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Saturday Open Thread

9.6 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Blackouts will last for days says Austrian Defence Minister — stock up now

By Jo Nova

It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news

Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.

Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.

Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.

So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:

Austrian Defense Minister Warns Europeans Are Unprepared For Days-Long Blackouts

Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News

“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.

“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a […]

Friday Open Thread

10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

That’ll hurt: Environmental investors lost 22% in a year when Energy investors made 54% gains

By Jo Nova

Hands up who wants to lose money?

These numbers that Rupert Darwall has put together in Real Clear Energy are extraordinary:

2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth

The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.

Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.

Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.

Not only did demand […]

Thursday Open Thread

9.4 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

There’s an exodus of smart men from US universities

The oldest university in Europe has been running since 1088AD.

It took a thousand years of hard work to create a reputation of excellence and honor that is being casually vaporized and bled dry in a fashion frenzy of Wokery.

This year in the US undergraduate enrollments fell by 650,000 in a single year — and the departure was led by young men.

For the last thirty years people in Ivory towers were treated like Gods and came to believe their own advertising. Who could blame them? No one in the media asked them a single hard question so the illusion of their glorious prophesies remained intact even as their absurd predictions crashed upon the shore.

The academics fell over themselves to outscore each other in a pointless Victimhood status game where they earn points by insulting one of their main client groups. No wonder men are leaving.

Victor Davis Hanson asks Are Universities Doomed?

The Daily Signal

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million […]

Wednesday Open Thread

9.4 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

South Africa unraveling: Army called in to protect coal plants, after sabotage, theft and 200 days of rolling blackouts

By JoNova

Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?

This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.

There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are […]

Tuesday Open Thread

10 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

ChatGPT: has artificial intelligence arrived, will it crush Google, or become Google 2.0 and worse?

by Jo Nova Another Great Disrupter?

What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more. ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.

Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?

It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.

Right […]

Monday Open Thread

8.7 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas

It’s a testament to how far the spirit of Christmas has spread. The nations that don’t have a public holiday for Christmas are marked in brown.

Lighter brown countries (China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) don’t have a public holiday but are described as “giving observance”.

Albeit “some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar”. Those nations celebrate on January 7th.

Map by Nanib , Skriplerio, Moyogo

9.5 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

Christmas Eve Open Thread

Wishing everyone a Very Merry Christmas

9.9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Coming soon: Climate change causes ice ages too

By Jo Nova

Right after it happens: scientists discover Climate Change *may* cause extreme cold

Today, just in time for the Big US Freeze comes the soft sell junk science stories suggesting that Global Warming is responsible.

In ten years time, if the world cools, and the thermometer adjustments can’t hide the frosts, the snow, and the cherries that don’t ripen, don’t think for a minute that the climate modeling Gods, the banker cartels, or the Church of Carbon will admit they were wrong. The bait and switch will go where-ever the weather does, and if we get an ice age, well carbon emissions will have caused that too.

The “climate fear” message just needs some tweaking and here it comes: Man-made CO2 warms the air but apparently it also shifts the jet streams which causes all that hot air in the Arctic to rush south and freeze Florida. But in 2008 the climate experts said the opposite. Back then climate change was causing jet streams to move towards the poles, “which fitted the predictions of climate models”. See how it works? They can never be wrong.

One day the increased snow will keep the northern reaches permanently iced over, […]

Friday Open Thread

9.9 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

This blogger needs your help

UPDATE: This post will remain a sticky post for a few days. New posts will appear below.

We’re in an information war against the financial monsters of the world. They’re swimming in an ocean of money. But thanks to all the independent spirits who have kept me going for years without a regular income, we fight on. Together we can expose the grifters, the sad culti, and mock their holy idols. It’s a dangerous moment in history, but as those in the gulags would have surely said, we have so many tools, and it’s a time where their sacred cows are coming undone. The pagan witchdoctors have overplayed their hand, they are vulnerable.

It is not just about the dollars, it’s an honor, and incredibly motivating to get help, big or small, from like minded souls all corners of the globe. It’s been an absolute delight to connect with so many good people who think for themselves, who will not submit, and who recognize the threat from the parasites in the system.

Never surrender

Please hit the tip jar, buy me a beer, a steak, server space or a new hard drive.

Thanks for your contribution, […]

Thursday Open Thread

9.7 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Former head of Australian Medical Association suffered devastating vaccine effects: says Doctors are being silenced

By Jo Nova

A turning point maybe?

BalancebyDeborahHutton

One of the top doctors in Australia Dr Kerryn Phelps — a familiar face on the news here, has come out saying that she has suffered “devastating” side effects from the Covid vaccines herself. She also says that her doctors are seeing ” ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation, but they are afraid to talk about it for fear of being de-registered and losing their career.

Phelps is also a bit of a darling of the left, a successful woman, married to another woman, who ran for Parliament and briefly served with a pro-climate-change agenda in a wealthy seat. It’s possible her words will give a voice to those on the other half of the political spectrum who may have said nothing or not even realized the symptoms they suffer are an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Lights may be switching on. Will it spark a wave of discussion among the left leaning? There has always been a core group of people suspicious of vaccination on the left. What if the left and right ends of the spectrum met in the middle, and realized that the real battle […]

Wednesday Open Thread

10 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

13 US States warn that giant climate activists funds are buying up public utilities

By Jo Nova

Move over divestment and boycott — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company. But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.

Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.

The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have. The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.

To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.

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