Weekend Unthreaded

9 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Arizona Audit finds thousands of dodgy votes, Senator says “decertify the election”

Biden won Arizona (theoretically anyway) by 10,457 votes. But mail-in ballots went forth and must have multiplied because 74,000 baby new ballots appeared in the final count that were never posted out. Strangely – after the election was over, 18,000 voters just disappeared off the rolls while 11,000 appeared from nowhere. The latter were people who weren’t on the rolls on November 7th, yet they voted, and then were on the rolls on by December 4th.

Despite Biden winning he’s had the most dreadful luck — the voting software was old and easily breached, and all the access logs showing the Democrat’s complete innocence were somehow completely wiped in March — just like that, poof? Then there were the ballots that were printed on different paper that bled, even though all votes were meant to be on bleedproof Votesecure paper?

And some people wonder why doubts about the Biden Government don’t go away…

Final results are coming soon:

Arizona Audit Finds Massive Irregularities, Including More Than 74,000 Mail-In Ballots Counted Than Mailed Out

By Debra Heine, American Greatness

More than 74,000 mail-in ballots were received in Maricopa County, Arizona than appear to have been mailed out, […]

Thursday Open Thread

9 out of 10 based on 26 ratings

58% percent of Americans say the Media Are the ‘Enemy of the People’

Good news: it’s quite an extraordinary result — six out of ten Americans are saying in the most blunt possible terms, that the media is not only biased, but actively working against the people and with hostile intent.

From this far down, there is no bounce. Only a full about-face with mea culpa and an Augean cleanout would even start to unwind this toxic position. And the Media puppets are not even close to that razing day.

The propaganda is falling on deaf ears and at this point, the harder they push, the worse it gets.

Trust is a precious and fragile thing

58% Of Voters Agree: Media Are ‘Enemy of the People’

Rassmussen Reports

Voters overwhelmingly believe “fake news” is a problem, and a majority agree with former President Donald Trump that the media have become “the enemy of the people.”

A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” including 34% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t agree, including 23% who Strongly Disagree. (To see survey question […]

Climate change makes Antarctic summers… cooler

Forty years of global warming have made East Antarctic summers even shorter and more miserably colder than they already were. (Save the wilderness — burn coal now?)

Surface Air temperature over East Antarctica (presumably in summer) from Hsu et al 2021.

East Antarctica is the vast mass of the Antarctic plateau which was, in theory, going to melt. If that three kilometer thick block of ice isn’t going to melt in summer, when exactly will it?

Remember when the poles were meant to amplify man-made global warming?

 

Not much of Antarctica is warming in summer.

These graphs come from a paper that Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone found. The authors Hsu et al think the cooling trend has a natural explanation (but if it had been warming, of course, no one would have asked that question). Hsu at al estimate that 20-40% of the trend is due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). And maybe it is, but they use climate models we know are broken. Curiously they predict the East Antarctic will keep cooling — which may be a first (for the models).

For what it’s worth the MJO is a massive convective atmospheric blob that […]

Tuesday Open Thread

9.4 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Big batteries could be bigger bombs than Beirut Fertilizer

Sudden tragic release of stored chemical energy in Beirut

It turns out storing Megawatts of high density energy in a confined space is “like a bomb”. Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is?

Clean, green, noisy and explosive.

And they are “unregulated” in the UK.

GWPF

UK’s giant battery ‘farms’ spark fears of explosions that can reach temperatures of 660C

Amy Oliver Mail on Sunday

…according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.

With the potential for huge explosions, fires and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.

The batteries, designed as reservoirs of spare electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun fails to shine, are spreading around the British countryside. And this, says Prof Allison and his fellow scientists, could spell catastrophe.

It’s like a potential bomb,’ he says. ‘When batteries catch fire, you can’t just squirt water on […]

Weekend Unthreaded

8.9 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

NOAA puts up a “La Niña” Watch: “The Global Cooling Accelerator” cometh?

Is this the start of a cooler shift? Cap Allon of Electroverse notes that we may be in for another La Nina:

The La Niña climate pattern is forecast to make a return this fall and last through the winter of 2021-22, according to an official “alert” issued Thursday, July 8 by the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), which suggests further global cooling as we enter the new year.

La Niña –-a natural cycle marked by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific Ocean-– is one of the main drivers of global weather — it is usually associated with colder global temperatures, droughts in the southern U.S., and increased precipitation in Australia.

Entering a La Niña event when global temperatures are already around baseline is significant.

If the climate pattern has the expected affect then we should brace for global temps to continue their overall downward trend –which began in 2016 (see link below)– to levels well below the norm.

We could conceivably be looking at UAH readings some 0.4C below the 30-year average by the spring of 2022.

A La Nina watch has been issued by CPC.

The updated run of the NMME has La Nina returning during late fall and early winter 2021. This progression is also supported by similar analog years. #ENSO pic.twitter.com/gPMVokOfDH

— Ethan Sacoransky (@blizzardof96) July 8, 2021

Read it all: https://electroverse.net/noaa-declares-la-nina-watch-for-the-fall-the-global-cooling-accelerator/

9.8 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

What if Sydney could shorten the lockdown with cheap common drugs, but we didnt even try them?

How much does the Medical Swamp hate antivirals?

The news nobody wanted to hear (except perhaps Pharmaceutical giants): 29 new active cases in the NSW community.

Will NSW get desperate enough to try cheap drugs with low risks, mass production and promising results? It’s winter and the Delta variant is spreading. Contact tracing is rapidly being outpaced. The number of close contacts doubled overnight to 14,000.

What have they got to lose?

The Financial Review

NSW reported 44 new locally acquired COVID-19 cases, 29 of those were in the community while infectious and the number of close contacts has doubled from 7000 to 14,000 in the past 24 hours.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the lockdown was likely to be extended beyond Friday, July 16, unless there was a “dramatic turnaround” in coming days.

Antiviral hesitancy could be costing the state billions. What if an antiviral trial were offered to anyone who tested positive and their contacts, subject to medical advice (approved by their doctor)? It would be a great reason to go get tested. Got symptoms? — We may be able to help you and your family.

Some antivirals and vitamins like D3 appear […]

Broke arm today

While ice skating, slender left wrist successfully stopped ice rink from bruising hip. Now temporarily a one handed blogger. But grateful — thinking how different it would be in hunter gatherer days without handy people with xray machine. Wondering how well bones healed while wandering savanna fighting off snakes with sticks. (Yay, civilization).

Distal radius now has exoskeleton.

Like someone else’s arm

As a long time veteran of leg fractures in youth of both skiing and car accident kind, this is not unfamiliar territory.

Blogging will be more concise for a while. A good challenge …

9.8 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

9.3 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Vaccines, not the magic bullet the advertisers claim

Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, but having dropped restrictions, they are picking them up again only one month later as the Delta variant spreads.

In Tel Aviv, 75 students got infected at one party from a vaccinated person who had caught the virus from another vaccinated person. And though the UK data is better than the Israeli data, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has had both of her vaccine doses but still has to self isolate for two weeks due to a “near exposure”. How confident are the UK health experts? Not very. With the UK only weeks away from the so-called Freedom day, will double vaxed people have to self isolate for two weeks each time they are exposed?

This belies the key point about “getting vaxed for the nation”. If being vaccinated is about keeping you out of hospital, not so much about infecting your friends, then getting vaxed is more for self protection. The cost-benefit equation might look good for high risk people, but changes dramatically for healthy young people. We need to know how much vaccination slows transmission yet it’s barely a part of the national conversation.

A month […]

Tuesday Open Thread

9.2 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

In Mexico deaths were 50% higher for 8 months, then they start Ivermectin…

For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.

Ivermectin use […]

Weekend Unthreaded

8.5 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Five Asian countries will build 600 coal plants, wreck world, but who cares?

….

Australia and the UK can close one coal plant each, but Asia will build 600.

There’s a socially awkward moment coming at the G20’s next dinner, but despite the combined selfish evil of the theoretical Asian Planet Wreckers, no one will really say much, put trade embargoes on, or boycott the Olympics.

Ultimately, everyone at the table knows that Carbon Voodoo is a Western dinner party game, not a serious pollutant.

China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units

Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian

Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.

They are all developing nations, apparently, so they can be forgiven, even though the list includes number 2 and 3 on the Worlds Biggest Economies list, and one of these fledglings just left the nest and landed on Mars.

Spot the craziness:

Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.

Why […]

Freak weather, heat domes, cold snaps, all grist for the Global Witchdoctors

The Heat Dome was a freak local event

Once upon a time, scientists would say only 30 year trends counted. Now, all weather is climate except when it isn’t. Climate modelers know the heat over North East America was caused by your beef steak, but the cold over New Mexico was not even worth mentioning. (Nor apparently was the minus 81 in Antarctica a couple of weeks ago).

As Ryan Maue says: Overall the contiguous US is 1.4F below average.

…h/t Clarence.t WUWT

 

The Sun is already saying the Heat Dome “killed at least 500 people”. Strangely the February Texas freeze and blackouts may have killed 700 people, but five months later the media is still carefully waiting for confirmation before it puts that in a headline.

Blame the Pacific Ocean

Even NOAA says a Heat Dome is caused by La Nina and a local weather phenomenon:

This [heat dome] happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”

A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the […]

Thursday Open Thread

9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Wind power “headed for disaster” in Germany

Is this the future of wind all over the world? The salad days of wind power in Germany are over. Bad news is rolling in from several directions. Twenty years of hope-n-subsidies has run aground. Profits are grinding down, and hardly any new towers are being erected. People are fighting back against the noise, the views, and the bird chopping. Conservationists might like the idea of wind, as long as it’s in someone else’s forest. Suddenly groups that oppose wind towers are gaining traction, and the red tape and legal battles have grown wings and settled on new developments like a bat plague.

New turbines are now supposed to be two kilometers from any home, and there just isn’t enough spare land to build them on. German wind farms are running out of Germany.

If only they were profitable and provided an essential service, they might still have friends.

Wind energy in crisis as expansion stalls in Germany

Alex Reichmuth; Nebelspalter, via GWPF

Lengthy planning and approval procedures stand in the way of the expansion of wind energy. There is too little designated space for possible locations and too many lawsuits against projects. The resistance to […]