Friday, February 19, 2021

EYEWITNESS
Russia: How village near 'Putin's Palace' really feels about Alexei Navalny exposé

Residents of Praskoveevka seem largely pleased at the employment the gigantic construction site next door has given them.


Diana Magnay
Moscow correspondent
Saturday 20 February 2021
Praskoveevka residents seemed largely pleased at the employment opportunities

The huge pile near Gelendzhik on Russia's Black Sea Coast which Alexei Navalny calls "Putin's Palace" has a way of coming back to haunt the Russian president.

In 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former prime minister and fierce Putin critic, published a report detailing the wealth and luxurious properties the president had allegedly accumulated in his then 12 years in power. Listed there was the Gelendzhik palace. The report included photographs of lavish interiors. They would resurface in Navalny's investigation nine years later.

"In a country where more than 20 million people barely make ends meet, the luxurious life of the president is a blatant and cynical challenge to society," Nemtsov wrote then. Three years later, he was murdered, shot within spitting distance of the Kremlin walls in a hit job which the Russian state has always denied having any involvement with.


Play Video - Navalny hits out at Putin again in video

Nemtsov of course, had nothing like the 112 million eyeballs on his report that "Putin's Palace" has had in just three weeks. Navalny has mastered a humorous, bruising YouTube persona which makes his criticism of Russia's kleptocracy far more potent than Nemtsov's ever was. It is a digital-savvy reach that the Kremlin craves and which its old-school spin doctors cannot begin to compete with.

But they are trying. The Kremlin-linked channel Mash managed to "secure access" to the site, a supposed scoop intended to show that the palace was still under construction (Navalny had always claimed that the interiors were ripped out and building re-started because of mould and design flaws a few years ago).

Screengrab of the 'Putin Palace' on the Black sea. 
Pic: YouTube/Alexei Navalny

Then one of Vladimir Putin's oldest pals Arkady Rotenberg told Mash the palace belonged to him and that he planned to turn it into a hotel. Shortly after Mash's deputy editor resigned over the videos, writing on Telegram that the decision-making from way above editorial level was akin to Soviet times.

The state's info-backlash continued. Russian state TV did a report on the property in Germany where Navalny had spent some of his time in recovery, suggesting it was way beyond his means and claiming that Navalny could not have produced his film alone.

Play Video - Putin suggests Navalny is being 'used by West'


"This is a fake movie about a fake palace where Navalny was invited just to do the voiceover. From the beginning it was scrupulously made by the secret services of three NATO countries, the USA, Great Britain and Germany," thundered Dmitry Kiselev, Russia's chief propagandist on his weekly news show.

That message resonates too. According to a recent poll from Russia's independent Levada centre, one in four Russians have watched Navalny's exposé but a third of those don't believe it. It found 77% of those who'd watched the film or knew of its contents said it did not change their attitude towards Vladimir Putin.

Pavel Chatalbash said Putin should have several residences as he's the president

"This is a fake, a paste-up by Navalny which was well-paid for," says Pavel Chatalbash, a pensioner in Praskoveevka, which is the nearest village to the palace.

Like so many pensioners he is a Putin loyalist, nevermind the stark contrast between the president's supposed wealth and meagre pensions.

"Putin should have several residences, since he is the president of the country. I don't judge him for that. Let's make Putin the tsar of Russia and then there will be no more questions!"

Some residents say they now face an oppressive degree of security

Residents of Praskoveevka we spoke to seemed largely pleased at the employment the gigantic construction site next door has given them and the surrounding region. "Everyone works here, everyone is happy, not just in the village, all over the Krasnodar region. Everything we have here is thanks to this," one woman said.

Leonid Bolbat, who is the leader of the local Cossacks, is less enthusiastic. He regrets the fact he can no longer pick mushrooms in the forests he went to as a boy. Access to an entire mountain range is now blocked. He fears the villagers' route to the sea will be too.

Leonid Bolbat says access to an entire mountain range is now blocked

"If you stop the car near this border guard base they'll come out straight away, ask who you are, and say you've got three seconds to leave the area. They've created a kind of military regime there," he says.

