, none of which have come true," Mr. Alexander said. "This included testimony he gave at a 1986 Senate hearing, testimony considered to have sparked the subsequent anthropogenic global warming narrative."

Despite his predictions failing to come to fruition, Mr. Hansen's efforts contributed to the founding of the IPCC, Mr. Alexander said.

"Although ostensibly the IPCC is a scientific body, the findings of its scientists are frequently distorted and hyped by the government and NGO bureaucrats who dominate the organization," he said. "The bureaucrats have played a major role in exaggerating the scientific conclusions of successive IPCC reports and escalating the rhetoric of its official pronouncements. Hence, the U.N. secretary-general's recent proclamations about a 'boiling' earth."

On July 27, Secretary General António Guterres said, “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived. The air is unbreathable. The heat is unbearable. And the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.”

Mr. Alexander said an honest answer to what's causing Earth's warming is, "We just don't know right now," but that doesn't mean scientists are short of ideas.

"The chances of CO2 being the number one culprit are very slim. CO2 undoubtedly contributes, but there are several natural cycles that most likely do, too," he said. "These include solar variability and ocean cycles, both ignored in climate models—because we don't know how to incorporate them—or represented poorly. While climate activists will tell you otherwise, climate science is still in its infancy, and there is a great deal we don't yet understand about our climate."

He said one example is a recent research paper that estimated that changes in the sun's output could explain 70 to 80 percent of global warming. Research such as that doesn't gain much traction because the IPCC is committed to the idea that human CO2 is the cause of global warming.

As further criticism, Mr. Alexander said John Christy, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the director of the Earth System Science Center, has clearly demonstrated that climate models exaggerate short-term future warming by two to three times.

To find more accurate measurements, Mr. Christy and Roy Spencer, a climatologist, former NASA scientist, and now a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, developed a global temperature data set from microwave satellite observations.

They started their project in 1989, analyzed data going back to 1979, and found that, in general, since 1979, the Earth's temperature has increased steadily by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years, according to global satellite data, Mr. Spencer said on his website.

As for why climate models are so inaccurate, Mr. Alexander said: "Computer simulations are only as reliable as the assumptions that the computer model is built on, and there are many assumptions that go into climate models. Assumptions about processes we don't fully understand require approximations.

Read more here...

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

As I have noted in the past, the western world came within a knife’s edge of being completely subjugated and placed under perpetual medical tyranny by a coalition of government officials, globalist interests and corporate partners. Liberty movement analysts have talked often of “open conspiracy,” but it was not until the pandemic response that we truly witnessed the mask come off and the greater agenda revealed.

Not more than five years ago the most common retort from skeptics was that such a conspiracy was “impossible” because it was “too elaborate to organize.” Today these people look rather foolish. It is undeniable – There is a cabal of power elites, they are highly organized around the globalist ideology and they want total centralized control of society. It is an immutable fact supported by endless proof. The debate is over. The covid response ended it.

The list of crimes against civil liberties is long. The establishment and the political left (with the help of a handful of Neocons) tried to implement unprecedented authoritarian measures from business and church shutdowns to forced masking (studies show the masks are useless) to forced vaccination using experimental mRNA products with no long term safety testing. In some countries (including New Zealand and Australia) covid camps were actually built to imprison not just citizens traveling overseas, but non-traveling citizens as well. Legislation to build such camps was pushed in the US.

A large percentage of Democrats in polls supported even more extreme policies, including:

55% of Democrats wanted fines for unvaxxed Americans.
59% of Democrats wanted the unvaccinated forcefully confined to their homes.
48% of Democrats wanted prison time for anyone that questioned the vaccines.
47% of Democrats were in favor of government tracking of the unvaxxed.
29% of Democrats were in favor or taking children away from the unvaxxed.

So, if someone tells you there “are no sides” and that the conflict is an illusion created by the “false left/right paradigm,” you know they are full of manure. There are definitely sides and the globalists are not our only concern. And though there are always nuances to take into consideration, exceptions to the rule do not change the rule.

As many leftists openly admitted during the mandates, the goal was to make life so miserable for the unvaccinated that they would eventually comply in order to survive. In this way, establishment elites and leftists could claim that people “volunteered” for the vaccines and no one was forced. What they really meant was, no one was forced at gunpoint, but we all knew that threat was coming next.

Keep in mind that all of these measures were rationalized in the name of “saving lives.” No lives were saved by the mandates. The official median infection fatality rate of covid is a mere 0.23%. In other words, all of these constitutional violations were attempted over a virus that 99.8% of people would inevitably catch and easily survive. I continue to suspect that the establishment expected covid to kill far more people than it did – When lab created diseases get out into the wild they change rapidly, usually evolving to be more infectious but less deadly.

The cabal is not all powerful and certainly not infallible. They make mistakes often. The covid agenda relied on multiple disjointed factors that were difficult to predict and most of them had to work in tandem. One of those factors was the dependency on the political left (a group of weaklings) to act as useful idiots and mob enforcers. Frankly, leftists just aren’t frightening enough to inspire compliance.

Another factor was the assumption that the response of conservative and independent free thinkers would be limited and easy to control. Finally, most if not all state governments in the US had to enforce the mandates for the duration.

Globalists seem to have greatly underestimated the potential resistance to their agenda, specifically in the US where 50 million+ armed citizens were ready to go to war over the draconian restrictions. I think the vaccine passports were the KEY to the scheme; vax passports would have given the establishment full spectrum dominance of the economy with people unable to get jobs or purchase necessities without submitting to the mandates.

It was here that many conservatives, independents and dozens of red states (to my surprise) made their stand, and suddenly, like magic, the covid hysteria vanished. The media propaganda campaign went quiet (compared to the previous two years), and the mandates were abandoned in most places around the world. The globalists were not ready to risk a fight against a massive insurgency.

It has been suggested that the covid agenda is about to make a comeback with a new hyped up strain of the virus. If this is the case, then the attempt will hit a wall. With even more Americans aware of the pointlessness of the mandates and the masks it is unlikely to gain much traction. Of course, as long as the people behind these schemes remain unpunished, they will be free to try again and again until something sticks.

