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Herding the Democrat school of fish toward civil war

Hypothetically, if someone were trying to divide a nation this survey is Paydirt

It’s almost like a team is winding up the young and impressionable, stoking their fears. Republican Voters worry about policies, but Democratic voters are just scared of Republicans.

h/t David for the “school of fish”.

Look at the top four concerns:

Matt Margolis, PJ Media

According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, Democrat voters are more concerned about “Donald Trump’s supporters” than anything else.

Democrats

Democrats are less concerned about policy issues than they are about people with whom they disagree politically. To them, Trump supporters are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, a more pressing issue than gun violence, and even more important than issues that affect their various constituencies, like discrimination against LGBT Americans, sexism, student debt, alleged voter suppression, etc.

To these voters, Trump supporters are a bigger issue than all of those and more. Imagine being a store owner minding your own business and thinking that the Democrat voters around you think you are a bigger issue facing this country than anything else, even more than the issues that directly affect […]

Weekend Unthreaded

8.4 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Vitamin B6 may reduce the cytokine storms of Covid

Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths

The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).

The Big Black hole in medical research?

I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.

The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to […]

News and tips Friday

Just trying to see if this is useful.

h/t Leo

8.5 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

US Climate Czar turns the thumb-screws on Australia coal

And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world.

It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not.

So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver?

Meanwhile last year China built three times more coal power than […]

Thursday Open Thread

8.3 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

The Disinformation Campaign about Disinformation

Tucker: Left’s ‘disinformation’ campaign is destroying America

The world would be a better place if everyone saw segments like this. Not to convert them to a cause, but just to open their eyes to the gaslighting in the media.

We’re in an Information War and the first salvo is just to let people know there is a War and their news service is being weaponized against them.



Lighting the Rascism Fire helps bury “other stuff” in the smoke

How to stop discussion about corruption at the highest levels — yell “racist”

[Zack] Goldberg looked at every time the term “racism” was used in America’s largest newspapers and noticed a trend. There was a noticeable spike just after 2011, which not coincidentally was right around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

When people are starting to talk about what Wall Street actually does in public, all at once journalists agree that the real problem with America is racism. America is not a place with a screwed-up economic system that rewards a tiny number of emotionally damaged grifters who possess otherwise useless skills applicable only to finance while everyone else gets poorer. That’s not a […]

German experiment to make wind powered Silicon Chips fails

Surprising no one: lumpy expensive electricity does not make for a High Tech Paradise

It’s another example of how more green jobs means less real ones. A German High Tech Chip maker driven to Singapore by renewable energy prices

Emden, Germany by Gritte

To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally.

h/t GWPF Chipmakers lament high taxes and levies on electricity in Germany 9.5 out of 10 based on 62 ratings […]

Climate Propaganda burns out: neither hope nor doom works on audiences anymore

Hard to find some good news out there today. But here’s a bit:

People are immune to climate hopey gloom

Researchers tried to figure out whether to make their climate propaganda more scary or more uplifting but found instead that they might as well show 500 people “the history of smartphones”. (That was the control video). Nothing works anymore.

It was a complete wash. No new activists were made.

However, despite these emotional responses, neither [doom nor hope] video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated…

After watching the online movies, nobody thought climate change was scarier, nobody want to change anything they did, and no one wanted to be climate activist either, unless they were already one to start with. After 30 years of propaganda, people have heard it all. Pounding them them with more isn’t going to work.

It didn’t matter which movie they saw.

Neither doom, hope nor placebo did a thing.

The multi-billion dollar industry of climate propaganda was hoping to tweak […]

Tuesday Open Thread

8.6 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Texas dodged a bullet: Would you like explosions with your blackouts?

Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips

Texas toyed with cascading crises

The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.

ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:

Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune

The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds […]

Extinction level event? 42,000 years ago Earths magnetic field shrank to nothing

Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2.

Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame).

This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.

The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/

Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9.1 out of 10 based on 25 ratings

Texas was prepared for global warming but not the return of the cold

If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?

Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.

Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac

Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.

But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the […]

Texas: day four without power and water for some, fishtanks freeze, pipes burst, “worse than Africa”

Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months

A few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.

It’s so cold in Texas homes that fish tanks are frozen. pic.twitter.com/IRuDjpG5Af

— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) February 18, 2021

Others are desperately using gas BBQ’s indoors even though it […]

Thursday Open Thread

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8.8 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Texas: 20 dead — Many now going 50 hours plus without electricity, heating, water

Things are still not looking good in Texas.

At the peak demand on Sunday in Texas the people were using 70 Gigawatts of electricity — an all time record. Then both wind and gas generators failed. Currently the ERCOT Grid is using about 42GW of electricity and ERCOT reports of up to 46 GW of generators being out of action. Total wind output is still under 3GW out of 30GW* of wind capacity.

The gas was the back up to the Wind, but Wind power can’t be a back up to the gas (or anything else).

An ERCOT press release claims that they still have to loadshed 14,000MW which means 2.8 million homes.

“As of 9 a.m., approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.”

It’s not clear to me how they arrive at only 18,000 MW missing of wind and solar. Perhaps they are only counting the 6 or so GW they expected to be able to use of windpower?

There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t even rotate the blackouts between […]

Pandemic of incompetence? Vitamin D reduced intensive care by 80%. Ministers don’t care?

If a new drug reduced deaths by 10% it would almost get a Nobel Prize — that is, as long as it made someone rich.

A free antiviral shining down on you?

At the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona 930 people who turned up with Covid were randomly asked to take a vitamin D3 (calcifediol) treatment or a placebo. Of them, 551 were given four doses of Vitamin D3 over the next four weeks. The other 379 luckless people got the chance to be randomized controls..

The lucky ones got 20,000IU (or 20 normal vitamin D3 tablets) on day one, then 10,000 IU (ten normal tablets) on four other days in the next month. (Technically, the big dose was given was given on day one followed up with half doses on day 3, 7, 15, and 30.)

In the hapless control group as many as 80 people (21%) would go on to need Intensive Care (ICU). And 57 people of the original 379 would end up dying, or about 15%.

Of the 551 people given five dollars worth* of Vitamin D (that’s the cost online) only 30 (5%) would go on to need the ICU, and all up 36 […]

Texas at -20C, five million without power as Wind Turbines freeze

Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state

An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas.

Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages.

UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather.

While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.

Anchorage, Alaska is warmer than parts of Texas.

At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west

Records will be broken in Texas

 

Daily Mail

Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without […]

Tuesday Open Thread

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