TBR News September 2, 2017
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., September 2, 2017:” A constant subject for the high-level intelligence people inside the Beltway is the progress of what is called ‘The Plan.’
This is a long-term program, formulated and implemented, by the far-right element in the government and eagerly supported by the so-called neo-cons.
The purpose of this program is to destabilize Russia, force Putin and his supporters out of office and replace them, as was done during the reign of the CIA-friendly Yeltsin, with persons friendly to the United States aims and, specially, friendly to US business interests.
Russia is in possession of a very large reservoir of natural resources from oil to gold and American interests very nearly had their controlling hands on all of this during the Yeltsin years but lost it when Putin got in control.
They hate his intractable nationalism and have done, and are doing, everything they can to discredit, defeat and eventually oust him.
A major part of The Plan has been to get physical control of countries surrounding Russia from the Baltic states to the ‘Stans and to ring Russia with American-oriented and friendly countries.
Putin, aware of this because of the obviousness of the plottings and also because of very high-level information leaks from Washington, responded and with deadly effect. Georgia was run by a domestic politician who was eccentric, egotistical but in the pocket of Washington, and who allowed American troops and their military equipment to pour into the country.
But two Georgian provinces, inhabited mostly by Russians, objected to the blatantly pro-West government in Tiblisi and protested.
Georgia’s answer was to threaten force and, with full American support, to mass Georgian troops on the borders of these provinces.
Putin responded by sending a Russian military strike force into the area in support of the break-away areas and this caused a two-fold retreat on the part of American supporters. The military units rapidly evacuated west to the Black Sea and US Naval evacuation while an army of CIA personnel fled in terror to the airport at Tiblisi to avoid capture. This demarche disillusioned a number of eastern European countries who then toned down their anti-Russian rhetoric and made pacific moves towards the Kremlin.
A very high-level Polish government contingent flying into Smolensk to confer with the Russians were destroyed when their aircraft, responding to faked ground signals at the fog-shrouded Smolensk airport, slammed into the ground, wiping out the top level Poles. The Russians did not destroy the Poles but American intelligence operatives did.
This pointless slaughter was designed to teach wavering cantonists a lesson.
And the so-called “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine was entirely a CIA operation.
The government in that country was replaced with a pro-Western one and the Ukraine was then viewed in Washington as another country to stock with threatening American missiles and troops.
When the Ukrainians tired of the corruption that inevitably is attendant upon a pro-West government and eventually elected a pro-Russian president, the CIA predictably responded by fomenting civil strife in Kiev and when that appeared to be waning, had their surrogates start shooting at random into the crowd to stir up public anger.
Putin’s response was to occupy the Russian-populated Crimea, hold an election that overwhelmingly supported union with Russia and gained the important naval base at Sebastopol that the Ukraine had promised to the US Navy and, more important, the Crimean off-shore oil fields and a coastline that permitted an easier installation of the South Stream oil transmission line from Russian oil fields to southern Europe.
The fury of the balked intelligence and governmental organs in Washington has been monumental and because a restive Europe is presenting a disunited front in the dictated attacks on Russia, more pressure is being planned to further threaten and pressure Putin.
The oil-rich Arctic is a prime future battlefield selected by Washington to engage the Russians, but the latter hold most of the geo-political cards.
And attempts to economically isolate Russia can easily backfire and create economic chaos with America’s economic powers.
The Russians hold 118 billion dollars worth of US Treasury certificate and their tenative allies, the Chinese, hold one trillion dollars of the same certificates. Should these countries, against whom the United States has been conducting clandestine political warfare, ever decide to jointly dump these financial instruments, the collapse of the dollar as the leading international currency would create an economic crisis that could easily prove fatal to Washington.
When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.
Table of Contents
- Is U.S. Congress Declaring War on WikiLeaks?
- Retail U.S. gasoline prices surge on Harvey supply disruptions
- ‘Your eyes start itching’: pollution soars in Houston after chemical industry leaks
- Petition to declare George Soros a ‘terrorist’ & seize his assets gains required 100k signatures
- Petition to declare ‘Antifa’ group terrorists collects 250k signatures
- The American Media’s Control of Public Opinion
- Hezbollah says bulk of IS convoy has left Syrian government area
- Russian warplanes bomb ISIS position as Damascus pushes forward to Deir ez-Zor
- Army to Send 1,200 Alaska-Based Soldiers to Afghanistan
- Fentanyl Overtakes Heroin as Leading Cause of U.S. Drug Deaths
- Protecting Earth from an asteroid strike – what can we do?
- In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere
Is U.S. Congress Declaring War on WikiLeaks?
Senate bill calls organization a ‘hostile intelligence service’ working with ‘state actors.’
September 1, 2017
by Philip Giraldi
The American Conservative
The United States, uniquely among nations, believes that its writ runs all over the world—and that it has a right to use its courts of law to seek retributive justice even in situations that did not involve American citizens and occurred in a foreign land. No other country sends its marshals overseas to forcibly detain fugitives from “justice.” If the United States is truly exceptional, it is no doubt due to its hubris in declaring itself to be the final arbiter of what goes on all around the globe.
It seems that nearly every week Congress outdoes itself in passing bills that are intended to pummel one foreign adversary or another. Russia and Iran have become particular favorites with nary a dissenting voice when new sanctions are put in place, together with mechanisms to ensure that a puissant chief executive shall have no ability to mitigate the punishment. And sometimes stealth is employed, inserting a nugget in an otherwise innocuous bit of legislation that will provide authority to go after yet another potential enemy of the state.
The latest Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761), which was released by the committee on August 18 when few senators were in town, is in the nature of a routine document. It notably calls for “more” in terms of both probing and revealing Russian spying and alleged aggression, but that was to be expected due to the current panic over Moscow and its intentions. It will nevertheless almost certainly become law even though few members of congress will actually bother to read any part of it. The bill has already been approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and will likely go immediately to a vote in the full Senate when that body reconvenes after the August recess. It will almost certainly be approved unanimously.
That anyone in the alternative media is paying any attention at all to what the bill says is due to the last section in the document, numbered 623. It reads “SENSE OF CONGRESS ON WIKILEAKS: It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”
Senator Ron Wyden was the only committee member who opposed the draft but even he opined that “the damage done by WikiLeaks to the United States is clear.” His concerns were that Section 623, if acted upon, could damage freedom of the press. He explained that “…the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets… The language in the bill suggesting that the U.S. government has some unstated course of action against ‘non-state hostile intelligence services’ is equally troubling.”