Government agencies and officials like Anthony Fauci remain unpunished for their numerous covid lies. Joe Biden remains unpunished for his attempts to supplant the Bill of Rights. The mainstream media and Big Tech companies remain unpunished for their collusion in propaganda and censorship efforts.

And, let’s not gloss over the fact that Donald Trump promoted the fast-tracked mRNA vaccine programs (I will admit that as far as I know he never called for people to be forced to comply).

He also placed many technocrats and globalists within his own cabinet who would later go on to help institute authoritarian policies. How much these people influenced him or lied to him is up for debate, but his current prosecution does not negate his role leading up to the lockdowns. If there is an election in 2024 and Trump re-enters the White House, remember that no president is going to save us from this fight, we must save ourselves.

The goal of the globalists will be to move swiftly into other crisis events, whether real or fabricated, to bring the population to heel. Enter today’s climate change hysteria…

The covid agenda and the climate change agenda are very similar in that they rely on a core fallacy. The lie is that these events are actually dictated by human behavior, and thus human behavior must be controlled in the name of the “greater good.” The idea goes beyond this, though, into the realm of collectivism; for the globalists and leftists assert that each individual action affects the lives of the rest of the population in a great and unedning hive. Therefore, every single person must have their lives micromanaged by the state to prevent some kind of chain reaction that leads to catastrophe for the precious bug colony.

This was the claim during the covid farce, and it’s also the claim for climate change and carbon restrictions. They have fabricated yet another excuse for eliminating personal freedoms. For covid it was the air we each breath out that would supposedly destroy public health, and for climate change it is once again the air we breath out that will supposedly destroy the world. Coincidence? I think not.

During the lockdowns, numerous globalists and globalist connected climate researchers publicly expressed joy at the suggestion that covid lockdowns could be useful for reducing carbon emissions. The phrase “climate lockdowns” started circulating around major conferences and in various globalist funded studies.

These studies obviously show a precipitous drop in human based carbon emissions during the lockdowns, but still do not provide any evidence that man-made emissions actually cause climate changes. This remains the underlying con game of the climate narrative – Climate researchers with access to billions in government funds and think-tank funds happily operate on the ASSUMPTION that emissions cause warming, when in fact they have zero evidence to support this position. Correlation is not causation.

This summer, the media has been relentlessly pounding the climate propaganda drum to a degree that mimics the covid propaganda of a couple years ago.  The nihilistic reports of impending “global boiling” are built upon a house of cards.  Almost all climate crisis claims are based on records of a little over 100 years old. The Earth’s climate history is vast and there have been numerous warming periods much hotter than today. All of these warming events occurred during periods of ample animal and plant life and without human industry to blame.

he climate bogeyman is nothing more than another covid-like fraud, a vehicle for grabbing power and erasing our freedoms. There is no threat, and even if there was there is nothing that human beings could do about it since we have no bearing whatsoever on the course of the Earth’s temperatures. The world’s climate has been changing for millions of years, and there is no difference between the changes of today vs the changes of the past.

The globalists know that to achieve the “new world order” or the “great reset” they desire, a large percentage of the population has to be onboard. And since most people have a measure of conscience as well as self interest, their enslavement has to be presented as a positive.  Tthey must be made to believe that by embracing slavery they are saving the planet and the lives of others.

None of this is true of course, but as long as the populace thinks they are doing good they can often be manipulated into supporting immense evil.

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday announced that it would postpone enforcement of a law that would require high-earners to exclusively allocate "catch-up" contributions to Roth-style investment accounts -- rather than pre-tax accounts that confer an immediate income tax benefit.  

The change in the law, inflicted by December 2022's SECURE 2.0 Act, stipulated that, starting in 2024, 401(k) participants making catch-up contributions by virtue of being age 50 or older must put those contributions in Roth accounts if their prior-year Social Security wages were more than $145,000. Friday's announcement means people fitting that description can allocate catch-up contributions to pre-tax accounts for another two years.  

Unlike traditional pre-tax contributions, Roth contributions do not reduce a participant's current-year taxable income and thus don't provide immediate tax relief. The Roth payoff comes later, as qualified distributions are income-tax-free. Conversely, pre-tax contributions are full taxable when distributed. 

Some higher earners anticipate being in a lower tax bracket when they start tapping their 401(k) in retirement, compared to the bracket they're in today. That means they're more enthused about reaping current-tax-year savings from pre-tax contributions rather than the tax-free treatment in retirement. 

For 2023, the regular 401(k) contribution limit is $22,500. Participants who are 50 and older can contribute another $7,500 in catch-up contributions, for a total of $30,000. Vanguard says 16% of eligible participants made catch-up contributions in 2022.  

A participant in the 35% tax bracket can cut his income tax bill an extra $2,625 by making a $7,500 pre-tax, catch-up contribution -- in addition to tax savings from the other regular contribution.  

"The administrative transition period will help taxpayers transition smoothly to the new Roth catch-up requirement and is designed to facilitate an orderly transition for compliance with that requirement," the IRS said. The widely-despised instrument of government theft also clarified that the SECURE 2.0 Act doesn't bar anyone from making catch-up contributions, regardless of income, in 2023 or beyond. Some feared a textual error had accidentally banned catch-up contributions altogether.  

The new and now-postponed rule about catch-up contributions only applies to 401(k) and similar accounts, not to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). 

Given the uncertainty of future tax rates -- imposed by a government that's hurtling toward insolvency -- many advisors say it's a good idea to diversify the tax flavor of your retirement accounts. Having a substantial bucket of Roth money provides flexibility in managing your tax bills in retirement...assuming Uncle Sam doesn't pull a Darth Vader and "alter the deal" by revoking the tax-free treatment for "wealthy" Americans. 

On September 14, 1959, The Soviet Union's Luna 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to make contact with the Moon - slamming into its surface and completing its lunar impactor mission.

