|
|
Would you like bunions with that? | Photo: Mshirk
Believe it or not, Medieval shoes tell us something important about modern civilization. The hyper-gregarious Homo Sapiens might be able to walk on the moon, but ultimately a large proportion of the species just want to climb the social ladder. And the smarter, higher order sapiens might paradoxically be willing to pay the most stupid price.
In this case, being “progressive” in the 14th Century meant wearing pointy shoes that left 4 out of 10 people buried at the friary with bent and sometimes broken bones. Bunions make it harder to balance so they increase the risk of falls. The undeniable benefits of scoring social fashion points were apparently worth spending decades distorting foot bones. Before you dismiss this as a teenage girly thing, ponder that two thirds of the victims were men.
The social competition to have the pointiest shoes became so dangerous that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law declaring toe-points had to be 2 inches or less within London.
Pointy shoes in a statue from 3,000 BC. | Camocon
The pointy shoe fashion bubble has struck all over the world: Japan, China, […]
God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:
Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.
Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.
One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:
Gas faces existential crisis in climate wary Europe
May 14, 2021, , Reuters
Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.
…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.
The […]
…
9.3 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
In 2017 there was an official Chinese Academy of Science video to showcase the new Wuhan “Level 4” lab. The video shows bats in a cage there and teams monitoring the lab in case there’s “an accident”.
The latest release of video footage tells us a few important things —
The Chinese Officials were lying when they said their were no live bats at the Wuhan Institute. The WHO was helping them lie. Peter Daszak, the President of the US group funneling NIH money to the lab, also lied and helped them to cover it up. In 2017 the Chinese Academy of Science admitted that ten years earlier, no one in China had known how to do this biosecurity research. The French (and presumably US collaborators) taught the Chinese how. They clashed all the way, and the Chinese threw the French out as soon as the lab was finished. French and US intelligence knew there was a high risk of bioweapons. But they didn’t tell the world, nor prepare for it. Instead they’ve done everything they can to cover it up. The Wuhan Institute of Virology viral databases went missing on Sept 12, 2019, before the virus started to spread. […]
Most Cantons in Switzerland voted “No”.
The Swiss just voted down their governments plan to change the weather with increased car and airline taxes, albeit by only 51.6 to 48.4. That nearly half the population voted yes is testament to thirty years of non-stop propaganda, and the near complete suppression of skeptics.
Imagine what the vote would have have been if they allowed skeptics equal air time and funded skeptical scientists even at 10% the rate the believer-modelers get?
BBC reporters were shocked:
Swiss voters reject key climate change measures Switzerland’s policy on fighting climate change has been thrown into doubt after voters rejected key measures in a popular vote.
A referendum saw voters narrowly reject the government’s plans for a car fuel levy and a tax on air tickets.
The measures were designed to help Switzerland meet targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
But no one mentioned this on the ABC or SBS news tonight. Instead they told us “Australia is increasingly isolated” for the 440th time.
A huge shock
By Imogen Foulkes, BBC News, Bern
The no-vote to limiting emissions is a huge shock. The Swiss […]
…
9.4 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Two is two all over the world, no matter the language. Maths unites humanity — that is, until someone decides to un-race-ify that which isn’t racist. At this point in the nonsense-time-continuum everything they do to make it less racist will only make it more.
And so it comes to pass that profoundly racist people are telling us maths is white supremacist. It’s not just a one-divided-by-zero moment in rhetoric and reasoning — it’s as if Asians don’t exist, or aren’t human, or don’t set records in Maths SATs? Whatever it is the Wokerati are protesting, it’s not about the group “the system favours most”. Instead it’s a scorecard in a secret social bingo and the winning numbers are W-H-I-T-E.
The most racist people in the world are not the ones doing differential geometry, it’s the ones dividing their community by their lowest common denominator — their skin.
What could be more racist than telling children that their melanin-type can’t get the answer right? Not only does it set them up to fail, it destroys their success if they manage it anyway. Did they really deserve that spot, that prize, or that degree?