Both men say they'd had a visit from intelligence agents after chatting with journalists the day before. It's an oppressive degree of security if the property is just a hotel. A no-fly zone up above and an over-zealous border guard post next door. Two sets of journalists who'd got out to film near the border guard in the week we went were detained and their material wiped. Hardly worth it if you then have nothing to show of it.

  
Gelendzhik beach is very popular and crowded with tourists in the summer

The "Putin's Palace" investigation clearly struck a nerve at the top. But Alexei Navalny is behind bars now for the foreseeable future and his life is in the hands of the state. In his position that is exceptionally dangerous. Look at what happened to him last summer. Look at Nemtsov.

Bolbat is unusually frank: "God grant that Navalny and his team come to power, things may get better."

I ask him if he thinks that's even possible. He says: "Anything can happen in life. I think it will be alright."
THIRD WORLD USA
Weather experts: Lack of planning caused cold catastrophe
DEREGULATION AUSTERITY TAX CUTS 
The event shows how unprepared the nation and its infrastructure are for extreme weather events that will become bigger problems with climate change, meteorologists and disaster experts said.

This illustration made available by the National Weather Service on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021 shows a Feb. 10-14 forecast for below-normal temperatures for large parts of the United States. The mid-February killer freeze was no surprise and yet catastrophe happened. Meteorologists, government and private, saw it coming, some nearly three weeks in advance. They started sounding warnings two weeks in advance. They talked to officials. They tweeted and used other social media and were downright blunt. [ AP ]

By Associated Press
Published 4 hours ago

This week’s killer freeze in the U.S. was no surprise.

Government and private meteorologists saw it coming, some nearly three weeks in advance. They started sounding warnings two weeks ahead of time. They talked to officials. They issued blunt warnings through social media.

And yet catastrophe happened. At least 20 people have died and 4 million homes at some point lost power, heat or water.

Experts said meteorologists had both types of sciences down right: the math-oriented atmospheric physics for the forecast and the squishy social sciences on how to get their message across.

“This became a disaster because of human and infrastructure frailty, a lack of planning for the worst case scenario and the enormity of the extreme weather,” said disaster science professor Jeannette Sutton of University at Albany in New York.

The event shows how unprepared the nation and its infrastructure are for extreme weather events that will become bigger problems with climate change, meteorologists and disaster experts said.

Insured damages — only a fraction of the real costs — for the nearly week-long intense freeze starting Valentine’s Day weekend are probably $18 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from the risk-modeling firm Karen Clark & Company.

Kim Klockow-McClain heads the National Weather Service’s behavioral insights unit, which focuses on how to make forecasts and warnings easier for people to understand and act on.

People heard the message and got the warnings, she said. For various reasons — thinking cold is no big deal, not having experienced this type of extreme cold, and focusing more on snow and ice than the temperature — they were unprepared, Klockow-McClain said.

“The meteorology was by far the easiest part of this,” Klockow-McClain said.

Private winter storm expert Judah Cohen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research first blogged about the danger on Jan. 25. He said the meteorological signal from the Arctic, where the cold air was escaping from, “was literally blinking red. It was the strongest I’d seen.”

At the University of Oklahoma, meteorology professor Kevin Kloesel, who also is the school’s emergency manager, sent out an alert on Jan. 31 warning of “sub-freezing temperatures and the possibility of sub-zero wind chills.” By Feb. 7, almost a week before the worst of the freeze started, he was sending multiple warnings a day.

University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado tweeted about “off the chart” cold on Feb. 5.

The weather service started talking about the freeze about two weeks ahead of time and gave “the most accurate forecast we can do along with consistent messaging,” said John Murphy, the agency’s chief operating officer. “The magnitude and severity of the event is one that some people weren’t fully prepared for.”

Texas A&M University meteorology professor Don Conlee said forecasting private and public was “probably the best I have seen in my meteorological career.”

So why did so many entities seem unprepared?

One of the main problems was the Texas power grid, which is overseen by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

Sutton said there was “a huge failure” on that part of the infrastructure.