After that momentous achievement, the USSR shifted its focus away from impactors, and eventually became the first country, in 1966, to successfully complete a soft landing on the Moon.

A few months later, NASA's Surveyor 1 became the first U.S. spacecraft to conduct a soft lunar landing - a mission which paved the way for the manned Apollo missions and eventually Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first humans to set foot on the celestial body's surface.

You will find more infographics at Statista

But, Russia’s first mission to the moon in nearly half a century (the last mission - Luna-24 was in 1976) came to an unexpectedly violent end when its unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after encountering a problem as it began preparing for pre-landing orbit.

A picture taken from the camera of the lunar landing spacecraft Luna-25 during its flight to the moon shows the mission emblem and the bucket of the lunar manipulator complex, August 15, 2023.

In a delightfully-worded statement, Russian space agency Roscosmos said:

“According to the results of a preliminary analysis… the Luna-25 spacecraft switched to a non-designated orbit and ceased to operate due to a collision with the surface of the Moon."

Luna-25 was launched on August 11 by a Soyuz 2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Region of Russia’s Far East.

The landing of the probe was supposed to happen days before the arrival of India’s own Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which is scheduled to reach the same area of the moon on Wednesday, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, the country’s space agency.

A rocket carrying Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft launched earlier this month. 

As The Wall Street Journal reports, Russia was racing with India to become the first nation to land a rover on the area of the moon that scientists believe could hold water and other elements that could support a human settlement in the future.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said Thursday (Aug. 17) its Chandrayaan-3 moon lander is now flying on its own after separating from the propulsion module that brought it to lunar realms.

"Thanks for the ride, mate," ISRO officials tweeted from the mission's account, as the agency announced the successful deployment ahead of the expected moon-landing attempt on Aug. 23.

The 6-billion-rupee (roughly $73 million) Chandrayaan-3 mission aims to bring India on to the surface with a precise landing near the moon's south pole.

Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have made soft landings on the surface before.

Finally, as we detailed previously, China, which along with the U.S. is a leading country in space technology, has agreed to pursue a project to establish a human settlement on the moon together with Russia, but this weekend’s crash of the Luna-25 could mean that Moscow, which is the junior partner in the relationship, has less to offer than originally assumed.

China has accelerated its space program in recent years, and is currently the only country (known) to have landed anything on the moon in the 21st century. The CCP also landed a lunar probe on the moon's far side for the first time in history in 2019.

Coming out of stealth development is an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft by Applied eVTOL Concepts. The new eVTOL has thruster technology developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration via a multi-million dollar grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

Applied eVTOL Concepts revealed the "Epiphany Transporter" last week, described as a "new mode of personal mobility."

The company released specs on the new aircraft, indicating it's capable of 160 mph with a 300-plus mile range but generates less than 55 decibels of noise at 50 feet.

For some context, a normal conversation with background music is around 50 decibels. 

"The Epiphany Transporter can accommodate two people, their luggage, plus golf clubs! Intended to be simple and safe to operate, and about the size of a Tesla Model 'S' automobile, it fits into a standard one-car garage with its thrusters folded up, Applied eVTOL Concepts said. 

The company said the thruster technology has been in development for a quarter-century:

Originally developed under a $5.1 million DARPA grant, the NASA-proven ducted thrusters have undergone over a quarter-century of refinement through full-scale flight testing in wind tunnels and several prototype manned vehicles.

The news of the "exceptionally quiet" and "neighbor-friendly" eVTOL comes as the Federal Aviation Administration has published the Advanced Air Mobility Implementation Plan to ensure safe skies for flying taxis operations by 2028. 

Last month, the FAA granted SpaceX-backed mobility firm Alef Aeronautics a Special Airworthiness Certification that will allow "limited" flight operations. 

We suspect those who want to be in command of an eVTOL will likely need to obtain a private pilot's license and get rated for the aircraft to operate in controlled airspace. 

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two prominent climate scientists have taken on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new rules to cut CO2 emissions in electricity generation, arguing in testimony that the regulations “will be disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

Citing extensive data to support their case, William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued that the claims used by the EPA to justify the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently proven to be wrong. 

“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen stated. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”

“All of the models that predict catastrophic global warming fail the key test of the scientific method: they grossly overpredict the warming versus actual data,” they stated. “The scientific method proves there is no risk that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.”

Climate models like the ones that the EPA is using have been consistently wrong for decades in predicting actual outcomes, Mr. Happer told The Epoch Times. He presented the table below to the EPA to illustrate his point.

“That was already an embarrassment in the ‘90s, when I was director of energy research in the U.S. Department of Energy,” he said. “I was funding a lot of this work, and I knew very well then that the models were overpredicting the warming by a huge amount.”

He and his colleague argued that the EPA has grossly overstated the harm from CO2 emissions while ignoring the benefits of CO2 to life on Earth.

Many who have fought against EPA climate regulations have done so by arguing what is called the “major questions doctrine,” that the EPA does not have the authority to invent regulations that have such an enormous impact on Americans without clear direction from Congress. Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen, however, have taken a different tack, arguing that the EPA regulations fail the “State Farm” test because they are “arbitrary and capricious.”

“Time and again, courts have applied ‘State Farm’s’ principles to invalidate agency rules where the agency failed to consider an important aspect of the problem, or cherry-picked data to support a pre-ordained conclusion,” they stated. The case they referred to is the 2003 case of State Farm v. Campell (pdf), in which the Supreme Court argued that “a State can have no legitimate interest in deliberately making the law so arbitrary that citizens will be unable to avoid punishment based solely upon bias or whim.”

According to Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen’s testimony, “600 million years of CO2 and temperature data contradict the theory that high levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming.”

They present CO2 and temperature data indicating much higher levels of both CO2 and temperatures than today, with little correlation between the two. They also argue that current CO2 levels are historically at a low point.

“The often highly emphasized 140 [parts per million] increase in CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial Age is trivial compared to CO2 changes over the geological history of life on Earth,” they stated. 

