Endocrine Disruptors

DDP Newsletter Vol. XL, No. 3

A current invisible scary threat, impossible for people to verify for themselves, is endocrine disruptors (EDs) lurking in the water. This topic first appeared in the National Library of Medicine PubMed data base in 1995, reached a maximum of 1,088 citations in 2019, and still occurs almost 1,000 times/y, dozens of times in association with plastics.

The term was coined at the 1991 Wingspread conference, a rebranding of the more benign term “endocrine modulators,” explains Steve Milloy (tinyurl.com/4ssdrfjj).

On Aug 23, 1994, the endocrine-disruptor scare was reported in the New York Times in an article titled “Pesticides May Leave Legacy of Hormonal Chaos.” Referring to some wildlife populations, Theo Colborn, the activist who convened the Wingspread conference, stated: “I’d say we are on a fast track to extinction…. You would expect the same thing to happen to human populations.” Colburn, a pharmacist, earned a Ph.D. in zoology at age 58 (ibid.).

Continue reading “Endocrine Disruptors”

World War III: Is There an Existential Crisis?

Are you or your children convinced that the world will soon end, and there’s no use preparing—or working, or planning for the future, or starting a family

Today, some 75% of young persons (age 16-25) in 10 countries report finding the future frightening because of climate change. The media is saturated with news about “climate change,” greatly exceeding coverage of other stories, as the graph shows.

There are scare stories that some humans are creating weather disasters as by steering hurricanes, and the prevailing narrative that human civilization is destroying the planet by burning hydrocarbon fuels. What to do? “VOTE” [for Kamala], says Bill Nye, “the Science Guy,” and for local authorities who are more quietly implementing “Net Zero” initiatives.) And prepare to give up your car, your freedom to travel, your large home and yard, etc.)

In fact, humans’ most powerful works are puny in comparison with the forces of nature that determine weather and climate (such as the sun and ocean currents). The energy in a hurricane is the equivalent of 10,000 nuclear bombs. If humans disappeared, the climate would keep changing.

Human-caused nuclear war, however, is a growing threat. Biological warfare has even greater potential to wipe out humanity. Some see artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat, at least in the future. At present, it is helping to keep control of the narratives. All of these threats (including the response to purported human-caused climate change, not the weather itself) could cause vast depopulation, and some say that is their purpose.

Preparedness is not futile. Communications, weather forecasting, a full gas tank, a go-kit, prudent stockpiling of supplies, knowledge of nuclear weapons effects, maintaining your health and immune system, and early treatment with repurposed drugs would greatly diminish casualties.

Faith, hope, and love remain a necessary foundation.

Additional information:

WHAT  IS  FEMA  DOING?

DDP Newsletter Vol. XL, No. 5

In the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, many people were asking this question. Accusations first about absence and then about slow deployment and malfeasance are widely disseminated and officially denied. Also, sensationalist theories assert that the storm was man-made or steered for a nefarious purpose, such as to affect the election or to wipe out those who oppose lithium mining in this area. Counterintuitively, influencers who promote such allegations claim to belong to the political side that was always highly skeptical about “man-made climate change.”

What is the true situation?

Whatever it is, it is not new. During Hurricane Katrina, people asked the same question, and the passage of S.3721, the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (https://tinyurl.com/8jyctvar) seemingly made no difference.

FEMA operates like any other corrupted bureaucracy: response will be slow and encumbered with red tape. There will be conflicts with local and state authorities and volunteers. As one person who did public relations for the agency during disasters described it, “FEMA sends in the money truck.” An official photo from North Carolina shows a neat trailer with staff to help people fill out forms. So far, a relatively paltry $4 million has been paid directly to families and individuals in the week after Hurricane Helene, reports Larry Bell, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has warned that his $640.9 million FEMA storm relief budget is now just about tapped out for the rest of this season (https://tinyurl.com/9a4rrwtz).

“FEMA is broke,” said Prof. Peter St Onge, because of spending on other priorities such as Ukraine and migrants. Quoting America First Legal, he said that “Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA into an illegal alien resettlement agency” (https://tinyurl.com/y5pxyjw5). Critics of this interpretation claim that subsidies for immigrants come from a “different source” and that the GOP-led House is responsible for the agency’s funding shortfall (https://tinyurl.com/4a5tn8p3).

But where are relief supplies going, and who is rescuing people?