Indeed, the language suggests that Section 623 is intended to justify taking direct action against WikiLeaks. And it might also establish a precedent which would potentially empower federal law enforcement agencies to go after legitimate media outlets that obtain and publish classified information regarded as critical or even damaging to government policies. As the mainstream media has long believed that it has a legitimate role in exposing malfeasance by government, Section 623 could easily set up a clash between press and law enforcement over what kind of information is usable and what is not.
It would be interesting to know who exactly inserted Section 623 in the intelligence authorization bill, but that information is unlikely to surface anytime soon. The sentence makes some very specific claims about WikiLeaks and its activities, namely that it operates as a hostile intelligence service, that its leadership constitutes enemy agents who are targeting the United States, and that it operates under the direction of a foreign intelligence agency that is unfriendly to Washington. It concludes that WikiLeaks should be “treated as such,” i.e. confronted as one would an enemy.
In reality, the conflation of WikiLeaks with an actual intelligence service is absurd. It does not recruit agents who obtain information for it and instead relies on volunteers, many of whom are apparently whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to provide it with material. It operates in standard journalistic fashion by publishing the material that it considers to be relevant to illegal or inappropriate activity by the U.S. and other governments, corporations, and even individuals. Critics claim that it is reckless in so doing, but WikiLeaks sees itself as an activist purveyor of global transparency and accountability.
And the assertion that WikiLeaks is acting as the agent of an unfriendly foreign government is also unproven, even though some in the U.S. government have insisted that is the case and an occasional investigative journalist has sought to connect the dots. Clearly the drafter of the sentence in SB 1761 is implying a Russian relationship, but there is no indisputable evidence that that is true and no hint that anything that WikiLeaks has revealed is propaganda. WikiLeaks derived information is unedited and authentic. It has been played and replayed by mainstream media in the U.S. and worldwide without any hesitation. WikiLeaks might not be your standard media outlet, but it is more like journalism than not, particularly if one accepts that alternative internet sources have become legitimate in their own right.
Most of the attention on Section 623 has focused on potential damage to the First Amendment to the Constitution, which established freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but I also see something more sinister in the language used. The sentence is nearly identical to a statement made by CIA Director Mike Pompeo on April 13 in which WikiLeaks was described as a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
It is no coincidence that the language is similar and it suggests that WikiLeaks and its senior leadership will be targeted by the United States government acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Daily Beast reports a comment by one former Senate committee staffer who notes that “It would allow the intelligence community to collect against them the same way they collect against al-Qaeda. If you think you’re helping WikiLeaks to aid a transparency organization, the U.S. government fundamentally disagrees with you and you could find yourself on the other end of NSA scrutiny.”
It has previously been reported how the Justice Department has had problems in making a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He is an Australian citizen who resides in London in asylum status in the Ecuadorean Embassy and WikiLeaks has no evident physical presence in the United States. Nevertheless, the Attorney General’s office has been hard at work preparing criminal charges, presumably relying on the Espionage Act of 1918, which can be construed as criminalizing the receipt of any classified material by an unauthorized party. Given the clearly expressed desire to punish Assange, he would quite likely be arrested and extradited to the U.S. by the British if he should ever attempt to leave the shelter of the Ecuadorean Embassy.
Some journalists are particularly concerned that henceforth any classified information made public by WikiLeaks and used by an American news outlet might also lead to criminal charges for the recipient, again under the Espionage Act. And Washington might even believe that it can to a certain extent enforce its ban on using WikiLeaks material globally by pressuring other governments and by tying up media outlets with lawsuits.
There are already plenty of laws that criminalize the mishandling or theft of classified information, but the government has proven singularly incapable of catching the leakers, so now it will go after the recipients. I would suspect that employees and managers of WikiLeaks, insofar as they can be identified, will be surveilled, harassed, and even arrested. They will have to be especially careful when they travel. WikiLeaks servers and systems will be disrupted through insertion of viruses and intensified hacking. Potential whistleblowers will undoubtedly take note and become reluctant to share information with a resource that is under siege. In short, WikiLeaks will be the enemy just like the old KGB once was, with all the gloves off, and the only difference is that WikiLeaks is “non-state.” By all normal standards, Section 623 is a declaration of war that has important consequences for those who believe that the appropriate media role is to challenge the government and other institutions.
To unleash the CIA on WikiLeaks the White House will likely have to come up with a “finding” to authorize special action. President Donald Trump will no doubt sign such a document and follow up with a tweet. It is particularly ironic that Trump once was a self-professed great fan of WikiLeaks, stating how he “loved it” while on the campaign trail in October 2016 after Hillary Clinton’s emails were made public. A lot has changed.
Retail U.S. gasoline prices surge on Harvey supply disruptions
September 2, 2017
by Julia Simon, Marianna Parraga
Reuters
NEW YORK/HOUSTON (Reuters) – Retail U.S. gasoline prices continued to rise as pipelines and terminals remained closed in Texas a week after Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, forcing refineries to warn customers about fuel-supply shortages.
Gasoline prices have risen more than 17.5 cents since Aug. 23, before the storm began. They were at $2.59 a gallon on Saturday, according to motorists advocacy group AAA, 16.7 percent higher on average than a year ago.
In Texas, the epicenter of the storm, where over 88,000 houses and businesses remain without power and reconstruction efforts have just begun, prices rose more than 3 percent from Friday to Saturday, and were up 12 percent from a week ago.
U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Saturday departed from Joint Base Andrews for their second trip to Texas and Louisiana since the storm started. They plan to visit flood survivors in Houston and Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Trump on Friday asked Congress for an initial $7.85 billion to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and a disaster loan program.
As the government tried to secure funds for reconstruction efforts in Texas that could take years, producers, refiners and infrastructure operators worked against the clock to reopen facilities.
Refiner Motiva has warned customers along the route of the largest U.S. fuel pipeline to prepare for shortages after Harvey shut refineries and cut supply to the line, said a source at convenience store and gas station chain Circle K, supplied by Motiva.
Circle K said the company was working with a limited supply.
In some Texas cities including Dallas, there were long lines at gas stations on Friday.
Harvey shut refineries that can process up to 4.4 million barrels per day of crude, accounting for nearly a quarter of U.S. fuel production capacity. The plants shut down include Motiva’s 603,000 bpd facility in Port Arthur, Texas, the largest refinery in the country.
Nearly half of U.S. refining capacity is in the Gulf Coast region, an area with proximity to plentiful crude supplies from Texas oil fields and also Mexican and Venezuelan oil imports. Most major Texas ports remained closed to large vessels, limiting discharge of imported crude.
“The refineries were built on the Gulf Coast with the idea that we’re going to import,” said Sandy Fielden, director of oil and products research at Morningstar in Austin, Texas. “That’s why we’re having problems today because that’s where they were all built.”
