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By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their […]
By Jo Nova
Make no mistake, the UN “finance” cartel is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the climate-mafia galaxy.
The UN Environment Programme brags that across insurance, banking and investing, it has over 450 members representing more than $100 trillion dollars worth of carrots and sticks to beat up politicians and businesses with. These are the cogs and levers of the halls of global power.
Image by Amy from Pixabay
It’s a UN programme, but the first “target setting” rules were launched at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting — the skiing holiday for corporate rulers and their celebrity minions. The Big unelected political powers holidaying with the richest people in the world. Democracy on a barbecue.
In 2021 many Insurance giants had rushed to join the global climate activist cartel designed for their industry — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned the insurance industry into another form of climate police answerable to the UN or the WEF. But it’s all coming undone now, thanks to the 23 US States who are pressing the Antitrust button. I mean, imagine if all the competitors in an industry got […]
By Jo Nova
Exxon was told to jump through circus hoops like a performing seal and report the risks of NetZero to Exxon shareholders. But Exxon pushed back by pointing out that NetZero-by-2050 is so impossible it will never happen, and therefore the risks are not even worth assessing. Furthermore, and rather damningly, Exxon said, society would be unlikely to “accept the degradation in the global standard of living required“. Exxon has taken was was supposed to be another PR win for the narrative and turned it into a media weapon.
This is exactly why the Big-Gov-Corporatist cartel wants to co-opt or destroy independent profitable corporations. In this case, companies that don’t need Big-Gov are free to point out the hypocritical inanity and absurdities which the lap-dog dependent industries like wind power and solar cannot.
Sadly, companies like Exxon still need to be brave because Big-Gov is so big, it is always the largest potential client and holds the sword of mendacious legislation, licensing and regulation as well.
Exxon Crushes Progressive Dreams That “Net Zero” Has Any Chance By 2050: It Would Mean Collapse In “Global Standard Of Living”
By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
The US supermajor […]
By Jo Nova
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
By Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History
The rise and fall of Peer Review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War […]
By Jo Nova
A “win” for predatory capitalism and government mis-interference
Liddell power station (foreground). Bayswater power station (rear).Photo NSW DPI
Yesterday, for the last time the final turbine was switched off at Liddell Coal plant after 52 years of operation. The NSW government gave it away for free in 2014 — bundled like a McHappy Meal in with the sale of Bayswater Coal, valued at $0. Governments saw old coal as worthless, at least until 2017 when everyone saw the bloodbath when the Hazelwood coal plant suddenly closed and electricity prices suddenly rose 85%. Then they started to panic a little — even Malcolm Turnbull (our Renewables lovin’ PM) started openly pressuring AGL to sell Liddell so it could keep running until his pet project the Snowy Hydro 2.0 could start. Chinese owned Alinta turned up with $250 million dollars and was willing to put in a billion to repair the station and extend its life up to 2030. Despite that bonanza, AGL refused to take the money. It was determined to run it into the ground and shut it down instead. Now it’s determined to blow it up as well. The Demolition crew is already appointed […]
By Jo Nova Vanguard abandons the UN led Net-Zero Climate Finance monster group
Only a week after Ron de Santis pulled $2 billion in Florida funds from BlackRock, Vanguard, the second biggest asset manager in the world, has abruptly pulled out of GFANZ.
Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.
The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys […]
by Jo Nova Banks suddenly threaten to abandon the Glasgow GFANZ “climate action” group
It was the massive miracle-funding coalition of Glasgow but it is already starting to unravel as the banks figure out that conspiring to force “climate action” puts them at risk of antitrust suits.
A month ago I wrote that 19 US States were pointing out that it’s not OK for asset managers like BlackRock and co to join together in cartels to block investment in fossil fuels. These corporations bragged about belonging to groups like GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) as if it made them into saintly environmentalists. But belonging to the group meant they are also effectively restraining trade, reducing competition and acting against the interests of their clients and against the wishes of voters.
Don’t underestimate how important this is or how ugly these monster cartels are: GFANZ has attracted some 500 members which control $130 trillion in assets. But the carbon targets they are told to aim for are set by the UN through something called the Race-To-Zero campaign. So this is a quasi World Government in cahoots with world bankers. Like a Great White Shark meets a pod […]
The rise of the tech giant billionaires, the crime, corruption, wokery, war, inflation, climate witchcraft, and the Big-Pharma reckless experiment — is all made possible by the same thing, and it’s been coming for fifty years.
Everyone under 40 has lived their entire lives in the fairy-land-of-plenty borrowed from the future. But all bubbles come to an end.
The rot started with a corrupted currency, and now infects every corner of the world — weakening markets and minds and concentrating power obscenely. When our medium of exchange is undisciplined, everything else is too. There is injustice built right in to Fake IOU’s made from thin air — especially when some can borrow big and early and at low cost, while others have to wait to earn them slowly an hour at a time. In the inflation race, speed is everything. They devalue the incentives that drive people to make things better, faster, and stronger. It punishes the prudent hardworking savers, and feeds speculative greed.
This is what BlackRock’s influence came from, and Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the WEF. All of them rode the wave of easy money and easy loans. Through predatory purchases on credit, they were able to buy […]
Finally 19 US States are hitting back at BlackRock the financial behemoth, and not a day too soon.
A light in the tunnel…
Americasroof
By a pure dollar reckoning, BlackRock is the third largest “foreign entity” in the world, after the USA and China, but its core business, its reason for existing is a contradiction: it claims to be an asset manager but acts like a political power. With neither citizens, land nor an army, it’s a kind of toxic financial bubble on a roll — part illusion, but still swallowing economies, minds and electricity grids.
BlackRock is supposedly investing funds on behalf of its customers while using those same funds to promote Woke political agendas that its management may like, but that its own customers may disagree with. It’s a totalitarian force that consumes democratic choices by force of money. Finally some state legislators are calling out the contradiction. Does BlackRock serve its customers or “the management of BlackRock”?
BlackRock is enormous, but it’s not untouchable, and if retirees and State pension plans pulled their money and filed writs for breaches of law, the activist-agency could vanish overnight. BlackRock has $10 trillion in assets to wield […]
Another Project Veritas operation exposes what’s going on behind the lines at Twitter and the most astonishing thing is not the political censorship but how Twitter is run like a Day Care centre for student activists. It’s not a profit making business, so much as a university club with salaries for people who may only work 4 hours a week and brag about being “left left left” and as “commie as f**k”. If they need days off, they just don’t turn up to work. Sometimes they take months off. “Mental health is everything”.
No wonder Twitter employees hate Musk and are stress eating — They have jobs where they get paid to take a month off, and no one cares how efficient they are, or what their sales figures or expenses were. Nice work if you can get it.
Which begs the pointed question of who is paying for all this?
If Twitter isn’t there to make money, who is pouring the dollars in, and is the political censorship the whole point? And if that’s the case, and it sure looks like it is, TWTR is a listed trading stock and the words fraud and fiduciary duty seem apropos. If […]
Character is destiny Daniel Hannan explains that Putin was undone by corruption
Bribery is no way to build an empire. Putin’s intelligence and military bureaucrats didn’t believe in the Russian Empire, and they kept the cash they were supposed to use for bribes in Ukraine. Then lied about the bribes and ultimately left Putin in a precarious position. But they too are vulnerable. Indeed Ukrainians are suffering. Russians are suffering. There are few winners and many losers.
Great civilizations are built on trust. Millions of people work most efficiently when they all know the rules, and everyone has a voice. We used to have that.
Comments here by David Evans on the article by Daniel Hannan
The details are only now emerging, and they help explain why Russia is losing in Ukraine and, indeed, why autocracies are often terrible at fighting wars.
By annexing Crimea and taking Donbass, in 2014 Putin tipped Ukraine into becoming majority western-oriented:
Until 2014, Ukraine was fairly evenly split between, to borrow 19th century Russian terminology, Westernizers and Slavophiles. Some Ukrainians wanted to join the institutions of the free world, including NATO. Others preferred, if not a merger with Russia, at least a special […]
Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.
And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies
by John Smoke, im1776
by Freestocks-photos
Charities are as large as the entire University sector.
Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.
John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.
It starts so gently:
Imagine a billionaire. He’s an […]
Who knew?
It doesn’t matter how much a company panders to the Religion.
The Pagan Chieftan hath spoken and decided that Shell not only has to cut its own emissions nearly in half, it improbably, somehow, is responsible for its customers emissions too. Will Shell put photos of heatwave casualties with warning labels on oil cans: “This product may cause Tornadoes”?
Shell is reaping the rewards of playing the “climate” game. They didn’t stand up against the climate witchery when it came for the coal industry, and now its come for them.
Oil Giants Are Dealt Major Defeats on Climate Change as Pressures Intensify
By Sarah McFarlane and Christopher M. Matthews, Wall Street Journal
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Dutch court found that Shell is partially responsible for climate change, and ordered the company to sharply reduce its carbon emissions. Hours later in the U.S., an activist investor won at least two seats on Exxon’s board, a historic defeat for the oil giant that will likely require it to alter its fossil-fuel focused strategy.
The Shell ruling, issued by the district court in The Hague, found that Shell must curb its carbon […]
UPDATED: See below
The Western World has mostly succeeded in reducing emissions by shifting their emissions to factories in developing nations. In industries like Steel, Cement and Plastic as much as 20 – 50% of all production has gone overseas.
All this was achieved in just 20 years or so…
…
In the game of emissions reductions the West will become irrelevant (and in so many other ways too):
…The even more important and larger question: even if the US succeeds, what about everyone else? Over the last 25 years, the developed world shifted much of its carbon-intensive manufacturing of steel, cement, ammonia and plastics to the developing world. As a result, developing world adoption of wind, solar, storage and nuclear power may end up being the primary determinant of future global emissions outcomes. That has certainly been the case over the last decade: Europe and Japan reduced primary energy use by 4%-6% but developing world increases were 6x higher than their reductions
–Michael Cembalist, JP Morgan Annual Energy Paper
UPDATE: David Wojick makes the good point that some of shift is due to an increase in China for China’s own use, as […]
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 […]
Evil weather-destroying equipment will be banished:
Photo Kwon Junho
Victorians building new homes will be denied the choice to pick their preferred heating and cooking appliances in the hope that this will stop storms and droughts for their great grandchildren.
As household prices rise, the money that could have been used for holidays, health, or education will be used to enrich a few corporations and make a small percentage of the population feel important and calmer.
If only the low carbon revolution was clean, green and cheap, no one would have to ban anything.
Suffer the children:
Push to turn off gas to help reach state’s climate goal
Tom Cowie and Nick O’Malley, The Age
Gas appliances including heaters, hot water services and cooktops would be phased out under a proposed moratorium on new gas connections to Victorian households to help the state achieve its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by up to 50 per cent.
Victorians are the nation’s biggest users of natural gas for heating, hot water and cooking due to the state’s historically cheap and plentiful supply piped in from Bass Strait since the 1970s.
But […]
China has become the Wild West of bio-research
…
The ZMan spots a repeat cycle of knowledge-hauls as China siphons off Western intellectual property, often with the help of the West.
First China hauled (and we gave) the factories, then it was the hi tech industry, now it’s biomedical ingenuity. The pattern repeats. China offered cheap labor for manufacturers and the tech industry with few annoying environmental burdens. Now China offers money and freedom from ethical quandaries for researchers who want to clone, create bioweapons, or hybrid human-animal cells.
The question for the West is, if environmental or ethical standards matter at home, shouldn’t they matter overseas too? If we aren’t happy to buy shirts made by slaves at home, why are foreign slave shirts OK? If we aren’t keen to fund bioweapons research in our own lands, why was it OK to help do that in China? (Thank Anthony Fauci).
Chinese Ethics, The ZMan
China makes it so easy for Western Scientists to collaborate:
There is no doubt that most Western governments operate biological research facilities. The fact that China is doing the same is no surprise. The difference is Western governments have to […]
And so the mask comes off. After forty years of cheating in a “forced technology transfer” the game is up. Trump called China for the theft of intellectual property, then launched a trade war, but the CCP already had stolen much of the information it needed.
This is not just an economic war, this is a big wet blanket on some kinds of scientific research. With one big bad player in the game breaking the rules, there is less incentive for people to announce and share discoveries. Royalties can’t be enforced, and a competitor might copy and compete against you. Are we entering a new era cold war of secrecy?
Back to Zang: Now that there is no need to hide the theft, nor pander in the hope of taking more, another Chinese Professor openly bragged about the situation last week:
China ‘Copied Its Way’ to Economic Success, Chinese Professor Boasts
Nicole Hao and Cathy He, Epoch Times
For the past 40 years, the Chinese regime only did one thing: plagiarize, Zang Qichao, a prominent marketing expert and visiting professor of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, told a group of Chinese entrepreneurs recently.
“We plagiarized wildly, […]
The USA might just unify despite Joe Biden. There are not many things that can bring the Occupy and Antifa crowd together with Proud Boys but sticking it to the overlords of Wall Street is just the ticket.
The Gamestop monster battle between the ruling class and the peasants
The naked short sellers of Wall Street were never a healthy part of a free market — they were selling shares they didn’t own. Their predatory behaviour could create the very destruction they profited from, ruining potentially productive assets in the process. In a bonfire of gambling greed, the Predators could effectively sell more shares than even existed — betting they could drive the price lower and buy back for a bargain. But the little-guy-punters in the reddit/Wallstreetbets crowd got organized and called the bluff. They pushed the $4 stock to $400, busting the Smarty-pants players and reveling in it. There are estimates that hedge funds have already lost nearly $20 billion. One group of short-selling gurus have been burnt so badly they’ve abandoned publishing short selling research. The wake from this is just beginning.
The problem for the Democrats is that this wave is a form of Draining The Swamp. […]
By Jo Nova
Daniel Greenfield put’s his finger on the diabolical feedback loop the West is in.
Big Gov protects the Big Tech monster from market competition — and in return Big Tech protects Big Government from political competition. Democrats have outsourced political repression of their enemies to cabals of private companies.
Nice Racket if you can get it.
The Democrats wet dream is to tar and feather opponents and then ban them from even speaking, and the conglomerate multinational octopuses are happy to oblige by tweaking search results, and suspending the right accounts. In return, they get sweet government deals and Section 230 protection. Who knew Amazon has nearly 500 federal subcontracts? When Amazon employees donate to the Democrats they’re just protecting their jobs.
When Google invests another $2 billion in Renewables, the last thing they want is climate denier Commander in Chief.
Public-Private partnerships are the unholiest anticompetitive destroyer of free speech. Big Gov works to make sure Big Tech can protect its monopoly control, while Big Tech works to make sure sure Big Gov is protected from criticism by blocking and banning free speech.
Sweet.
DEMOCRATS OUTSOURCE POLITICAL REPRESSION TO CORPORATE MONOPOLIES
Daniel Greenfield,
Democrats […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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