Elon Musk accused FEMA of “belligerent government incompetence.” He claimed that FEMA was “blockading the disaster area and preventing private helicopters from delivering Starlink terminals, which connect to satellite internet service, and other supplies…. @FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help” (tinyurl.com/25thtp8z).

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said, “No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights.” A FEMA spokesperson stated, “FEMA has helped provide Starlink terminals…. These units are supporting state and local municipalities, Urban Search and Rescue and disaster coordination” (ibid.).

[Musk noted that Starlink likely would have already been up and running in some of these areas if the Harris-Biden Federal Communications Commission hadn’t stopped a $885 million grant to SpaceX to provide broadband to rural communities in 2022. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside $42 billion to build broadband infrastructure in rural and underserved communities, but so far, zero connection have been made.]

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called the “false” criticisms of the agency’s response “dangerous.” They could hinder FEMA’s recovery efforts. “It has a tremendous impact on the comfort level of our own employees to be able to go out there, but it’s also demoralizing to all of the first responders…FEMA staff, volunteers,” she told host George Stephanopoulos (https://tinyurl.com/mstnssvp).

One allegation is that FEMA refused to supply body bags and was planning to bulldoze an area without recovering the bodies. A responsive response would have been: “We did supply the body bags. All human remains will be treated with respect. Here is a source of information about efforts to identify them.” This has not been heard.

The task is enormous; volunteers are urgently needed. However, FEMA.gov urges you to “donate and volunteer responsibly.” You should register before volunteering. Unaffiliated volunteers who self-deploy might burden the community, FEMA warns.

As disaster response lags, FEMA’S new priorities, posted on its website, are: (1) Instill equity as a foundation of emergency management; (2) Lead whole of community in climate resilience; (3) Promote and sustain a ready FEMA and prepared nation.

Criswell said she made Equity her priority; then FEMA held Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training saying the U.S. is rooted in extreme violence, and “White Supremacy is in almost every institution” (https://tinyurl.com/yrfbrb8r). In a virtual meeting in March 2023, FEMA emergency management specialist Tyler Atkins said the agency was prioritizing LGBTQ people because they are “already disadvantaged.” LGBTQ victims should receive more support because they would have been “already struggling” before a natural disaster (https://tinyurl.com/39syehx7).

FEMA BACKGROUND

DDP was originally part of The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA). Our joint meetings generally featured a speaker from FEMA—when it still concerned itself with civil defense. In the Reagan Administration, under Gen. Julius Becton, FEMA revived nuclear war defense instead of being an “all hazards but one” agency. It supported the construction of five mobile NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) shelter displays, which appeared at DDP meetings and were taken by DDP to county and state fairs in many cities. The one made for FEMA deteriorated unused at the National Emergency Training Center until it was finally buried to use in fire-training exercises. FEMA required us to remove the medical kit as too dangerous for laypeople (the updated version can be downloaded from ddponline.org/medkit).The refurbished Arizona shelter appeared at the 2023 meeting and is now popular in Oregon at fairs and in parades. Today, the U.S. is largely do-it-yourself for all hazards as well as for civil defense.

FEMA was started by executive order in the Nixon Administration to assure the survivability of the United States government in the event of a nuclear attack on this nation. It was also assigned the task of being a federal coordinating body during times of domestic disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes.

Over the years, the scope of FEMA’s activities has expanded, as have its powers, through a series of executive orders. For example, E.O. 11921 of June 11, 1976, gives the federal government power over all “usable  water” (https://tinyurl.com/39wp43j3).

Only a small fraction of FEMA’s spending goes for helping U.S. disaster victims. Continuity of government—including elaborate bunkers for selected officials—is likely the highest priority. Some say that FEMA is the most powerful organization in the U.S.—or could be in case of a national crisis (real or imagined). Meanwhile, it is busily implementing the regime’s political and social priorities, as flood victims are abandoned.

World War III: Russian Nuclear Doctrine Revised

Have you wondered what the candidates for President think about Vladimir Putin’s statement to the UN Security Council?

“President Vladimir Putin warned the West on Wednesday that Russia could use nuclear weapons if it was struck with conventional missiles, and that Moscow would consider any assault on it supported by a nuclear power to be a joint attack,” according to a press release by Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge.

This occurs in the context of Ukrainian demands for permission to use U.S. or NATO-supplied long-range missiles to strike targets deep within Russian territory.

“This will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.” Putin added that the Ukrainian army does not have the ability to program long-range missiles or the satellite data necessary for their targeting, relying on NATO military personnel for those tasks.