The reduced availability of fuel has forced the Colonial Pipeline, which provides fuel from refineries near the Gulf of Mexico to the U.S. Northeast, to reduce supplies.
But some crude oil pipelines have restarted. Magellan Midstream Partners (MMP.N) announced late Friday that it resumed operations on its BridgeTex and Longhorn crude oil systems. The two pipelines transport around 675,000 barrels per day of West Texas crude oil to East Houston.
The company says it expects to resume service on its Houston crude oil distribution system over the weekend.
As of Friday, the volume of U.S. crude production still shut-in had declined to about 153,000 barrels per day, from 324,000 just two days ago.
Reporting by Julia Simon in New York and Marianna Parraga in Houston; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Steve Orlofsky
‘Your eyes start itching’: pollution soars in Houston after chemical industry leaks
Communities face surging toxic fumes and possible water contamination, as refineries and plants report more than 2,700 tons of extra pollution
September 2, 2017
by Oliver Milman in Houston, Texas
The Guardian
Hurricane Harvey has resulted in Houston’s petrochemical industry leaking thousands of tons of pollutants, with communities living near plants damaged by the storm exposed to soaring levels of toxic fumes and potential water contamination.
Refineries and chemical plants have reported more than 2,700 tons, or 5.4m pounds, of extra air pollution due to direct damage from the hurricane as well as the preventive shutting down of facilities, which causes a spike in released toxins.
On Friday, ozone levels in south-west Houston were nearly three times higher than the national standard, triggering one of Texas’s worst recent smogs. Scientists warned that people outside cleaning up in the aftermath of Harvey were vulnerable to the poor air, particularly the elderly, children and those with asthma.
According to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity, a cocktail of nearly 1m pounds of particularly harmful substances such as benzene, hexane, sulfur dioxide, butadiene and xylene have been emitted by more than 60 petroleum industry plants operated by ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and other businesses since the hurricane.
Houston has not met national air quality standards since the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the sudden surge in pollution has caused deep concern among public health advocates.
“It’s a really serious public health crisis from the pollution and other impacts people are facing,” said Bakeyah Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston.
“Communities in close proximity to these facilities will get the worst of it, as they get the worst of it on a daily basis. There’s also the acute danger of one of these facilities exploding in neighbourhoods where storage tanks are adjacent to people’s back yards. It’s a very real threat and it’s a very precarious situation.”
The released chemicals are linked, through prolonged exposure, to an array of health problems including heightened cancer risk, gastrointestinal ailments, nausea and muscle weakness. Residents living near the sprawling industrial facilities that dominate Houston’s ship channel said they have experienced pungent smells and respiratory issues in the wake of the hurricane.
“It feels like someone has a hand on the crest of your noses and is pushing down on your nose and eyes,” said Bryan Parras, who lives in the East End area of Houston. “You start to get headaches, your eyes start itching, your throat gets scratchy. I noticed it going outside for just a second. And then I realized that the air conditioning was sucking it into the house.”
Parras has worked for the past decade to highlight the pollution issues faced the overwhelmingly Latino and black communities living directly next to Houston’s petrochemical industry. While it is difficult to directly link air pollution in a particular area to a person’s illness, people along the ship channel have reported elevated levels of leukemia, asthma and other ailments.
“I grew up here and I remember being sick all the time,” Parras said. “I’m still pretty fucked up because of where I grew up and live. This hurricane has been devastating for these communities and it’s still playing out because we don’t know the full extent of it yet.
“The Latino community here is full of good people. They do the dirtiest jobs and they don’t ask for much and yet they are over-policed, criminalized and targeted. These people have very little political power and the city knows it. The real disaster is that they are poisoning these communities slowly, 24-7.”
Daniel Cohan, an air pollution expert at Rice University, said the emissions could be even greater than what the companies are reporting to regulators, given the difficulties in ascertaining exactly what has been leaked. Several air quality monitors were also rendered inoperable by the hurricane.
“The emissions could be many times higher,” he said. “A lot of the risks for carcinogens and neurotoxins come following exposure for a long time but the immediate concern is that people in the neighborhoods around the plants, a lot of low-income Hispanic communities, will suffer itchy eyes and throat complaints. The air will be unpleasant to breathe.
“It’s concerning how state policies allow enormous amounts of pollution during shut down and start up periods. I hope the next few days are the worst of it.”
The most spectacular industrial damage so far has taken place at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, where a number of explosions have been reported.
Many other petrochemical facilities have reported lesser but significant damage to their roofs and holding tanks from Harvey, the heaviest rain event in recorded US history. ExxonMobil had to shut down two facilities, with one damaged plant in Baytown releasing more than 12,500lbs of chemicals including benzene and xylene.
Fourteen plants, operated by firms including Shell and Dow Chemical, have also reported wastewater overflows following the hurricane. It’s not yet clear what volume of pollutants has been released, although some scientists are concerned the huge volume of water washing through Houston will carry high levels of toxins.
Along with its enormous petrochemical industry, Harris county, in which Houston sits, has more than a dozen superfund sites – federally designated toxic areas in need of cleaning up – that may also spread contamination.
The US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have said they have about 200 staff members working to monitor wastewater issues and safeguard drinking water.
“Floodwaters may contain many hazards, including bacteria and other disease agents,” the agencies warned in a joint statement. “Precautions should be taken by anyone involved in cleanup activities or any others who may be exposed to floodwaters.
“These precautions include heeding all warnings from local and state authorities regarding boil-water notices, swimming advisories, or other safety advisories.”
Many residents have been alarmed by the toxic impacts of the hurricane but are skeptical that their more chronic pollution problems will be addressed once the floodwaters from Harvey have receded.
Jessica Hultze, a retired woman who lives in Houston’s second ward district, a largely Latino area, said she had noticed a strong smell of gasoline that made her feel uncomfortable.
“This has been bad but it’s not going to get better, it’ll only get worse,” she said. “We all talk about how close we are to the refineries but for us there is no hope, we will die with this poisonous air. There are so many people around here with tubes coming out of their noses.
“I’ve been around for a few years and no one has listened to us. We are just the little people.”
Petition to declare George Soros a ‘terrorist’ & seize his assets gains required 100k signatures
September 1, 2017
RT
In less than a fortnight, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition accusing billionaire investor George Soros of sedition against the US, demanding that he and his affiliates be declared “domestic terrorists” and that his assets be seized.
The petition was initially launched on August 20 by “E.B.” on the White House petitions website. Since it reached the threshold of 100,000 signatures before the September 19 deadline, the White House will now have to provide a formal response.
