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Flynn Reef, Queensland, Photo by Wise Hok Wai Lum
Ever since Australia asked for an investigation into the source of Covid, China has been accidentally-on-purpose sticking pins into our trade deals. Pop went the wine, coal, beef, barley and lobster markets.
Now after concreting corals reefs in the South China Sea and plundering the Galapagos, China is suddenly concerned about the Great Barrier Reef. Overnight Chinese players in the UN have pushed it to the top of a list that had 82 more fragile ecosystems ahead of it. Pop, goes the tourism trade as the headlines ring out that UNESCO says the Reef is “in danger”.
At the moment, the only tourists that could possibly be frightened away are a few New Zealanders, because no one else can easily get around the two week quarantine. But when flights reboot, Australia just needs to send photos of the glorious corals to the world and “pop” goes the UN and China’s reputation.
It’s time the West dumped the UN — it’s just a play tool for Sino power
That would “pop” some of the CCP web of influence. What’s a Veto of a dead committee worth?
How many other environmental […]
Strap yourself in: Solar Power and batteries made a whole town 100% renewable (for 80 minutes).
It’s an Australian first! Put out a press release. No seriously, they did:
Solar and battery microgrid takes WA town to 100% renewables in Australian first
Western Australia has again demonstrated its remote renewable energy generation chops, after successfully powering the Pilbara town of Onslow entirely on a combination of large and small-scale solar and battery storage for a total of 80 minutes.
Only 520,000 minutes short of a whole year.
“The milestone achievement was announced by WA energy minister Bill Johnston on Friday morning after being demonstrated by state government-owned regional utility Horizon Power, which established the solar and storage microgrid next to an existing gas plant.”
Onslow is a metropolis of 847 people sited in one of the sunniest zones in one of the sunniest countries in the world. With at least 3650 hours of sun a year, Onslow vies for a top ten position globally.
If solar power was going to make it anywhere, this would be it. But we all know what keeps the lights on in Onslow and it isn’t solar power.
The […]
It’s the sort of news that causes a Geopolitical realignment
There are now three Chinese defectors saying Covid19 was deliberately created by the Chinese Military. The third, Dong Jingwei, is possibly the highest ranking yet, and apparently talked to the DIA in mid February after flying into the US to visit his daughter.
The claims are that he has brought with him terabytes of data or “nearly 19 million documents”. It’s potentially dynamite — allegedly containing studies of Covid, forecasts of spread in the West, and names of Chinese spies in the US with details of payments.
If this is confirmed, and the Chinese Military did release a deadly bioweapon on the world, as Paula Bolyard says, “it ranks as one of the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen” — and the media, and some intelligence agencies, helped to cover it up.
The DIA kept the defector a secret from the CIA and FBI because they believed there were Chinese spies within them.
BREAKING: Defector Claiming Chinese Military Responsible for COVID-19 Identified as Top Counterintelligence Official
Paula Bolyard, PJ Media
According to RedState, the data includes:
Early pathogenic studies of the virus […]
Signs of life in the UK outpost of Civilization
A new TV channel called “GB News” only opened on Sunday, to smashingly good ratings. GB News outdid the BBC and Sky on its first day as 164,000 people tuned in to see if they got real news for a change instead of repetitive inane cliches approved by some middle level bureaucratic arts graduate who was pushing their own political agenda to pump up their grifting salary and impress their friends. The BBC got 133,000 viewers and Sky 57,000.
BBC hit by mass boycott as viewers flock to Andrew Neil’s GB News and cancel TV licences
by Laura O’Callaghan, Express
AVID fans of GB News have hailed Britain’s newest TV channel and vowed to continue their boycott of the Beeb as they seek information from alternative sources.
Naturally, the collectivist bullies have gone after the advertisers, and while many spineless corporate CEOs have folded to cancel culture, at least one team is fighting back. Companies with weak CEOs include Kopparberg, Grolsch, Nivea, Open University, and Ikea.
Bravo to The Co-op which stood their ground
The Co-op announced that it would not remove its advertising.
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, […]
God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:
Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.
Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.
One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:
Gas faces existential crisis in climate wary Europe
May 14, 2021, , Reuters
Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.
…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.
The […]
It’s everywhere nearly. The UK variant (called “Alpha”) has become the dominant strain (see that graph far below). But now the Indian V2 variant (the Delta strain) is taking over from the UK strain. It is rapidly spreading in Russia, Bangladesh and Portugal.