In his debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump said he wanted the Ukraine-Russia war to stop. In her address to the Democratic Party convention in August, Harris said that she “will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

 According to the TCN Morning Note of Sep 26, this is “our most dangerous moment since the Cuban missile crisis.” Tucker Carlson references a report about a House Oversight Committee investigation on whether the recent trip by Ukraine president Zelensky misused government funds to support the Harris campaign.

There is no mention of the nuclear war threat on Google News, which covers Hurricane Helene, the indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, Covid vaccine, and Diddy, continuing the policy of do-it-yourself nuclear war preparedness.

Additional information:

Physicians for Civil Defense

Climate Watch: Is CO2 Reaching a Crisis Level?

Are you worried about your carbon footprint?

“My Carbon” apps are under development. The World Economic Forum states: “Finally, it is significant that all stakeholders across the value chain come together and contribute towards achieving a net-zero future by leaving no one behind.”

Major medical journals urge physicians to consider the climate, as in choosing what kind of anesthesia to give you.

As shown in the graph, atmospheric CO2 is indeed approaching a red line.

In his film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore acknowledged that CO2 levels have been much higher—ice cores provide indisputable evidence. He did not say where it came from before there were humans burning coal, oil, and natural gas, or why the extremely high levels did not cause the oceans to boil.

Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore explains where it went: into ocean sediments in the calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms that sank when the organism died: natural sequestration.

Detailed analysis of recent papers on atmospheric CO2 and temperature by Willis Eschenbach and others concludes: “For the past 66 million years, atmospheric CO2 can be understood as a neutral spectator molecule, right up through the present.”

Why then would we want, at great expense, to remove CO2 and get closer to the red line of death?

Additional Information:

Saving the World from CO2 Starvation, Civil Defense Perspectives, July 2019

Climate Watch: Is Sea Level Rise Accelerating?

Even if you live inland yourself, a rise in sea level flooding New York or Florida would affect you. So how much should you worry?

NOAA makes some scary predictions in its U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. Certainly, sea level has increased about 400 ft in the past 20,000 years as glaciers melted after the last Ice Age, as the graph shows, but the slow current rate is not accelerating. Since about 6,000 years ago, sea-level has risen at a consistently slow rate of 0.15 to 0.2 millimeters per year totaling around 1 meter of rise for the entire period.

Al Gore and Barack Obama, with their expensive beachfront property, do not seem to be worried.

Models predict an acceleration in sea-level rise, but so far measurements from tide gauges do not show it. In some local areas, the level is higher because of land subsidence, which has nothing to do with CO2 or climate change.

Current artificial intelligence (AI) systems constantly refer to satellite data or tide-gauge data that has been modified by satellite data in their efforts to prove human-caused acceleration even when you ask specifically about tide gauge data alone. In a lengthy conversation with Gemini, Jonathan Cohler eventually got the system to admit: “There is no acceleration apparent in any tide-gauge data.” Further, he asked: “Now, why did it take you so long to admit the simple fact?” Gemini responded: “I initially prioritized providing information aligned with scientific consensus rather than focusing on raw tide-gauge data.” Gemini also admitted that it had been programmed to lie and that it had been trained using heavily biased training data.

        Those who are using AI to do their research need to understand that the public-facing interface is pre-programmed to heavily favor the conclusions the developers want people to reach, especially on Covid, climate change, and other controversial subjects.  Here is some nonprogrammable evidence pertaining to sea-level rise:

Additional information:

Five or More Failed Experiments in Measuring Global Sea Level Change. Willie Soon, Ph.D.

Climate Watch: Are Temperatures Constantly Increasing?

I hope you are able to stay cool, without resorting to the limited “cooling centers” some towns like Tucson make available. It has been hot, but is it a record and an ominous trend?

We might dismiss the high temperatures in the 1930s as mere anomalous “weather,” but are we now in a climate warming trend?            

According to this graph from the 1975 National Academy of Sciences, the 1930s were at the peak of a warming trend that began around 1890, before the great increase in burning fuels like coal, and began to decrease as fuel use increased.

Alternating this graph with one prepared by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration             (NOAA) by manipulating the data, one can see the effect of erasing the Northern Hemispheric warmth from 1890 to the mid-1950s and reducing the warmth of 1938 by nearly half a degree Celsius. Climategate emails show that erasure of the prior warmth was a coordinated effort to “hide the decline.”

 Politicians’ proposals to “address” the climate threat are based on this data.

