Recent Posts


The Free world fights back. Anonymous hacks Russian state TV and government sites. Twitter is part of the war effort: #Ukraine

The World watches Ukraine. As the citizens are turning themselves into an army, they are being trained on Twitter, on how to beat tanks, pick strategic targets, and of course, there will be a propaganda campaign. Nothing can be verified. Except for the remarkable bravery of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who knocked back an offer to be evacuated, and is fighting with the army. He is being treated as a hero — the new leader of the free world.

Winning hearts all over the world has a material benefit. Hackers are working to punish Putin, theatening an unprecedented cyberwar that will cripple his websites and expose all his secrets. “We are Anonymous. We are legion. Expect us”. There are reports #Anonymous has already taken down six Russian government websites, and have even hacked into Russian state TV stations as well, showing what is happening in Ukraine. “Soon you will feel the wrath of the worlds hackers many of which may reside in your country.” Elon Musk has also offered the Starlink Satellites for Ukraine to use.

While Russia used Shock and Awe, the Ukrainians appear to be winning now. Though if Russian armored columns make it through to Kyiv […]

Sunday Open Thread

9.3 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Might be some downside there: Stock market bubble bigger than 1929

John Hussman warns that people may not realize how much stocks are likely to crash

Dr David Evans supplied some interesting links and adds “The biggest theme in markets is that ratios eventually revert to their mean (or average). No, it’s not different this time. A return to average on this graph implies a drop of about 75%.”

 

Hassman Margin-Adjusted P/E (US stock market price-earning ratio (adjusted))

John Hussman: Investors are paying top dollar for top dollar

Why is it so hard to accept that speculative bubbles can burst? Interest rates were driven to zero for a decade. Yield-starved investors chased stocks to valuations beyond the 1929 and 2000 extremes. That speculation front-loaded more than a decade of future market gains into the present. Those gains are now behind us, embedded in breathtaking multiples. If history is any guide, a collapse in valuations is likely to return those gains to the future.

The process of losing speculative gains and recovering them over time is what I’ve often called a “long, interesting trip to nowhere.” It bears repeating that the S&P 500 lagged Treasury bills from 1929-1947, 1966-1985, and 2000-2013. 50 years out of an 84-year period.

Now, […]

As the US, EU shrink, Russia grows: In 2020 the US was the worlds largest oil and gas producer

Marc Morano is On Fire

The man from Climate Depot

Morano: ‘In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance’

MORANO: “We are already seeing – the first part of it is in California, $6 a gallon. Gas is already up a dollar. Estimates are seven, $8 a gallon possible with recession if Putin, who we’ve given all of this power to by literally shutting down U.S. domestic energy.

Just a little history lesson here. In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance. We were the world’s largest oil and gas producer. More energy exports and imports, more energy production than consumption and we hadn’t done that since Harry Truman was president. Joe Biden came in at he said the first thing he wanted to do was jail fossil fuel executives. Biden’s energy secretary had done a video singing about no more gasoline, The is world aflame due to global warming.

9.1 out of 10 based on 54 ratings […]

Hm? A tiny part of the Covid spike is the same as something Moderna patented in 2016

Just another day in a cold Biotech War?

“The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.”

Image: Scientific Animations

To put this in perspective the whole virus is essentially a code with 29,000 bases in a row, and this story is about a sequence of 19.

The code is in the same four letter “alphabet”, more or less, as all life on Earth — A, T*, C and G. But in this new discovery there are 19 particular bases (or nucleotides) in a row. These are the bases that were so useful that Moderna patented the sequence in 2016. Oddly, no other coronavirus has that sequence. Indeed, nothing else in a virus or animal cell does either.

The reason these 19 bases are so interesting is that they make up the critical point called the “Furin Cleavage Site”. Furin is an enzyme inside our cells that acts like a specialist scissor, cutting only certain proteins in an exact way. A number of nasty germs sneak in and use our Furin snippy tools too — like HIV and Ebola, and […]

Weekend Unthreaded

8.9 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Webinar (Tues): Is the Great Barrier Reef in danger (or is it just a marketing tool to raise funds for the Green Blob?)

Join Peter Ridd, Jo Nova, Walter Starck and Alan Moran for the Great Barrier Reef Webinar

Tuesday March 1: Sign up here: AEF Webinar: Is the Great Barrier Reef Dying or Thriving?

Photo: Wise Hok Wai Lum

One side of politics has just spent another billion dollars to “save the reef”. The other side of politics may spend even more. But how much is our national policy set by scientific data and how much is controlled by scenic-disaster-shots? Do Australian academics and media activists craft a false notion of a fantasy Reef-Nirvana where bleaching never occurred, where cyclones were gentle, and where corals are supposed to live in aquarium-like conditions with constant pH and temperature 24 hours a day? Is the reef really in worse condition now than thirty years ago when half of our man-made emissions had not been emitted?

Walter Starck wants to know why we have one the largest fishing zones per capita in the world but most families struggle to afford to eat Australian fish?

A STICKY POST. Details below.

9.5 out of 10 based on 86 ratings […]

Green weakness enables wars. Punish Russia by burning more Coal, Gas, Shale and Nuclear power

While the West went weak-Green, Russia became the 2nd largest gas supplier on Earth

“The Eco-Hair-Shirt of Climate-Changey sufferance comes at a terrible price”

The Renewable-West is toothless to stop Russia doing whatever it damn-well wants.

Energy is power. As the West gave up the power to run its own factories and keep its own people warm, it also gave up the power to influence world affairs. The fashionable Eco-Hair-Shirt of Climate-Changey sufferance comes at a terrible price.

Weakness invites wars

Without its own energy supply, amidst an energy crisis, the West can’t help but buy gas from Russia. The only sanctions we can apply are weak and thus the West pays top dollar for Russian gas, and sends more tank-money to a nation with power because it’s selling a product that everyone wants. Nobody wants a wind farm unless someone else pays a subsidy.

The best thing the West could do now is run their old coal and nuclear plants at top speed, launch the UK Shale industry, and get serious about the North Sea. Then the price of gas would fall, the EU could use sanctions that mattered.

Instead Germany is shutting nuclear plants, Britain […]

Thursday Open Thread

8.5 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Oops. Who wants a Bank Run? Canadian Government unfreezes some accounts, after accidentally revealing no Canadian bank is safe

Justin Trudeau froze bank accounts of bread-winners who had committed no crime, in order to stop a protest that had largely been stopped. Everyone could see this was wanton partisan spite. But in a financial system built entirely on trust Trudeau was sticking giant public pins in Banking Voodoo dolls. If banks are just tools of partisan petty Ministers to use on political opponents, no one’s money was safe. Even if Trudeau reverses all the theft, people can’t un-see the Voodoo Doll.

Canadian banks became a bad joke:

Babylon Bee.

 

Trudeau wasn’t trying to stop the current convoy, he was trying to scare away all the future ones. It’s all about intimidation, to scare future donors from supporting future events. Canadians, we, all of us in the West have a choice now — to be scared into serfdom or to donate twice as much.

Google is on his side: identifying all the donors on a live map

In an extraordinary breach, Google published a map today for some hours with every hacked donor name and address, even including people who just donated $10. The link was here, but it’s just a “404 error” now. As @alberta_cw […]

Still no free lunch: 62,000 people bankrupted by Spain’s solar subsidy-industry

The Socialists in Spain offered bonanza subsidies to build solar plants. People accepted them. Too many people accepted them.

Then the Socialist-rulers realized they could not pay them all. But the solar panels had been built. The debts were all accrued. All that was left was for investors to learn the true value of surges of surplus energy at the same time of day.

Sadly people faced losing their homes, in what must have been a grueling realization.



If only Socialists could do maths, they could have seen this coming. It’s not even quantum mechanics, it’s just arithmetic.

If only investors researched their investments and remembered that if it looks too good to be true, everyone else will pile on, and supply will wildly exceed demand, especially because no one really wants extra electrons for lunch.

Teach the children. The government should not be picking winners, but if it does, buy something else.

h/t Jim Simpson

9.8 out of 10 based on 54 ratings

Clueless: 2nd richest man in Australia thinks we have a free market in energy

Mike Cannon-Brookes might be an Australian tech-billionaire who wants to buy out one of our biggest energy companies and get rid of coal, but not only does he apparently not understand electricity grids, he doesn’t even know what a free market is.

In a free market customers could choose not to buy green electrons:

If we had a real free market in energy, we could a tick-that-box on our plan that said “100% coal fired, cheapest available reliable electricity”. Instead, all Australians are forced to buy electricity from a hobbled patchwork grid which has been repurposed as a Global Air Conditioner.

It’s a national grid crafted through “Renewable Energy Targets”, and pure hopium. Hidden in our electricity bills, taxes, and frozen-pea packets at Coles, are multiple subsidies to help wind and solar power. Poor Australians have paid to help put discounted solar panels on their rich neighbors roofs, and are paying for back up, storage, stabilizers, unnecessary two-billion dollar interstate transmission lines, and demand management plans.

Every windless minute at night the poor pay more for electricity than they would have — if the Agents of Weather-changing Sorcery were not allowed to romp freely through the energy market. Once […]

Tuesday Open Thread

9.2 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Things are bad when even Romanians are warning you that your leader is a tyrant

Cristian Terhes of the European Parliament: “he’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania”

If even you raise doubts, about the vaccine, you are outcasted.

What’s the difference between what he does and what happened under the inquisition? See on one side they say, we should not believe in God, and on the other they say “we should believe in science. “

Science is not about belief…

Kings and Emperors ruled by Godly decree. Today tyrants rule by “science”. And The Science says whatever they want. If the Archbishop of Science finds the wrong thing, he will be sacked until the new Archbishop gets it right.

 



In 2014 Daniel Dickin warned that Canada will become a dictatorship under Trudeau. He observed that Trudeau had no respect for democratic processes and rigged or tampered with Liberal nominations. Some candidates were mysteriously disqualified, paperwork went missing, and Trudeau ordered candidates to vote exactly the way he wanted.

Then there are those immortal moments when Trudeau admired the dictatorship in China.

h/t David, PeterS.

9.7 out of 10 based on 72 ratings […]

It’s just a ship full of luxury cars on fire, and no one can put out the lithium batteries

Do EV’s make good reefs?

h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.

The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:

German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.

It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.

According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.

“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent

Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.

Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters

Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now

March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.

[…]

Privacy? Dissidents get doxxed and abused but supporters of the State can hide away

The Canadian government is so loved that the people who work for it want to hide their faces and names.

What government transparency means now: The whistleblowers will be exposed

The riot squad dress like Antifa and have no name badges. And the tow trucks in Ottawa were allowed to hide their truck branding so they suffer no pushback for towing away peaceful protestors.

Not the Canada you thought you were living in…

Who are these men hanging around as the tow-trucks took the trucks in Ottawa?

It’s hard to tell from the video, but there are a lot of people in halloween costumes doing something during the day the trucks were towed away.

Which trucking companies did the towing in Ottawa. Source: Yahoo

If most Canadians really did want the truckers gone surely some tow-truck drivers would be happy to help and soak up the free advertising. Or maybe all the polls are wrong?

Government critics get abuse and death threats

The team with the army, navy, jails and the billion-dollar budget is so afraid of the unarmed family men with trucks, tractors and hot-tubs that they have vowed to hunt them down “for months”. Not only […]

Trudeau weighs up whether to stop forced injections, but decides to trample with horses

Trudeau faced a tricky choice: he could stop forcing people to get injections-they-don’t-want and the Truckers would all go home, problem solved, but he would look like a loser. Or he could trample, spray and beat them, and steal their money instead. So he did.

It’s for their health:

Look what Putin is doing now. Sanctions immediately! pic.twitter.com/scUeh2JGHK

— Poso Remembers Ottawa (@JackPosobiec) February 19, 2022

.@ezralevant: “I think Justin Trudeau wants violence, to retroactively justify what he’s doing. Why would you run horses into a group of civilians other than you want blood?”

It’s “a dark day for Canada,” the @RebelNewsOnline founder tells @JennPellegrino. pic.twitter.com/iIc93IEwJx

— Newsmax (@newsmax) February 19, 2022

ICYMI: help us sue the police at https://t.co/t3xuubxewY https://t.co/wIfkOhLBwz

— K2🍁🚛 (@kiansimone44) February 19, 2022

When journalists and old women are attacked and police bear down on protesters with the cavalry, pepper spray and batons, we would expect most Western leaders to speak out, and most serious mastheads. Here’s the Wall Street Journal. Note the others in the coming days (or lack thereof).

Trudeau’s Destructive ‘Emergency’

The truckers protest could have been handled without […]

Truckers threaten to bust up the narrative that the Socialists care for the Workers

Managing people with bullying and coercion is a brittle and fragile tool

When it starts to break, it collapses.

Adam Mill: Why They’re So Afraid of the Truckers

In 1981, the Soviets seemed invincible. Yet their power was fragile, vulnerable to a single fissure of courage that started in Poland. That crack lengthened and spread until the entire system crumbled. It must have seemed impossible to defeat an ideology that controlled every institution—the press, the education system, the military, etc. Yet, without firing a shot, a courageous protest in Poland did just that.

In September of 1981, the Soviet Union seemed an uncrackable monolith. On its frontiers stood a NATO force that would last only a few weeks were a conventional war to break out. The Soviets could rely upon apologists in Western academia and the media to amplify their propaganda and stifle voices demanding freedom. Yet the opposition of a labor union to Soviet Communism powerfully undermined its claim to legitimacy

The Soviet Union, like modern leftism today, appropriates and exploits the struggle of ordinary people while simultaneously making things worse for them. Their soft hands and arrogance set them […]

Weekend Unthreaded

8.5 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Protesters are calling for Peace and everyone to “Get to Ottawa Now”

D-Day in Ottawa

Today the ante goes up again. Trudeau has played his wildcard. He is demonizing and dehumanizing the honest good people who just want to work for their families or cross the border without getting an injection.

Is it a two faced bluff, or will people be put in jail? One the one hand, in legal fine print, Trudeau’s emergency order still allows for peaceful protest. On the other hand, everything the authorities are doing is intended to intimidate the Truckers into leaving. And they are being very intimidating.

Freedom Convoy Protesters Are About To Get Arrested En Masse

Ottawa police have been going from truck to truck, passing out flyers to Freedom Convoy protesters which demand they vacate the demonstration zone immediately or face arrest and criminal charges.

“You must leave the area now,” reads the notice. “Anyone blocking streets, or assisting others in the blocking [of] streets, are committing a criminal offence and you may be arrested,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The government is trying to order the police to use force against Canadian citizens who are peaceful demonstrators.

 

There are rumours busloads of police are on […]