Here's an interesting report, from Michael G. Fons (the fig farmer) of Michael's Substack:
"Remember the 2020 Beirut blast, and the "mysterious" Iranian shipyard explosion two weeks prior to that? Remember Trump said that Pentagon officials told him that the Beirut blast was a bomb of some sort. I checked the radiation monitoring website, radmon.org shortly after the Beirut blast, and noticed two huge radiation spikes in the Italian Mediterranean radiation monitor. One corresponded with the Beirut blast, and the other with the Iranian shipyard explosion. You can still see this on the way back archive of the radmon.org website [see site 24]. I did a screenshot of it, which I linked to below, and added a map below showing the location of each explosion. The Beirut blast looked just like a small tactical nuclear explosion, with the bubble like appearance. And, there was a radiation spike that corresponded to it. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be an ammonium nitrate explosion. LOL. https://mellano.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/radiation-1.jpg" (From a comment on Drop Site News re Lebanon)
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Don actually reads Russian and Arabic so he can source information outside of the Western propaganda bubble. Here's a description of how he processes articles to report on, from a recent article on Don's Substack:
"[W]hen I scan Russian articles that are candidates for inclusion in my Substack, I normally pick the best candidates and read the whole article in the original Russian first, mostly to keep up with the language, making it easier to scan articles in the future. In the case of Arabic, in which I am just an intermediate learner, I use Google Translate to sort thru titles, then use Google again to translate just the selected title and use this as a vocab builder. BTW, unlike other translators, Google translate also provides pronunciation audio. Then I have Google Translate put it into English for the readers and finally, I go through the translation and make necessary changes. For ex, Google often automatically renders the Russian word oblast as region. But an oblast is a specific kind of region. It is the largest political subdivision in Russia or Ukraine. Analogously to a US state or a Canadian or French province. So rendering oblast as "region" is like calling a US state a region. That wouldn't work, and likewise it does not work to call an oblast a region. To do this I must be aware of the names of oblasts, which I know in Ukraine, but not always in Russian, in which case I need to look up the name of the oblast. Other problems are the nicknames. For ex, Russian authors sometimes call Ukraine "the Independent," but that is meaningless if rendered into English without explanation, so I have to re-translate it as Ukraine. Then there is the Russian slang word for China, podnebesnaya, meaning "under the heavens", and Google is unaware of this. Generally there is a lot of slang used by Russian authors and Google Translate usually doesn't know this, so it just renders the slang literally, word for word, and requires a bit of editing. For me all of this is a fun challenge but it takes time." "BTW, I rarely post translations from European languages because generally, the European viewpoint is the same as the biased American one. As for Chinese, these authors are very diplomatic and don't usually do deep criticism of US news in Chinese so their English language posts are almost the same as Chinese articles in English, eg., appearing in Global Times or Xinhua." "The Russian stuff is often full of info and opinion unavailable in their English language articles - Sputnik, Pravda, etc."
"As for Arabic news and views sites, I used to post translated articles from a feisty Arabic source that was highly critical of US policy. Unfortunately, after a few months of this, I went to the site one morning and found a notice from the FBI saying that access to the site was blocked because this was a site associated with terrorism. Of course, the decision to block the site would have been made not in the US but in Tel Aviv. So I need to be careful about mentioning names of Arabic language publications. Needless to say, the news sites of, most Arab countries, under heavy pressure from the US (mostly the CIA) hew to the viewpoint of the US Neocons, and there is no point in translating them. There are precious few exceptions but I have found some and intend to translate and post some of their content, Lord willing."
Leave a comment! This is a re-direct to my Substack page.
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