What Can You Believe Anymore? Not So Much Apparently

In my persistent quest for the truth, I have been persuaded that

almost nothing is ever as it seems anymore.

In today's news from Dubai comes a report of a man from Kerala, India, who applied on a mechanical engineering job in the Gulf State. The email he received from his prospective employer was astonishing for its candidness. It has since gone viral:

Gulf News - Shaheen Bagh is the epicentre of ongoing mass demonstrations against India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act.

The act makes it more difficult for Muslims to become citizens of India:

The Shaheen Bagh protest is an ongoing 24/7 sit-in peaceful protest, led by women, that began with the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in both houses of Parliament on 11 December 2019 and the ensuing police intervention against students at Jamia Millia Islamia who were opposing the Amendment. Mainly Muslim women, the protesters at Shaheen Bagh, since 15 December 2019, have blocked a major highway[a] in New Delhi using non-violent resistance for 43 days now as of 26 January 2020. It has now become the longest ongoing continuous protest against CAA-NRC-NPR. -Wikipedia

Abdulla S.S., 23, who had applied for a mechanical engineer’s position in Dubai said he is still reeling from the shock of the email he got from UAE-based Indian expat Jayant Gokhale in response to his job application last week.

Rs 1000 is about $14 USD; free food and tea, sweets, are a pretty tempting offer especially for an unemployed Indian. 

The question is: 'is this going on elsewhere, or is it a one-off event?'  

This week in Vancouver, the extradition trial of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Hauwei, and the daughter of the founder of the spectacularly successful Chinese telecom company, got underway with a couple dozen protesters at the courts to support Meng. 

It turns out that they were hired to be there and, at least some, didn't know why they were even there until the last minute. 

Some of the participants have since alleged they were paid to take part in the protest.

Ken Bonson told the Star a friend recruited her and later deposited $150 into her account. At the courthouse, a woman she had never met before named “Joey” supplied them with posters, Bonson said. After learning more about Meng and the allegations against her, Bonson said she wished she had never taken part and felt “ashamed and embarrassed.” The Star has since spoken to the friend, who denies being paid or paying anyone to take part in the protest. The man refused to go on record for an interview. He said he did not know anyone named “Joey.”

Julia Hackstaff, an actor, wrote on Facebook that she was the victim of a “filthy cheap scam.” She said someone had contacted her Sunday evening asking if she wanted to be a background performer in a production for $100. When she arrived, she said, she received ambiguous instructions to hold a sign. When reporters approached the group and started asking questions, she thought it was all part of the production but quickly realized “everything was ‘too real.’

“I left after 5 minutes of being there.” - The Star

Another reason to suspect protests.

There is no reason to suspect the greatest protest of the 21st century - the Yellow Vest protest in France that has been going on for almost a year and a half, but, it might be worth investigating anyway.

But, perhaps the most disturbing example of paid protesting has to do with indigenous people of British Columbia and Alberta being used as pawns by American environmentalists, some of whom are sponsored by David Rockefeller (The Rockefellers were founders and owners of Standard Oil), to isolate Alberta oil and gas and keep it from reaching tidewater. This ensures Americans can buy it at ultra cheap prices, and they can't take markets that might otherwise be open to American oil and gas.

A left-wing lobby group in San Francisco wired $55,000 to the bank account of an Indian chief in Northern Alberta, paying him to oppose the oilsands.

The same IRS disclosure shows Tides Foundation (started by philanthropist Drummond Pike) made 25 different payments to Canadian anti-oilsands activists in a single year, totaling well over a million dollars. And that’s just one U.S. lobby group. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund out of New York, spends $7 million a year in Canada, with an explicit campaign strategy of fomenting Aboriginal unrest, through protests and lawsuits. - Toronto Sun    Alberta's Oil Not the Only Thing That's Dirty

The Rockefellers are known as great philanthropists, and they were. However, one has to wonder how much of their philanthropy was self-serving. 