The Nextstrain country comparison site shows which variants are most common — prevalence of the strain — not the absolute numbers. There are “only” 5,000 new cases a day in the UK at the moment (far down from the peak of 60,000 cases a day). But they are increasingly the Indian variant.
In the USA there are only 12,000 new cases a day, and only a hint of the Indian Delta variant.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain. https://covariants.org/per-country
…
The rate of increase is easier to see if the other variants are deselected.
There are some ominous looking trajectories there.
Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain.
It’s the slope of the trend change in the Delta variant that matters. (The last week of data in India is probably an anomaly.)
The Indian Delta variant has also spread to China, which is doing what it always does, mass testing and lockdowns. The […]
This may be nothing, but Reddit and The Guardian are out and intermittently there are reports also of Amazon, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC down. Reddit says “Fastly Error” so it may be nothing more than one cloud computing service crashing.
The BBC Minutes ago (was not down for me)
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
The UK government website – gov.uk – is also down as is parts of the BBC and a host of other media outlets.
Affected websites displayed the message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.
UPDATE: It appears to be solved according to The Australian. Just another odd cyber thing. There seem to be a lot of them lately. Almost like someone was rattling the cage.
9.7 out of 10 based on 34 ratings
Suddenly there is pandemonium about the Lab Leak idea as the West wakes up a year too late. If only they’d been reading unfunded bloggers? It’s old news to readers here, but watch the pea. Why is it suddenly OK to mention now, after being banned on Facebook for months? Because timing is everything in politics.
Imagine how different it would have been in February last year if Western leaders knew then that it was possible the Wuhan flu had leaked from a lab? And talk of it being a bioweapon was all over twitter even in January last year. How fast would those borders have slammed shut, saving literally a million lives or three and so many businesses? Neighbours around China were already snapping doors closed in the first days of February. Remember all the nations that wouldn’t accept, the poor infected Diamond Princess? Even if the West wasn’t sure, the possibility that it was a laboratory leak would have changed everything about the early response. Italy would hardly have run a “hug a Chinese (bioweapon)” campaign.
Image: Scientific Animations
Politics explains so much. Sixteen months of silence served Biden’s backers well. If Donald Trump could have […]
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The West is switching to trendy unreliable energy while Russia is ramping up coal and gas production.
Russia is building a ten billion dollar railroad to sell coal to Asia, but Australia is building a ten billion dollar hydro bandaid “battery” just to make unreliable energy slightly less useless.
Russia is being left behind on renewables, and they’re probably delighted. The more the West cripples itself in a quest to make sparkly green-electrons that stop the storms, the richer the Russians will get.
With the second largest coal reserves in the world, they’re well positioned to meet the growing demand from India and China. Indeed, if Russia could just think of a way to stop the USA and Australia from producing coal, they could corner the market.
If Russian Intel isn’t paying climate activists and child-complainers a retainer, they must have rocks for brains. But since they are apparently paying French and German bloggers to discredit the Pfizer vaccine perhaps they already are some of the great minds behind Greenpeace?
And if they were funding climate disinformation campaigns, which media outlet would tell us?
h.t GWPF
Source EIA 2021
Give me one reason Russia […]
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 […]
Ben Davidson speaks from Spaceweathernews.com and claims that there was a short sharp geomagnetic storm over the East Coast of Australia around the time the Queensland Callide Power plant exploded.
The CME that flew past Earth didn’t do much around the world, causing a small 1% deviation in magnetometers. But there was a burst of activity in the Southern Hemisphere that appears to have hit the east coast of Australia. Magnetometers there saw a 300 – 500% change* between noon and 3pm on the same day as the Callide Coal Power Plant blew up. The explosion happened at 1.44pm and the 275 kV transmission lines tripped at 2:06pm.
*(UPDATE: There is some contention in comments about the Australian DST figures — we’re they really that high or unusual? I’ll update the post when I can confirm it either way).
We don’t know if this tipped something over the edge at Callide, but the timing is highly coincidental. If Earth’s magnetic field is weakening it would seem urgent, to say the least, to understand the risks these spaceweather events pose to our critical infrastructure.
Perhaps an engineer who knows the design of (hydrogen cooled) supercritical coal reactors might be able […]
Saint Greta’s comeuppance
US site RedState was very impressed with this letter sent to Alan Jones, and read on SkyNews, Australia.
Someone was very fed up with the vainglorious students who skipped school to do a rent-a-crowd climate protest:
“To all the school kids going on strike for climate change, you’re the first generation who’ve required air conditioning in every classroom. You want TV in every room and your classes are all computerized. You spend all day and night on electronic devices.
More than ever you don’t walk or ride bikes to school, but you arrive in caravans of private cars that choke suburban roads and worsen rush-hour traffic. You’re the biggest consumers of manufactured goods ever. And update perfectly good, expensive, luxury items to stay trendy. Your entertainment comes from electric devices.
Furthermore, the people driving your protests are the same people who insist on artificially inflating the population growth through immigration, which increases the need for energy, manufacturing, and transport. The more people we have, the more forest and bushland we clear, the more of the environment that’s destroyed.
How about this? Tell your teachers to switch off the […]
Make this man President. Ron DeSantis has signed into law something that will allow Floridians to sue Big Tech if they have been banned by one sided “selectively enforced” rules. Finally, Big Tech, at least in Florida, will have to set some rules and apply them to both sides of any debate or the aggrieved party can sue Big Tech.
It’s aimed at Silicon Valley:
“I, along with the legislators and this great governor, do not think that a handful of kids behind some desks in Silicon Valley get to be the arbiter of what free speech is,” House bill sponsor Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill said.
The new law comes into effect on July 1. It applies to any company with a revenue over $100 million or who have 100 million monthly participants. This is about maintaining a free and open town square. If political candidates are deplatformed it will cost the Tech Giants a quarter of a million dollars a day. (Those fines might have to be raised).
Coming soon: Big Tech to create all kinds of rules that benefit people who like Oligarchs.
Presumably Big Tech have already convened a team to deal with this. Expect […]
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 […]
It’s all a charade. The news was no news. A group of countries that mostly don’t fund coal plants overseas agreed to keep not doing it. And Japan and Korea, who had already said they were phasing out their programs in 2016, said they would keep phasing it out.
This abdication of global charity leaves the path clear for the largest funder of foreign coal plants, the Chinese Communist Party. China can win even more favours and UN votes by being the only supplier of coal fired assistance to a desperate third world. That’ll suit President Xi. He thanks the G7 patsies who limit their gifts to dinky unreliable solar panels and wind towers. Ten or twenty years from now, those gifts will be so much landfill. The coal plants will power on.
This was another nothingness press release just to look like a “win”, like progress was happening, and to give irrelevant former PMs a chance to grandstand. And the ABC and SBS bored us with another advert for Green-Fantasy-Island and didn’t mention that this was largely a repeat of a 5 year old agreement. Nor did they mention that China is the largest funder of foreign coal, […]
The Tomago smelter uses more than 10% of the entire New South Wales electricity grid supply. But the price spikes in electricity are so crippling the industrial giant could not afford to keep running on three occasions in the last week. Welcome to Venezaustralia.
Tomago
And it’s not even winter yet:
Prices were spiking in four states on May 17th.. Thanks to WattClarity.
Tomago aluminium smelter powers down three times in a week due to electricity shortages
A massive 35,000 per cent spike in wholesale power prices due to supply shortages has forced a NSW aluminium smelter to shut down three times in the past week to keep the lights on in Sydney.
The Tomago smelter, which supports more than 1800 local jobs, has had to power down multiple times since May 12 to ensure households across the state have enough power for heating as winter sets in.
Tomago chief executive Matt Howell said the sudden power price hike to $14,500 a megawatt hour was the equivalent of petrol prices going up to $400 a litre.
This time it was mega-price-spikes but other days Tomago plays Electricity-Saint for […]
Political correctness is the correct way to lose every election. By its very nature, virtue signalling is almost guaranteed to be an electoral disaster. The whole game is to get to the top of the pecking order and mark yourself as being above the unwashed riff raff. A long time ago, if your brain wave was a good idea, the riff raff would adopt it too, which was all fine and good, except then you need another different good idea. And when all that’s left are more absurd signalling displays: Can you control the weather with your plastic shopping bag? Can you set people free by vandalizing statues?
Labor Parties all over the world suffer from the same thing. They stopped listening and caring what the workers think.
h/ t David E
Look at the massive disconnect here:
Poll proves wokery lost Labour ‘red wall’ seats:
Glen Owen, Mail on Sunday
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion on woke issues, a Mail on Sunday poll has found. The survey revealed that the party was overwhelmingly associated with support for politically correct issues – such as pulling down statues of […]
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