Can anyone still pretend the Media are not a wing of the Democrats?

Having sold their souls not-covering Biden-family corruption, election scandals, Pharmaceutical malfeasance, and rackets running through politics and science, it’s no surprise that barely 1 in 6 Republicans trust most media outlets. Mass lies will do that.

Look at the vast partisan gulf in the poll below which asked “how trustworthy do you rate the news media…“. Can anyone look at this graph and argue that the media is not dominated by left-leaning views? Fully 18 of 22 media outlets appeal to, and are trusted by around three times as many left leaning voters.

It’s no surprise that the most polarized and divisive news source in America is CNN followed by The New York Times and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.

The Republicans (red) are more skeptical than Democrats (blue) of nearly every media outlet.

The least polarising of the mainstream news outlets is the Wall Street Journal.

The only media outlet arguably that serves both political views is The Weather Channel, but even there half of Republicans and 40% of Democrats don’t “trust” it. There is no common Town Square media left where both sides of the political spectrum can hear each others views.

How things have […]

Democracy lives? 28 States in the US working on legislation to promote lvermectin use

It’s a shock. More than half the states in the US are considering legislation to allow doctors and sometimes even nurses and pharmacists too, to prescribe early treatment drugs “off label”.

Let’s not forget that doctors were able to do that for decades and it’s largely the medical boards who have become the defacto Praetorian Guards of Big-Pharma — taking away the rights of doctors via threats to destroy their career if they step out of line.

Many of the proposed bills simply aim to stop medical boards from evicting doctors who use drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee appear to have largely succeeded. The rest are working on it. In Tennessee, people may even be able to buy a drug that’s been given to a billion other humans, right over-the-counter. Golly, that’s almost as free as El Salvador?!

Meanwhile people in America are providing the drug “off-label” and “off-prescription” anyway, sneaking it into hospitals and handing it out at churches. It would be better for everyone if they could ask their doctors. But this response from state legislators in the US seems remarkable to this Australian — almost like Democracy still has a chance.

[…]

Sunday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Experts Adrift: Solar Cycle 25 more active than expected

There’s an electromagnetic ball of fire that is 1.3 million times the size of Earth and just 8 minutes away by photon, and we really don’t know what’s going on there.

Climate models assume the solar wind and magnetic field has no effect on our climate. But we find solar patterns everywhere from the prehistoric climate of Greenland, the North Atlantic jet stream, and even in human fertility and lifespan and jellyfish plagues.

Historians will mock us for trying to predict Earth’s climate when we are in the baby days of Space Weather knowledge. Solar Cycle 24 (the last one) was a shorter cycle, just under 10 years. Right now the big question is whether Solar Cycle 25 will be bigger and more active which seems to happen after a short cycle. But it’s too early to tell. This top graph overstates the effect.

Sunspot Activity on The Sun Is Seriously Exceeding Official Predictions

The Solar Cycle Prediction Panel predicted that the 25th cycle since record-keeping began would be similarly quiet, with a peak of 115 sunspots. By contrast, the number of sunspots for the last 18 months has been consistently higher than predictions. At time of writing, […]

Fourth dose booster honeymoon all over in just 8 weeks

Not much of a honeymoon — “Week 2 to week 6”

Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash

A new Israeli study sliced through the medical records of 1.2 million people. They compared people who had three doses with people who went on to have four. By three or four weeks after the 4th shot, people had half as many symptomatic infections. It’s “nice” but it’s only 50% efficacy, and that’s as good as it gets. So much for the glory days of “95% efficacy” — things are so unimpressive, no one talks in percentages anymore. By eight weeks after the fourth dose there was pretty much no extra protection against infection left.

On the plus side, the fourth dose did seem to prevent people getting a nasty disease, with 3.5 times as many 3-dose people getting a severe infection compared to the 4th-dosers. On the down side, those patients were only followed for six weeks. The honeymoon-from-hospitalization may fade quickly too. It lasts a few months with the 3rd dose.