In addition, the scientists' testimony to the EPA stated that the agency’s emissions rules fail to consider the fact that CO2 and fossil fuels are essential to life on earth, particularly human life.

“Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere create more food for people worldwide, including more food for people in drought-stricken areas,” they stated. “Increases in carbon dioxide over the past two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, caused an approximate 20 percent increase in the food available to people worldwide, as well as increased greening of the planet and a benign warming in temperature.”

More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more plant growth and higher farming yields, they argued. In addition, synthetic fertilizers, which are derivatives of natural gas, are responsible for nearly half the world’s food production today. “Net zero” goals would reduce CO2 emissions by more than 40 gigatons per year, reducing the food supply proportionally, they said.

In addition to disregarding the benefits of CO2, they stated, the EPA’s emission rules and the global warming narrative that has been used to justify them are based on flawed data.

In addition to teaching physics at Princeton, Mr. Happer’s decades of work in physics has focused on atmospheric radiation and atmospheric turbulence, and his inventions have been used by astronomers and in national defense.

“Radiation in the atmosphere is my specialty,” Mr. Happer said, “and I know more about it than, I would guess, any climate scientists.” 

His expertise, he said, “involves much of the same physics that’s involved in climate, and none of it is very alarming.”

The global warming narrative argues that as people burn fossil fuels, they emit higher concentrations of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs sunlight and creates a “greenhouse effect,” trapping the sun’s radiation and warming the earth. 

But one aspect of CO2 emissions that global warming models fail to take into account, Mr. Happer said, is a phenomenon called “saturation,” or the diminishing effect of CO2 in the atmosphere at higher concentrations.

“At the current concentrations of CO2, around 400 parts per million, it decreases the radiation to space by about 30 percent, compared to what you would have if you took it all away,” Mr. Happer said. “So that’s enough to cause quite a bit of warming of the earth, and thank God for that; it helps make the earth habitable, along with the effects of water vapor and clouds.”

“But if you could double the amount of CO2 from 400 to 800, and that will take a long time, the amount that you decrease radiation to space is only one percent,” Mr. Happer said. “Very few people realize how hard it is for additional carbon dioxide to make a difference to the radiation to space. That’s what’s called saturation, and it’s been well known for a century.”

In addition to scientific arguments about why global warming is overblown, the scientists also cite data showing large discrepancies between global warming models and actual observations. In some cases, Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen say, data has been disingenuously manipulated to fit the climate-change narrative.

“The most striking example of that is the temperature record,” Mr. Happer said. “If you look at the temperature records that were published 20 years ago, they showed very clearly that in the United States by far the warmest years we had were during the mid-1930s. 

“If you look at the data today, that is no longer true,” he said. “People in charge of that data, or what the public sees, have gradually reduced the temperatures of the ‘30s, then increased the temperature of more recent measurements.”

An example of misleading data used by the EPA as proof of global warming is shown in the chart below, Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen claimed. 

“This chart does not actually show ‘daily temperatures,’” they state. “Instead it show a ‘ratio’ of daily record highs to lows - a number that appears designed to create the impression that temperatures are steadily rising.”

By contrast, the scientists presented the following table, which indicates significantly higher temperatures in the 1930s versus today. 

The Scientific ‘Consensus’ for Climate Change

Proponents of the global warming narrative often state that it is “settled science” and that nearly all scientists agree that global warming is real and the result of human activity.

According to an official NASA statement, “the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists—97 percent—agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change. Most of the leading science organizations around the world have issued public statements expressing this, including international and U.S. science academies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a whole host of reputable scientific bodies around the world.”

A report by Cornell University states that “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.”

But Mr. Happer argues that consensus is not science, citing a lecture on the scientific method by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, who said, “if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”

“Science has never been made by consensus,” Mr. Happer said. “The way you decide something is true in science is you compare it with experiment or observations.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s a consensus; it doesn’t matter if a Nobel Prize winner says it’s true, if it disagrees with observations, it’s wrong,” he said. “And that’s the situation with climate models. They are clearly wrong because they don’t agree with observations.”

The National Library of Medicine cites a speech by physician and author Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology in 2003 in which he said, “consensus is the business of politics.”

“Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world,” Dr. Crichton said. “In science, consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results.”

“The initial predictions of climate disasters had New York flooded by now, no ice left at the North Pole, England would be like Siberia by now,” Mr. Happer said. “Nothing that they predicted actually came true. You have to do something to keep the money coming in, so they changed ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’”

The Price of Dissent

Regarding the consensus in published literature cited by Cornell University, some experts counter that academic publications routinely reject any submissions that question the global warming narrative. 

“I’m lucky because I didn’t really start pushing back on this until I was close to retirement,” Mr. Happer said. He had already established himself at that point as a tenured professor at Princeton, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and director of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“If I’d been much younger, they could have made sure I never got tenure, that my papers would never get published,” he said. “They can keep me from publishing papers now, but it doesn’t matter because I already have status. But it would matter a lot if I were younger and I had a career that I was trying to make.”

In an interview with John Stossel, climate scientist Judith Curry said she paid the price for contradicting the narrative and called the global warming consensus “a manufactured consensus.”

Ms. Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said that when she published a study that claimed hurricanes were increasing in intensity, “I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star; I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians and to give these talks, and lots of media attention.”

When several researchers questioned her findings, she investigated their claims and concluded that her critics were correct. 

“Part of it was bad data; part of it was natural climate variability,” she said. But when she went public with that fact, she was shunned, she said and pushed out of academia. 

Mr. Lindzen tells a similar tale, once he began to question the climate narrative.

“Funding and publication became almost impossible,” he said, “and I was holding the most distinguished chair in meteorology,” which was MIT’s Sloan Professorship of Meteorology. 

Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser told The Epoch Times that he, too, was abruptly canceled from giving a speech on climate at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25.

Mr. Clauser had stated during a previous speech at Quantum Korea 2023 that “climate change is not a crisis.”

