Bulletins and News Discussion from November 4th to November 10th, 2024 - This is a Giant Problem

Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.

The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country's largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine's 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.

There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn't take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn't until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.

The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill's smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife's water supply.

Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management's demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.

Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn't changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.

After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.

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1.3K comments

I've seen people suggest that the failed zionist hooligan riot in Amsterdam was not just horrible people being horrible but was a deliberate false flag operation carried out by the illegal zionist entity. What do people in this site think about that theory? Some points made in support of the theory:
Prior news reports stated that operatives of the terrorist organisation Mossad would be sent to Amsterdam to protect the hooligans
The incidents happened on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the best time for this to happen from the viewpoint of zionist propagandists
Amsterdam's green party mayor has a history of being more permissive towards anti-genocide and pro-liberation protests than the zionist entity and the far-right Duty regime likes. The entity is petty enough to ger her blamed for "antisemitic pogroms" as revenge.
The western consent manufacturing machine was in full swing right away, with every mainstream media outlet and professional opinion-haver parroting the same lines about "antisemitic" violence.
Against this theory speaks:
Zionist hooligans are this horrible.
Nobody could have predicted that the locals would defend themselves this decisively. There would have been no media outrage if the hooligans had just done their racist violence unopposed.
The zionist entity does not control scheduling of European football matches, UEFA does. Although UEFA is corrupt and liberal I somehow feel that the idea of the terrorist organisation Mossad dictating the match schedule to be too conspiratorial to seem plausible.
Western liberals do not need a conspiracy to be racist against Arabs and assume the worst about their intentions. They will uncritically believe any zionist claim of "antisemitism" as they have done every time until now.
- I think that the biggest spanner in the works is that Zionists are just like that. Besides chanting about dead children and attacking people in the streets, they will always, at all times, turn around and claim that they are under attack. If this was a false flag operation then it just means that every day of the year is a false flag opportunity for Zionists.
- The situation appears to be an attempt to redirect the narrative away from Israeli football fans being provocative. The counternarrative being presented is that these incidents are indicators that Europeans, the Dutch, and the residential Arab & Muslim populations of Europe are hostile to Jewish people.
  Promoting the notion of Zionism that Jewish people are inherently unsafe in Europe, and that any current "bigotry" is not really European but an import of MENA immigrants, and ultimately the price of tolerance by these liberal democracies.
  There's plenty of video evidence denying the narrative there, but that doesn't let the press stop them.
- I think it's just the natural consequence of their ability to manufacture consent being good and their ability to enact violence on people who can fight back being really really bad.
- I don't think you need to organise a specific false-flag style plan, when starting shit and then falling to the ground screaming at the refs has been your standard practice for decades. Especially when 'the refs' in this case are the reactionary media/state apparatus that has thier own multitude of interests in promoting Zionism and supressing dissent (dependence on the US, weapons sales, political contributions, media grants, growing unrest at home about declining conditions, Israel as a laboratory for oppressive foreign and domestic policy etc).
  The original reporting in Hebrew before the trip said Mossad agents were travelling with the team rather than the fans. I'm not saying that it impossible or even unlikely that some may have enjoyed joining their fash cohorts in putting the boot into people they hate either on the streets over those two nights or in the political and media response afterward, but just for the sake of accuracy I think that's worth mentioning.
  There is no doubt however that the Israeli state has a number of well-oiled machines and even government departments whose entire purpose is to do this whenever they believe they can take advantage of events and twist them to their benefit. Most states do this to some degree, but Israel puts an absurd amount of money, technology, and manpower behind their efforts even comparatively.
  I think it's business as usual.
- The way the media jumped on it all at once - falsely - got caught with their pants down hy a 14 year old journalist and photographer. The way the King also falsely spread lies. Shows leadership involvement. But now they all have egg on thier face but will still use the false reports to make draconian laws anyways.
  All the signs of a flase flag and they would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling kid journalists.
- seems highly plausible to me. CIA media all calling it a "pogrom" is just absurd.

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