About stuartbramhall

Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Islam Comes to India

Posted on July 23, 2023 by stuartbramhall

Episode 17 Islam Comes to India

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

Long before the advent of Islam, Arab traders developed settlements along India’s west coast using the “trade winds” from seasonal monsoons to travel to and from the Arabian peninsula. Between 998 and 1030, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (modern day Afganistan) repeatedly conducted 17 military raids on resource-rich India (for booty rather than religious conversion). Islam subsequently spread inland via local kings who converted to Islam and spread their religion through military conquest.

In 711 Muhammad ibn Al-Qasim conquered Sindh at the mouth of the Indus river. At present this is the second most populous region in Pakistan.

Starting in the 11th century, Sufi missionaries from the Arabian peninsula also played a major role in converting India to Islam. Muslims who settled in the arid western Punjab (now part of Pakistan) introduced Persian irrigation technology enabling the region to shift from herding to agriculture. The area is still dominated by shrines to deceased Sufi saints.

The Bengal was still forested when Muslims arrived, bringing steel axes and other tools to root up the large trees and introduce lucrative wet rice farming. The society in east Bengal (modern Bangladesh) has tended towards egalitarianism. In west Bengal, descendants of Sufi missionaries would form a hereditary elite.

Starting in 1206 a series of Muslim rulers (collectively known as the Delhi Sultans) made Delhi their capitol. Originating from Afghanistan and Central Asia, their regimes were fragile, with vassal kingdoms tending to break away and form independent states.

For centuries, the vast majority of India was non-Muslim, with most Muslim rulers declaring their Hindu subjects Dhimmi (protected subjects) purchased through a special tax.

At present, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) is home to one-third of the world’s Muslims (503,990,000).

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366205

Africans Planting Revolution – Small Farmers still FEED the World

Posted on July 22, 2023 by stuartbramhall

from thefreeonline on July 22, 2023 By Fred Pearce at YaleEnvironmen about E360.

As Africa Loses Forest, Its Small Farmers Are Bringing Back Trees

The loss of forests across Africa has long been documented. But recent studies show that small farmers from Senegal to Ethiopia to Malawi are allowing trees to regenerate on their lands, resulting in improved crop yields, productive fruit harvests, and a boost for carbon storage.

For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making.

[…]

But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields..

Across the continent — from Senegal and Niger in the west, to Ethiopia in the east, and Malawi in the south — smallholder farmers are rejecting government advice that trees should be expunged from fields because they get in the way of growing crops. Instead, they are allowing previously suppressed trees to regenerate on their land — to improve soils and crop yields; to provide harvests of fruit, fuelwood, and fodder for their livestock; and ultimately to achieve a better life for their families.

As large areas of farmland across Africa turn from brown to green, the results are also good for local economies, offering an easy and cheap way to intensify their farming and increase output, as well as benefiting biodiversity and the global climate. An acre of growing trees on farmland captures and stores up to 4 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, researchers say.

[…]

The latest published evidence of Africa’s resurgent farmland trees comes in the first ever detailed analysis of satellite images of the continent carried out at a scale that can identify individual large trees outside forests. Florian Reiner, a remote-sensing analyst at the University of Copenhagen, working with an international team of colleagues, reported in Nature Communications last month that at least 29 percent of tree cover in Africa is “outside areas previously classified as forest.”

These often previously unmapped trees are not in plantations; they are mostly natural trees scattered across savanna grasslands, croplands, and pastures. “Many African landscapes are drylands, where trees outside forests are the major form of woody vegetation,” says Reiner.

[…]

Forests cover some 21 percent of Africa, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Most are in the Congo Basin, home to the world’s second largest rainforest after the Amazon. But adding in non-forest trees visible to the AI system increases the figure for tree cover to close to 30 percent, depending on precise definitions.

[…]

Chris Reij, a dryland restoration specialist at the World Resources Institute in Washington D.C., has seen firsthand how millions of farmers across Niger, southern Mali, and Ethiopia have begun nurturing natural regrowth of hundreds of millions of trees from long-suppressed roots beneath their fields. This is often known as farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR).

[…]

Meanwhile, Gray Tappan, a geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey, has mapped a dramatic increase in tree cover on farms in Malawi, Senegal, Niger and elsewhere. And in a visual analysis carried out in May at the request of Yale Environment 360, he used sample satellite images to estimate that there are about 1.4 billion trees on farms across sub-Saharan Africa, more than three times as many as were spotted by Reiner’s automated system.

