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COP 28 and the nuclear energy numbers racket

By Sharon Squassoni | December 13, 2023,  https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/the-nuclear-energy-numbers-racket/

Nuclear energy made a big splash at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai with a declaration by 22 countries calling for a tripling of nuclear energy by 2050. It seems like an impressive and urgent call to arms. On closer inspection, however, the numbers don’t work out. Even at best, a shift to invest more heavily in nuclear energy over the next two decades could actually worsen the climate crisis, as cheaper, quicker alternatives are ignored for more expensive, slow-to-deploy nuclear options.

Here’s what the numbers say:

22: That 22 countries signed the declaration may seem like a lot of support, but 31 countries (plus Taiwan) currently produce nuclear energy. Notably missing from the declaration are Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of nuclear power plants and has the fourth largest nuclear energy capacity globally; China has built the most nuclear power plants of any country in the last two decades and ranks third globally in capacity. Thirteen other countries that have key nuclear programs are also missing from the declaration: five in Europe (Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain), two in South Asia (India and Pakistan) three in the  Americas (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico), South Africa (the only nuclear energy producer in Africa), and Iran.

5: Five of the countries signing the declaration do not have nuclear power—Mongolia, Morocco, Ghana, Moldova, and Poland. Only Poland’s electricity grid can support three or four large nuclear reactors—the rest would have to invest billions of dollars first to expand their grids or rely on smaller reactors that would not overwhelm grid capacity. Poland wants to replace its smaller coal plants with almost 80 small modular reactors (SMRs), but these “paper reactors” are largely just plans and not yet proven technology. One American vendor, NuScale, recently scrapped a six-unit project when cost estimates rose exponentially. In any event, none of these five countries is likely to make a significant contribution toward tripling nuclear energy in the next 20 years.

17: The 17 remaining signatories to the nuclear energy declaration represent a little more than half of all countries with nuclear energy, raising the issue of how much support there really is for tripling nuclear energy by 2050.

3x: The idea of tripling nuclear energy to meet climate change requirements is not new. In fact, it was one of eight climate stabilization “wedges” laid out in Science magazine in 2004 in a now-famous article by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University. A stabilization wedge would avoid one billion tons of carbon emissions per year by 2055. In the case of nuclear energy, this would require building 700 large nuclear reactors over the course of 50 years. (In 2022, there were 416 reactors operating around the world, with 374 gigawatts-electric of capacity). In 2005, to reach the one-billion-ton goal of emissions reduction would have meant building 14 reactors per year, assuming all existing reactors continued operating. (In fact, the build rate needed to be 23 per year to replace aging reactors that would need to be retired.)  Given the stagnation of the nuclear power industry since then, the build rate now to reach wedge level would need to be 40 per year.

10: Average annual number of connections of nuclear power plants to the electricity grid, per year, over the entire history of nuclear energy. Between 2011 and 2021, however, the average annual number of nuclear power reactors connected to the grid was 5.

42 GWe: New nuclear energy capacity added from 2000 to 2020.

605 GWe: New wind capacity added from 2000 to 2020.

578 GWe: New solar capacity added from 2000 to 2020.  Growth in renewables has vastly outpaced that of nuclear energy in recent years.

10: Average annual number of connections of nuclear power plants to the electricity grid, per year, over the entire history of nuclear energy. Between 2011 and 2021, however, the average annual number of nuclear power reactors connected to the grid was 5.

42 GWe: New nuclear energy capacity added from 2000 to 2020.

605 GWe: New wind capacity added from 2000 to 2020.

578 GWe: New solar capacity added from 2000 to 2020.  Growth in renewables has vastly outpaced that of nuclear energy in recent years.

15 trillion: In US dollars, the cost to build enough NuScale reactors (9,738 77 megawatt-electric reactors) to triple nuclear energy capacity, assuming existing reactors continue to operate.  There are less expensive SMRs, perhaps, but none further along in the US licensing process.

13: An unlucky number in some cultures, but this was the time from design to projected operation of the NuScale VOYGR plant. Nuclear power plants have to be “done right,” and cutting corners to speed deployment is in no one’s interests. The design-and-build phase for a country’s first nuclear reactor, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, is 15 years. If the great expansion of nuclear energy is supposed to occur in more than the 22 countries that signed the declaration, this lead-time cannot be ignored.

The climate crisis is real, but nuclear energy will continue to be the most expensive and slowest option to reach net zero emissions, no matter how you cook the numbers.

December 17, 2023 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

400,000 Ukrainians Killed In Action Explains A Whole Lot

U.S. intelligence contacts have expressed shock as to just how far from reality the narrative being pushed by the Biden administration is from what’s happening in Ukraine and its real war losses.

