Thursday

9.2 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

French built a reactor in 7 years in 1976, but modern Australia needs “decades”

By Jo Nova

It’s like the West has forgotten how to build things…

The nuclear debate in Australia is 100 years behind the rest of Western Civilization. Like children, we banned nuclear power before we even built one. We could afford to strut in our anti-nuke super-cape because we were swimming in 300 years worth of coal. (Now we want to ban that too.)

Somehow, despite the burden of all that coal, the idea of nuclear has grown legs, but the rest of the world must be laughing at us. The US built the first reactor way back in 1957, and 50 years ago the French built 56 reactors in just 15 years and most of the reactors were built in 6-8 years.

But our experts in the CSIRO  think it will take us 14 years to even build a small one.

Even if the nuclear ban was lifted tomorrow and a decision immediately taken to commission a nuclear reactor, CSIRO estimates the first SMR would not be in full operation before 2038, ruling it out of “any major role” in reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

Today we have computer aided design and supercomputers with AI, but we can’t even build a 50 year old copy of a French plant as fast as the French could in an era when homes still had slide rules.

If we ask President Macron nicely, perhaps he’ll even give us the old plans?

The first 910 MW reactor at Blayais Nuclear Power Plant was built from 1976 to 1981 and is still operating today. The three other turbines were finished by 1983. So the ancient 1970s French industry could build a 4GW nuclear plant in 7 years.

Nuclear Power Plant

It produces about 26,000GWh of electricitie each year with a capacity factor of about 75%.

Brown coal power is still cheaper.

 

10 out of 10 based on 97 ratings

Wednesday

9.5 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Breaking: US Supreme Court decides jury of 150 million can rule on Trump

By Jo Nova

In a democracy the Court of Public Opinion is (still) the highest court

Donald Trump’s name can stay on the ballots.

US Flag, Flying.

It’s one of those rare moments in 2024 when something makes sense. All nine justices of the US Supreme Court  have decided that the largest jury in the world should be allowed to judge for themselves who they want to have as President.

The Colorado Supreme Court had decided that Donald Trump was too naughty for people to vote for, even though he hadn’t been charged or convicted of leading an insurrection of horned people (or any one else) to overthrow the US government.  The votes of a few state officials would therefore overrule the votes of millions potentially. And the whole idea of being innocent until proven guilty was tossed out the window.

The Court of Public Opinion is the only one that matters in a democracy. If there was free speech and a free media, crimes will be investigated, and the evidence put on display

As The Epoch Times said — it has never happened like this before:

Keep reading  →

9.7 out of 10 based on 108 ratings

Tuesday

9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Monday

10 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Join me at the Big Ideas for a Better Australia conference — Friday week in Albury!

By Jo Nova

Jo Nova photo

I’m looking forward to spending three days at the Triple Conference in Albury from March 15 -17th. Topics include looking at ways to get the Government out of our lives, get cheap energy, returning manufacturing, rule of law, management of the Murray Darling,  I’ll be speaking and so will David Burton of the Inigo Jones long term weather forecasting and the failures of the BOM. Other speakers include three Senators: Malcolm Roberts, Ralph Babet, and Alex Antic, plus two sitting MPs, many former MP’s like Gary Johns, Warren Mundine, plus also Augusto Zimmerman — it’s big!

The Gala Dinner on Saturday is called Nyet Zero. 

It’s being organised by Topher Field of AussieWire.

This is the first time the three conferences have been combined: Big Ideas for A Better Australia,  the Friedman Conference for libertarians, and the Church and State conference.

The conference itself is under $300, the Conference plus Gala Dinner is about $550, and there is a VIP option too. Tickets here.

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 62 ratings

Sunday

8.8 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Cannibalism to save the world? New Scientist opens that door…

Cannibalism, New Scientist

By Jo Nova

Next step: sustainable human steak?

They don’t mention the “sustainable” word, but you know they want to. Right from the start they’re selling it to us:

Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry?

Why can’t we feed our bodies to the homeless indeed, apart from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,  prions, parasites, heavy metals? And if  cannibalism pops up on the menu often enough, who knows what other problem will pop up on the radar? Things at the top of the food chain (and we are at the top) tend to accumulate all kinds of unwanted chemicals, like lead, PCBs, and pollutants.