So the fourth dose isn’t going to last through the winter — the meaningful honeymoon period is just a few weeks — from Week 2 to Week 6 […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Unvaxxed Australians can’t leave the country because of a WHO treaty: “We’re protecting the world”

Here’s a surprise for all you Australians trapped in Australia because you chose not to take part in a medical experiment. The reason you can’t leave is not for your own health. It’s not for the health of fellow Australians. It’s because we are “protecting the rest of the world”. This is a world where where fully vaccinated travellers have already spread Covid to every country on Earth and at least 72 countries are happy for you to turn up on their door with your tourist dollars and without a vaccine.

As Senator Rennick says: “I cannot for the life of me see the health risks in an unvaccinated person leaving the country.”

Paul Kelly, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer explained that it was due to Australia’s International Health Obligations. That’s an international treaty we signed because we’re a member of the WHO. As far as a quick search turns up, Australia, Canada and the UAE may be the only nations still banning their own citizens from leaving. In Canada, things are so inexplicable, the vaccinated don’t even need to do a test anymore. So people infected with Covid are free to fly in or out of Canada shedding virus […]

Thursday Open Thread

9.5 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Unvaccinated Australians can’t leave Australia — unless they escape — is that swim, paddle or dingy?

Welcome to Prison Australia where unvaccinated citizens are not able to leave. (And Canadians thought they were the only ones). If your best friend is getting married in Madagascar, the Africans will let you fly in, but you can’t go because Australia won’t let you out.

Australians who are unvaccinated or not-jabbed-enough can apply for permission to leave. But unless you need foreign medical care, live or work overseas, or are flying in the “national interest” (meaning you’re a politician) you may not qualify. Trips need to be “longer than three months” for no good reason I can think of, except that it stops most holidayers. Which is obviously the point.

People may get an exemption if they need to work overseas. Which is fine if your boss wants to send you to conventions in the Greek Islands but you can’t take the wife and kids unless she owns the company, and the kids are your employees. Otherwise, there’s no pleasure cruises for the unjabbed peasants from Oz.

Unvaccinated Australians who want to leave pretty much have to escape

We can always drive to Broome. We might find an Indonesian fishing boat and get a lift back the other […]

Climate Change causes Frosts now: French Winegrowers lighting fires, candles to protect crops

As the grapevines bud for the season in France, a mild spring followed by a savage frost is bad news for farmers.

There have been three bad frosts in recent years. The young fashionable expert tells us that frost means it’s climate change. But people didn’t realize…” it’s a form of denial” she says with a straight face.

Thank goodness for fossil fuels:

Because global warming means you need more insurance against frost and “heating cables” to keep the plants warm:

The change in weather pattern is also pushing up his insurance coverage for loss of harvest, he added. In Yonne, two-thirds of the harvest was destroyed as a result of the frost last year, according to the farm ministry.

Winemakers were starting to join forces to invest in new tools, such as heating cables, to help mitigate the effects of such frosts, she said. However, many in the industry are still reluctant to face up to the fact that the impact of climate change could be long-lasting, Civet said.

Mass Psychosis?

Coldest night on a national scale since records began in France in 1947

Météo-France, the country’s meteorological service, said the night […]

Tuesday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Show this in schools: The CCP in 2020 banning doctors spreading illegal rumors of pneumonia

This is a pre-packed lesson in free speech:

#TheGreatTranslationMovement #大翻译运动 https://t.co/B6CkomLqoI

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动官方推号 (@TGTM_Official) April 3, 2022

How do we know when it’s propaganda — when all the news readers speak with one voice.

What’s the difference between the Western doctors and the CCP-docs? About a year. AHPRA are the communist party of medicine in Australia. Instead of banning doctors who talked about a new form of pneumonia, AHPRA bans doctors who talk about cheap treatments or problems with vaccines. What’s the difference?

9.7 out of 10 based on 92 ratings

Guest post by Rafe Champion. Be a wind watcher and get savvy about wind droughts

This supports Jo’s post on wind droughts. The point is that we have to strive for “wind drought literacy” in the general population. Apart from people who mess around in sailboats and people who play sports where the wind has an impact on missiles in flight, most of us take little notice of the wind unless it is blowing our hat off or turning our umbrella inside out.

It is really important for everyone to know that the wind is quite often low across the whole of SE Australia due to high pressure systems and sometimes these systems linger for a day or two. Wind droughts are more frequent in individual states.

The easiest way to get a fix on the wind situation is to glance at the NEMwatch widget. It is live and it changes every five minutes. You can read it on your phone and this is the kind of picture you will see.

The bars indicate the amount of power that is being generated and consumed in each state at the moment. WA is not connected to the Eastern electricity grid so supply matches demand while in the SE there are flows between the states

[…]

Long lost forgotten rain bombs — the BoM yells “unprecedented” while ignoring 120 years of history

If Climate Change was a real threat, the Bureau of Meteorology might even look at their own historic records.

When Jennifer Marohasy and Chris Gillham did just that, they found that as bad as the current situation is, it’s happened before:

The wettest day in Lismore was in February 1954. The wettest year for Lismore was 1893. There was no increase in the intensity or frequency of extreme wet days at Lismore, or the towns around it.

Now if the BOM looks at this with a supercomputer, they might find an effect from CO2. But if the BOM just used a calendar, like I did, they might find the latest floods started the week after Hunga Tonga volcanic dust rolled across Australia. Maybe that matters?

No one needed a supercomputer to read a rain gauge in 1885, and we have excellent long data. Imagine how handy that might be if the BoM wanted to understand, say, Australian flood cycles? There are 137 years of rainfall records in Lismore from 1885 to now, but the BOM said we set a new record for Lismore based on Lismore airport where records started as long ago as… 2002.

 

The Bureau […]

It’d be fine if we could put electricity in shoe boxes. (Wind power is 98% unreliable)

Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW.

From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual.

The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?

Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge.

The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity.

9.8 out of 10 based on 87 ratings

Japan flips on nuclear — it tried to go Green without it but now wants to reopen closed plants

Nuclear’s suddenly the answer to “Net Zero” — Japan wants to triple its nuclear power by 2030

It’s the third largest economy in the world, and a large but quiet vacuum of global fossil fuels. Right now it’s the second largest importer of gas in the world after China, and the third largest importer of coal (not that Extinction Rebellion seems to care).

Before the Fukushima disaster in 2011, nuclear power generation produced as much as 30% of Japan’s energy mix, but that’s now shrunk to just 6%. Japan has only six operating nuclear reactors left with a total capacity of six gigawatts, down from 54 before the Fukushima incident. Just a few days ago polls showed that that the fear and negativity of nuclear power in Japan has dramatically shifted in the last few months. One little war can change everything. Russia has suddenly given everyone permission to get serious about nuclear power.

Now the Japanese government wants to grow back from 6% to 20% nuclear in just 8 years.

Japan Sees Nuclear Energy As A Vital Piece Of Its Net-Zero Plan

OilPrice.com

Prior to the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power generation accounted for almost 30% […]

Weekend Unthreaded

10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Money-world splits into two: Is this the end of an era of US dollar as reserve currency?

The ante was upped

Just like that: The US froze Russian bank accounts. It broke all the rules. In return, Russia is freezing gas deliveries unless people pay in roubles. The US played a very big wildcard, and Joe Biden and the USA may lose in a big way. The World’s Reserve currency is the US Dollar, and it’s a powerful tool for the US. But if the dollar were weakened, by say 50 years of inflation, and the trust it is based on was blown, the bluff may be up.

One thing leads to another. Who will blink first?

Does Russia need the money more than Europe needs the gas?

Europe Is Facing Supply Disruptions As Russia’s Gas-For-Rubles Deadline Looms

OilPrice:

Russia’s insistence that its “unfriendly” nations pay in rubles for Russian natural gas risks disrupting European supplies as soon as this week as the deadline set by Putin for moving to ruble payments is drawing closer.

Europe, which depends on Russian natural gas for more than one-third of its demand—with some countries, including the biggest economy Germany, depending on Russia for half of its consumption—has rejected the gas-for-rubles idea, saying it […]