Drummond Pike, started Tides Foundation, then Tides Center, then Tides Canada. Much of Pike's work was involved in supporting progressive politicians in both Canada and the  USA:

Pike along with George Soros and other Democracy Alliance members John R. Hunting; Paul Rudd (co-founder of Adaptive Analytics); Pat Stryker; Nicholas Hanauer; ex-Clinton administration official Rob Stein; Gail Furman; real estate developer Robert Bowditch; Pioneer Hybrid International-heir and congressional candidate Scott Wallace; Susie Tompkins Buell; real estate developer Albert Dwoskin; and Taco Bell-heir Rob McKay, funded the Secretary of State Project, an American non-profit, 527 political action committee focused on electing reform-minded progressive Secretaries of State in battleground states, who typically oversee the election process. The Alliance was critical in getting California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie re-elected. - Wikipedia

See also:

Talk About ‘Collusion’: How Foreign-Backed Anti-Oil Activists Infiltrated Canada’s Government   Or, how wealthy American environmentalists bought the Canadian government and destroyed Alberta's Oil Sands industry

How America is Strangling the Canadian Oil Industry, and We're Helping Them

Anti-pipeline campaign was planned, intended, and foreign-funded: Vivian Krause

Journalist Investigates the IPCC with Disturbing Results

Donna Laframboise, an investigative journalist was not very interested in environmental sciences until she began to see other journalists regurgitating unproven ideas on climate change as though they were facts. 

She began to investigate and found that, no, 97% of scientists were not in agreement on anthropogenic global warming. Then she began to look at the IPCC and was thoroughly dismayed at what she found.

The following video on FB is 53+ minutes long but mesmerizing as Laframboise meticulously lays out her disturbing findings. The video was recorded in 2013, but is even more relevant today.

Mammal Apocalypse - Two-thirds of Wildlife will Disappear by 2020, WWF Says

This story sounds pretty apocalyptic and seems to be presented in the media as such. But it is very misleading. What news outlets have not been very clear about is that the report predicts a 67% drop in wildlife from 1970 to 2020. One would think there was going to be a 67% drop in wildlife in the next 3 years and neither the media nor WWF seem to be in any hurry to clear that up.

Global populations have plunged 60% since 1970 amid

rising human activity

Thomson Reuters 

Two orphaned orangutan babies play in a tree at 'jungle school' at Indonesia's International Animal Rescue centre. Both the Bornean and Sumatran orangutan are critically endangered due to poaching, the illegal pet trade and habitat destruction. (Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty)

Worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plunged by almost 60 per cent since 1970 as human activities overwhelm the environment, the WWF conservation group said on Thursday.

An index compiled with data from the Zoological Society of London to measure the abundance of biodiversity was down 58 per cent from 1970 to 2012 and would fall 67 per cent by 2020 on current trends, the WWF said in a report.

The decline is yet another sign that people have become the driving force for change on Earth, ushering in the epoch of the Anthropocene, a term derived from "anthropos," the Greek for "human" and "-cene" denoting a geological period.

Conservation efforts appear to be having scant impact as the index is showing a steeper plunge in wildlife populations than two years ago, when the WWF estimated there had been a 52 per cent decline between 1970 and 2010.

"Wildlife is disappearing within our lifetimes at an unprecedented rate," Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, said in a statement of the group's Living Planet Report, published every two years.

"Biodiversity forms the foundation of healthy forests, rivers and oceans," he said.

"We are entering a new era in Earth's history: the Anthropocene."

The index tracks about 14,200 populations of 3,700 species of vertebrates — creatures ranging from pea-sized frogs to 30-metre long whales.

The rising human population is threatening wildlife by clearing land for farms and cities, the report said. Other factors include pollution, invasive species, hunting and climate change. But there are still chances to reverse the trends, it said.

Biscuit, left, a baby male snow leopard, lives with his mother Shikari at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. Snow leopards live in the high mountains of Central Asia and the wild population is estimated to number in the low thousands. (Mario Tama/Getty)

"Importantly… these are declines, they are not yet extinctions," said Prof. Ken Norris, the society's director of science.

Deon Nel, WWF global conservation director, also told Reuters it wasn't all bad news.

"I don't speak at all about doom and gloom — we do see a lot of positive signs," Nel said.

A global agreement signed by almost 200 nations last year to curb climate change could, for instance, help protect tropical forests, slow a spread of deserts and curb an acidification of the seas caused by a build-up of carbon dioxide. And a 2015 UN plan for sustainable development by 2030, seeking to end poverty with policies that safeguard the environment, would also help if properly implemented.

Some species are recovering. Last month, the giant panda was taken off an endangered list after a recovery in China.