The creators of the petition on the website ‘We the People’ say that Soros has “willfully” tried to “destabilize and otherwise commit acts of sedition against the United States and its citizens.” To achieve these goals, the author says, “Soros has created multiple organizations with a sole purpose is to apply Alinsky model terrorist tactics to destroy the US government “The “Alinsky model” refers to American community organizer and writer Saul Alinsky. In his book ‘Rules for Radicals,’ he outlines 13 rules for political struggle to seize power.
The petition calls on the Department of Justice to “immediately declare George Soros and all of his organizations and staff members to be domestic terrorists, and have all of his personal an organizational wealth and assets seized under Civil Asset Forfeiture law.”
Another recent high-profile petition, which has already exceeded the 100,000-signature threshold by three times, calls on US President Donald Trump to classify the Antifa activist group as a terrorist organization, accusing them of violence at demonstrations and incitement to kill police.
The White House, however, has left almost a dozen petitions unanswered since Donald Trump took office in February, and is considering shutting the service down.
George Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire with a net worth of $25 billion and 33rd richest man in the world, according to Forbes. The 87-year-old investing heavyweight is behind many organizations and projects, some of which have been the target of criticism for years. His Open Society Foundation, along with USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, have been accused of fomenting color revolutions to install governments friendly to the US – from Serbia in 2000 to Ukraine in 2014.
Petition to declare ‘Antifa’ group terrorists collects 250k signatures
August 22, 2017
RT
In less than a week, one quarter of a million Americans have signed a petition to have President Donald Trump officially classify the “Antifa” group a terrorist organization, accusing them of violence at demonstrations and incitement to kill police
Using the petition website originally set up by the Obama administration, the petition calls for labeling Antifa terrorists due to the group’s “violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States.” It also compares Antifa to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
The petition was launched Thursday amid threats by Antifa against speakers and attendees of the free speech rally in Boston, Massachusetts, which was scheduled for Saturday. The rally’s libertarian organizers had been denounced as white supremacists and neo-Nazis – a charge they have emphatically denied.
In the end, Boston police kept some 40,000 protesters away from the small gathering of free speech activists. Though the majority of demonstrators were peaceful, at one point the police had to plead that individuals stop “throwing urine, bottles and other harmful projectiles” at their officers.
For their part, Boston Antifa activists made it clear that they weren’t just objecting to the free speech rights of neo-Nazis, but a wide range of political opinions they disagreed with.
After that, outraged Americans signed the petition against Antifa in droves. By Monday, it hit the 100,000 signature threshold required for the White House to officially respond to it. The Trump administration has not commented on the petition yet.
Though Antifa has been active for years, the group stepped into the limelight in 2016, when its activists engaged in violence at protests against Trump, who was running for president on the Republican ticket.
The group was thrust into the limelight last week, after Antifa activists clashed with an “alt-right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that included neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members. After the rally, a car driven by a white nationalist crashed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 other people.
Having denounced the KKK, the neo-Nazis and racists, Trump called out Antifa as well, referring to them as the “alt-left.”
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” the president said at a press conference last week. “What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs?”
Trump’s critics reacted with outrage, accusing the president of positing “moral equivalence” between Antifa and the neo-Nazis. A number of columnists and political analysts, however, point out that “Nazi” is quickly becoming a label for anyone Antifa disagrees with, which is having a chilling effect on political speech in America.
The ralliers in Boston “did nothing wrong,” Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote on Monday. “All they were guilty of was attempting to defend the importance of free speech. For that, they were unjustly smeared as Nazis and their own freedom of speech was mauled.”
It is unlikely the White House will actually go as far to declare Antifa terrorists, journalist John Bosnitch told RT. The petition is more of a message to the group to tone down their violence or face the consequences, he said.
“It is a big step to go from accusing some members of Antifa of being violent – which many of them are and intentionally so – to banning an organization on the grounds that its purpose is to create terror,” Bosnitch said. “I don’t think the White House will approve this, and I don’t think they should.”
The American Media’s Control of Public Opinion
September 2, 2017
by Christian Jürs
There is no greater power in the world today than that wielded by the manipulators of public opinion in America. No king or pope of old, no conquering general or high priest ever disposed of a power even remotely approaching that of the few dozen men who control America’s mass media of news and entertainment.
Their power is not distant and impersonal; it reaches into every home in America, and it works its will during nearly every waking hour. It is the power that shapes and molds the mind of virtually every citizen, young or old, rich or poor, simple or sophisticated.
The mass media form for us our image of the world and then tell us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know — or think we know — about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, or our television.
It is not just the heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories from our newspapers or the blatant propagandizing of history-distorting TV “docudramas” that characterizes the opinion-manipulating techniques of the media masters. They exercise both subtlety and thoroughness in their management of the news and the entertainment that they present to us.
For example, the way in which the news is covered: which items are emphasized and which are played down; the reporter’s choice of words, tone of voice, and facial expressions; the wording of headlines; the choice of illustrations — all of these things subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear.
On top of this, of course, the columnists and editors remove any remaining doubt from our minds as to just what we are to think about it all. Employing carefully developed psychological techniques, they guide our thought and opinion so that we can be in tune with the “in” crowd, the “beautiful people,” the “smart money.” They let us know exactly what our attitudes should be toward various types of people and behavior by placing those people or that behavior in the context of a TV drama or situation comedy and having the other TV characters react in the politically correct way.
Molding American Minds
For example, a racially mixed couple will be respected, liked, and socially sought after by other characters, as will a “take charge” African-American scholar or businessman, or a sensitive and talented homosexual, or a poor but honest and hardworking illegal alien from Mexico. On the other hand, any individual who writes or publishes any material that is considered by aggressive Jewish groups as being in the slightest way anti-Semitic immediately becomes the target for such charges as “Holocaust denier,” “anti-Semite,” “Pro-Arab terrorist,” “fascist,” and even “anti-American.”
The average American, of whose daily life TV-watching takes such an unhealthy portion, distinguishes between these fictional situations and reality only with difficulty, if at all. He responds to the televised actions, statements, and attitudes of TV actors much as he does to his own peers in real life. For all too many Americans the real world has been replaced by the false reality of the TV environment, and it is to this false reality that his urge to conform responds. Thus, when a TV scriptwriter expresses approval of some ideas and actions through the TV characters for whom he is writing, and disapproval of others, he exerts a powerful pressure on millions of viewers toward conformity with his own views.
And as it is with TV entertainment, so it is also with the news, whether televised or printed. The insidious thing about this form of thought control is that even when we realize that entertainment or news is biased, the media masters still are able to manipulate most of us. This is because they not only slant what they present, but they establish tacit boundaries and ground rules for the permissible spectrum of opinion.
As an example, consider the media treatment of Middle East news. Many publishers, editors or commentators are slavishly pro-Israel in their every utterance, while others seem nearly neutral. No one, however, dares suggest that the U.S. government is backing the wrong side in the Arab-Jewish conflict and that it served Jewish interests, rather than American interests, to send U.S. forces to cripple Iraq, Israel’s principal rival in the Middle East. Thus, a spectrum of permissible opinion, from pro-Israel to nearly neutral, is established.
Because there are differences in degree, however, most Americans fail to realize that they are being manipulated. Even the citizen who complains about “managed news” falls into the trap of thinking that because he is presented with an apparent spectrum of opinion he can escape the thought controllers’ influence by believing the editor or commentator of his choice. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation. Every point on the permissible spectrum of public opinion is acceptable to the media masters — and no impermissible fact or viewpoint is allowed any exposure at all, if they can prevent it.
The control of the opinion-molding media is nearly monolithic. All of the controlled media — television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures — speak with a single voice, each reinforcing the other. Despite the appearance of variety, there is no real dissent, no alternative source of facts or ideas accessible to the great mass of people that might allow them to form opinions at odds with those of the media masters. They are presented with a single view of the world — a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish “Holocaust” tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of non-White aliens pouring across our borders, the danger of permitting citizens to keep and bear arms, the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations, and the desirability of a “pluralistic,” cosmopolitan society rather than a homogeneous, White one. It is a view of the world designed by the media masters to suit their own ends — and the pressure to conform to that view is overwhelming. People adapt their opinions to it, vote in accord with it, and shape their lives to fit it.
And who are these all-powerful masters of the media? As we shall see, they are, to a very large extent, Jewish. It isn’t simply a matter of the media being controlled by profit-hungry capitalists, some of whom happen to be Jews. If that were the case, the ethnicity of the media masters would reflect, at least approximately, the ratio of rich gentiles to rich Jews. Despite a few prominent exceptions, the preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than mere happenstance.
Hezbollah says bulk of IS convoy has left Syrian government area
September 2, 2017
Reuters
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Most of an Islamic State evacuation convoy stuck in east Syria has crossed out of government territory and is no longer the responsibility of the Syrian government or its ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi‘ite group said on Saturday.
A U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State has been using warplanes to prevent the convoy from entering territory held by the jihadists in east Syria. Hezbollah and the Syrian army had escorted it from west Syria as part of a truce deal.
“The Syrian state and Hezbollah have fulfilled their obligations to transfer buses out of the area of Syrian government control without exposing them,” the statement said.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the U.S.-led jets were still blocking the convoy of fighters and their families, which was stuck in the desert, and were also stopping any aid from reaching it.
Six buses remain in government-held territory under the protection and care of the Syrian state and Hezbollah, the statement said. There were originally 17 buses in the convoy.
Hezbollah said there were old people, casualties and pregnant women in the buses stranded outside Syrian government control in the desert and called on the international community to step in to prevent them coming to harm.
About 300 lightly armed fighters were traveling on the buses, having surrendered their enclave straddling Syria’s border with Lebanon on Monday under a deal which allowed them to join their jihadist comrades on the other side of the country.
It angered both the U.S.-led coalition, which does not want more battle-hardened militants in an area where it is operating, and Iraq, which sees them as a threat because the convoy’s proposed destination of Al-Bukamal is close to its own border.
The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, helped by Russia and Iran-backed militias including Hezbollah, is fighting Islamic State as it pushes eastwards across the desert.
HEZBOLLAH
A commander in the pro-Assad military alliance said earlier on Saturday that Hezbollah and the Syrian army were seeking an alternative way for the convoy to cross into Islamic State territory, having already tried two other routes.
“Work is under way to change the course of the convoy for a second time,” the commander said.
The coalition has vowed to continue monitoring the convoy and disrupting any effort it makes to cross into jihadist territory but said it would not bomb it directly because it contains about 300 civilian family members of the fighters.
It has asked Russia to tell the Syrian government that it will not allow the convoy to move further east towards the Iraqi border, according to a statement issued late on Friday.
On Wednesday, the coalition said its jets had cratered a road and destroyed a bridge to stop the convoy progressing, and had bombed some of the jihadists’ comrades coming the other way to meet it.
Hezbollah and the Syrian army on Thursday changed the route of the convoy from Humeima, a hamlet deep in the southeast desert, to a location further north, but coalition jets again struck near that route, the commander said.
“It was considered a threat, meaning there was no passage that way,” the commander said. On Friday coalition jets made mock air raids over the convoy, the commander added.
“It caused panic among the Daeshis. The militants are scared the convoy will be bombarded as soon as it enters Deir al-Zor,” the commander said, using a plural form of the Arabic acronym for Islamic state to refer to its fighters.
Reporting by Laila Bassam; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Helen Popper, Greg Mahlich
Russian warplanes bomb ISIS position as Damascus pushes forward to Deir ez-Zor
September 2, 2017
DW
The Russian Defense Ministry has released footage of airstrikes targeting Islamic State forces in the Deir ez-Zor governorate. The bombings are being conducted to help Syrian government forces break through a blockade of the provincial capital.
Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) controls the rural areas of the governorate while the city remains under the control of government troops. The Syrian Army, backed by the Russian Air Force, is ramping up pressure on the jihadists to push them back from the city and establish a safe land route after years of blockade.
Army to Send 1,200 Alaska-Based Soldiers to Afghanistan
The U.S. Army will start deploying about 1,200 Alaska-based soldiers to Afghanistan this week.
September 1, 2017
AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The U.S. Army is set to send about 1,200 Alaska-based soldiers to Afghanistan this week to advise the country’s security forces.
The soldiers of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division from Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson will deploy throughout the next month, Alaska Public Media reported on Wednesday.
Maj. David Cochrane, the unit’s operations commander, said most soldiers will be sent to eastern Afghanistan to advise and assist the country’s security forces.
The unit was last deployed to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012. Cochrane said the new mission is expected to be less combat-oriented.
“We’re partnered with both the Afghan police — uniformed and border police — and then the Afghan national Army,” Cochrane said. “We’re really wanting to help them become more capable, and more able to defend their own nation, to conduct their own missions, and be independent of outside help.”
The deployment was first announced in April and is not connected with President Trump’s recent decision to send several thousand more troops to Afghanistan.
The 25th Infantry Division (nicknamed “Tropic Lightning”, “Electric Strawberry”, and the C’ Chi National Guard during the Vietnam War) is a U.S. Army division based in Hawaii. The division, which was activated on 1 October 1941 in Hawaii, conducts military operations in the Asia-Pacific region. Its present deployment is composed of Stryker, light infantry, airborne, and aviation units. The division is being moved to Alaaska as part of a program to gain control of Arctic natural resources and territory.
Organization of the 25th Infantry Division
Current structure
Cmdr: MG Christopher G. Cavoli 2016-present
OrBat of the 25th Infantry Division
25th Infantry Division
1st Brigade Combat Team (Stryker) “Arctic Wolves” (under United States Army Alaska)
Headquarters & Headquarters Company
1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment
3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment
1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment
5th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment (RSTA)
2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artillery Regiment
25th Support Battalion
Delta Company, 52nd Infantry Regiment (Anti-tank)
73rd Engineer Company
176th Signal Company
184th Military Intelligence Company
Task Force Couch (Deactivated in 2007)
2nd Brigade Combat Team (Stryker) “Warriors”
Headquarters & Headquarters Company
1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment
1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment
1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment
2nd Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment (RSTA)
2nd Battalion 11th Field Artillery Regiment
225th Brigade Support Battalion
Bravo Company, 52nd Infantry Regiment (Anti-tank)
66th Engineer Company
556th Signal Company
185th Military Intelligence Company
3rd Brigade Combat Team (Infantry) “Broncos”
2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment “Wolfhounds”
2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment “Cacti”
3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment “Raider”
3rd Battalion, 7th Field Artillery Regiment “Steel”
325th Brigade Support Battalion “Mustangs”
Special Troops Battalion “Bayonet”
4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) “Spartan” (under United States Army Alaska)
1st Battalion (Airborne), 501st Infantry Regiment “1 Geronimo”
3rd Battalion (Airborne), 509th Infantry Regiment “3 Geronimo”
1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment “Denali”
2nd Battalion (Airborne), 377th Field Artillery Regiment “Spartan Steel”
725th Brigade Support Battalion “Centurion”
Special Troops Battalion “Warrior”
Combat Aviation Brigade
Headquarters & Headquarters Company
1st Battalion (Attack Reconnaissance), 25th Aviation Regiment (AH 64)”Gunfighters”
2nd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment (UH-60) “Diamond Head”
3rd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment (CH-47) “Hammerhead”
2nd Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment (OH-58D) “Lightning Horse”
209th Aviation Support Battalion “Lobos”
Fentanyl Overtakes Heroin as Leading Cause of U.S. Drug Deaths
The first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths in 2016 shows overdose deaths growing even faster than previously thought.
September 2, 2017
by Josh Katz
The New York Times
Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It’s a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times’s estimate in June, which was based on earlier preliminary data.
Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, accompanied by an upturn in deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamines. Together they add up to an epidemic of drug overdoses that is killing people at a faster rate than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.
This is the first national data to break down the growth by drug and by state. We’ve known for a while that fentanyls were behind the growing count of drug deaths in some states and counties. But now we can see the extent to which this is true nationally, as deaths involving synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyls, have risen to more than 20,000 from 3,000 in just three years.
Deaths involving prescription opioids continue to rise, but many of those deaths also involved heroin, fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue. There is a downward trend in deaths from prescription opioids alone. At the same time, there has been a resurgence in cocaine and methamphetamine deaths. Many of these also involve opioids, but a significant portion of drug deaths — roughly one-third in 2015 — do not.
The explosion in fentanyl deaths and the persistence of widespread opioid addiction have swamped local and state resources. Communities say their budgets are being strained by the additional needs — for increased police and medical care, for widespread naloxone distribution and for a stronger foster care system that can handle the swelling number of neglected or orphaned children.
It’s an epidemic hitting different parts of the country in different ways. People are accustomed to thinking of the opioid crisis as a rural white problem, with accounts of Appalachian despair and the plight of New England heroin addicts. But fentanyls are changing the equation: The death rate in Maryland last year outpaced that in both Kentucky and Maine.
This provisional data, compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, was produced in response to requests from government officials after reporting from The Times in June. An early version of the report was posted online last month and will be formally published by the N.C.H.S. in the coming weeks. According to Robert Anderson, the agency’s chief of mortality statistics, the document is the first edition of what will be a monthly report on the latest provisional overdose death counts.
Because of delays in drug death reporting, the data is mostly but not entirely complete. The final numbers, released in December, could be even higher.
It’s too early to know what 2017 will hold, but anecdotal reports from state health departments and county coroners and medical examiners suggest that the overdose epidemic has continued to worsen. In March, President Trump created a commission to study the crisis. The commission’s interim report made a number of recommendations, but the administration has yet to take concrete action on any of them.
Protecting Earth from an asteroid strike – what can we do?
As a humble Earth-bound species, humanity has been lucky enough to avoid major asteroid collisions. As we take our first steps into space, scientists are working on ways to protect Earth – before our luck runs out.
September 2, 2017
by Darko Janjevic
DW
An asteroid named Florence whizzed past Earth on Friday, safely passing us by at the distance of 7 million kilometers (4.4 million miles) from the surface. According to NASA, Florence was “the largest asteroid to pass this close to our planet since the first near-Earth asteroid was discovered over a century ago.”
With its diameter of 4.4 kilometers, NASA classifies the object as “potentially hazardous.” An impact with an asteroid this size would cause unprecedented destruction. In 2013, a much smaller and previously undetected meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, releasing the energy equivalent around 30 Hiroshima atom bombs, according to NASA. As the blast happened over 23 kilometers above ground, most of the energy was absorbed by the atmosphere and nobody was killed. Still, the resulting shockwave knocked people off their feet, shattered windows in six Russian cities, and the fireball temporarily blinded scores of observers on the ground. Scientists estimate that the object was 59 feet (18 meters) wide.
The events such as the Chelyabinsk blast, or the more devastating Tunguska incident in 1908, remain very rare. Next time, however, we might be ready for it – with scientists across the globe developing numerous strategies for planetary defense.
Nuclear option
The science fiction notion of blasting an asteroid out of the sky might not be enough to protect humanity, researchers say. Our nuclear missiles could be effective against smaller asteroids, but any object big enough to threaten our civilization would be too big to be destroyed in such a way. Additionally, fragmenting an incoming asteroid could create a “shotgun effect” with many smaller pieces possibly dealing even more damage when hitting Earth.
A more advanced concept involving nuclear weapons was picked up by NASA in 2012 from Iowa State researcher Bong Wie and NASA engineer Brent Barbee. The duo assumed varying warning times to mount an anti-asteroid mission: ranging from several years to only days before the impact.
The risk of asteroids hitting Earth is “very real,” Wie said in a paper published at NASA’s website. “It is only a matter of when, and humankind must be prepared for it.”
The researchers created a concept for a two-part spacecraft called Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle or HAIV. The vehicle would carry a nuclear bomb. Approaching the asteroid, the non-nuclear section of the HAIV would smash into it and create a crater. The nuclear device would then enter the crater and detonate, with the strength of the blast magnified multiple times underground. If done correctly, the blast might be enough to scatter asteroid fragments and reduce their chances of hitting Earth.
According to Wie and Barbee, their system would be capable of destroying an asteroid of up to 45 meters in size outside the orbit of the Moon, providing a one-week warning. Larger objects would demand longer warning periods.
However, it would first take several years to build such a system, and its components still need to be experimentally tested.
Kinetic impactor technique
With HAIV still on the drawing board, both NASA and their European colleagues in ESA are already preparing missions to test the kinetic impactor technique – hitting asteroids with man-made objects to alter their course. Given long enough warning times, even a slight course correction could direct an asteroid safely past Earth.
NASA is currently designing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, expected to eventually rendezvous with an asteroid called Didymos. The asteroid would fly by Earth in 2022 and then again in 2024. Didymos is a binary system, consisting of a larger object, some 780 meters in size, and a smaller one, around 160 meters wide, which is orbiting his larger twin.
After catching up with Didymos, the refrigerator-sized DART will strike the smaller object while traveling at the speed around six kilometer per second, which is nine times faster than a bullet. The impact should change the orbit of smaller segment and provide data for such attempts on a larger scale.
ESA is responsible for the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) spacecraft, which would monitor the impact and record the results.
Gravity tractor
Arguably the most elegant strategy for knocking a potentially dangerous asteroid off course is the so-called gravity tractor. The concept is simple – a spacecraft flying alongside an asteroid for years or decades would have enough gravitational pull to change its path. However, the technique has never been tried in practice and would require “decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission,” according to NASA.
Scientists have also proposed various other options, such as attaching rocket engines or solar sails to asteroids, or even painting the objects white to change the amount of solar radiation, which would provide a small but steady push away from the impact zone.
Sky is clear for now
Scientists say that a car-sized asteroid hits the Earth atmosphere about once every year, and burns up before reaching the surface. However, NASA predicts that there is less than a 0.01 percent chance of a potentially hazardous asteroid making an impact in the next hundred years.
In 2135, a 500-meter asteroid Bennu will make a close pass to Earth, getting inside the Moon’s orbit and potentially changing its path. Although we know that it would not hit Earth that time, its orbit might change just enough to collide with Earth several decades later. The chances for that are about one in 2,700. This would give the Earth time to prepare and launch one of its planetary defense missions.
Even if Bennu ends up colliding with Earth, the asteroid is not big enough to destroy human civilization.
Last year, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx mission towards Bennu, which is scheduled to reach the object in 2018 and study it for two years before returning to Earth with a sample. The primary mission goals are to learn more about the evolution of Earth and the Solar System. However, scientists could also use this data to prepare for the potential impact in the future.
In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere
Over 100 years after the most powerful explosion in documented history, researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what happened
July 7, 2016
by Melissa Hogenboom
BBC News
On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river.
The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.
The earth trembled. Windows smashed in the nearest town over 35 miles (60km) away. Residents there even felt heat from the blast, and some were blown off their feet.
Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely inhabited. There were no official reports of human casualties, though one local deer herder reportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast. Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.
One eyewitness account said that “the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire…
“At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing.”
This “Tunguska event” remains the most powerful of its kind recorded in history – it produced about 185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb (with some estimates coming in even higher). Seismic rumbles were even observed as far away as the UK.
And yet, over a hundred years later researchers are still asking questions about what exactly took place on that fateful day. Many are convinced that it was an asteroid or a comet that was responsible for the blast. But very few traces of this large extraterrestrial object have ever been found, opening the way for more outlandish explanations for the explosion.
The Tunguska region of Siberia is a remote place, with a dramatic climate. It has a long hostile winter and a very short summer, when the ground changes into a muddy uninhabitable swamp. This makes the area extremely hard to get to.
When the explosion happened, nobody ventured to the site to investigate. This was partly because the Russian authorities had more pressing concerns than sating scientific curiosity, says Natalia Artemieva of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Political strife in the country was growing – World War One and the Russian Revolution were just a few years away. “There were only some publications in local papers, not even in St Petersburg or Moscow,” she says.
It was only a few decades later, in 1927, that a Russian team led by Leonid Kulik finally made a trip to the area. He had stumbled across a description of the event six years earlier and convinced Russian authorities that a trip would be worthwhile. When he got there, the damage was still immediately apparent, almost 20 years after the blast.
He found a large area of flattened trees, spreading out about 31 miles (50km) wide in a strange butterfly shape. He proposed that an extraterrestrial meteor had exploded in the atmosphere.
It puzzled him that there was no impact crater, or in fact, any meteoric remnants at all. To explain this, he suggested that the swampy ground was too soft to preserve whatever hit it and that any debris from the collision had been buried.
Kulik still hoped that he could uncover the remains, as he wrote in his 1938 conclusions. “We should expect to encounter, at a depth of hardly less than 25 metres, crushed masses of this nickeliferous iron, individual pieces of which may have a weight of one or two hundred metric tons.”
Russian researchers later said that it was a comet, not a meteor that caused the damage. Comets are largely made up of ice – not rock, like meteorites – so the absence of alien rock fragments would make more sense this way. The ice would have started to evaporate as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, and continue to do so as it hit the ground.
But that was not the end of the debate. Because the exact identity of the explosion was unclear, strange alternative theories soon started to appear.
Some suggested the Tunguska event could have been the result of matter and antimatter colliding. When this happens, the particles annihilate and emit intense bursts of energy.
Another proposal was that a nuclear explosion caused the blast. An even more outlandish suggestion was that an alien spaceship crashed at the site on its search for the fresh water of Lake Baikal.
As you might expect, none of these theories stuck. Then, in a 1958 expedition to the site, researchers discovered tiny remnants of silicate and magnetite in the soil.
Further analysis showed they were high in nickel, a known characteristic of meteoric rock. The meteor explanation looked correct after all – and K. Florensky, author of a 1963 report on the event, was keen to put the more fantastical theories to rest:
“While I am aware of the advantages of sensational publicity in drawing public attention to a problem, it should be stressed that unhealthy interest aroused as a result of distorted facts and misinformation should never be used as a basis for the furtherance of scientific knowledge.”
But that did not stop others coming up with even more imaginative ideas. In 1973 a paper was published in the reputable journal Nature, suggesting that a black hole collided into Earth to cause the explosion. This was quickly disputed by others.
Artemieva says ideas like this are simply a by-product of human psychology. “People who like secrets and ‘theories’ usually do not listen to scientists,” she says. A huge explosion, coupled with a lack of cosmic remnants, is ripe for these kinds of speculations.
But she also says scientists must shoulder some responsibility, because they took so long to analyse the explosion site. They were more concerned with bigger asteroids that might cause global extinctions, just as the Chicxulub asteroid did. It wiped out most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
In 2013 one team put a stop to much of the speculation of the earlier decades. Led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the researchers analysed microscopic samples of rocks collected from the explosion site in 1978. The rocks had a meteoric origin. Crucially, the fragments they analysed were recovered from a layer of peat dating back to 1908.
The remnants had traces of a carbon mineral called lonsdaleite, which has a crystal structure almost like diamond. This particular mineral is known to form when a graphite-containing structure, such as a meteor, crashes into Earth.
“Our study of samples from Tunguska, as well as research of many other authors reveals meteorite origin of Tunguska event,” says Kvasnytsya. “We believe that nothing paranormal happened at Tunguska.”
The main problem, he says, is that researchers had spent too much time looking for large pieces of rock. “What was necessary was to look for very small particles,” such as the ones his team studied.
But it is not a definitive conclusion. Meteor showers occur often. Many small ones might therefore sprinkle their remnants onto Earth unnoticed. Samples with meteoric origin could presumably come from one of these. Some researchers also cast doubt that the peat collected dates from 1908.
Even Artemieva says she needs to revise her models to understand the total absence of meteorites at Tunguska.
Still, in line with Leonid Kulik’s early observations, today the broad consensus remains that the Tunguska event was caused by a large cosmic body, like an asteroid or comet, colliding with Earth’s atmosphere.
Most asteroids have quite stable orbits, many of which are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, “various gravitational interactions can make them change their orbit more dramatically,” says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, UK.
Occasionally these rocky bodies can cross over into Earth’s orbit which can put them onto a collision course with us. At the point one enters into our atmosphere and begins to fragment, it is known as a meteor.
What made the Tunguska event so dramatic was that it was an extremely rare case of what researchers call a “megaton” event – as the energy emitted was about 10-15 megatons of TNT, though even higher estimates have also been proposed.
This is also why the Tunguska event has been difficult to make full sense of. It is the only event of that magnitude that has happened in recent history. “That limits our understanding,” says Collins.
Artemieva now says there are clear stages that took place, which she has outlined in a review to be published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the second half of 2016.
First, the cosmic body entered our atmosphere at 9-19 miles per second (15-30km/s).
Fortunately, our atmosphere is good at protecting us. “It will break apart a rock smaller than a football field across,” explains NASA researcher Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Most people think they come whaling in from outer space and leave a crater, and there’s a big smoking piece of rock on the ground. The truth is kind of the opposite.”
The atmosphere will generally break rocks up a few kilometres above the Earth’s surface, producing an occasional shower of smaller rocks that, by the time they hit the ground, will be cold.
In the case of Tunguska, the incoming meteor must have been extremely fragile, or the explosion so intense, it obliterated all its remnants 8-10km above Earth.
This process explains the event’s second stage. The atmosphere vaporised the object into tiny pieces, while at the same time intense kinetic energy also transformed them into heat.
“The process is similar to a chemical explosion. In conventional explosions, chemical or nuclear energy is transformed into heat,” says Artemieva.
In other words, any remnants from whatever entered Earth’s atmosphere were turned into cosmic dust in the process.
If events unfolded this way, it explains the lack of large chunks of cosmic material at the site. “It is very difficult to find a millimetre-size grain in a big area. It is necessary to search in the peat,” says Kvasnytsya.
As the object entered our atmosphere and broke apart, the intense heat resulted in shockwaves that were felt for hundreds of kilometres. When this airburst then hit the ground it flattened all the trees in the vicinity.
Artemieva suggests an enormous plume resulted from the updraught, which was then followed by a cloud, “thousands of kilometres in diameter”.
But Tunguska’s story is not over. Even now, some other researchers have proposed that we have been missing an obvious clue to explain the event.
In 2007 an Italian team suggested that a lake 5 miles (8km) north-north-west of the explosion’s epicentre could be an impact crater. Lake Cheko, they say, did not feature on any maps before the event.
Luca Gasperini of the University of Bologna in Italy, travelled to the lake in the late 1990s, and says it is difficult to explain the origin of the lake in any other way. “Now we are sure it was formed after the impact, not from the main Tunguska body but of a fragment of the asteroid that was preserved by the explosion.”
Gasperini firmly believes that a large piece of asteroid lies 33ft (10m) below the bottom of the lake, buried in sediment. “It would be very easy for Russians to get there and drill,” he says. Despite heavy criticism of the theory, he still hopes someone will scour the lake for remnants of meteoric origin.
That Lake Cheko is an impact crater is not a popular idea. It is just another “quasi-theory” says Artemieva. “Any ‘enigmatic’ objects at the bottom of this lake could be easily recovered with minimal efforts – the lake is not deep,” she says. Collins also disagrees with Gasperini’s idea.
In 2008, he and colleagues published a rebuttal to the theory, stating that “unaffected mature trees” were close to the lake, which would have been obliterated if a large piece of rock had fallen close by.
Regardless of the details, the influence of the Tunguska event is still felt. Research papers on the subject continue to be published.
Today, astronomers also peer into the skies with powerful telescopes to look for signs that rocks with the potential to cause a similar event are heading our way, and to assess the risk that they pose.
In 2013 in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a relatively small meteor around 62ft (19m) wide created visible disruption. This surprised researchers like Collins. His models had predicted it would not cause as much damage as it did.
“What’s challenging is that this process of the asteroid disrupting in the atmosphere, decelerating, evaporating and transferring its energy to the air, is a very complicated process. We would like to understand it more, to better predict consequences of these events in future.”
Chelyabinsk-sized meteors were previously believed to occur roughly every 100 years, while Tunguska-sized events had been predicted to occur once a millennium. This figure has since been revised. Chelyabinsk-sized meteors could be happening 10 times more frequently, says Collins, while Tunguska style impacts could occur as often as once every 100-200 years.
Unfortunately, we are and will remain defenceless against similar events, says Kvasnytsya. If another explosion like the Tunguska event took place above a populated city, it would cause thousands if not millions of casualties, depending where it hit.
But it is not all bad news. The probability of that happening is extremely small, says Collins, especially given the huge surface area of Earth that is covered in water. “When a Tunguska-type event happens again, the overwhelming probability is that it will happen nowhere near human population.”
We may never find out whether the Tunguska event was caused by a meteor or comet, but in a way that does not matter. Either could have resulted in the intense cosmic disruption, which we are still talking about over a century later.