The story of the outside world’s discovery of Africa’s unmapped trees began in the fragile farmlands of southern Niger, a landlocked nation in the Sahel region on the fringe of the Sahara Desert. Trees were once a natural feature of these arid lands, and many traditional pre-colonial farming systems incorporated them.

[…]

Their roots often remain in the soil. But farmers had long been taught by colonial and government authorities to remove sprouting trees from their fields each year before planting crops, to make plowing easier.

During droughts in the 1980s, as warnings about desertification in Africa gained global attention, many of these treeless landscapes seemed destined to turn to desert. But then farmers began to change tack, disregarding expert advice and allowing tree seedlings and roots to grow unmolested.

One story widely told in the villages of Niger is that the transformation began when two young farmers returned late to their fields after working during the dry season at a distant mine. With the rains already starting, they planted their crops without first clearing their fields of vegetation. To everyone’s surprise, a few months later this apparent indolence resulted in better crop yields than their neighbors’.

The next year, other farmers in the small remote village of Dan Saga copied them, with similar results. Soon, dozens of other villages across Zinder and Maradi provinces joined in. Trees began growing widely amid their crops.

Reij was among the first outsiders to visit and see how the land had been transformed. It happened by chance. “In 2004, I drove 500 miles east from [Niger’s] capital Niamey and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, there are trees everywhere,’” he remembers. “It was a total change since my first visit 20 years before.” He and others have estimated that there are now some 200 million more trees across a previously almost treeless landscape of some 12.5 million acres in southern Niger.

[…]

In southern Mali, the 200 miles between the country’s two largest cities, “is now almost all agroforest,” Reij says. Similarly, the Seno Plain on the border with Burkina Faso is “all stunningly beautiful, a dense parkland of trees mostly less than 20 years old.”

Tappan, meanwhile, was part of a research team that in 1986 produced what is still the most detailed map of vegetation in Senegal. Last year, he revisited the country and compared images of the landscape today with his earlier aerial photographs. “I found extensive increases in tree density on farms,” he says. FMNR now covers more than 6.6 million acres of Senegal. “It is a major success story and shows that woody vegetation can regenerate in a handful of years, even in regions of low rainfall.”

Meanwhile in Ethiopia, the view from the road for more than 100 miles south of Hawassa “almost looks as if you are travelling through forest,” says Reij. In the areas of highest population density, with up to 2,300 people per square mile, “the density of trees only grows.” This traditional system of agroforestry, practiced in particular by the Gedeo people, has as its main crops Arabica coffee and enset, which produces a banana-like fruit and starchy stems and roots that can be fermented to make porridge or bread, according to Sileshi Degefa, a natural resources scientist at Addis Ababa University.

Tappan estimates that, as a result of the widespread adoption of FMNR, 40 percent of farmland in Mali and Burkina Faso has trees dotted across fields, a figure that rises to 50 percent in Niger, 65 percent in Senegal, and 70 percent in Malawi. Trent Bunderson, founder of a Malawi-based NGO Total LandCare and now chief scientist for nature-based solutions at C-Quest Capital, says Malawi farmers frequently nurture more than a hundred natural trees per acre on their land, with winter thorn a particular favorite.

Yet these trees remain largely ignored by conservationists, foresters, and governments. Reij says that at a recent meeting of African government officials, held in Malawi to discuss how to improve forest cover across the continent, “no one, including the Malawian hosts, even mentioned the 8 million acres of cultivated land with on-farm trees across that country.”

So how many trees are there on Africa’s millions of smallholder farms? In response to this question from Yale Environment 360, Tappan undertook a short assessment. He inspected Google Earth images of almost 100 randomly chosen 25-acre agricultural areas from seven representative countries and visually examined them for trees. He found an average of 69 trees in each area.

Using an accepted estimate that a bit over 30 percent of sub-Saharan Africa is made up of cropland, he calculated that these cultivated areas contain a total of 1.4 billion trees. “You can round my number up or down a bit,” he says. “But I think the assumptions I used do actually give a reasonably reliable number. It’s a lot of trees.”