He said that climate is a self-regulating process and that more clouds form when temperatures rise, resulting in a compensatory cooling effect. Although he agrees that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, he argued that the gas's effect on global warming is swamped by the natural cloud cycle.

However, only days before his IMF discussion was to take place, Mr. Clauser received an email indicating that the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) director, Pablo Moreno, didn't want the event to happen. An assistant who was coordinating the event wrote to Mr. Clauser: “When I arranged this the Director was very happy about it but things have evidently changed.”

The IMF’s current policy on climate change is that “large emitting countries need to introduce a carbon tax that rises quickly to $75 a ton in 2030, consistent with limiting global warming to 2° [Celcius] or less.”

The Climate Money Machine

Asked why there would be a need to censor, alter, and cherry-pick data to support the global warming narrative, Mr. Lindzen said “because it’s a hoax.”

Mr. Clauser said of the climate consensus, “We are totally awash in pseudoscience.”

“There is this huge fraction of the population that has been brainwashed into thinking this is an existential threat to the planet,” Mr. Happer said. “I don’t blame the people; they don’t have the background to know they are being deceived, but they are being deceived.” 

The World Bank announced in September 2022 that it paid out a record $31.7 billion that fiscal year to help countries address climate change, a 19 percent increase from the $26.6 billion it paid out over the previous fiscal year. And according to Reuters, the United States is projected to spend about $500 billion to fight climate change over the next decade, including $362 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, $98 billion from the Infrastructure Act, and $54 billion from the CHIPS law.

“What would happen to sustainable energy, the worthless windmills and solar panels if suddenly there were no climate change emergency,” Mr. Happer said. “They’re really not very good technology and they’re doing a lot more harm than good, but nevertheless people are making lots of money.”

Many investors, most notably BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, have cited government regulations and subsidies as a key reason why investments in “green” energies would be profitable. 

Research grants to study climate change are offered by many government agencies, including the EPA, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as by non-profits including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the MacArthur Foundation, which paid out $458 million since 2014.

“Going back to [19]88 to ’90, funding went up by a factor of 15,” Mr. Lindzen said. “You created a whole new community.

“This was a small field in 1990; not a single member of the faculty at MIT called themselves a climate scientist,” he said. “By 1996, everyone was a climate scientist, and that included impacts. If you’re studying cockroaches and you put in your grant, ‘cockroaches and climate,’ you are a climate scientist.”

Asked to respond to the professors’ comments, an EPA spokesperson stated: “The Agency will review all comments we received as we work to finalize the proposed standards.”

In a continuing trend of mixed signals from the Biden Administration, NASA of all agencies has gone on record as opposing a new lithium mining project in Nevada.

Since assuming office in 2021, President Biden has prioritized the development of wind and solar projects, but there’s been a clear and consistent hypocrisy from administration officials. To build these energy projects, we need raw materials such as copper, cobalt, and lithium – all rare earth minerals which require more mining – something the Biden Administration is refusing to champion. This was on clear display in our home state of Minnesota, where earlier this year, the Biden Interior Department banned copper-nickel mining in part of the Duluth Complex in the Superior National Forest. The Duluth Complex in northern Minnesota is home to the largest copper-nickel find in the world. The area contains 95% of America’s nickel reserves, almost 90% of our cobalt reserves, and some 33% of our copper reserves. 

Yet, with the expansion of clean energy and other mineral needs, demand for raw materials such as copper is only expected to increase in the coming years. In fact, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, our global mining needs will grow by approximately 500%. That is a massive increase, of course, and will require political willpower to mine. If we’re going to expand mining, for the wellbeing of people and our planet, we should do it here in the U.S. 

Currently, many of these raw materials are sourced from countries like China and the DR Congo. In fact, China controls 80% of the world’s rare-earth element supply, a stunning monopoly. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used this monopoly to assert its influence in foreign nations, such as the DRC. These countries, though, have disturbing and abysmal labor and environmental standards. In the DRC, for example, there have been instances of child slave labor in mines, a grievous violation of basic human rights. The exploitation and mistreatment of children through forced labor is an abhorrent practice that should never be tolerated.

In contrast, the U.S. has some of the best labor and environmental standards in the world. If we reshore the mining and processing of crucial raw materials, Americans and our environment win. U.S. mining jobs are well-paying and safer for laborers than the industry often is abroad. Additionally, the U.S. is far better equipped to conserve our natural environment while conducting mining projects using advanced American technology and 21st Century mining methods. In other words, we have the tools to mine for the materials we need without destroying our environment. 

Unfortunately, it’s not only political willpower that is holding back American mining. Our burdensome permitting process is also hindering our ability to mine and process the likes of copper, cobalt, and lithium in this country. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress passed H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, which included Rep. Stauber’s PERMIT-MN Act and other provisions, which would modernize the permitting process for 2023 mining needs.

The fact remains that when we employ an “out of sight, out of mind” mining strategy, both Americans and our environment lose. Not only do Americans lose out on good-paying jobs, but we’re supporting a dirtier, unsafe industry abroad. If we care about our planet and our people, the U.S. will take control of its mining future.

Congressman Pete Stauber has represented Minnesota’s eighth congressional district since 2019.

Danielle Butcher Franz, born and raised in Minnesota, is the executive vice president of the American Conservation Coalition Action (ACC Action). 

Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Courtney Gilardi’s 10-year-old daughter never had problems sleeping. But in August 2020, the morning after a 5G cell tower was installed within 450 feet of their Pittsfield, Massachusetts, home, she woke up complaining of headaches, dizziness, a buzzing in her head, and general malaise.

Normally, she gets up at 8 a.m. But on that day, she didn’t come downstairs till the afternoon.

“She didn’t look well, and she said that she was headachy, dizzy, fuzzy. Those are not words that she has ever used to describe how she’s been feeling before,” Ms. Gilardi said.

The girl, her sister, and Ms. Gilardi herself, who said she started experiencing sleep disturbances, rapid heart rates, and migraines, were soon diagnosed with microwave syndrome, a condition known to develop after a person is exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by wireless technologies.

The doctor’s advice was simple: Stay away from your home.

Microwave Syndrome: What Is It and How Does It Harm You?

Microwave syndrome refers to sensitivity and symptom development caused by environmental microwave radiation. This type of radiation is used to heat food in microwave ovens.

People are primarily exposed to microwave radiation through wireless devices and antennas. Cell phone towers, Wi-Fi modems, phones, tablets, smart wearables, and smart home appliances continuously emit these waves 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Symptoms of microwave radiation exposure include insomnia, headaches, fatigue, stress, pain, and even skin rashes. Individuals with chronic diseases may experience a worsening of preexisting symptoms as part of microwave syndrome, according to research.

Microwave Radiation’s Health Effects: Current Findings

Microwave radiation’s health effects have long been debated, with industry-funded studies often concluding no link between exposure and health.

Randomized human studies are lacking due to ethical considerations, but prospective studies on humans, and animal and cell studies suggest potentially harmful biological effects.

Naval Medical Research

In 1971, researchers at the Naval Medical Research Institute published a report on the biological effects of electromagnetic fields, including radio frequency and microwave radiation (pdf). The report examined their effects on humans, animals, and cells.

Professor Martin Pall from Washington State University, who specializes in chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, and the effects of low-intensity microwave frequency electromagnetic fields on the human body, summarized the biological effects as follows:

• Forty neuropsychiatric effects, including changes in brain structure, brain function, psychological responses, and behavior.
• Eight hormonal effects, including hyperthyroidism and pituitary dysfunction.
• Cardiac effects, including decreased heart activity and changes in heart rhythm.
• Chromosome breaks and changes to chromosome structure.
• Histological changes to the testes.
• Cell death, an important process in neurodegenerative diseases.

Other biological effects included changes to metabolism and digestion.

The Bioinitiative Report

The Bioinitiative Report, coauthored by Dr. David Carpenter, professor of environmental health sciences at the University at Albany’s School of Public Health, investigated the correlation between EMFs and health. It found that adverse biological reactions can be triggered even at levels far below the industry standards of maximum body exposure, set at 1.6 watts per kilogram (pdf).

The current standard is based on the assumption that microwave radiation affects the body solely through heat, disregarding its nonthermal effects.

However, exposure to nonthermal EMF radiation at a chronic level of 0.00034 microwatts through mobile phones has been linked to a significant reduction in sperm count. Microwatts represent a millionth of a watt.

Furthermore, children and adolescents exposed to 0.02 microwatts for a short period reported symptoms like headaches, irritation, and difficulties with concentration in school, according to the report.

“There is really no level that you could say with absolute confidence that it was safe for everybody,” Dr. Carpenter told The Epoch Times.

He added that setting a standard with no biological effects is unrealistic given the rapid growth in wireless technology use since the report’s publication in 2007, leading to increased microwave radiation exposure for individuals.

While the report faced scrutiny for its lack of peer review, all of its included studies were subject to peer review.

The Moscow Signal

Before the introduction of cellphones and wireless devices, the Moscow Signal report documented microwave transmissions by the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1976, ranging from 2.5 to 4.4 gigahertz (GHz), which aligns with the frequency range of today’s Wi-Fi and 4G networks.

Although the U.S. government eventually determined the exposure was an espionage attempt with no significant health effects on embassy staff, this conclusion has been disputed.

In 1975, Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, became sick, experiencing bleeding from the eyes and later succumbing to leukemia. Other embassy personnel also developed cancer, fueling the controversy surrounding the link between microwave radiation and cancer.

A year later, the U.S. Department of State commissioned a study comparing the health outcomes of Moscow embassy staff and their families to counterparts from Eastern European cities, who were assumed to have not been subjected to the same exposure. The study found that the staff in Moscow suffered no significant ill effects from the microwave exposure.

A 2019 review of the epidemiological study suggested that the original findings were toned down by the Department of State and that some key questions remain unanswered.

Read more here...

On Thursday of this week, India launched a rocket carrying a spacecraft for its lunar mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre located in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh Friday, in an ambitious second attempt at putting a lander and a rover on the moon amid several other global efforts to explore the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-3, the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit, took off from a launchpad in Sriharikota with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India’s emerging space technology.

India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water. According to a failure analysis report submitted to the ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.

The $140-million mission in 2019 was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits and were confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.

Reaching the moon is something only three other nations have achieved.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista's Martin Armstrong details, on September 14, 1959, The Soviet Union's Luna 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to make contact with the Moon - slamming into its surface and completing its lunar impactor mission.

After that momentous achievement, the USSR shifted its focus away from impactors, and eventually became the first country, in 1966, to successfully complete a soft landing on the Moon.

A few months later, NASA's Surveyor 1 became the first U.S. spacecraft to conduct a soft lunar landing - a mission which paved the way for the manned Apollo missions and eventually Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first humans to set foot on the celestial body's surface.

Despite the USSR's early space race dominance, the United States is still to this day the only country to have successfully landed humans on the Moon - having done so another five times after the famous Apollo 11 mission. Having fallen down the priority list of most space agencies since the heights of the sixties, landing on the Moon has come back into focus in recent years. China became the first country to soft land a spacecraft on the 'dark' or 'far' side of the Moon, when the Chang'e 4 lander touched down and deployed the Yutu-2 lunar rover in December 2018.

India is the only other country to have landed on the moon by way of an impactor or lander mission (others have done so but only as the final stage of an orbiter mission, crashing down onto the surface with self-destruction their only objective).

After orbiting the Moon for 312 days, Chandrayaan-1 deployed a moon impact probe in November 2008, releasing underground debris that, after analysis by the orbiter, confirmed the presence of water. The mission also made India the first to complete a hard landing on the lunar south pole.

Off the back of this success, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) turned its attention to a soft lunar landing.

In September 2019, Chandrayaan-2 crashed during a landing attempt, with the orbiter remaining operational.

ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said, shortly after this week's launch of Chandrayaan-3, that the Indian space agency has perfected the art of reaching up to the moon, “but it is the landing that the agency is working on.”

If India is successful with Chandrayaan-3, they will be the first country to land near the Moon's south pole, which has not been explored as much as other parts of its surface.

The first part has gone well, India's space agency says.

But we will now need to wait until at least 23 August to see if India can do something no one else has ever done - and land on the south side of the moon.

Authored by Katie Hutton via TheMindUnleashed.com,

Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard, is certain that he has identified possible relics of extraterrestrial technology in the debris of a meteor that crashed into the seas off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.

The materials have recently been transported back to Harvard by Loeb and his colleagues for further examination. The United States Space Command is able to establish with an almost unshakeable confidence level of 99.999% that it originated from another solar system. The government provided Loeb with a radial distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) around the possible landing site.

“That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It’s a very big area the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down,” said Loeb, 

“We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly.”

WOW—Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in 2014. Loeb’s team brought the materials back for analysis. U.S. Space Command confirms with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that it came from another solar system. pic.twitter.com/Uv9sgdsHo1

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) July 7, 2023

Because of their calculations, they were able to plot out a possible course for the meteor. The results of their computations carved a course that occurred to pass exactly across the ten kilometer range that was predicted by the United States government.

Loeb and his team traveled to the location in a vessel known as the Silver Star. The ship made a number of laps both along and around the course that had been forecast for it. The researchers explored the ocean bottom using a sled that was loaded with magnets and was attached to their boat.

“We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background,” explained Loeb,

“They have colors of gold, blue, brown and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.”

Their examination of the spherules’ composition revealed that they are composed of 84 percent iron, 8 percent silicon, 4 percent magnesium, and 2 percent titanium, in addition to other trace components. They are less than a millimeter in width. The team discovered a total of fifty of them.

“Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes these fragments may be alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua New Guinea in 2014.” –CBS News.

“It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA,” added Loeb.

“We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, which is faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological gadget.”

He compares the current circumstance to one of the Voyager spacecrafts that were developed and deployed by NASA.

“They will exit the solar system in 10,000 years. Just imagine them colliding with another planet far away a billion years from now. They would appear as a meteor of a composition moving faster than usual,” explained Loeb.

At Harvard, the investigation and examination have only just started. Loeb is attempting to determine if the spherules are a product of manmade or natural processes.

If it turns out that they are naturally occurring, it will provide researchers with information on the kinds of materials that could exist outside our solar system. If it’s not natural, then we may start asking serious questions.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb has made a remarkable discovery in the Pacific Ocean. Using an "interstellar hook," his team retrieved potential fragments of an interstellar object. This expedition was part of the Galileo Project, aiming to capture #UFO images. The recovered fragments… pic.twitter.com/ItKD27rGvV

— Thi Hien Nguyen (@thi_hien_nguyen) July 7, 2023

Harvard professor Avi Loeb has made a remarkable discovery in the Pacific Ocean. Using an "interstellar hook," his team retrieved potential fragments of an interstellar object. This expedition was part of the Galileo Project, aiming to capture #UFO images. The recovered fragments… pic.twitter.com/ItKD27rGvV

— Thi Hien Nguyen (@thi_hien_nguyen) July 7, 2023

“It will take us tens of thousands of years to exit our solar system with our current spacecraft to another star. This material spent that time arriving to us, but it’s already here,” smiled Loeb, 

“We just need to check our backyard to see if we have packages from an interstellar Amazon that takes billions of years for the travel.”

He still has to investigate other debris, and the camera that was connected to their sled has hours of film that he has not yet examined. He thinks there is a possibility that the spherules are only the first few hints leading up to a much larger discovery.

“They also help us pinpoint any big piece of the meteor we could find in a future expedition,” details Loeb, 

“We hope to find a big piece of this object that survived the impact because then we can tell if it’s a rock or technological gadget.”

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• NASA and ESA are collaborating to investigate dark energy, a phenomenon that remains largely unknown despite its significant impact on the Universe's expansion.

• The Euclid and Roman telescopes will be used to measure dark energy with unprecedented precision and gather more data to test different theories about its nature.

• By mapping the large-scale structure of the Universe, the telescopes aim to uncover the role of gravity and provide valuable insights into dark energy and dark matter.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are teaming up to explore one of the biggest puzzles of the Universe: dark energy. 

A new space telescope, Euclid, which will explore the dark Universe, is launching in July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. With an important contribution from NASA, the ESA mission will look into why the Universe is expanding, a still unknown phenomenon that scientists have dubbed "dark energy."   

Currently, more is unknown than known about dark energy. Scientists know how much dark energy there is because they know how it affects the Universe's expansion. 

Everything else about dark energy is a complete mystery, NASA says. 

But the mystery is huge, and a first step to solving it could be the beginning of understanding at least a fraction of the Universe. Dark energy makes up 68% of the Universe. Another 27% is made up of dark matter. And only 5% is the rest—everything on Earth and everything ever observed by scientists with all of their instruments. 

So NASA and the ESA are joining forces to try to shed some light on one of the Universe's greatest mysteries.

Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that the current understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way.

By May 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join ESA's mission Euclid to explore this puzzle in ways that have never been possible before. NASA's Roman and ESA's Euclid will be used by astronomers to test the two theories about dark energy at the same time.   

"Twenty-five years after its discovery, the universe's accelerated expansion remains one of the most pressing mysteries in astrophysics," said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Rhodes is also a deputy project scientist for Roman and the U.S. science lead for Euclid. 

"With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery." 

There are different theories about dark energy. One explanation is that it is a property of space. Another is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy.  

Another possible explanation could be that Albert Einstein's theory of gravity is incorrect. 

"The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data," NASA says. 

So, NASA and ESA hope that their Euclid and Roman missions, which will map parts of the Universe, could be the beginning of understanding the dark energy mystery. 

The Euclid space telescope will create a map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. 

"Together, Euclid and Roman will add up to much more than the sum of their parts," said Yun Wang, a senior research scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, who has led galaxy clustering science groups for both Euclid and Roman. 

"Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe."  

On today's World Asteroid Day, fascination is mixing with fear when considering the latest and upcoming asteroid flybys.According to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a number of asteroids have already passed by a little too close for comfort this year.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista's Anna Fleck reports, the colossal 2005 YY128, which flew by the Earth on February 16, had a maximum possible diameter of more than 1,000 meters (0.6 miles).

Because of its size, 2005 YY128 was already discovered in 2005 - as denoted in its name.

In recent years, scientists have been discovering more and more so-called Near Earth Asteroids, including many smaller ones.

Despite their comparatively smaller size, these asteroids could still cause considerable damage if they collided with Earth.

2023 DZ2 (nicknamed “Dizzy”), passed by Earth on March 25, and came so close that it could be seen with a telescope and even binoculars.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via the Gatestone Institute,

Has the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe finally been answered? In what appears to be a well-coordinated disclosure campaign, several knowledgeable "insiders" have recently made public statements claiming that "ET" is real and has been visiting Earth for decades.

As we have highlighted, the global economic impact of El Niño could be in the trillions of dollars over the next several years. American business leaders are bracing for weather disruptions as their discussion on recent earnings calls about the damaging weather phenomenon surges to multi-year highs. 

Bloomberg data shows executives speaking about El Niño has surged to the highest levels since 2019. There is growing concern among some corporate America that extreme weather will dent future earnings. 

News stories referencing El Niño have surged to highs not seen since October 2015. 

Christopher Callahan, an Earth system scientist at Dartmouth College, who co-authored the report "Persistent effect of El Niño on global economic growth," recently warned: 

"There's an economic legacy of El Niño in GDP [gross domestic product] growth." 

Last month, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California identified a "potential precursor" of El Niño conditions after one of its satellites spotted a massive wave of warm water moving across the equatorial Pacific.

Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich can detect Kelvin waves – low waves that can be hundreds of miles /km wide. When Kelvin waves form at the equator, they can bring warm water – and higher sea levels – from west to east across the Pacific, all characterizations of an El Niño. pic.twitter.com/0TrjhyWmxK

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) May 12, 2023

As of May 11, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center said the probability of El Niño forming is greater than 90% over the next few months. 

Recall we wrote, "El Nino Watch Initiated As Ag-Industry In Crosshairs." 

And maybe CEOs have found the next scapegoat to blame when earnings take a dive... 

Weeks after Russia's former head of the Roscomsmos space agency cast doubt on the US moon landing in 1969, China announced plans to put a person on the moon by 2030.

In a Monday announcement, Lin Xiqiang, the deputy director of China’s Manned Space Agency, said that the CCP's moon landing project - part of the country's broader Lunar Exploration Project (Chang'e Project, named after the Chinese moon goddess) - had only "recently" been kick started. The project seeks to eventually enable short-term stays on the lunar surface, as along with the collection of samples and other research, The NY Times reports.

Chinese scientists have previously nodded at a 2030 goal in a less formal capacity; for example, the chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program said last month that a 2030 landing would be “no problem.”

The Monday announcement came at a news conference to mark the liftoff of three new astronauts on Tuesday to China’s new space station, which was completed late last year.

A manned lunar landing would be a major milestone for China’s, and the world’s, space exploration: No human has been on the moon since the United States’ Apollo missions in the 1960s and ’70s. And it could mark a significant achievement for China in its burgeoning competition with the United States in space. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has said that the country should become a “great space power.”

The announcement follows one by NASA, which announced a plan to put a team on the moon by 2025 as part of the (repeatedly delayed) Artemis program.

Both Beijing and Washington want to build research stations on the moon, and to land people on Mars.

The Times frames the announcement as a point of contention between the US and China, echoing the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson, has said that the United States should “watch out” for Chinese attempts to dominate the lunar surface and keep Americans out. A Pentagon report last year warned that China could overtake American capabilities in space by 2045. -NY Times

China has accelerated its space program in recent years, and is currently the only country (known) to have landed anything on the moon in the 21st century. The CCP also landed a lunar probe on the moon's far side for the first time in history in 2019.

If the moon is next for humans, it might be a good time to bone up on your Heinlein.

Careful, China. You never know what's up there!

Russia's former head of the Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, said he went on a quest about a decade ago to find concrete proof that the Americans landed on the Moon in 1969. After finding little evidence, he questioned whether the Apollo 11 Mission reached the lunar surface. 

"About ten years ago, when I worked in the Government, I sent an official request to Roskosmos to provide me with documentary evidence of the Americans' stay on the moon, which at that time was still at the disposal of the federal agency," Rogozin said in a post on Telegram on Sunday. 

He continued, "I was painfully embarrassed by the fact that the Soviet cosmonauts returning from multi-day expeditions could barely stand on their feet and underwent a long recovery after such flights, and the Americans crawled out of their lunar ships like cucumbers from the garden. "

Rogozin claimed to have submitted multiple requests to Roscosmos for proof of NASA's 1969 Moon landing. He said the only evidence he received was a book that contained an account by Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov about his conversation with the American astronauts and their discussions about the lunar mission. 

Rogozin continued in the post: 

In 2018, when I went to work at the state corporation Roskosmos, I continued to search for this evidence, but I didn't find anything there, except for the angry accusations of some of our fans of going to America at the expense of others, academicians, that I, they say, undermine the "sacred cooperation with NASA," I also received one angry call from a high-ranking official accusing me of "aggravating the international situation" with my doubts.

Yes, I did not undermine or aggravate anything, but only by virtue of my nature I tried to get to the bottom of the details and establish, at least for myself, the true state of affairs in the issue of exploration of the Moon by our competitors. It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the 60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?

Add Rogozin to the moon-landing denialism camp because how dare anyone question that the spacecraft with less computing power than even a modern USB-C charger could land astronauts on the Moon in 1969 -- and astronauts have yet to return 54 years later. 

... still there are many questions.