It’s no secret that formerly respectable and mainstream media outlets became fake news purveyors. Whatever it is that drove journalists to lie and manipulate, the evidence is there to prove their intent to deceive.
Much like television commercials and print advertisements, news stories are written to sell the reader something. Many times, what the news outlets are selling is politically motivated. On almost any given topic they choose to cover, they’ve been seen to cherry pick quotes that are in line with their interests and agendas, to omit relevant information that may harm their stand on something, and to use language that falsely imputes guilt on Republicans and conservatives.
The list below includes several examples of stealthy and manipulative alterations of already published news articles by the Washington Post and CNN.
On a side note: there were countless (literally, countless) articles that had been revised or completely rewritten without public notice. It’s been done so much, you would think that this practice is perfectly “ethical.” It was actually quite comical, yet disappointing, to witness reporters announcing minor changes such as, “This article was changed to fix the last name of X person. It was misspelled in the original article,” while entire paragraphs have been added or deleted without a peep from them.
Washington Post
A peculiar feature of the WaPo coverage in newsdiffs : even when newsdiffs has many changes to an article, the “All Changes” page in newsdiffs says “Alas! We don’t seem to know anything about this article. Sorry!” Might be a bug in newsdiffs.
The Washington Post frequently changed both the content and the time of the article, without stating that that an earlier version was already published.
A change of terms: “Climate change denialist information” → the broader “denialist information.”
“CP’s thinking is similar to that of the carbon-dioxide warmists’: Just produce enough hot air and claim that ”carbon” is the culprit.”
– Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser___________________________________________
Dear Postmaster General,
By Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser
Please, have pity on me – I just can’t get the old terms out of my mind. Canada Post is now controlled by a president, CEO, and other highly-paid functionaries that certainly deserve the full support of the citizenry. Not to forget, the daily “health-exercises” of trekking to the community mailboxes to retrieve our dose of donation-seeking “Dear Friend/Supporter” letters and the like.
On behalf of all our friends, neighbours, acquaintances, in- and outlaws, our sincere thanks for keeping us on our toes. Undoubtedly, this enforced exercise regime contributes to our health, longevity and generally positive outlook.
However, if you permit me, I have some complaints too. They relate to the postage rates for anything, from postcards to my friends in the next village to books within and out-of-the-country. Our postal rates are outrageously high and are killing your business! After all, it’s easy to compare postage rates.
Postage Rates
You are probably correct in assuming that the internet and email have reduced your business volume. The question though must be: what drives what? What came first, the chicken or the egg? In other words, has the personal mail volume declined because mailing a message via “snail mail” is no longer of interest to us geezers or because of your outrageous mailing rates?
As it so happens, we do get a lot of mail, without fail every day (Monday to Friday) from friends, magazine distributors, banks, charitable organisations, tax and other money collection agencies, etc. My Dearest and I have a little side-bet as to who is going to be the day’s (mail)-winner; I’m happy to report that it’s usually me.
What always strikes me strange is the postage applied to such mailings from far-away places. For example, from the U.S., standard letters can be mailed within the country for $ 0.49 (postcards for only $ 0.34) or to anywhere with a “global forever” stamp that can be had for $ 1.15. The latter requires in Canada a stamp of nominal (CD) $ 2.50 plus tax, for a total of $ 2.83. Even when considering the current exchange rate (of approx. USD 0.75/ CD 1.00), this is still close to double the rate in Canada. Is it any wonder that there are companies that regularly drive across the border to do their mass mailings from the U.S., at half the cost per letter? Letter mail is just the tip of the iceberg though. What really riles me is the cost of mailing printed material here, like books.
Printed Matter
Perhaps, dear General, you know, a typical 1 lb. book can be mailed in the U.S. to anywhere in that country for about US $3.50 or less. To mail the same book within Canada costs, at a minimum, approximately three-times that, depending on the distance, with more distant places in Canada incurring even higher rates. To mail such a book from Canada into the U.S. (via the cheapest rate) is approximately FIVE times the cost (including taxes).
Do I need to say more?
If you had some business acumen, wouldn’t you want to capture that “trade” with a competitive postal rate? Instead, your prevailing rate guarantees to drive that business away to other service providers. Even much smaller differences of international postal rates can make a substantial difference in the total cost of mass mailings. I can see that also from the origins of some of the mailings we get. For example, relatively heavy magazines that arrive from outside the country are mailed from places I had never heard of before. Their postal rates for foreign-destinations are even lower, but the receiving countries’ postal services are doing the “heavy-lifting” of delivering such items anywhere within its boundaries.
Just Imagine
Just image the postal rates were much lower here too, for example $0.25 for a standard letter within and $ 0.50 to out-of-country destinations. Can you imagine what kind of business activity that would generate? I’m sure you would have to get thousands of more sorting machines and hire more employees. Actually, from what I can see, our local mail carrier is already quite busy as it is. Not only does he deliver the letter mail during part of his workday, the part is whizzing around the area in a small van to deliver parcels from the “Amazonian jungle.”
The “Amazonian Jungle”
As you will know, the “Amazon” is a large entity on earth. It stretches for thousands of miles. The Amazon River is said to be the largest river on earth, with a discharge of 200,000 m^3 per second, approximately five times that of its nearest competitor, the Congo River.