[…]

The lesson from both studies, whether using AI or the human eye, is that Africa has many more trees than previously supposed. Moreover, many of these trees are newly established, regenerate naturally, and are being nurtured by millions of smallholder farmers.

[…]

This narrative sounds counterintuitive. The assumption has been that as populations grow in Africa, poor farmers have no alternative but to clear trees to cultivate the crops they need to feed their families.

But the truth is the opposite, says Reij. “Farmers in areas with high population densities need to intensify agriculture on increasingly small plots of land. And to do that they need to improve soil fertility. Allowing trees to grow on their land can be the easiest and cheapest way of achieving that.”

[…]

Via https://thefreeonline.com/2023/07/22/africans-planting-revolution-small-farmers-still-feed-the-world-2/

The Pros and Cons of Veganism

Posted on July 22, 2023 by stuartbramhall

Story at-a-glance

Although veganism has some health benefits, it is also loaded with many disadvantages and is unsuitable for many, especially if you have certain genetic polymorphisms predisposing you to poor beta-carotene conversion
People with polymorphisms causing poor conversion of beta-carotene are at high risk for reproductive problems, skin and eye problems and poor dental health
The blood type diet, detailed in “Eat Right 4 Your Type,” often works well for those with blood type O, as those recommendations are consistent with a healthy diet. It typically does not work well for the other blood types
Nutrient cycling (cycling between higher and lower amounts of fat, net carbs and protein) and cycling between high and low calorie intakes (fasting and feasting) appear to be foundational criteria for optimal biological functioning
If you’re on a ketogenic diet, it’s important to cycle high and low amounts of net carbs once your body is able to efficiently burn fat for fuel in order to optimize your metabolism. Cyclical fasting is also recommended

Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published July 8, 2018.

Denise Minger is perhaps most noted for her comprehensive rebuttal of “The China Study” some eight years ago. She’s heavily vested in the vegan versus omnivore battle, having cycled through vegetarianism and raw veganism, finally coming full circle to being an omnivore.

Minger took to vegetarianism when she was just 7 years old. “I was eating steak one night at dinner and almost choked on it. I developed some kind of phobia surrounding things with meat textures and went vegetarian overnight,” she explains.

Raw Veganism Took a Toll on Health

However, during the 10 years she remained a vegetarian, she began developing food allergies, including wheat and dairy allergies. “By the time I was a teenager, I was really health-conscious,” she says. “I had to get into that whole scene just to stay healthy.”

At age 15, she discovered the raw vegan movement and got on the 80/10/10 diet, promoted by Dr. Douglas Graham. The diet is based on the hypothesis that we should eat what other primates eat, particularly frugivorous chimpanzees and bonobos.

[…]

As mentioned, Minger produced a very comprehensive critique of “The China Study” which is the scientific justification for many vegan positions. Her analysis — which some suspected to be funded by the meat industry — was actually undertaken while recovering from an accident. At the age of 22, she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle and shattered her elbow. Her convalescence afforded her the time to work on this project.

[…]

The Case for Lowering Protein Intake

For all its drawbacks, there are benefits to veganism. The biggest one, from my perspective, is that vegans have — compared to those who eat the standard American diet — a significantly lower protein intake. I think there are valuable insights that can be drawn from that, which can be integrated into a low-carb paleo approach. Minger agrees, saying:

[…]

This makes sense considering the importance of long-chained omega-3 fats: eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Those who restrict themselves to a plant-based diet are only getting alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) which, while being a precursor for EPA and DHA cannot be converted at significant, therapeutic levels.

Protein Cycling

Clearly, the composition of the animal protein is a significant issue. We don’t want processed foods. We don’t want meat from factory farms that is contaminated with glyphosate (due to contaminated grain feed). But there’s also the issue of the amount. Many are simply eating far too much protein, which (when consumed in excess) activates mTOR, a pathway involved in both aging and cancer. Pulsing higher and lower amounts of protein also seems a wise strategy.

[…]

Macronutrient Cycling — An Overlooked Component

In deconstructing and assessing the low-carb, high-fat approach, Minger concluded the lack of high and low nutrient cycling was one of the main problems, especially long-term, and particularly for women. “I do one-on-one consulting with people,” she says.

“A large group that I have come in contact with are women who’ve done low-carb. Their thyroid function is tanking. They’re gaining weight. They feel terrible. Their hair is falling out. It happens with men too sometimes, but I think women, hormonally, are more sensitive to the lack of carbohydrates.”