BY TYLER DURDEN, FRIDAY, DEC 15, 2023 

Authored by Mike Fredenburg via The Epoch Times,

How many casualties has Ukraine suffered?

How many causalities has Russia suffered?

Answering these questions is critical to determining the best and most moral path forward for Ukraine and the United States.

Estimates of Ukrainians killed in action (KIA) range from a low of just over 30,000 to a high of over 400,000.

Obviously, these two estimates can’t be reconciled. And it really, really matters to the people of Ukraine which one is closer to the truth. While 30,000 deaths is tragic, anything approaching 400,000 KIA and the accompanying hundreds of thousands of causalities is a humanitarian catastrophe that makes talks of continuing offensive operations next year, or even believing in a stalemate, wishful thinking that will result in even more fruitless Ukrainian deaths.

Unsurprisingly, since the war began, the United States and its allies have unswervingly pushed the narrative that Russia is incurring far more casualties than Ukraine. This casualty narrative was critical to maintaining any plausibility that Ukraine could defeat a country that has four to five times more men of military age and that was recently rated as having the world’s most powerful military. Hence, given the need to maintain the plausibility of a Ukrainian victory, it isn’t surprising that NATO intelligence asserted that the battle of Bakhmut saw Russia losing at least five soldiers KIA for every one of Ukraine’s.

However, since the fall of Bakhmut to Russia, the failure of the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive, and signs that Ukraine’s military is nearing collapse, we’re no longer hearing about five-to-one casualty rates. Still, the most recent estimates from United States and British officials claim that Russia has suffered 120,000 KIA while Ukraine has suffered “only” 70,000 KIA (more than the United States suffered in over 10 years of the Vietnam War).

But not everyone agrees with U.S./British casualty estimates for an army that started the war by mobilizing early 1 million men in arms and, over the course of the war, mobilized another estimated 1 million. Among the growing number of those who don’t agree is the former director of the Joint Operations Center at Supreme Headquarters Europe and one of the key leaders in achieving the legendary victory in the mass tank battle of 73 Easting, retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor.

In a recent interview with myself, Col. Macgregor agreed that while estimates putting Russian KIA at as high as 50,000 to 60,000 are defensible, most estimates for Ukrainian KIAs are not.

In what many will undoubtedly find shocking given the countless stories disparaging Russia’s military skills and capabilities while uncritically fawning over Ukraine’s military prowess, Col. Macgregor puts Ukrainian KIA at over 400,000 out of the 2 million Ukraine has mobilized.

Col. Macgregor arrived at this shocking number using a wide variety of sources, including contacts within U.S. intelligence and contacts on the ground in Ukraine and Poland who have intimate knowledge of what’s really happening in Ukraine.

In particular, he noted that his U.S. intelligence contacts have expressed shock as to just how far from reality the narrative being pushed by the Biden administration is from what’s happening in Ukraine and its real war losses.

Likewise, Col. Macgregor’s Ukraine contacts relayed to him accounts of thousands of wounded Ukrainians being left to die on the battlefield, growing numbers of Ukrainian commanders and troops refusing orders to conduct suicide attacks against heavily fortified Russian positions, Ukrainian soldiers surrendering en masse to Russia, hospitals overflowing with Ukrainian wounded, and many other accounts that testify to horrendous casualty rates that contradict the narrative pushed by Western media.

Additionally, Col. Macgregor’s contacts have analyzed satellite imagery showing a massive expansion of Ukrainian cemeteries and countless tens of thousands of fresh graves. Other open-source intelligence analysis has also documented in detail Ukraine’s massive expansion of cemeteries that will soon allow Ukraine to reportedly bury 1.5 million more people. And a Russian analyst using death notices and other open-source intelligence has come up with Ukrainian KIA estimates of over 300,000.

But for Col. Macgregor, it’s the totality of the reports he has seen, his understanding of historical casualty rates, his personal military experience, and information from his sources that has brought him to the conclusion that Ukraine’s KIA is a magnitude greater than what’s commonly being reported.

These numbers, coupled with the fact the war could have been avoided had President Volodymyr Zelenskyy been knowledgeable and wise enough to understand that U.S./NATO promises of victory were completely unrealistic and couldn’t be relied upon, have led Col. Macgregor, who has fond memories of growing up in a Ukrainian immigrant neighborhood, to believe that the war is an absolute disaster for Ukraine that could have and should have been avoided.

