Presenting meaningful information in engaging ways backed up by reliable sources, Grist articles often re-appear here at TitanicLifeboatAcademy.org, with the kind permission of Grist editors.

Today, one of those articles instead inspired me to bring up a clean sheet of pixels and start typing. ~ Ed.

That article, “Why the federal government is making climate data disappear,” begins:

For 25 years, a group of the country’s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, on June 30, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.

“No, they didn’t!”  My immediate response was a quick trip over to archive.org where immortality resides for ethereal pixels of all varieties – all Western varieties. There, I found 472 publications from 1918 to 2026. True, it’s not so convenient as the old National Climate Assessments website, but it’s also the result of 15 seconds of internet research. We are not powerless against imperial oppression. (To my knowledge, the global majority has yet to create their own archive. And, I hope they soon will.)

The Grist article continues:

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

 Orwell, 1984:

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”   

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

Grist, again:

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing.

True. But, not only how the planet is changing.  Far too of us can see how geopolitics, geo-economics, information itself, and interlacing  psyops are changing our personal day-to-day lives.

Grist:

The administration hasn’t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn’t deny the reality of climate change...but he’s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of U.S. climate policy….If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn’t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation.

Search for Truth

In this time of momentous changes, articles like Grist’s can become threads to pull,  unraveling truths kept hidden by the mainstream. We are not powerless if we seek out and follow these threads. It is imperative we do the work to keep learning, expanding our grasp of global conditions, and always refusing to play.

The only winning move is not to play.  ~ War Games:

Petitioning won’t help us. We “petition”  those whom we perceive as having far greater power. We must not grant them such power.

Nor does protesting usually further our causes. It’s too weak, too "canned", too controlled.  Those of us who came of age in the ‘60’s, when protests actually got in the way of the “elite” agenda, still think of protesting as "effective".  Our leaders were jailed, even shot. That didn't stop us. Families, children, jobs and responsibilities did. Meanwhile, protests grew co-opted, controlled, transformed into safety valves to let off steam, defusing them. Ever wonder why "Occupy" fizzled out? Originally scheduled for June, 2011, it gained enormous momentum, was noticed, co-opted, funded and rescheduled for September 17, giving it just 2 months before New York's winter dispersed it while it was still in its formative stage.  Protests are still "allowed", but they get directed, underwritten, scripted, outfitted and equipped, located and scheduled, televised and reported, even brutally suppressed, and – when their steam is gone – extinguished. 

it’s gone beyond protests. When someone steals your property, rapes your friend, and murders your neighbor’s entire family, do you “protest”?? People did.  For Gaza. Little happened for two years during protests in West Asia and the Latin Americas, until sufficient numbers of Western peoples spread the word in the West and grassroots protests grew there as well to the point where Western "elites" had to open a safety valve. Now we will watch as the Western "elites" appear to respond, then divert attention with other crises, including some closer to home.

The first week of September, 2025 was a major historic turning point in world history.

Hopefully, that's not news to you, our TLA readers. Yet, how many in the West can name even one of the three interlocking events of that week which strengthened the momentum of change already well underway, birthing a new and very different era for this millennium? Certainly these events were sparsely covered in the MSM. Under the lamplight of MSM "news", we are told of "plots" "against" the "well being" of our countries, even more "terrorism". 

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ~ CIA Director, William Casey  

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

Searching Outside the Mainstream

Of course, where we search is as important - no doubt more important - as searching itself. 

Venturing onto social media like X, VK, and especially Telegram increases the scope of our knowledge, making us more resilient, as does reading daily news websites from outside the West. 

We must do it now while access is still available. Now, while the environment is becoming more hostile, rendering “sustainability” more difficult, and the government is growing more inscrutable, more deceitful, more suppressive. “The Truth is out there,” regardless of Western "elites" efforts to censor, censure or harm those who speak it. 

From Wikipedia:

The streetlight effect, or the drunkard's search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.^[1] Both names refer to a well-known joke:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".^[2]

The anecdote appears in a story of the Islamic folklore character Nasreddin.  

If they lie about an area of your expertise, why wouldn't they lie about everything else as well?

I'm repeatedly astounded by colleagues who, expert in their degree field, see no contradiction in relying on the MSM for information on fields in which they are not expert. For example a climate scientist may decry the MSM's capitalistic (and erroneous) view of solar panels as The Solution, pointing out the significant "embedded energy"  (amount of fossil fuels) required for their manufacture, placement and use.  But, that same scientist may rely on that same MSM for information on all other areas.  If we know they lied about "A", why implicitly trust them about "B", "C", and "D"??  Because it's easier. Because your  phone automatically goes there. And that's why it's named a "SMART" phone by the people who designed it for the data it produces about you for them.  And, the control it affords over the information to which you have easy access. And, what you do with that information. And, what it can sell you (including erroneous information) as a result. That's why it's called SMART.  Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology.  

Know what's going on! 

Before he died from deliberate medical neglect while incarcerated by Ukraine, Gonzalo Lira was a well known commentator on YouTube who continually and prophetically warned:

“Know … what’s going on!” 

TitanicLifeboatAcademy.org strives to offer an very good starting point.

Author

Caren Black writes TEOLAWKI TIMES for TitanicLifeboatAcademy.org and serves as senior editor. 

Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer - Grist