“Institutional memory appears to be less than 10 years because this happened in 2011 and there was a comprehensive set of recommendation s on how this might be avoided in the future,” Kloesel said in an email.

The grid operator’s chief executive officer, Bill Magness, told reporters Thursday that the agency prepared based on past cold outbreaks and “this one changes the game because it was so much bigger, so much more severe and we’ve seen the impact it’s had.”

Essentially saying it was so big it wasn’t planned for “is not a great way to plan,” Sutton said, “especially if we are supposed to learn from our failures.”


Another possible issue is that meteorologists who do warnings weren’t familiar with the fragility of the Texas grid, so they were not able to emphasize power more in their warnings, Klockow-McClain said.

Also, this was so unusual that ordinary people had no idea how to handle it, Sutton said. It simply wasn’t something they had experienced before.

People also think they know cold, even though this was different and extreme, so people likely judged the forecasts based on much milder chills, Klockow-McClain said.

The forecast also included snow and ice that probably got people’s attention more than the temperature drop, Klockow-McClain said.

“Human beings, we live our lives as though we are not at risk,” Sutton said. “We come up with all kinds of rationale for ‘we’re going to be OK.’”
Earth's magnetic field broke down 42,000 years ago and caused massive sudden climate change

by Chris Fogwill, Alan Hogg, Chris Turney and Zoë Thomas, The Conversation
Credit: vchal / shutterstock

FEBRUARY 19, 2021

The world experienced a few centuries of apocalyptic conditions 42,000 years ago, triggered by a reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles combined with changes in the Sun's behavior. That's the key finding of our new multidisciplinary study, published in Science.

This last major geomagnetic reversal triggered a series of dramatic events that have far-reaching consequences for our planet. They read like the plot of a horror movie: the ozone layer was destroyed, electrical storms raged across the tropics, solar winds generated spectacular light shows (auroras), Arctic air poured across North America, ice sheets and glaciers surged and weather patterns shifted violently.

During these events, life on earth was exposed to intense ultraviolet light, Neanderthals and giant animals known as megafauna went extinct, while modern humans sought protection in caves.

The magnetic north pole—where a compass needle points to—does not have a permanent location. Instead, it usually wobbles around close to the geographic north pole—the point around which the Earth spins—over time due to movements within the Earth's core.

For reasons still not entirely clear, magnetic pole movements can sometimes be more extreme than a wobble. One of the most dramatic of these pole migrations took place some 42,000 years ago and is known as the Laschamps Excursion—named after the village where it was discovered in the French Massif Central.

The Laschamps Excursion has been recognized around the world, including most recently in Tasmania, Australia. But up until now, it has not been clear whether such magnetic changes had any impacts on climate and life on the planet. Our new work draws together multiple lines of evidence that strongly suggest the effects were indeed global and far-reaching.

Ancient trees

To investigate what happened, we analyzed ancient New Zealand kauri trees that had been preserved in peat bogs and other sediments for more than 40,000 years. Using the annual growth rings in the kauri trees, we have been able to create a detailed timescale of how Earth's atmosphere changed over this time. The trees revealed a prolonged spike in atmospheric radiocarbon levels caused by the collapse of Earth's magnetic field as the poles switched, providing a way of precisely linking widely geographically dispersed records.


"The kauri trees are like the Rosetta Stone, helping us tie together records of environmental change in caves, ice cores, and peat bogs around the world," says professor Alan Cooper, who co-lead this research project.

Using the newly-created timescale, we were able to show that tropical Pacific rain belts and the Southern Ocean westerly winds abruptly shifted at the same time, bringing arid conditions to places like Australia at the same time as a range of megafauna, including giant kangaroos and giant wombats went extinct. Further north, the vast Laurentide Ice Sheet rapidly grew across the eastern US and Canada, while in Europe the Neanderthals spiraled into extinction.
How the tree analysis works.

Climate modeling


Working with a computer program that simulated the global interactions between chemistry and the climate, we investigated the impact of a weaker magnetic field and changes in the Sun's strength. Importantly, during the magnetic switch, the strength of the magnetic field plummeted to less than 6% of what it is today. A compass back then would struggle to even find north.