Not to mention the spiritual questions and the mental health issues. Who knows? Relatives might feel a bit miffed if Aunty Betty was carved up for canapes and offered up to the crowd at the local alcoholics shelter.

Welcome to dystopia. We can devalue human lives, but think of the cows we’ll save!

And the CultureWar continues

Tut. Tut. Tut. New Scientist gently chides us for being the sort of modern prejudiced people who think cannibalism is taboo. Its just your colonial roots that do that to you, right?

If you don’t like cannibals you are just a racist:

Our aversion has been explained in various ways. Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation. These came to represent the “other” to Western societies – and revulsion towards cannibalism became a tenet of their moral conscience.

Once human bodies are reduced to being meat to feed the poor, euthanasia is almost a gift to the world, really. And science is just, well, one of many ideologies, not something special.

The New Scientist output is just another article chipping away at the pillars of Western Civilization. The fact they don’t even consider pollutants and diseases, nor the soul sapping mental health issues is just embarrassing for a supposedly “scientific” magazine.

For whatever its worth, after half a billion years of evolution, predators almost never eat other predators, and most species don’t eat their own kind. Perhaps there is a reason…
9.6 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Saturday

9.3 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

The phase change is upon us. Suddenly everyone is backing away from EVs

Alien ship, crash, trainwreck, Fantasy. Dystopia. Desert.

By Jo Nova

Not only has the bubble popped, but everyone knows it’s popped.

After ten years, Apple abandons the fantasy of EV’s

Apple is believed to have spent “billions” since 2014, trying to develop an EV in the semi secretive “Project Titan”. They reportedly had 2,000 employees working on it, but this week, they dropped it like a hot rock, and, by golly, investors were relieved.

It came as a big surprise.  Two years ago Apple was so serious it hired some veterans from Lamborghini. In January Apple was hiring drivers for its autonomous testing fleet. A few weeks ago the project was live but being downgraded to a less autonomous machine and delayed until 2028. But this week, employees are being laid off, and Apple is moving many of the workforce to AI.

Most commentators saw this as a cost cutting exercise due to competition from China, but some are seeing this as a bigger sign:

“It does not get much more shocking than this,” said Roger Lanctot, automotive analyst at TechInsights. “If you have more money than God and you decide not to pursue a particular concept it is a massive rejection of this value proposition.”

Reinhardt Krause, Investors Business Daily

Now everyman and his dog is getting out

This news is not just about the failure of the autonomous driverless vehicle. It comes on top of the news that practically everyone in the auto industry is stepping away slowly.  Mercedes Benz is pulling back on EV ambitions.  They were aiming to get to the heavenly 100% electric zone by 2030, but now they’re bringing in a new combustion model in 2027. They say Europe won’t be ready by 2030 to go fully electric, and they are concerned about the lower than expected demand for EVs.

Aston Martin is also delaying their electric car program and explain it’s just because people don’t want them:

Aston Martin boss Lawrence Stroll has confirmed the reason for the delay was simply a lack of consumer demand for the latest EV model at this stage. — Express. UK

Tesla, the EV giant, still survives but the deceleration is breathtaking:

Even Tesla, the pioneer of the EV revolution in the US, has warned its rate of expansion will be “notably lower” this year. Domestic EV sales growth will decelerate to 11 per cent next year from an estimated 47 per cent growth rate this year, according to a forecast by UBS.

It’s rare in life to watch a bubble unravel so fast around us

In the middle of 2023 American car sales yards started to fill with EV’s that weren’t selling. Then the repair costs started accumulating and EV’s were becoming hard to insure, the second hand sales value fell. Then came the spectacular Luton Airport fire where 1,200 cars were cremated and an airport terminal collapsed. By late October the quarterly reports and the terrible earnings were piling up. VW orders were down 50%, Ford was losing $38,000 on every car. In early November one of the largest rental car companies in the world announced they were selling a third of their EV fleet because EV’s cost more to repair and customers didn’t want to rent them anyway. And that was before Americans found out that EV’s can’t be charged if the temperature gets below zero, and cars were stuck for days in a cold snap in Chicago.

The bubble was inflated with Big Government money. Despite all these failures and the obvious news that EV’s are not yet, and may never be, cheap and convenient, many governments still want to force people to buy them in the hope of slowing the storms in 2100.