She’s also found evidence suggesting chronic lack of carbohydrates may be having an adverse effect on your gut microbiome. In his commentary, “Sorry Low Carbers, Your Microbiome Is Just Not That Into You,”¹ Jeff Leach with the Human Food Project details the likely shifts found in the gut microbiome composition of people who consume low-carbohydrate diets. Whether or not those shifts are wholly detrimental or not is still unknown, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Minger is equally ambivalent about long-term, chronic high-fat consumption, as some of the evidence suggests it may increase gut permeability and the transport of endotoxin from gram-negative bacteria into the bloodstream, which increases chronic inflammation and related health problems.

[…]

From my perspective, I think there are compelling reasons to suspect one might run into problems, for many of the reasons Minger cites. It appears nutrient cycling (i.e., cycling between higher and lower amounts of fat, net carbs and protein), and also cycling between high and low calorie intakes (fasting and feasting), are foundational criteria for optimal biological functioning.

[…]

Cyclical Ketogenic Diet Combined With Cyclical Fasting

First of all, the late Dr. Joseph Kraft showed that using sensitive oral glucose loading and testing insulin levels that insulin resistance is pervasive. Based on a more refined definition of insulin resistance, at least 80% of the population have diabetes in situ,^2,³ which means they’re insulin resistant even though their fasting glucose is normal.

This is where low-carb can be really useful, yet it alone will still not be enough for many. A lot of people need to get even more aggressive and do fasting. Once you’ve done that for a while and resolve the insulin resistance, you need to cycle net carbs (total carbs minus fiber) back in.

The converse can also occur. If you suppress insulin for too long, your blood sugar will tend to rise from hepatic gluconeogenesis. If you reintroduce carbohydrates at that point, it will raise insulin and lower your blood sugar. You can also eat too much fat; since fat is high in calories, the excess calories alone can lead to weight gain. As mentioned above, protein intake also needs to be regulated to avoid mTOR activation.

Traditional paleo is frequently high-protein, high-fat, similar to the Atkins approach. But you’re not going to get all the benefits unless you restrict protein. As a general rule, I recommend limiting protein to half a gram per pound of lean body weight, to ensure you’re getting the protein you need for muscle maintenance and repair. The answer is not to cut protein out altogether. You do need some, just not the enormous amounts most Americans are used to eating.

Focus on Nutrient Density

When asked what the best animal food composition might be, Minger stresses the importance of nutrient density over any specific dosage recommendations, as the ideal amount will depend on the type of meat you’re eating. “For my own diet, I focus on organ meats and shellfish,” she says. “Those are the primary foods I eat that are of animal origin. Oysters are my favorite. Nutritionally, if you look at liver and oysters, oysters are kind of like the liver of the ocean.”

People who shun animal foods due to ethical concerns about eating something that is highly sentient can also take heart in the fact that oysters lack the central nervous system “that would make them equivalent to a cow.” “There’s a bivalve vegan movement, where people are vegan with the inclusion of certain shellfish. I think that can go a long way for people to balance out a vegan diet,” she says.

As for cooking, Minger recommends using gentle methods to avoid the creation of carcinogens associated with high-temperature cooking. These byproducts “seem to be driving the correlation between meat consumption and different cancers that we see in observational studies,” she says.

“Whenever you look at a study that actually controls for the cooking method, typically once you take away the high-heat kind of strategies for cooking your meat, the correlations with various diseases start to diminish, if not disappear completely.” Byproducts created during grilling and frying include heterocyclic amines and polyaromatic hydrocarbons that form carcinogens. So, don’t overcook your meat, and balance muscle meat (steaks) with organ meat and other animal parts.

[…]

Via https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/07/22/the-china-study-and-other-nutrition-plans.aspx

The Free Speech Scare

Posted on July 22, 2023 by stuartbramhall

Jeffrey Tucker
Brownstone Institute

It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.

What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.

This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room. It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

BREAKING – EXPLOSIVE: @RobertKennedyJr puts Democratic Congress members trying to censor him in their place with fiery open remarks during a hearing to expose censorship. It's shocking that in the United States of America, people are being censored for speaking the truth! WATCH! pic.twitter.com/MKQMk2INAu

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) July 20, 2023

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as Mencken might say, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: it reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

A PHD level explanation of the important of free speech to democracy from @RobertKennedyJr. pic.twitter.com/S0HxIDLvLA

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) July 20, 2023

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.” Reporting on the spectacle, the New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?

Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. We have already discussed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.

The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1020) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the US that the communists, anarchists, and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the US government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.

The Espionage Act of 1917 was one result. It is still in force and being deployed today, most recently against former President Trump. Many states passed censorship laws. The feds deported many people suspected of sedition and treason. Suspected communists were hauled in front of Congress and grilled.

The second bout occurred after the Second World War with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Army-McCarthy hearings that led to blacklists and media smears of every sort. The result was a chilling of free speech across American industry that hit media particularly hard. That incident later became legendary due to the exaggerations and disregard for the First Amendment.

How does the Covid-era censorship fit into this historical context? At Brownstone, we’ve compared the wild Covid response to a wartime footing that caused as much trauma on the homeland as previous world wars.

Three years of research, documents, and reporting have established that the lockdowns and all that followed were not directed by public health authorities. They were the veneer for the national security state, which took charge in the month of February 2020 and deployed the full takeover of both government and society in mid-March. This is one reason that it’s been so difficult getting information on how and why all of this happened to us: it’s been mostly classified under the guise of national security.

In other words, this was war and the nation was ruled for a time (and maybe still is) by what amounts to quasi-martial law. Indeed, it felt like that. No one knew for sure who was in charge and who was making all these wild decisions for our lives and work. It was never clear what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The rules and edicts seemed arbitrary, having no real connection to the goal; indeed no one really knew what the goal was besides more and more control. There was no real exit strategy or end game.

As with the two previous bouts of censorship in the last century, there commenced a closure of public debate. It began almost immediately as the lockdowns edict were issued. They tightened over the months and years. Elites sought to plug every leak in the official narrative through every means possible. They invaded every space. Those they could not get to (like Parler) were simply unplugged. Amazon rejected books. YouTube deleted millions of posts. Twitter was brutal, while once-friendly Facebook became the enforcer of regime propaganda.

The hunt for dissenters took strange forms. Those who held gatherings were shamed. People who did not socially distance were called disease spreaders. Walking outside without a mask one day, a man shouted out to me in anger that “masks are socially recommended.” I kept turning that phrase around in my mind because it made no sense. The mask, no matter how obviously ineffective, was imposed as a tactic of humiliation and an exclusionary measure that targeted the incredulous. It was also a symbol: stop talking because your voice does not matter. Your speech will be muffled.

The vaccine of course came next: deployed as a tool to purge the military, public sector, academia, and the corporate world. The moment the New York Times reported that vaccine uptake was lower in states that supported Trump, the Biden administration had its talking points and agenda. The shot would be deployed to purge. Indeed, five cities briefly segregated themselves to exclude the unvaccinated from public spaces. The continued spread of the virus itself was blamed on the noncompliant.

Those who decried the trajectory could hardly find a voice much less assemble a social network. The idea was to make us all feel isolated even if we might have been the overwhelming majority. We just could not tell either way.

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-free-speech-scare/

9/11 Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers

Posted on July 21, 2023 by stuartbramhall

Graeme MacQueen

Propaganda in Focus

Many of us are convinced that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. But the question at once arises: if this is what happened, would somebody not have noticed?

The answer is that many people did notice. There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2. This paper will give a brief overview of this evidence.

[…]

The oral histories were collected by the World Trade Center Task Force of the FDNY after New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided it would be important to have a record of what the members of the department experienced on that day. The Task Force interviews comprise 10-12,000 pages of statements by approximately 500 “FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002” (258).

Professor David Ray Griffin, with the help of able researchers, was the first scholar to ferret out fascinating descriptions of explosions from this material (259). The author of the present paper published a subsequent article after reading the oral histories, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers” (260).

The presentation and analysis below build on this earlier work. As the evidence is presented, three important points will emerge. First, the conviction that the Towers came down because of explosions was common on 9/11. Second, there is substantial eyewitness evidence supporting this conviction. Third, this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.

The explosion hypothesis was common on 9/11

[…]

In a video clip preserved from 9/11, ABC television reporter N. J. Burkett is seen standing close to the Twin Towers. He draws our attention to the firefighters at the scene and to the burning buildings themselves. Suddenly, the South Tower begins to come apart behind him. As the pulverized debris shoots into the air, Burkett says: “A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!” Mr. Burkett’s statement shows no evidence of over-thinking the situation or of a conspiratorial mindset. He certainly did not come along after 9/11: he expressed his judgment before the debris of the building had even reached the ground. Then he ran for his life. Half an hour later he would run for his life again as the North Tower came down (261).
In CNN’s same-day coverage of the events of 9/11, Mayor Giuliani was asked questions about explosions in the Twin Towers on two separate occasions. The second occasion is a press conference at about 2:39 p.m. A female reporter (off screen) asks the Mayor: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought the two buildings down? Was it caused by the planes or by something else?” (262). Notice that she does not ask if there were explosions: she assumes there were. She does not ask if these explosions brought down the Towers: she assumes they did. She merely wants to know what caused the explosions – the planes or “something else.”
In footage known as the “Matthew Shapoff video,” acquired from NIST through a Freedom of Information Act request, there are several people (off screen) chatting while they watch the events at the World Trade Center unfold at a distance and film them with their video camera. Suddenly, through their camera we see the North Tower begin to throw pulverized debris in all directions in huge plumes as it disintegrates. After a horrified, “oh, my God!” we hear a male voice, presumably that of Shapoff, exclaim as follows: “That was a bomb that did that! That was a fuckin’ bomb that did that! There’s no goddamn way that could have happened!” (263). Again, this is a spontaneous reaction to what Shapoff was observing.
New York firefighter Christopher Fenyo, in a passage from the World Trade Center Task Force interviews, speaks of a debate that began among firefighters who were on the scene. The debate started after the destruction of the South Tower but before the destruction of the North Tower – in other words, between about 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. “…At that point a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.” As with Shapoff, the statement concerns not just explosions generally but the intentional destruction of the building with explosives. That is, people were already debating a subcategory of the explosion hypothesis, the controlled demolition hypothesis, before 10:30 on the morning of 9/11.
The FBI’s name for its investigation of the 9/11 incidents is PENTTBOM, which stands for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” Is it possible that when this name was assigned someone in the FBI thought a bombing had taken place? (Recall that according to the current official narrative there was no bombing at any of the affected locations.) On the day of 9/11, USA Today’s foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was seen telling his TV audience that the FBI’s “working theory” at that time was that “at the same time two planes hit the building…there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building, which exploded at the same time and brought both of them down” (264). Given that Kelley was later shown to have routinely fabricated stories for USA Today, his allegations about the FBI would have to be corroborated. However, the general hypothesis ascribed here to the FBI – the buildings were brought down through the use of explosives – was common on 9/11. For example, Albert Turi, FDNY Chief of Safety, told NBC’s Pat Dawson not long after the destruction of the Towers that, in Dawson’s words, “according to his [Turi’s] theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building” (265).

[…]

There is strong eyewitness evidence supporting the explosion hypothesis.

[…]

Zoda says, as he moves his hand: “Floor by floor, it started poppin’ out.” Tardio concurs and uses the same hand gesture: “It was as if they had detonated, detonated (Zoda: “Yeah, detonated, yeah”), you know, as if they were planted to take down a building: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Zoda adds: “All the way down. I was watching and running.”

These are firefighters and they are used to encountering the standard sorts of explosions that occur in building fires. But they do not talk about smoke explosions, or “boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor” (BLEVE) explosions, or any of the other expected forms of explosion. Instead, they are talking about, and acting out with dramatic gestures, something altogether different. They say that what they saw resembled a controlled demolition.

[…]

Ross Milanytch, an employee at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank, says of the South Tower: “It started exploding…It was about the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.”

John Bussey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said this of the South Tower:

“Off the phone, and collecting my thoughts for the next report, I heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” (268)

Kenneth Rogers of the New York Fire Department said this about his experience with the South Tower:

“…we were standing there with about five companies and we were just waiting for our assignment and then there was an explosion in the south tower… A lot of guys left at that point. I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized

[…]

The handwritten PAPD report of this brave and obviously traumatized individual, which corroborates the above account in several crucial respects, is directly available in the PAPD documents released in 2003 (272). One page of that report is reproduced as follows.