You may also have heard of the “Amazons,” warrior-women that are said to be residing somewhere in the Amazon jungle. It’s my understanding that these ladies can be quite combatant, sort of like the “Amazon” company. If you can trust the media reports, the latter is in the process of driving you, the age-old mail delivery service out of business altogether. What’s really surprising though, at least to me, is that you appear to be keen on helping it along in that.
Isn’t it true that the Amazonians can mail parcels here at a much lower rate than you charge me and my fellow citizens? Why do they deserve a special consideration, i.e. lower delivery rates?
It seems to me that my neighbors’ and my letter mail postage rate are indirectly supporting the Amazonians. Perhaps, it’s time to change that. After all, aren’t they investing in long-range transport systems like “fast arrow drones?” Well, if they can’t deliver their goods because of poor aiming or whatever reason, is it our duty to improve their capability? Do they need more subsidies?
Postal Subsidies
Why would Canada Post (CP) or any postal service want to subsidize the Amazonian quivers with high letter-mail postage rates? The Amazons’ arrows or flying drones will arrive soon enough. Then, I think, the 5-day (Canada) or 6-day-per-week (U.S.) mail AND the postal service parcel delivery will be on the way out the door.
CP’s thinking is similar to that of the carbon-dioxide warmists’: Just produce enough hot air and claim that ”carbon” is the culprit of every weather event that’s happening, anywhere and anytime. Not to forget, as the main stream media tells us almost daily that “Greenland’s ice cap is melting away,” except that it is not true. In fact, exactly the opposite happened; see for yourself at http://ift.tt/2oSbbuY , the pertinent graph is shown below.
Fig: The accumulated surface mass balance for ice on Greenland, from September 1, 2016 to Feb. 2017 (blue line). Image credit: Danish Meteorological Institute, on Feb. 15, 2017; as of late April, 2017, the seasonal growth rate has returned to near the upper band of the 1990-2013 mean.
Do YOU see evidence of any undue melting of Greenland’s ice sheet in that?
Perhaps, the postal services may also want to prevent the Greenland ice mass from melting; why not spend a few millions on that? The PSs have a monopoly and can charge whatever they want.
Flushing money down “the Amazon” will only accelerate the self-destructing path the postal services appear to have embarked on.
_____________________________________________
Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is a professional scientist with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Technical University, Munich, Germany. He has worked as a research scientist and project chief at Environment Canada‘s Canada Centre for Inland Waters for over 30 years and is currently Director of Research at TerraBase Inc. He is author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and agency reports, books, computer programs, trade magazines, and newspaper articles.
Dr. Kaiser has been president of the International Association for Great Lakes Research, a peer reviewer of numerous scientific papers for several journals, Editor-in-Chief of the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly a decade, and an adjunct professor. He has contributed to a variety of scientific projects and reports and has made many presentations at national and international conferences.
Dr. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts convenientmyths.com
The author notes that ‘the rigs are getting roughly twice as productive every three years. No other energy technology is improving that quickly.’
Wind and solar are now experiencing a declining rate of improvement as those technologies start to approach their limits in terms of what physics permits. Shale technology is a long way from its physics limits. In fact, the shale industry is at the beginning of what I’ve earlier termed Shale 2.0.
The Promethean task of supplying energy to the U.S. economy and the rest of the world involves scales that are truly difficult to visualize. Many options appear to make sense until you crunch the numbers. That’s why Bill Gates said that people need to bring “math skills to the problem.”
Consider petroleum alone, which accounts for about one-third of global energy use.
If the world’s current oil supply were delivered in a pile of actual barrels, that stack would rise up at a velocity of 1,500 miles per hour and reach the moon’s orbit in a week – and continue at that rate every week for years to come.
Meanwhile, solar and wind power are the two most discussed “disruptions” to our energy supply. It is true that solar/wind costs have gone down dramatically in the past decade. At the same time there’s a policy revolution in subsidies (more about policies in part 3 of this series) leading to a cumulative $100+ billion in the U.S. for solar/wind. The effect of this combination has been to proliferate solar panels and wind turbines sufficient to drive a nearly 10-fold increase in combined energy supplied from those sources.
While that’s quite remarkable, wind and solar together still supply less than 1.5% of America’s energy. Fast growth from a small number is like winning $100 in Vegas on a $10 bet. Nice, but not life-changing.
To find a “radical and pervasive” change in energy markets we have to look elsewhere. Over the same decade noted above, the amount of energy added to America from shale hydrocarbons was 2,000% greater than the additional supply from solar and wind combined. That actual revolution also happened because of the maturation of new technologies. But, notably, in this case it took place without the stimulus of special subsidies.
The scale and velocity of the shale revolution is under-appreciated. It is the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply — not just hydrocarbons, but all forms of energy — that has occurred in history. The only time something close to as dramatic has occurred was in the decade following the 1968 opening of Saudi Arabia’s giant Ghawar oil field.
STT has fought the battle against the great wind power fraud on a number of fronts over the years: the totally unnecessary harm caused to wind farm neighbours by incessant, turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound; the pointless slaughter of millions of birds and bats; the environmental harm caused by the growing mountains and lakes […]
Iowa Climate Science Education 