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Friday

9.6 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Billionaires are paying to pump climate porn through Hollywood

Lion rock, Girl. Fantasy, Surreal. Pagan.

By Jo Nova

It’s lucky the world has so many billionaires to save us from Democracy eh?

But instead of persuading us, or doing honest adverts to save the world (which they could obviously afford) they prefer the deceptive approach.

If you think Hollywood is boring these days, there’s a reason

Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic found the Go-To Guide for hiding climate propaganda in Hollywood Movies where children won’t even realize they are being spoon-fed political products:

Green Billionaires Press Hollywood to Promote Armageddon Climate Messages in Movies

Good Energy aims to weave climate alarm into all types of film-making, “especially” if it is not about climate. With the support of Bloomberg, it recently published ‘Good Energy – A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change’. It claims the Playbook is “now the industry’s go-to guide to incorporating climate into any storyline or genre”. As with almost all green campaigning groups, Good Energy would not exist without the support of billionaire funding. These operations seek a supra-national collectivist Net Zero solution to a claimed climate emergency. Good Energy acknowledges it would not exist without this funding, adding, “as collaborators and champions, each has provided a unique contribution for which we are endlessly grateful”.

Hollywood propaganda

If action against climate change is woven into the cultural wallpaper, children may not even be able to imagine a world without FakeBurgers and windmills. The seas will endlessly rise while somehow staying in the same place, like living in an Escher puzzle. Every storm surge will be fossil fueled and every retreat will be invisible.

Have you run out of plotlines? Good Energy can help…

Hollywood propagandaRolling Stone puts the details on the climate movie wallpaper being fostered. Instead of boring statistics and depressing details, Hollywood “is playing its part”. It’s creating heroes that, ah, do what the billionaires want:

How Hollywood Is Crafting A New Climate Change Narrative

Take the Netflix show, Unstable, for example. In the new series, Rob Lowe stars as a genius biotech innovator, who’s created a slew of planet-saving solutions. The Hulu mystery, A Murder at the End of World, hones in on a tech billionaire who wants to save the world from climate change. Hulu’s Indigenous American comedy-drama, Reservation Dogs, features Dallas Goldtooth, an advocate for the Land Back Indigenous sovereignty movement. The CBS sitcom, Ghosts, rolled out an episode called “The Tree,” that dives into different ways a few of the central characters relate to nature and climate change.

And if you were a billionaire invested in EVs or batteries, you’d want heroes to help your investments grow too, right? (Especially, now).

Donations to Hollywood Propaganda Inc are a tax deductible advertising expense that’s not called advertising. It’s something you can brag about at Davos!

According to an analysis by the Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project and Good Energy, which supports TV and film creators in telling compelling and accurate climate stories, less than 3 percent of film and TV scripts from 2016 to 2020 mentioned climate-related terms.

For now, the organization is dedicated to ensuring that by 2027, 50 percent of contemporary TV and film acknowledges climate change.

What this also guarantees is that it buys up some writers that might have mocked climate change. De facto it squeezes creativity out. That only works though, if some upstart production unit doesn’t cherry pick off the sacred cows of modern climate-moo, and have a riotously funny time doing it. That probably won’t happen in Hollywood, but it might on Twitter, which is why Elon is such a threat. It only takes one popular rebel to breach the whole cultural fake facade.

This goes deeper than just being a renewables advert

The Playbook notes that “indigenous people are the first climate scientists, and indigenous people are leading us through this climate crisis”.

If raindancing shaman were the original climate scientists, then science itself is just another religion, and it’s nothing special. The whole idea of hypothesis testing, pffft. The modern scientists are just an upgrade on the original voodoo, not a totally novel philosophy that transformed the world.

See what they did there? They’re not just selling windmills, they’re undermining a civilization.

It is a cultural war, whether you want one or not.

The sponsors behind the subliminal advertising program are groups like the Sierra Club, which is then funded by the Tides Foundation, among others, which was in turn funded by the usuals: the Rockefellers, the Soros, the Hewletts, and the Packards, and all the rest. There are a hundred other variations for the money to flow from the Uber Rich to protect their investments and keep the riff raff happy voting for absurd Presidents and Prime Ministers, and content to holiday at home with a heat pump.

The men with the most money in the world will craft our culture if we let them.

Tell the children…

Fantasy female hero image by Stefan Keller

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 87 ratings

Thursday

Happy leap year.

9.3 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

A bombshell win: vaccine mandates for police and ambulance drivers ruled a breach of human rights

By Jo Nova

Two years late: Two legal wins, and a Senate investigation

Two years after police and ambulance drivers were forced to get Covid injections, the Queensland Supreme Court has ruled that the vaccine mandates were unlawful. Because this decision is about human rights, it’s may also apply to other humans (we hope).  So lawyers all over the country are sitting up and paying attention.

This follows on from a South Australian decision a few weeks ago where the Employment Tribunal found that an employer (the state government) was liable for any injuries caused to staff by mandatory injections required in the workplace.

And possibly related to all this, in 2022 10,000 Australians died above and beyond the normal rate and no one (officially) knows why. The Australian Senate has decided (on the fourth try, and only by one vote) they can say for sure someone should definitely look into this. This banal, but good outcome was possibly a parliamentary world first — which says a lot about the state of democracies around the world because the same odd patterns of deaths is occurring in pretty much every democracy.

The Labor Party and Greens voted against it, presumably being worried about industrial relations but fine with dead bodies.

Forced vaccination finally deemed unlawful

QLD Supreme Court declares Police and Ambulance vaccine mandates unlawful

Rebel News

In a landmark ruling, the Queensland Supreme Court has declared the Covid-19 vaccine mandates for police and ambulance staff to be unlawful under the Human Rights Act.

The ruling, which declared the mandates to be in breach of the Human Rights Act, comes after 38 Queensland Police staff, including 16 officers, were reportedly sacked for refusing to get vaccinated.

The Queensland Supreme Court 130 years ago when people still knew how to build good buildings.

Some 200 police in the state were suspended due to non-compliance. The decision to force medical experiments on employees was made in January 2022.  So here we are living in a legal swamp where it’s taken two long years to find out what is “lawful”. Both the Police Commissioner of Queensland, and the Queensland Health director-general apparently didn’t fully understand the law. And the government may yet appeal, which means, in the fullness of millions of dollars perhaps the unlawful will become lawful again.

The legal system is seemingly set up by lawyers for lawyers, and the crime it takes so long to even know that the law is. Not only did some people get injected against their wishes, but others who complied might have chosen differently had they known this two years ago. Some people were put through hell for believing (correctly) that they had the legal right to choose what they inject. They lost their jobs and went through two years of stress, fear and lost income.  A few others who took the vaccine may have had their own kind of hell, depending on whether they had side effects.

There is an ocean of human pain there that could have been avoided if our laws were simplified and unlawful orders were not left to unlawfully fester for two whole years.

The Guardian

The court found the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, failed to give proper consideration to human rights relevant to the decision to issue the vaccine mandate.

The former Department of Health director general Dr John Wakefield was unable to prove he issued the vaccine mandate under an implied term of the employment agreements for ambulance service workers.

As a result, both vaccine mandates were found by the court to be “unlawful” and to have no effect.

We wonder if the police commissioner had given “proper consideration to the human rights”, would that make forced vaccinations OK? And if Wakefield failed to find the right clause in employment agreements, will future agreements be written to include the right for employers to inject workers against things not invented yet?

The Australian notes that this has widespread ramifications:

Queensland’s ‘unlawful’ Covid-19 vaccine mandate ruling just ‘tip of the iceberg’: experts

by Ellie Dudley and Lydia Lynch

A landmark legal decision “vindicating” dozens of Queensland paramedics and police officers who took on the state government’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates is just the “tip of the iceberg” of litigation attempting to overthrow pandemic orders, experts say, with cases in similar jurisdictions likely to ride on the coat-tails of the successful action.

More than 70 staff had taken legal action against the state government in three separate applications, arguing the vaccine require­ments were incompatible with their human rights and they had been discriminated against “due to their political belief or activity”.

The Australian Senate decides unexplained mass deaths might be worth a look

When thousands of Australians start to die above the norm, it only takes our elected representatives two years to make the big decision to call for an inquiry.  Senator Babet (UAP) is to be congratulated for his tenacity, but seriously, how low is our bar? The investigation should have been done in 2021 when the deaths became detectable and lives could have been saved.

Australian Senate acknowledges need for inquiry into excess deaths

By Rebekah Barnett

While yesterday’s motion calling for agreement that there is “a need for further inquiry” into the causes of Australia’s excess mortality is more symbolic than practical in its outcome, Senator Babet says that its passing is an important step in the right direction.

“This motion is symbolic of a changing sentiment around this issue, and I am not aware of any other parliament in the world who has admitted that excess deaths are worthy of inquiry,” Senator Babet said in a statement released after the vote.

Law and justice.In the world we thought we lived in, if a major new experimental drug was rolled out in an emergency, in a nation with 22 million mobile phones, satellites and 100,000 bureaucrats, you’d think batches would have been tracked, results collected and within a few months our Minister of Health would be able to release safety data for all of us to see. Instead, we got nothing.

Remember the big Queensland vaccine trail that was supposed to follow 10,000 people for five years? The QoVax trial gave the illusion the government cared, but mysteriously ran out of funding after just one year. Somehow, the Australian government was happy to spend $18 billion on Australia’s vaccine and treatment of Covid 19, yet wouldn’t spend 0.5% of that checking whether the vaccines were safe.[Update: For some reason the Australian Government has lost that page bragging about their spending. Luckily the WayBack Machine has a copy. ]

They had a year of data. What did they know?

h/t another Ian, Stephen Neil, Earl, David of Cooyal, Rebel News. Kesten Green.

REFERENCE

URL to the government page on vaccine spending (broken):  https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/about-rollout/vaccine-agreements

Scales of justice by Ezequiel Octavianoy

Nurse with needle by Dim Hou

 

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

Wednesday

9.4 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Forty years of trust in science drops after pandemic

By Jo Nova

The brand-name of science is being trashed

Trust in science continues to fall. The disillusionment with the Covid response has spread to science in general. Anthony Fauci said “trust the science” then showed us how untrustworthy science was. SARS-2 definitely wasn’t a lab-leak, except it probably was; the vaccine was 95% effective, except everyone caught covid, and the data was world’s best practice but the FDA fought tooth and nail to stop us seeing it until 2076.

These results are terrible: despite respondents being surrounded by hi-tech cars, phones, food and gadgets which were all impossible without science, only 57% of people now think science has has a “mostly positive” effect.  That’s 43% of the population who now think science hurts us as much as it helps (or is even worse).

The good name of science, created by two generations with antibiotics, satellites, and the moon-landing,  has been exploited by name-calling parasites.

Pew research released this in November, calling it just “a decline”:

What Pew didn’t say was that these sort of surveys have been going on for years and this was the biggest fall in forty years.

A similar survey set by the National Science Foundation has been running since 1979, and year after year, found that between 68% and 79% of Americans used to think the benefits of science outweighed the negatives.

It’s been remarkably consistent for four decades but we’re in new territory now.

Here are those older results:

Polls, USA,

(Click to enlarge and see the caption.)
The terms “experts” and “consensus” won’t work like they used too.
Contrast this with  the news just released by Nature with the headline “trust in scientists is high”, but watch the pea.  They don’t compare it to the past, report a trend, or give it any context at all. It’s just a mindless number, 3.62, (but it’s high mom!)

People around the world have high levels of trust in scientists, and most want researchers to get more involved in policymaking, finds a global survey with more than 70,000 participants. But trust levels are influenced by political orientation and differ among nations, according to the study, which was described in a preprint posted online last month1.

Respondents were asked to indicate how much they agreed with a dozen statements about the integrity, competency, benevolence and openness of scientists, on a scale of 1 to 5. A higher score indicated higher trust.  Across all participants, the average trust score was moderately high, at 3.62…

Even the psychologist they interview can only bring himself to say “fairly high”.

Nature make sure to tell us trust is ” linked to political orientation”. They blame it mostly on political leaders. It’s as if the voters are just the sheep being led astray, not the ones throwing tomatoes at the politicians who are slow to figure it out.

It is the end of an era.

REFERENCES

Public assessment of benefits and harms of scientific research: 1979–2018

National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation, Survey of Public Attitudes Toward and Understanding of Science and Technology (1979–2001); University of Michigan, Survey of Consumer Attitudes (2004); NORC at the University of Chicago, General Social Survey (2006–18). Science and Engineering Indicators

 

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 79 ratings

Tuesday

7.9 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Monday

8.5 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Sunday

9.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings