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Lithuania, 1955
There are almost no brave people left in academia, or sport, or the land of celebrity. When one of their own faces the axe for some random transgression of an invisible rule book on political niceties, their colleagues abandon them.
In academia, they’re supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop –the individual giants who fought their way to the top. But it’s like we’ve selected for wary herding people instead. And perhaps that’s the point. When universities were turned into schools and businesses, and quirky philanthropist funding became predictable Big-Government largess, the mavericks and rebels didn’t fit and one by one were expelled, sacked — or just pushed sideways til they fell out. What’s left in the wasteland of academia, apparently, are the mid-wit networking climbers. The middling Ordinaires rose into positions above their due and became afraid of losing the sweeter deal than they deserved. If they were the top dogs in their field, and if that mattered, they could speak their mind, get sacked, and still be offered a new position at a competing institution. But second rung players don’t have that option. They won’t put their head above the parapet and […]
Current Witchdoctor Warning: Severe levels of Voodoo likely on all channels
Climate Fear Week is Here.
Your car exhaust causes bushfires, your roast beef leads to droughts and the wrong lightglobes could flood the nation.
Hurry, hurry, it’s your absolute last last-chance after the last last-chance to save the world. According to an unaudited, unaccountable UN committee, It’s Code Red for Humanity! Rush and install Solar Special Protection Shields on your home today to be sure no one inside is at higher risk of Malaria, Asthma, Obesity, Eco-depression, and to save Nemo from feeling reckless. (Why haven’t you done that already, you evil reef killer?)
Despite installing more renewables than any nation per capita on Earth, Australia is failing to cleanse the Earth of pollution. Likewise the USA and UK which have both reduced actual carbon emissions by more than nearly everyone else are only leaders when they vote for socialists. Too many windmills are never enough! (Don’t mention the eagles or the whales, but praise the Sharks, for they are the sacred spirit of Virtue Signalling.)
There are many things you can do to play your part to make the weather nicer for our grandchildren, or at least reinforce […]
Which industry spends more than any other in Washington? Big Pharma
Over the last 20 years no industry spent more than Pharmaceuticals and Health products on lobbying and campaign contributions. Fully $4,700 million dollars traveled from pharmaceutical giants to politicians, parties and lobbyists.
In 2018 the citizens of the US spent $345 billion on prescription drugs in pharmacies… which works out to about $1,000 per person per year. Adjusted for inflation, that has doubled since 1999 which is not that long ago. Despite competition, discovery and efficiency gains, Americans are spending more than ever.
Maybe Americans are getting much better painkillers, antibiotics, and blood pressure medications than ever before, or maybe government regulations are doing more to protect profits rather than people?
All that lobbying is quite legal, but it isn’t enough. Somehow Big Pharma keep getting caught being naughty as well, lying and hiding things from customers. And if there is no reputational damage from outright deceit and fraud, perhaps the billion-dollar fines are just another cost on the balance sheet. (If only The Media wanted to shine a light on that…)
The Black Pigeon lists some crimes: ..
Oliver Wouters study on Lobbying…
Lobbying Expenditures and Campaign Contributions […]
…
The people don’t really want Electric Vehicles, so the US Government is thinking of forcing them on the buyers by squeezing the industry that makes them. There is talk of new rules which apply to the companies selling cars. The control of production could be hidden in something called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. By averaging the fuel consumption across a whole company, those brands will have to find a way to sell more EV’s and to limit their own sales of gas guzzlers. It’s a supply and demand thing, if a company can only make so many large internal combustion engine cars, the prices of those will be artificially high. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The poor will still pay more for cars than they do now, but the cheapest cars on the market will be EV’s — subsidized by inflated prices on petrol driven cars.
This is just a thought bubble for now, but obviously, the message is to buy your big cars and look after them. They’ll be hot property in the second hand market.
Say goodbye to the free market: The Soviets would be proud of […]
Despite headlines declaring the World is Committed to Cutting Emissions, and that ( pick a nation) is an “isolated pariah” — the truth is they were all supposed to “update their emissions targets” but 42% of nations, including the two largest, haven’t. Worse, the updates were supposed be done by the end of 2020, and the UN extended the deadline, so they are already double late. And since China effectively promised to do nothing til 2030, all it had to do was say it would do nothing again, so that’s double-late on a non-promise, and it can’t even do that?
h/t GWPF
China, India ignore UN deadline to update emissions targets in COP26 warning shot
In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
South Africa hasn’t put in its own update, but it has asked for money:
Meanwhile South Africa has demanded that developed countries should set a target of $750 billion a year to help poorer nations […]
The people of Indonesia look like they found a way to manage things without the government, the WHO or the UN.
File it under: Big-Government kills
Indonesia has 270 million people and very little Covid — or at least, it didn’t. It turns out a philanthropist was dishing out ivermectin in one of the “largest ivermectin markets worldwide”. Then the government took it over, insisted on clinical trials, and slowed it down, as governments do. Cases rose from 7,000 cases a day on June 12th to 50,000 cases a day by July 18th.
Looking at the success of Covid in India, Mexico and Peru as well, how many days of lockdown could have been avoided if Australia used cheap antivirals? Not only could the latest NSW outbreak be crushed sooner, but if one limo driver had used ivermectin — it might never have started.
How much does Big-Bureaucracy hate cheap out-of-patent drugs?
Indonesian cases of Covid. Graph. OWID
Two weeks after the clinical trials began, Ivermectin and a whole rash of antiviral drugs was suddenly given emergency approval. Perhaps there was panic?
July 15th; BPOM Approves Ivermectin as Covid-19 Therapeutic Drug
But the Bureaucrats must be […]
Thousands were asleep at the wheel, occupied with busywork, and an endless trail of minor crises. Each little step was worse than the one before, inexorably, but only a little worse. Like a field of corn that we never see growing — but one day it is over our head.
There is no time when everyone realizes together and lifts in mass protest. Instead, little moments tip the balance, one person at a time. And once awake, good people don’t want to be troublemakers. They are afraid to stand out.
Its all so human while it becomes something so horribly inhumane.
The form of the nation stays the same but the spirit changes to become something people would never have accepted even five years earlier. Like perhaps the idea that people who committed, at most, a minor misdemeanor, a trespass, could be kept without charges in solitary confinement for months on end.
We are a gregarious species. It is hardwired. Our great strength is also our greatest vulnerability…
So many wait for someone else to speak up.
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. They interviewed 10 Germans who talked […]
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, […]
Science of Civilization Lesson #2: What’s the most deadly kind of government on Earth?
“Big Government”
One third of millennials approve of communism, probably because they don’t know what it is:
January 2020: Poll of young Americans found 70% will “vote socialist” and half of them think communism is OK
Gulag in Latvia | Image Rakoon.
According to a poll commissioned by the Washington, D.C. area nonprofit Victims of Communism, 70 percent of Millennials say they are likely to vote for a socialist while one in three view communism favorably.
The same poll also reported that 27 percent of people believe President Donald Trump is the biggest threat to world peace. The survey placed the U.S. president over North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
According to YouGov, 36 percent of millennials say they approve of communism. That percentage is up almost 10 percent from 2018.
Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, has a plan that students in his state should understand why Cubans swim to Florida more than Floridians swim to Cuba:
DeSantis signs bills requiring Fla. […]
When only the best will do:
Babylon Bee
“I thought I knew all there was to know about communist indoctrination, but I was wrong,” said the ruthless dictator to reporters after sitting through a 2-hour lecture on why fidget spinners are a remnant of Western patriarchal oppression. “Your American college professors have this down to an art!” …
The murderous leader of North Korea plans to go back to his home country and start his own Ivy League school: Kim Jong UNiversity.
Thanks to the Babylon Bee. Click the logo to read the rest.
9.9 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
It’s almost like China’s climate action was just window dressing. It seems to be unraveling…
China’s National Carbon Trading Scheme was supposed to go into full operation later this month, but now it’s been cut back by two-thirds. Instead of burdening 6,000 companies it will only afflict 2,000. And only a week ago, the Chinese government suddenly axed solar and wind subsidies, with the cuts starting just six weeks from now. Oilprice calls it “a crushing blow for wind and solar”. In a devastating move, there are even demands that solar plants have to sell electricity at the same price as coal power. The cruelty!
China produces three quarters of all the world’s solar panels, having subsidized-the-heck out of the global industry, exploited slave labor and driven the US leaders out of production.
Judging by the Wall St Journal story — in the last two months the paradigm has shifted from Environmental control to Economic priority. Perhaps solar power wasn’t much use for building ballistic missile submarines?
How different things would be if solar was actually cheaper than coal…
No new solar power plant subsidies. Just like that? China to stop subsidies for new solar power stations, onshore wind projects […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
We all need some good news and who doesn’t like seeing overbearing-undemocratic-parasites lose? In terms of the cycle of civilizations, perhaps we are past the peak of Big Government, and headed for decentralization. As state entities grow too big and get too disconnected from the voters, they inevitably became overconfident, and overplay their hand — micromanaging hair dryers and droughts at the same time. But “the mood has changed”…
Nigel Farage predicts the EU will collapse within a decade.
Speaking to Fox Business, the former Brexit Party leader said that Brexit’s success will become a model for other European countries “impressed” by Britain’s life outside of the EU. He said that many in Europe were looking on in jealousy after much of the EU scaremongering about Brexit failed to materialise. “There is now a 70 percent approval rating for Brexit now. “
After seven years of trying to get Switzerland under tighter EU control, the Swiss have abandoned the talks.
The Swiss talks with Brussels collapse after seven long years
Damian Wilson, RT
Switzerland shocked Brussels by walking away from a closer relationship and into an uncertain future, but MP Thomas Aeschi says the Swiss will […]
History books will be written and some professors, academics, and bureaucrats will have no excuse.
Which organisations can serve now?
It took two court hearings and major complaints and assertive activism to save eighty year old Judy Smentkiewicz. But how many others died because their sons or daughters didn’t see Pierre Kory on TV? Or they didn’t have the wherewithal to go to court? Or their friends trying to share the message were censored on Facebook? It shouldn’t have to be this way.
This is Judy’s story below, but so much more. Read the whole thing. It’s very well written by Michael Capuzzo. Surely, this is a story that needs an answer. Where are the Forth Estate, the Opposition, The AMA, or the publicly funded professors at our universities?
I am but a cog passing on points of view that should be part of our national conversation. Some things matter: like antivirals and closed borders.
Nick Corbishley says “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world”
Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. … But unfortunately most reporters are not […]
Skeptics have known for years that Nature was more about fashion than science. A parody from 2019.
When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting?
It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk.
And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science.
Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth.
A new […]
Bragging, so soon? This kind of talk will not endear:
The comments were made by Chen Ping, a Senior Researcher at The China Institute of Fudan University, a CCP affiliated think tank, and a professor at Peking University.
The video, which appeared online recently, was translated by New York-based Chinese blogger Jennifer Zeng:
His main argument is that the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the #CCP has won and “will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution” after the 2020 #CCPVirus #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/Z6pUJZIYzp
— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 18, 2021
Note the caveat. Professor Ping says that the Biological War was launched against China.
Ping states in the video that “In 2020, China won the trade war, science and technology war, and especially the biological war.”
…“the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the CCP has won and ‘will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution’ after the 2020 CCPVirus (COVID19) pandemic.”
The achievement is unprecedented. This is an epoch-making historical record,” […]
In 2020, the WHO did not protect even one country, but now says they just need more money and more power. The WHO should be disbanded, it failed at the one most important job it was set up to do — stop pandemics.
It’s only a year too late, but the WHO is finally telling people they could avoid deadly pandemics. A new report is out, with former New Zealand PM Helen Clark admitting only that the World Health Organisation was a week too late in calling it an emergency. After that tiny mini-culpa, then she blames slow nations for “wasting the month of February”. Though Clark seems to have forgotten the same stupid nations were all following WHO’s advice at the time.
This is what failure looks like — Tedros, the WHO Director General on Jan 29, last year
When he could have saved the world, he was being a one man Xi Jinping fan club. Listen to this shameless rave:
…Tedros said it is admirable that the Chinese government has shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic. President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership […]
I knew they were bad, but this was blistering:
Big Tech’s Monopoly Creep
by Napolean Linarthatos, The AmericanConservative
… generations that come after us will have the opportunity to wonder how on earth we had been duped for so long and so pathetically by a few Big Tech monopolists, how it was possible to have such a grand accumulation of power and wealth preserved by a system so bluntly corrupt in its modus operandi.
In October 2020, the House Antitrust Subcommittee issued a damning report of steamrolling corruption. It was so brazen, Amazon even sold counterfeit copies of products until the targets gave in — even big names, like Nike. The supergiant went into business against smaller companies, dumping product on the market in impossibly good offers, until it beat them, and stole their customers, and then bought them anyway. (After that customers discovered the deals were not so sweet.) Employees of Amazon even admitted they used private customer data to find market opportunities for Amazon to exploit. The situation is so rapacious now that little companies are not even bought out anymore, they are just cloned and crushed.
And it’s not just Amazon. Smaller partners […]
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