With essentially no magnetic field, our planet totally lost its very effective shield against cosmic radiation, and many more of these very penetrating particles from space could access the top of the atmosphere. On top of this, the Sun experienced several "grand solar minima" throughout this period, during which the overall solar activity was generally much lower but also more unstable, sending out numerous massive solar flares that allowed more powerful ionizing cosmic rays to reach Earth.

Our models showed that this combination of factors had an amplifying effect. The high energy cosmic rays from the galaxy and also enormous bursts of cosmic rays from solar flares were able to penetrate the upper atmosphere, charging the particles in the air and causing chemical changes that drove the loss of stratospheric ozone.

The modeled chemistry-climate simulations are consistent with the environmental shifts observed in many natural climate and environmental change archives. These conditions would have also extended the dazzling light shows of the aurora across the world—at times, nights would have been as bright as daytime. We suggest the dramatic changes and unprecedented high UV levels caused early humans to seek shelter in caves, explaining the apparent sudden flowering of cave art across the world 42,000 years ago.

It must have seemed like the end of days.


The Adams Event


Because of the coincidence of seemingly random cosmic events and the extreme environmental changes found around the world 42,000 years ago, we have called this period the "Adams Event"—a tribute to the great science fiction writer Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and identified "42" as the answer to life, the universe and everything. Douglas Adams really was onto something big, and the remaining mystery is how he knew?


Explore further
More information: A. Cooper at South Australian Museum in Adelaide, SA, Australia el al., "A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago," Science (2021). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abb8677

Journal information: Science

Provided by The Conversation
 

 

QAnon conspiracists think Biden and China are responsible for the crisis in Texas


Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that president Biden is responsible for situation in Texas, which has left many without electricity, heat or water.

Followers of QAnon, a disproven and unfounded far-right theory that ex-president Donald Trump is at war with Satan-worshipping paedophiles, believe that Biden granted China access to America’s power grid, causing the energy crisis which is currently ongoing in Texas.

The unsubstantiated claims were made despite Texas having its own separate power system to the rest of America.

A post by one QAnon conspiracist, referred to only as InevitableET, reads: “I started pulling Biden’s [Executive Orders] this morning and I found something buried in the Keystone Pipeline EO… way towards the end of the doc.

“it turns out that the same day Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, he also lifted the security on our power grid for 90 days.

It goes on to add: “Conclusively, Biden, on his first day in office, opened up the American electrical grid to China.

“His very first day in office. Three weeks later, 5 million are without power and struggling to keep their families warm, and many livestock are unable to survive the emergent conditions caused by my power and limited water.”

Meanwhile, another Twitter user shared a post from Instagram, where an account writes in the caption: “The guy in the first video put his snow in the microwave, as well as the oven and on stove top and got unnatural, anomalous results. Have you tried these experiments?”

Texans later commented to express their shock at the snow not melting, with one person saying they tried it and found the snow “stinks and won’t melt”.

“It takes forever for it to slowly go down. It’s not normal,” they add.

Fellow Twitter users were quick to mock the lack of evidence behind such claims:

The QAnon conspiracy is the latest inaccurate statement around the cause of the Texas crisis, with Republicans previously blaming the Green New Deal, wind and solar energy for the outages.

 




If you're wondering who brought Texas low, it's Joe Biden who did it by selling Texas out to the ChiComs. This seems like something Q should have prevented by having Trump win re-election, but as QAnon says "It had to be this way"
Image
Image
Image
53
43
Share this Tweet
I'm in Houston. The snow melted. That said, I didn't see a single anti-masker outside, totally unclothed, in defiance of recommendations to stay warm and wear layered clothing. Seems they still at least believe in jackets. For now.
185
5
Share this Tweet
if there are forces out there who can in one night blanket an entire state in fake snow made out of weird chemicals, you better believe I'm signing up with them and not their enemies
84
5
Share this Tweet
They think it's fake snow? Are the below freezing temps from a giant fan?
104
2
Share this Tweet