Nothing entrenches racism like judging […]
Photo: Whispyhistory
The world faced the greatest global health crisis in one hundred years, but it’s taken a whole year to write up a small study that shows hydroxychoroquine could improve the survival rate of people on ventilators by a factor of three, and that the dose matters.
If anyone says “but this is not a big study”, that’s exactly my point. Why is it so hard to get a large study of a drug that was already known to be useful against SARS-1 fifteen years before SARS-2 arrived. A drug that even the President of the US was talking about in the earliest days? In January 2020 we already knew that the three drugs that were “fairly effective” were Remdesivir, Chloroquine and Ritonavir. On February 13, the South Koreans were already recommending hydroxychloroquine and telling us the anti-virals should be “started as soon as possible”. We had that head start, we threw it away.
Apparently the kings-of-compassion in the commentariat would rather see deaths than admit Donald Trump was right. And the experts in Pharmaceutical Giants only cared about the profit line.
And so it comes to pass, finally, that we find out what happened to 255 […]
…
9.3 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
The good news is that there is a way out of the new mutant load. The bad news is the Swamp is in the way.
India’s caseload has continued to shrink since we last looked at it. Which is great news, but instead of endorsing the approach that worked, the health ministry is now writing to doctors telling them not to use Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
Indeed the new recommendations even go so far as to say that zinc and multivitamins are out too. Even zinc?
Ponder that Ivermectin is so powerful it even destroys multivitamins.
Is the day coming when we see antivirals suddenly accepted like the Wuhan Lab theory was? Lives depend on it, but vast piles of money do too. The medical censorship swamp is well equipped, and I suspect, has years of experience. There are so many anti-viral medicines, they’ve been around for years and all the financial incentives not to use cheap out-of-patent drugs have always been there.
Here are the graphs of infections in some states of India:
…
So who leaned on the Indian officials? Who knows?
Ivermectin, Doxycycline Dropped From List of COVID-19 Drugs by Health Ministry
New Delhi: […]
It’s everywhere nearly. The UK variant (called “Alpha”) has become the dominant strain (see that graph far below). But now the Indian V2 variant (the Delta strain) is taking over from the UK strain. It is rapidly spreading in Russia, Bangladesh and Portugal.
The Nextstrain country comparison site shows which variants are most common — prevalence of the strain — not the absolute numbers. There are “only” 5,000 new cases a day in the UK at the moment (far down from the peak of 60,000 cases a day). But they are increasingly the Indian variant.
In the USA there are only 12,000 new cases a day, and only a hint of the Indian Delta variant.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain. https://covariants.org/per-country
…
The rate of increase is easier to see if the other variants are deselected.
There are some ominous looking trajectories there.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain.
It’s the slope of the trend change in the Delta variant that matters. (The last week of data in India is probably an anomaly.)
The Indian Delta variant has also spread to China, which is doing what it always does, mass testing and lockdowns. The […]
This may be nothing, but Reddit and The Guardian are out and intermittently there are reports also of Amazon, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC down. Reddit says “Fastly Error” so it may be nothing more than one cloud computing service crashing.
The BBC Minutes ago (was not down for me)
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
The UK government website – gov.uk – is also down as is parts of the BBC and a host of other media outlets.
Affected websites displayed the message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.
UPDATE: It appears to be solved according to The Australian. Just another odd cyber thing. There seem to be a lot of them lately. Almost like someone was rattling the cage.
9.7 out of 10 based on 34 ratings
…
10 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
What does the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) do? Fund research into deadly viruses that may leak.
How’s that Threat Reduction working out?
The US military was more closely involved than they let on. What kind of crazy pays adversaries to research deadly weapons?
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’
The Grants were going to a group called EcoHealth Alliance which got $123 million in total from the US Government from 2013 – 2020. Indeed it got as much as 90% of its money from the US government. It’s almost a government department, but without the accountability. It funneled some of that $123m to the Wuhan lab. The man running Eco Health — Dr Peter Daszak was the one who helped whip up the Lancet paper saying Covid was absolutely definitely natural — about four weeks after most people first heard of the virus. The useless World Health Organisation then invited Daszak to come along on the “investigation into the origin of Covid” in China. Bravo U.N.. Daszak went on to thank […]
With the US Defence Force about to release “something” on UFO’s, these very engaging videos from Mick West are persuasive and apropos. But if smart guys with trigonometry and metadata can explain how these aliens are mysterious camera artefacts — surely the Pentagon can too?