Quantity

It is difficult to formulate a complete account of eyewitnesses who describe, expressly or implicitly, explosions near the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Neither the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission, nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology have published a count. I have compiled the most complete known list of witnesses to explosions at the Twin Towers. There are 156 such witness statements. The two graphs presented below summarize certain aspects of the list.

FIGURE 8-1: WITNESSES BY PROFESSION/AGENCY

[,,,]

The “explosion” category is by far the largest, with 112 eyewitnesses. However, the “bomb” category, with 32 eyewitnesses, is extremely important as well. Most of the people on this list speaking of bombs are firefighters, and it is clear from their use of the word “bomb” that they are not talking about the sort of explosion they expect to encounter in a high-rise fire.

[…]

FIGURE 8-2: WITNESSES BY TERM USED

The types of explosions that typically accompany a fire are described in detail in various publications, probably most authoritatively in the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. There the NFPA describes four types of explosion that would have been expected to accompany the fires in the Twin Towers.

BLEVE (“boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosion,” as with an exploding boiler)
Electrical explosion
Smoke explosion (i.e. backdraft)
Combustion explosion (e.g., natural gas, jet fuel vapor)

There are three characteristics of the eyewitness statements that rule out all four types of explosion. That is, these four sorts of explosions may well have occurred, but they do not account for the main explosions witnesses say they perceived. Here are the three characteristics that must be explained.

[…]

Via https://propagandainfocus.substack.com/p/eyewitness-evidence-of-explosions-in-the-twin-towers

FBI Memo: Ukrainian Firm Hired Hunter Biden to Block Corruption Probe

Posted on July 21, 2023 by stuartbramhall

Just the News

Sen. Charles Grassley releases long-sought FBI confidential informant report alleging bribery scheme

A trusted FBI informant told agents in 2020 that Hunter Biden was hired by Burisma Holdings to use his father to help “protect” the Ukrainian gas firm from problems, including an effort to “take care of'” a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the company for corruption, according to an explosive document released by Sen. Charles Grassley on Thursday.

“They hired Hunter Biden to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” the informant reported to the FBI that a top Burisma official named Vadim Pojarskii declared during a meeting while Joe Biden was still vice president, according to the FD-1023 confidential human source report Grassley, R-Iowa, released.

The informant also reported that Burisma had asked Hunter Biden to help get the top prosecutor in Ukraine, Victor Shokin, sidelined because he was investigating the firm for corruption and interfering with Burisma’s effort to buy a U.S. firm.

“Shokin’s investigation into Burisma, which was made public at this time, it would have a substantial negative impact on Burisma’s prospective IPO in the United States,” the report alleged. “Zlochevsky replied something to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad.'”

The report reveals that the informant began reporting these concerns back in 2017.

You can read the full document here.

fd_1023_obtained_by_senator_grassley_-_biden.pdf

Joe Biden has admitted he forced Shokin’s firing in late 2015 and early 2016 by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine. The prosecutor was fired, but Biden has adamantly denied he did so to help his son’s company.

The memo clearly states Burisma owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, told the informant he had been “coerced” into paying the Biden’s money and estimated the price tag to be $10 million.

“Zlochevsky stated he didn’t want to pay the Bidens and he was pushed to pay them,” the report stated.

The owner added it “cost 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden,” the informant reported, adding that “at this time, it was unclear to CHS whether these alleged payments were already made.”

The informant also revealed that Burisma officials had become frustrated by Hunter Biden’s performance.

“Pojarskii replied that Hunter Biden was not smart, and they wanted to get additional counsel,” the FBI reported. “The group then had a general conversation about whether the purchase/merger with a US company would be a good business decision.”

In response to the FD-1023’s release, White house spokesperson Ian Sams issued the following statement:

“It is remarkable that congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to go after President Biden regardless of the truth, continue to push claims that have been debunked for years and that they themselves have cautioned to take ‘with a grain of salt’ because they could be ‘made up.’ These claims have reportedly been scrutinized by the Trump Justice Department, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney, and a full impeachment trial of the former President that centered on these very issues, and over and over again, they have been found to lack credibility. It’s clear that congressional Republicans are dead-set on playing shameless, dishonest politics and refuse to let truth get in the way. It is well past time for news organizations to hold them to basic levels of factual accountability for their repeated and increasingly desperate efforts to mislead both the public and the press.”

[…]

Via https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-informant-told-agents-hunter-biden-hired-burisma