“In humanitarian terms, this tragedy has resulted in the Ukrainian nation being destroyed in a war that never needed to be fought,” Col. Macgregor said…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Given the strong evidence that Ukraine is suffering country-destroying casualties, talk of a stalemate, much less of successful offensive territory-gaining operations, is more about face-saving than any realistic chance of Ukraine avoiding losing.

Hence, the only moral path forward for the United States is to tell President Zelenskyy it’s well past the time to sue for peace and that he must accept neutrality and the loss of the regions that seceded from Ukraine in 2014.

This is a bitter pill to swallow for Ukrainian nationalists and those in the United States who hoped Ukraine would do far more damage to Russia, but the alternative is accelerating Ukraine’s diminishing chances of remaining a viable nation-state, a whole lot more fruitless Ukrainian deaths, and peace terms substantially worse than those that can be negotiated today.  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/400000-ukrainians-killed-action-explains-whole-lot

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists

“Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”

While the agreement’s call for the need to transition away from fossil fuels is welcome, it has numerous caveats and loopholes that risks rendering it meaningless.

Climate experts say lack of unambiguous statement is ‘tragedy for the planet and our future’

Damian Carrington Environment editor

in Dubai. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

Cop28

Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists

Climate experts say lack of unambiguous statement is ‘tragedy for the planet and our future’

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarringtonFri 15 Dec 2023 04.00 AEDT

The failure of Cop28 to call for a phase-out of fossil fuels is “devastating” and “dangerous” given the urgent need for action to tackle the climate crisis, scientists have said.

One called it a “tragedy for the planet and our future” while another said it was the “dream outcome” for the fossil fuel industry.

The UN climate summit ended on Wednesday with a compromise deal that called for a “transition away” from fossil fuels. The stronger term “phase-out” had been backed by 130 of the 198 countries negotiating in Dubai but was blocked by petrostates including Saudi Arabia.

The deal was hailed as historic as it was the first citing of fossil fuels, the root cause of the climate crisis, in 30 years of climate negotiations. But scientists said the agreement contained many loopholes and did not match the severity of the climate emergency.

“The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating,” said Prof Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “To ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”

Dr Magdalena Skipper, the editor in chief of the science journal Nature, said: “The science is clear – fossil fuels must go. World leaders will fail their people and the planet unless they accept this reality.”

An editorial in Nature said the failure over the phase-out was “more than a missed opportunity”, it was “dangerous” and ran “counter to the core goals laid down in the 2015 Paris climate agreement” of limiting global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

“The climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases,” the editorial continued. “There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

Sir David King, the chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and a former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “The wording of the deal is feeble. Ensuring 1.5C remains viable will require total commitment to a range of far-reaching measures, including full fossil fuel phase-out.”

There was a chasm between the stark statement of the emissions cuts needed and the action proposed to deliver those reductions, he said: “The Cop28 text recognises there is a need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ to stay in line with 1.5C. But then it lists a whole bunch of efforts that don’t have a chance of achieving that.”

The scientists said the loopholes included the call to “accelerate” carbon capture and storage to trap emissions from burning fossil fuels, an option that can play a minor role at best.

Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London, said: “Until fossil fuels are phased out, the world will continue to become a more dangerous, more expensive and more uncertain place to live. With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”

Prof Martin Siegert, a polar scientist and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Exeter, said: “The science is perfectly clear. Cop28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the Cop response to deal with it.”

Prof Mike Berners-Lee, an expert on carbon footprinting at Lancaster University, said: “Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”

Dr Elena Cantarello, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Bournemouth University, UK, said: “It is hugely disappointing to see how a very small number of countries have been able to put short-term national interests ahead of the future of people and nature.”

Dr James Dyke, an associate professor in earth system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said: “Cop28 needed to deliver an unambiguous statement. While the agreement’s call for the need to transition away from fossil fuels is welcome, it has numerous caveats and loopholes that risks rendering it meaningless…………………………………………………………. more  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/14/failure-cop28-fossil-fuel-phase-out-devastating-say-scientists

December 17, 2023 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Israel Is Wiping Out Gaza’s Journalists: A Tribute

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tejRW7oRniQ

By Mnar Adley / MintPress News,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/15/israel-is-wiping-out-gazas-journalists-a-tribute/

I recently became the recipient of the Women and Media Award from the Women’s Institute of the Freedom of the Press. While it’s truly an honor to receive this recognition for the journalism that I direct at MintPress News, it’s nearly impossible for me to revel in this accolade when my heart is weighed down heavily by the ongoing turmoil in Gaza.

As a Palestinian-American journalist who has lived under the oppressive shadow of Israeli occupation and witnessed firsthand the relentless brutality of the apartheid regime, I cannot remain silent as my people face relentless oppression and violence.