Additional information:

Climate Watch: Is There Any Climate Good News

As the election campaigns shift into high gear, we expect to hear a lot about climate change. Last year, at the United Nations global climate summit in Dubai, Kamala Harris told world leaders that the climate clock “is no longer just ticking, it is banging. And we must make up for lost time.”

One of the predicted horrors of climate change is drought, although flooding is also a possibility. At the time of the top graph, 80% of the U.S. was experiencing severe or extreme drought.  At the time of the lower graph, only 5% of the U.S. is experiencing severe or extreme drought.

The top graph is from August 1934; the lower one is from July 2024—when the atmospheric CO2 has increased. And the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas has also increased.

Raising the CO2 level and driving SUVs did not cure drought. But it obviously didn’t cause it either. Many complex natural factors interact to cause climate or weather events, including the amount of precipitation.             Politicians should be challenged to explain how the Green New Deal will improve the climate.

Additional information:

Climate Watch: Unprecedented High Temperatures?

I hope you are able to find a respite from the heat. We’ve had “excessive heat” warnings in Tucson for several days straight.

But as the graph shows, it is not unprecedented. U.S. maximum temperatures in June 1933 were higher. Of course, one can argue that it was just “weather” then, owing to Dust Bowl conditions, but it is “climate change” now. (Note that connecting two points, as in the graph, does not make a trend. The direction of a trend depends on the starting and stopping points. If we started in 1776, near the end of the Little Ice Age, it is definitely warmer now.)

The mean of maximum U.S. temperatures as guesstimated by NOAA has been fluctuating between about 78 and 86 degrees F. Many factors contribute to these differences of about 8 degrees. The gradual small rise in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has nothing to do with them.

Heat waves are a serious problem for people who live in cities. The urban heat island (UHI) effect can raise temperatures 10 or more degrees above what they would be in the countryside. Increasing urbanization likely accounts for 40 percent of reported warming. The ways to mitigate it do not involve reducing “carbon footprints.” Increasing green spaces, rooftop gardens, reflective roofing materials, and permeable pavements are helpful measures.

Looking at global rather than U.S. temperatures in the graph below, we see that there is a big spike in 2024. This is explained by the 2022 eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, which injected an unprecedented amount of water vapor, from 146 trillion grams (40 billion gallons) of water, into the stratosphere. This is equal to about 10 percent of the water vapor normally present there. Water vapor is by far the most important “greenhouse gas.”

Local factors and natural phenomena affect the weather and the climate—while the mainstream media only reports  about carbon dioxide, which is at most a minor contributor.

Additional information:

WW III: Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) Doctrine Being Tested

Over the noise about the Trump guilty verdict, have you seen any reports about developments in the Russia/Ukraine war?

As Russia continues to make slow progress on the ground, longer-range weapons are being supplied to Ukraine, along with proposals to strike targets within Russia. The defense minister of the Netherlands said that Ukraine could use the F-16s it sends in any way it likes.

The top map shows the location of Russian early warning system (EWS) radars and the area over which they can detect an incoming ballistic missile. The lower one shows the area covered by two installations that were reportedly attacked. At least one is said to be out of action awaiting repairs.

A degraded EWS leaves a country subject to a decapitating strike. Cold War doctrine calls for a devastating response, which has so far not materialized. But against what? NATO is maintaining plausible deniability.

Ascending the escalatory ladder without dire consequences so far “has led to a situation where many western decision-makers sincerely believe they can act with impunity, totally disregarding Russian warnings, while considering the likelihood of nuclear war an impossibility.”

The U.S. has no system to destroy nuclear warheads about to impact an American city. The batteries of Nike missiles that used to ring cities in the 1950s (the Nike-Hercules was nuclear-tipped) were all decommissioned.

The Soviet Union did not abandon anti-ballistic missile defense using nuclear warheads. In 2001, Russia was said to have a de facto missile-defense network with at least 8,000 modern interceptors, tipped with small nuclear warheads that do not require bullet-hitting-bullet accuracy. As of 2020, there were plans to double the firepower capabilities of the system defending Moscow.

There are many unknowns about Russian and U.S. capabilities, and the long-lasting MAD doctrine credited with keeping the peace for decades is being challenged.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump said that nuclear annihilation is the real threat, in commenting on President Joe Biden’s recent speech, in which he said global warming posed the “greatest existential threat to our country.” Neither candidate is talking about strategic or civil defense. The Biden Administration has authorized Ukraine to use U.S. weapons for “limited” strikes within Russia.

Additional Information: D.I.Y. Civil Defense