Why then are they called “unexplained” and why are they being released as teasers for “the big news?” Did the DoD forget parallax and gymbal corrections?
Apparently 120 incidents will be reviewed in June. Former intelligence director John Ratcliffe has hinted the report will be a big deal. Let’s hope they saved the best stuff. I’m looking forward to a good tantalizing mystery.
Michael Shermer (of Skeptic.com infamy) wrote this all up in a long feature on Quillette:
Understanding the Unidentified
The “Go Fast” video purportedly shows an object with no heat source (and therefore propelled by some unconventional engine) that appears to move impossibly fast just above the surface of the ocean. West then conducted what he describes as “10th grade trigonometry” (based on the numbers provided in the video image itself) to show that, in fact, the object was well above the ocean surface at around 13,000 feet and was probably […]
…
9.1 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
Suddenly there is pandemonium about the Lab Leak idea as the West wakes up a year too late. If only they’d been reading unfunded bloggers? It’s old news to readers here, but watch the pea. Why is it suddenly OK to mention now, after being banned on Facebook for months? Because timing is everything in politics.
Imagine how different it would have been in February last year if Western leaders knew then that it was possible the Wuhan flu had leaked from a lab? And talk of it being a bioweapon was all over twitter even in January last year. How fast would those borders have slammed shut, saving literally a million lives or three and so many businesses? Neighbours around China were already snapping doors closed in the first days of February. Remember all the nations that wouldn’t accept, the poor infected Diamond Princess? Even if the West wasn’t sure, the possibility that it was a laboratory leak would have changed everything about the early response. Italy would hardly have run a “hug a Chinese (bioweapon)” campaign.
Image: Scientific Animations
Politics explains so much. Sixteen months of silence served Biden’s backers well. If Donald Trump could have […]
China just doesn’t know how to make friends in a free world
Image by AngMoKio
China’s great weakness — or rather the Chinese Communist Party’s is that no one likes authoritarian rulers, or people that lie, steal, spy and send out bioweapons. As I said over a year ago, The one thing China may have achieved with the Covid is to rally the rest of the world against it. It’s taken a year because the craven media couldn’t admit Trump was right about the lab leak, but there’s no hiding it now.
China has few friends. As well as infecting the whole world, it has fought with Indians, threatened the Philippines and Malaysia over the South Sea, flown fighter jets over Taiwan, and bullied Australia, even saying our weak military would be the first hit in a war. China is leaning on Japan to give it strategic islands, and to distance itself from the US. Like a mafia state, the threat is blunt: “no rational country would want to contain or offend its biggest trading partner” says Beijing. Nice economy you have there, be a shame if something happened to it. The PRC even took on a boy […]
…
8.9 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
Росгвардия
The West is switching to trendy unreliable energy while Russia is ramping up coal and gas production.
Russia is building a ten billion dollar railroad to sell coal to Asia, but Australia is building a ten billion dollar hydro bandaid “battery” just to make unreliable energy slightly less useless.
Russia is being left behind on renewables, and they’re probably delighted. The more the West cripples itself in a quest to make sparkly green-electrons that stop the storms, the richer the Russians will get.
With the second largest coal reserves in the world, they’re well positioned to meet the growing demand from India and China. Indeed, if Russia could just think of a way to stop the USA and Australia from producing coal, they could corner the market.
If Russian Intel isn’t paying climate activists and child-complainers a retainer, they must have rocks for brains. But since they are apparently paying French and German bloggers to discredit the Pfizer vaccine perhaps they already are some of the great minds behind Greenpeace?
And if they were funding climate disinformation campaigns, which media outlet would tell us?
h.t GWPF
Source EIA 2021
Give me one reason Russia […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments