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Iranian General Dead, What’s Next, Asks Physicians for Civil Defense

After Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed by a U.S. drone strike, Iran has vowed reprisals. A senior commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps claims that up to 35 “vital” US and Israeli targets are within Iran’s reach.

Physicians for Civil Defense observes that in this age of “asymmetric warfare,” civilians here, not just military installations “over there,” are at risk.

Iran’s aspirations of being a nuclear power, with ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to America, have apparently not yet been achieved, but other methods of causing mass casualties and disruptions are available, states Jane M. Orient, M.D, president of Physicians for Civil Defense.

Extinction Rebellion

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(6): November 2019 (published December 2019)

Global street theater this year has featured the Extinction Rebellion movement (XR), which began last year in Britain and claims to have chapters in 50 countries and to have held protests in 60 cities in Turkey, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere. Its flag displays a stylized hourglass in a circle. Protests often feature demonstrators wearing white masks and red costumes, and copious amounts of fake blood.

XR is aligned with the school strike movement reportedly inspired by Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Thunberg, after attending a global climate change summit in Madrid, lamented that millions of students “striking” had “achieved nothing.” Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. “The current world leaders are betraying us and we will not let that happen anymore,” Thunberg said in a brief speech to a crowd of 15,000 protesters (https://tinyurl.com/rmj39jj).

Fire and Ice

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(5): September 2019 (published Decembrt 2019)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost, 1920

According to one of his biographers, Robert Frost’s most famous poem, “Fire and Ice,” was inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The structure of the poem with two short last lines evokes the downward funnel of the rings of hell, with sins of passion at the top and the worst offenders, the traitors Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius, at the bottom submerged in ice up to their neck.

Saving the World from CO2 Starvation

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(4): July 2019 (published October 2019)

The carbon cycle on earth involves the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere, and the lithosphere. Today’s panicked schoolchildren crusade for the cause of keeping it (carbon-based “fossil” fuels) in the ground, or for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pumping it below ground, purportedly to keep it from frying the planet or acidifying the oceans.

In fact, there is a natural mechanism for sequestering CO₂: living organisms in the ocean. One hundred million billion tons of carbon have been taken up by coccolithophores (phytoplankton), shellfish, corals and foraminifera (zooplankton) over the past 160 million years, according to Patrick Moore, speaking at the 37th annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. These organisms incorporate carbon into calcium carbonate plates, scales, or shells. Over the long-term, these become a carbon sink as they fall to the bottom of the ocean and become part of the sediment. The level of atmospheric CO₂ has fallen steadily from about 2,500 ppmv to the current level of less than 400 ppmv over this period—perilously close to the 150 ppmv level that spells the death of plants.

The Great Pacific Plastic Hoax

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(3): May 2019 (published October 2019)

Last summer, Seattle became the first major American city to ban plastic straws. Alaska Airlines also announced a plan to ditch them, followed by the food service company Bon Appétit, American Airlines, and Starbucks (Fast Company [FC] 3/1/19, https://tinyurl.com/y2up6bqy). California became the first state to ban them from restaurant tables.

This gesture is aimed at addressing ocean plastic pollution, one of the newest Greenpeace scare campaigns:

“There is a sea of plastic garbage twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

“A new continent ‘Plastic Nation’ has emerged and threatens to kill the oceans in less than 10 years.”

Urgent Questions on Ebola Need Immediate Answers

While public health officials are preoccupied with measles, hundreds of people are coming through our border from the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where thousands have Ebola, notes Physicians for Civil Defense.

In the entire U.S., there are about half a dozen hospital beds equipped for safe treatment of Ebola victims. We were very fortunate to escape a disastrous outbreak here during the epidemic in West Africa. There are two new vaccines that generate antibodies, but we don’t know how protective they would be—if you are one of the few who could get a dose.

Outbreaks

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(2): March 2019

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a disease outbreak is the occurrence of cases of disease in excess of what would normally be expected in a defined community, geographical area, or season. A single case of a communicable disease long absent, or caused by an agent not previously recognized in that area may also be reported as an outbreak.

Although measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, there are dozens to hundreds of cases reported every year, generally attributed to travel from abroad. A peak of 667 cases in 2014 was followed by 188 in 2015 and 86 in 2015. In 2019, the 2014 peak has been surpassed. The last death in the U.S. attributed to measles occurred in 2015.

Why the nonstop news coverage? It appears to be related to the nationwide push to do away with exemptions from the nearly 70 injections of mandated school vaccines, except for narrowly defined medical exemptions. There is far less coverage of outbreaks that can’t be blamed on the tiny proportion of vaccine exemptors, or that result from an influx of unhealthy immigrants or from homeless drug addicts defecating in public.

Green New Deal

Civil Defense Perspectives 34(1): January 2019 (published May 2019)

The new date for the Apocalypse has been set for 12 years, unless “we” take immediate drastic action. Schoolchildren are “striking” (skipping school) to urge governments to do something to save their futures.

Former bartender, new Democratic Socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) (D-N.Y.) crashed into the new Congress, holding a sit-in in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office even before Congress convened, to advocate the Green New Deal. Many Democrat candidates for President and dozens of congressmen have signed on. It calls for a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II” —with a “near total economic transformation.”

This would require generating 100% of power from “renewable” sources, “upgrading” all buildings for energy efficiency (cost to meet California requirements for an average home, $58,000), and replacing 260 million gasoline-powered cars with all-electric vehicles (or perhaps just junking them).

Apocalypse When?

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(6): November 2018

The date certain of the climate apocalypse when Manhattan will be underwater, predicted for 40 years, keeps getting pushed back from Al Gore’s early threats, but this just means a “bit more breathing space” for the world to meet its CO₂ reduction goals.

It’s a “matter of (half) degrees,” writes Nature on Oct 11. “The latest IPCC assessment on a 1.5 °C increase makes it clear that there is no safe level of global warming.” A 1.5 °C increase could cause the loss of 70%-90% of our coral reefs; with 2 °C, they could disappear almost entirely. “Projections based on current emissions commitments suggest that the world is on track for around 3 °C of warming by the end of the century” (ibid.)

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says CO₂ emissions must peak now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models show that to achieve the goal of a less-than-2.7 °F (1.5 °C) increase, the world must stop all fossil fuel use in 4 years. If all countries met their Paris targets, we’d be 1% of the way there (Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ 10/9/18). The number of countries even aiming to reach their Paris targets is 16/197 (6%) (TWTW 11/3/18, sepp.org).

Scientific Regression

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(5): September 2018

Everyone claims to be in favor of “data-based,” “evidence-based,” or “science-based” policy; demands “peer review”; and disdains “pseudoscience,” “fringe opinions,” and “outliers.”

But in these days when our society is so heavily dependent on science, “the problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t,” writes software engineer William A. Wilson (First Things, May 2016, https://tinyurl.com/zzlbevc).

The original study by the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) showed that an astonishing 65% of 100 published psychology experiments failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

An unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry is that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer found that in more than 75% of 67 recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, data published in prestigious journals did not match up with their attempts to replicate it.