I want to dedicate this award to the fearless journalists in Gaza who are risking their lives to show us the raw reality of life under Israeli bombs.

Since October 7th, the death toll stands stark and horrific – Israel is systematically taking out journalists, one by one, and killing their families. The Israeli military has already claimed the lives of at least 82 Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These courageous individuals, committed to unveiling the truth, have become direct targets of a regime desperate to cloak its genocidal actions from the world’s scrutiny.

Israel doesn’t want the world to see the reality of its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, so it’s assassinating the messengers.


In most parts of the world, wearing a flack jacket marked “press” gives you protection. But right now in Palestine, it may as well be a target, as Israel has turned Gaza into what the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has called a “cemetery for journalists.”

And you’d think mainstream corporate journalists would talk about the targeting of journalists in Gaza, but they’re not. If legacy media outlets like the New York Times or CNN cover Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, they don’t have the basic journalistic integrity to say who killed them and fail to point out that Israel is systematically targeting them.

Corporate media are whitewashing Israeli crimes and playing the fool, pretending not to understand where the missiles come from. They pretend not to hear the genocidal rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv. And even as Israel makes Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, they ignore what is in front of their eyes, manufacturing consent for ethnic cleansing.

Brave women have lost their lives trying to document the Israeli onslaught. Women like Alaa Taher Al-Hassanat, a presenter for the AlMajedat Media Network, whose house was bombarded by Israeli missiles on November 20.

Or Salma Mkhaimer, killed alongside her child in an Israeli air strike on her house in Rafah, Gaza.

And Freelance journalist Ayat Khadoura was also killed in her home by an Israeli air strike. In her “last message to the world” posted on Instagram, she said: “We used to have big dreams, but now our dream is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

This only continues a long history of Israel systematically targeting journalists since its founding in 1948.

Just last year, Israel went so far as to murder our beloved Shireen Abu-Akleh, an American citizen and recipient of the same Women and Media Award that I’m receiving today. And in 2021, it blew up the Associated Press building in Gaza. Yet throughout all this, Israel continues to get a free pass in corporate media.

Despite the hardships, many journalists are risking their lives working around the clock to document the genocide in Gaza. Journalists like Motaz Azaiza, Younis Tirawi, Muhammad Smiry, Motasem Mortaja, Wael Dahdouh, and Hind Khoudary, to name a few, speak truth to power, chronicling the horrors in Gaza.

These people show us in real-time the courage it often takes to be a journalist. And because of that, dozens pay the ultimate price for their bravery.

This award I humbly dedicate to them—the fallen journalists who were mercilessly taken by Israel and those who, against all odds, continue to broadcast to the world the unimaginable horrors of life under incessant bombings.

As for journalists like myself, we vow to carry on their legacy and amplify their voices in the West. We will repeat their message of hope and truth while we challenge and confront the very system perpetuating my people’s destruction, supported directly by our governments and their lapdog media.

If wars can be ignited by deceit, then let us rally for peace through unwavering truth.

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

COP 28 ‘s fundamentally weak agreement to “call on parties to contribute” to action on climate change

The president of COP28 is styling this as a moment in history. The point at
which the world changed course and began to really bear down on the
overwhelming source of the emissions warming our planet: coal, oil and gas.
And it really is significant progress that for the first time fossil fuels
and the need to “transition” away from them has been included in the
text.

Campaigners will say it is too little too late. But the world coming
together to acknowledge that fact will have consequences in the real world.
Would you want to bet your life savings on a new coal-fired power plant
after today?

But it is true that the agreement is fundamentally weak. Why?
Because the strongest language the UAE could get the world to agree was to
“call on parties to contribute” to a series of actions to tackle
climate change.

BBC 13th Dec 2023

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-67674841

December 17, 2023 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

China’s CGN Halts Funding for UK’s Hinkley Nuclear Plant

  • EDF may have to fund completion of £32.7 billion plant alone
  • Britain took over CGN’s stake in a similar project last year

By Francois De Beaupuy, December 14, 2023

China General Nuclear Power Corp. has halted funding for the UK’s Hinkley Point C nuclear station in a fresh sign of tension between London and Beijing.

CGN skipped several installments in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. That means Electricite de France SA, which was building the £32.7 billion ($41 billion) plant with CGN, may have to pay for its completion alone, they said, asking not to be named,
because the information isn’t public.

The withdrawal of funding comes
after the UK took over CGN’s stake in a similar nuclear project in
Sizewell last year following concerns over national security. Back then,
the government didn’t rule out that it might intervene in other cases of
Chinese involvement in UK energy supply, arguing that it would need to
consider risks to security and energy independence.

CGN’s plan to build a
Chinese-designed atomic plant in Southeast England is also up in the air.
It’s unclear whether the funding halt is temporary or definite, some of
the people said, adding that the project will continue in any case. A
spokesperson for EDF declined to comment when reached by Bloomberg, and CGN
didn’t respond to a request for comment.

 Bloomberg 14th Dec 2023

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-in-uk-stops-getting-funding-from-china-s-cgn

December 17, 2023 Posted by | business and costs, China, politics international | Leave a comment

Nearly Half of All Israeli Munitions Dropped on Gaza are Imprecise ‘Dumb’ Bombs

Israeli warplanes have used at least 29,000 munitions on the Gaza Strip

By Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/15/nearly-half-of-all-israeli-munitions-dropped-on-gaza-are-imprecise-dumb-bombs/

Nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions Israel has dropped on the Gaza Strip are unguided or “dumb” bombs, CNN reported Thursday, citing a US intelligence assessment.

The report said Israel had used 29,000 air-to-ground munitions in its bombardment of Gaza, a total that does not include artillery shells and tank munitions that are also being fired on the Strip. The assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found 40-45% of the 29,000 munitions have been dumb bombs, and the rest have been precise guided munitions.

Unguided munitions are less precise and are generally considered more of a threat to civilians, but Israel is also slaughtering civilians with precision-guided munitions. A report from +972 Magazine revealed Israel is purposefully targeting civilian areas and launching strikes that might kill one Hamas commander, knowing hundreds of civilians will be killed.

Amnesty International conducted an investigation that found Israel targeted two homes in Gaza full of civilians using Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), US-provided kits that turn dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions. The strikes killed 40 people, including 19 children, and Amnesty is calling for it to be investigated as a war crime.

The intelligence assessment comes after President Biden called Israel’s Gaza bombing “indiscriminate” but vowed to keep supporting it anyway. Despite the massive civilian death toll in Gaza, the US has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel.

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Biden Intends To Keep Participating In The Incineration Of Gaza

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 15, 2023

Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel. 

CNN reports:

The Biden administration currently has no plans to place conditions on the military aid it is providing to Israel, officials told CNN, despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for the US to stop providing weapons unless Israel does more to protect civilians in Gaza.

Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel. 

Speaking to Democratic donors in Washington this week, President Joe Biden acknowledged that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign, how Israel is losing international support, and the need for a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority. But he said even throughout those discussions, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.”

Echoing that sentiment, US officials told CNN that the US has no plans to shift its position and draw any red lines around the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel.

This is the real story of Washington’s relationship with the incineration of Gaza. Ignore all their feigned concern about civilian casualties and posturing about Israel’s need to wrap this up soon; in reality they intend to keep backing this mass atrocity unconditionally.

❖

“Israel has a right to defend itself” sounds reasonable until you realize it actually means “Israel has a right to kill as many Palestinian children as it wants in its efforts to eliminate all armed resistance to a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime.”

Israel supporters like to say, “Hamas can end this any time by surrendering.” 

Israel can end this any time by ceasing to be a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime held together by endless violence and apartheid. Israel wasn’t attacked because Palestinians are innately evil and want to kill Jews, Israel was attacked because it has treated Palestinians horrifically for generations. If Israel and its allies ended the injustices, paid reparations and righted the wrongs that have been inflicted on Palestinians for the last 75 years, there could be a sustainable peace. 

The only way to believe all this intense civilian-slaughtering warfare is necessary to obtain peace is to believe Palestinians are orc-like subhumans who are acting out of an innate hatefulness and thus cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this.

“Hamas can end this any time by surrendering” really just means “Israel gets to keep murdering Gaza’s children until Gaza’s government gives it what it wants.” Which is about as evil a position as you can possibly imagine. This is not an acceptable position for any person to have

Israel’s unique focus on attacking hospitals makes no sense as a military strategy but makes lots of sense as an ethnic cleansing strategy.

❖

Western media are constantly babbling about “Iran-backed” forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, yet Israeli bombings are never described as “US-backed”, even though they indisputably are, and even though the evidence for this is far stronger than any claims about Iranian backing.

❖

Both Zionists and people who hate Jews conflate Judaism and Zionism, and both Zionists and people who hate Jews contribute to spreading hatred of Jews by indoctrinating the public with this distortion……………………………………………….

I don’t criticize Israel because I want to, I criticize Israel because I have to. If I could avoid saying stuff that gets weird sociopaths shrieking at me and calling me a Nazi all day long, I would. But if Israel’s going to commit horrific mass atrocities, it must be opposed.  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-intends-to-keep-participating?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139812608&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

ACTION ALERT: New York Times Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots

because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.


JIM NAURECKAS, DECEMBER 15, 2023

“Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?” a New York Times article (12/10/23) by Jonathan Weisman asked. Trying to pinpoint the moment when “anti-Zionism crosses from political belief to bigotry,” Weisman suggested there were different kinds of anti-Zionism based on different visions of what Zionism means. But his effort to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable critics of Israel painted principled supporters of equal rights as antisemitic bigots.

Weisman offered one definition of Zionism—the way it was “once clearly understood”—as “the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors.” To oppose this kind of Zionism “suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews”—which he said to many Jews “is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.” Their argument is:

Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.

On the other hand, wrote Weisman, “some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state.” This kind of anti-Zionism merely opposes “an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank,” land that could serve as “a separate state for the Palestinian people.”

These two views of Zionism seemed to represent the poles of acceptable and unacceptable anti-Zionism. The piece quoted Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) explaining that “some anti-Zionism” isn’t “used to cloak hatred of Jews”; Nadler stressed, though, that “MOST anti-Zionism—the type that calls for Israel’s destruction, denying its right to exist—is antisemitic.”

The Nexus Task Force, a group associated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has a definition of antisemitism that is more tolerant of criticism of Israel than that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also cited by the Times. But it still insists, Weisman wrote, “that it is antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people and exercise self-determination.”

Not ‘self-determination’

The phrase “self-determination” is doing a lot of work here. In international relations, it is generally used to mean that the residents of a geographical area inhabited by a distinct group have a right to decide whether or not they want that area to remain part of a larger entity. It’s a right that seems to come and go depending on political allegiances: When Albanians in Kosovo wanted to secede from Serbia, their right to do so was enforced with NATO bombs. If ethnic Russians who wanted to split off from Ukraine got help from Moscow, though, that wasn’t self-determination but a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.

To call Zionism a belief in Jewish “self-determination,” however, perverts the concept to include moving to a geographic region and forcibly expelling many of the people who already live there, in order to create a situation where members of your group can have a “sovereign homeland” where they “are assured of governing themselves.”

Ensuring the dominance of a particular ethnic group through forced migration is not usually called “self-determination,” but rather “ethnic cleansing.” This is the older version of Zionism that Weisman seems to suggest can only be opposed by antisemites.

It’s true that there is another vision of Zionism, unsatisfied with expelling the indigenous residents to the fringes of Israel/Palestine, that insists on incorporating those fringes. Ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has occupied the remaining parts of what was the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, where many refugees from the establishment of Israel were forced to live.

But because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.

As it happens, this is precisely the strategy that white-ruled South Africa employed to pretend that white supremacy was compatible with democracy; it called the fictitious countries that the nation’s Black majority supposedly belonged to “bantustans.” This and other resemblances to white South Africa are why leading human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem call Israel an apartheid state.

But both versions of Zionism involve the dismissal of one group’s rights in order to create a polity dominated by another group—a project that can certainly be opposed in either iteration without signifying animosity or prejudice toward anyone. (To be sure, there are antisemites who use “Zionists” as a transparent codeword for Jews. These are generally pretty easy to spot.)

A smear that needs correction

There is much to take issue with in Weisman’s article, but there is one point he makes that really warrants a correction. As an example of straightforward “Jew hatred,” he cites “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions”—and offers as an example that this is what “pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.”

But the protesters at Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant, weren’t blaming “Jews around the world” for Israel’s assault on Gaza; they were holding Goldie’s owner, Israeli-born Michael Solomonov, responsible, because his restaurants had raised $100,000 for United Hatzalah, a medical organization that supports the Israeli Defense Forces.

According to the Guardian (12/8/23), which interviewed “protesters and current and former employees at Solomonov’s restaurants,” critics both inside and outside the staff were concerned that Solomonov hosted a fundraiser for prominent pro-Israel politicians, and had “booked and paid for multiple, lavish private dinners…for IDF members preparing to deploy to fight for Israel.” (The New York Times article—12/4/23—that Weisman linked to did not appear to be based on interviews with any protesters, but instead quoted numerous politicians condemning their demonstration.)

Obviously Solomonov and his critics have different views of his actions. But there is no evidence that protesters were targeting his restaurant simply because he was Jewish, and it’s an irresponsible smear for Weisman to assert that they were

ACTION: Please tell the New York Times to correct its false claim that people protesting at a Philadelphia restaurant owned by a prominent supporter of the Israeli Defense Forces were “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions.”

CONTACT: You can send a message about factual errors to the New York Times at nytnews@nytimes.com. 

December 17, 2023 Posted by | media, USA | Leave a comment

Theddlethorpe nuclear waste site: Informed decision needed, says council.

 Residents must be clear about plans to build a nuclear waste site in their
village before deciding on them, a council leader has said.

A former gas terminal in Theddlethorpe, near Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, was announced
as a possible location for an underground disposal facility in 2021. A
public vote on whether to approve the plans may not take place until 2027.

Craig Leyland of East Lindsey District Council said it was “critical”
voters made an “informed decision”. The proposal by Nuclear Waste Services
– formerly known as Radioactive Waste Management – for a Geological
Disposal Facility (GDF) would see nuclear waste from the UK being stored
underneath up to 1,000m of solid rock until its radioactivity had naturally
decayed.

The plans have “had a detrimental effect on physical and mental
health” of residents, according to Travis Hesketh, an Independent Group
councillor at East Lindsey District Council. He called for a review into
residents’ views on the GDF at a meeting on Wednesday, the Local Democracy
Reporting Service said.

 BBC 14th Dec 2023

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-67716286

December 17, 2023 Posted by | politics, UK, wastes | Leave a comment

Matthew Modine on His Role in ‘Oppenheimer’ and Producing Nuclear Testing Doc ‘Downwind’: ‘This Insanity Hasn’t Stopped’

By Addie Morfoot, Variety, 15 Dec 23

In “Downwind,” a documentary executive produced by Matthew Modine, directors Mark Shapiro and Douglas Brian Miller chronicle the lethal effects that nuclear testing on American soil has had on U.S. citizens.

The Oscar hopeful reveals that from 1951 to 1992, Mercury, Nevada, was the site for the testing of 928 large scale nuclear weapons. Wind dispersed radioactive fallout from those atmospheric blasts (mushroom clouds) and underground testing (venting) in a seemingly unpredictable manner to people living “downwind.” The United States Department of Justice defines “downwinders,” also known as lab rats, as human beings who live in counties located downwind from Nevada Test Site in the states of Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

The film explains that the radiation led to various diseases, mainly cancer. Shapiro and Miller also highlight how Hollywood star John Wayne and numerous members of the cast and crew of the 1956 movie “The Conqueror” died, arguably, of cancer due to filming in Nevada close to the atomic testing sites.

Martin Sheen narrates “Downwind,” which features several interviews with various talking heads including Michael Douglas, who starred in the 1979 nuclear-meltdown movie “The China Syndrome, comedian Lewis Black, John Wayne’s son Patrick as well members from the Shoshone Nation who were severely impacted by the nuclear radiation that spread to their land.

For Modine, who played American electrical engineer and administrator Vannevar Bush in Christopher Nolan’s movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb, the issue hit close to home………………………………………………………………………………………

What was it like to tell the story of how the insanity started in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”?

I think that the most frightening scene in the entire movie is when you have a group of men sitting in a room and the Secretary of Defense says, ‘I’ve made this, list of 15 cities where we are going to drop the bomb.’ Then Matt Damon’s character (General Groves) says, “Bombs.” Now my character has just said that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die immediately from the fallout of the radiation and he says, “Bombs. We are going to drop one to demonstrate that it works, and a second to demonstrate that we can replicate it,” without a breath. It’s like, ‘What’s for dinner? Cornbread and peas.” On the day we were shooting that scene, I told Nolan, “You know what takes this into the realm of absurdity and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”? He said, “What?” And I said, “birthday cake.” You don’t have to change anything. Just put some balloons in the room and have us eating birthday cake because that’s how insane it was.  https://variety.com/2023/film/news/matthew-modine-oppenheimer-nuclear-testing-documentary-downwind-1235834894/

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Kristen Stewart Warns the World Is “Dangerously Close” to Nuclear Catastrophe

The Hollywood actress supports Paul Jay’s Daniel Ellsberg documentary ‘How to Stop a Nuclear War,’ based on the book ‘Doomsday Machine’ by the Vietnam-era whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers.

BY ETAN VLESSING,  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/kristen-stewart-nuclear-catastrophe-warning-1235758067/ 15 Dec 23

Kristen Stewart is sounding the alarm over the threat of a global nuclear war by getting behind Paul Jay’s feature doc about Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is now in production.

“We’ve grown so accustomed to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, that it barely registers in our daily lives,” Stewart says in a fundraising video obtained by The Hollywood Reporter for the documentary, which is based on the book Doomsday Machine by the Vietnam-era whistleblower. “But when some new crisis or close call startles out of our slumber for just a brief moment, we truly grasp the insanity of living on a hair trigger to what could be a real-life Armageddon.”

Stewart’s fiancée, Dylan Meyer, is the daughter of Nicholas Meyer, the director of ABC’s groundbreaking 1983 TV movie The Day After and an executive producer of the How to Stop a Nuclear War documentary. Emma Thompson is also on board to narrate the upcoming feature doc, where Ellsberg warns that the nuclear weapon arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are still very much a threat to global peace, and that an all-out nuclear war remains capable of being launched from missile silos or submarines on a few minutes’ notice.

Stewart, who will also appear in the eventual documentary, echoes Ellsberg in arguing the world is “dangerously close to nuclear conflict, perhaps closer than we have been since the Cold War.”

In the sizzle reel sent to potential investors of the doc as the producers fill out the budget, Stewart praises the history-making whistleblower, who died in June 2023 at age 92. “[Ellsberg’s] insider knowledge of nuclear war planning informs the film’s urgent call to action. This films sounds the alarm about this threat, but also shows the solutions and steps we can take to avert catastrophe,” she adds.

Ellsberg famously made copies of the Pentagon Papers and other classified nuclear documents during the Nixon administration and leaked the documents to The New York Times and other media outlets in 1971. As a high-level Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg was charged by the U.S. with breaking the Espionage Act, but the case was dismissed because of government misconduct in evidence-gathering.

“If we don’t address this [nuclear weapons] issue, nothing else we care about — no social justice or environmental causes or peaceful political resolutions, movies we make, people we love, the things we care about — don’t matter anymore. They don’t matter in a postapocalyptic wasteland,” Stewart warns.

DECEMBER 15, 2023

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December 17, 2023 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dreams of a nuclear revival overtaken by reality

In Dubai as in France, the nuclear industry is replaying with its “renewal” project, an old dream of grandeur that it has never materialized on a global scale. Faced with the climate emergency, there is no more time to waste, nor resources to squander, analyzes Yves Marignac of négaWatt.

 Alternatives Economiques 14th Dec 2023

https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/reves-dune-relance-nucleaire-rattrapes-realite/00109026

December 17, 2023 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

All The Propaganda Is Splattering Against A Solid Wall Of Reality

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 16, 2023,  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/all-the-propaganda-is-splattering?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139828791&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

Humans inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world and the narrative world. The world of concrete material reality, and the world of mental stories about reality. 

There’s the material reality of presents piled under the Christmas tree, and then there’s the story parents tell small children about how those presents got there. There’s the material reality of military explosives ripping human bodies to shreds, and then there’s the story the powerful tell the world about how and why that’s happening.

What we are seeing with Gaza is manufactured narrative splatting against reality over and over again. The western empire churns out propaganda narratives about what Israel is doing, and those narratives are crashing headlong into raw video footage and concrete facts in ways you don’t often see.

Here are some examples of made-up narratives:

• October 7 was an unprovoked attack

• This a war of defense and Israel has a right to defend itself

• Jewish people can’t be safe unless they have a homeland in which they receive preferential treatment over other ethnic groups

• There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated

• All civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas

Here are some examples of objective reality:

• Raw video footage of civilians who’ve been burned, mutilated and ripped apart by Israeli military explosives

• Photos of dead children who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes

• The objective fact that journalists are being killed at a historically unprecedented rate in this onslaught

• The objective fact that children are being killed at a much higher rate than in other modern conflicts


• The objective fact that Israel is laying siege to a civilian population while systematically displacing them en masse and destroying their healthcare system

The former category consists entirely of insubstantial thought fluff; they’re stories people made up to advance their own agendas, and have no objective reality in and of themselves. The latter category consists of the concrete realities of the material world.

Relatively few people are fully aware of just how extensively mental narrative dominates human consciousness, and how this has allowed human civilization to be dominated by whoever can control what our society’s dominant narratives are. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is a part, has succeeded in establishing a system of narrative control whose sophistication and efficacy has no parallel or precedent.

But in Gaza it isn’t working. It isn’t working because there’s no amount of propaganda spin you can put on raw data that is self-evidently unacceptable and inexcusable. No matter how much propaganda spin you heap on top of a video of a dismembered child, you cannot persuade me that it is fine and acceptable.

This is a very, very big problem for the empire. There is panic happening behind the scenes. What’s happening in Gaza is unspeakably horrific, and Israel’s atrocities must end immediately. But if there’s any silver lining in all this horror, it’s that people are being snapped out of the imperial propaganda matrix like never before.

December 17, 2023 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment