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.
In his opening introduction, Andrew Neil vowed to expose “cancel culture” and focus on the news that matters to people outside of the “Westminster bubble”.
“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.
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!
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?
BEIJING, June 11 (Reuters) – China will no longer grant subsidies for new solar power stations, distributed solar projects by commercial users or onshore wind projects from the central government budget in 2021, the state planner said in a statement on Friday.
And now solar power can only sell at the same price as coal power? Really?
Electricity generated from the new projects will be sold at local benchmark coal-fired power prices or at market prices, the statement said.
Probably the reason for the solar subsidy cuts is because the bill had heated up to $42 billion by mid last year. And those subsidies are largely paid by electricity consumer serfs who weren’t too happy*.
The country’s finance ministry had previously committed togranting 57 percent more subsidies to solar power projects this year, although it did slash subsidies for wind power.
Entrapment on Capitol Hill: Did the FBI infiltrate and even lead the riot?
Capitol Hill, January 6
A very strange pattern
Many people are still being held in jail, without bail, five months later, but some of the people who appeared to be the most aggressive activists at Capitol Hill didn’t even get indicted. Were these people legally protected because they were undercover operatives or informants working with the FBI? If so, how much did these actors instigate events and thus entrap genuine protesters?
And if the FBI knew this event was going to happen, on “the most important day ever in Congress”, why didn’t they stop it and let Congress debate the question of whether the election was stolen? Seven US states had sent in dual electors, effectively choosing both Biden and Trump, and a growing number of Senators in five of those states had upped the ante by calling for an official decertification. All that Donald Trump, Rudy Guiliani and 88 State Senators were asking for, was a ten day delay so those key states could consider the new evidence and vote again and choose one set of electors.
Look who benefited from the Capitol Storming?
As reader Chris says:
The last thing genuine Trump supporters, or Republican constitutionalists wanted was to disrupt this critical sitting and the tabling of election fraud evidence.
But, the last thing the SWAMP wanted was the tabling of election fraud evidence.
Revolver takes a close look at the two different types of protestors at Capitol Hill:
The first category is the group of mostly harmless tourists who walked through already opened doors and already-removed barricades, and at most were guilty of minor trespassing charges and light property offenses. The second group consists of those who were violent with police officers, broke down barricades, smashed windows, belonged to a “militia” group engaged in military-style planning prior to the event, discussed transporting heavy weaponry, and so forth.
What’s at stake in these investigations:
If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing.
Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol — and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.
Meanwhile the ABC News said nothing, and SBS News told Australians tonight that “White Supremacy” is the single greatest threat the US faces.
There was a practice run three months earlier in Michigan led by the FBI
Remember the strange “Governor Whitmer Kidnapping Plot?” One third of those that Stormed Michigans Capitol turned out to be FBI agents or informants, and many of the people at that storming also came to Capitol Hill on Jan 6th.
…what if we told you that scarcely three months before the 1/6 Capitol Siege, the FBI arrested 14 people for planning to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the State Government — and that the alleged conspiracy to overthrow the State government involved storming of the State Capitol?
And what if we told you that of the 14 individuals who allegedly plotted the “kidnapping” and overthrow of the state government, at least five were undercover agents and federal informants? And as if that’s not enough, many of the individuals allegedly involved in this plot appear to belong to the “Three Percenters,” one of the very same militia groups now blamed for storming January 6.
And, as the cherry on top, what if we told you that the director of the Detroit FBI Field Office, who oversaw the infiltration operation of the Michigan Plot, was subsequently granted a highly coincidental promotion to the D.C. office, where he is now the lead FBI agent for all 1/6 cases?
As crazy as it sounds, all of this is true…
What did the FBI know, when did they know it, and were they involved?
Did the FBI infiltrate the militia groups and protesters at Capitol Hill and how many agents were there?
Why are some people who were there being kept in solitary confinement five months later, while others, who appeared to be leaders on the day, are able to go free? Is it because these people were FBI agents?
Why are federal agencies hiding 10,000 or more hours of security camera footage of what happened on January 6th at Capitol Hill? Including, probably detailed footage of the pipe bomber the FBI supposedly want to catch.
Who killed Ashli Babbit?
January 6 became the reason the Biden government claim they need to use law enforcement to crush anyone who opposes the Biden government.
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, Sweden, Turkey and even in the 20th Century. The horned statue to the left is from the near East circa 3000 BC.
In the battle of stupid fashion trends the best weapon is free speech. If the King makes pointy shoes an employment criterion, even smart men who know the price will still pay it to get the girls and the goodies for their offspring. It’s a cold cost-benefit calculation, not a religion.
It’s quickly cured if the court jester can mock the King. Once the price is named out loud the race is over, and all the contestants lose.
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:
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 costs of renewables are expected to continue falling, while gas plant owners are exposed to EU carbon prices, which have hit record levels above 50 euros a tonne, and volatile wholesale energy prices.
But in Europe, where coal is already hard to finance, lending institutions and governments have moved on to tightening requirements for funding gas projects.
The European Investment Bank, Europe’s largest public lender, has revamped its lending policy to largely exclude new gas infrastructure from the end of this year.
“To put it mildly, gas is over…Without the end to the use of unabated fossil fuels, we will not be able to reach the climate targets,” EIB president Werner Hoyer said in January.
And so the shortage came to pass:
Not only was there a shortage of gas plants, but also a shortage of gas too. Winter was freezing, and Russia was sending more gas to China, and less through the old pipe to Europe through Ukraine. Plus the pipes from Norway were under heavy maintenance.
Europe is so short of natural gas that the continent — usually seen as the poster child for the global fight against emissions — is turning to coal to meet electricity demand that is now back to pre-pandemic levels. Coal usage in the continent jumped 10% to 15% this year after a colder- and longer-than-usual winter left gas storage sites depleted, said Andy Sommer, team leader of fundamental analysis and modeling at Swiss trader Axpo Solutions AG.
In 2017 there was an official Chinese Academy of Science video to showcase the new Wuhan “Level 4” lab. The video shows bats in a cage there and teams monitoring the lab in case there’s “an accident”.
The latest release of video footage tells us a few important things —
The Chinese Officials were lying when they said their were no live bats at the Wuhan Institute.
The WHO was helping them lie.
Peter Daszak, the President of the US group funneling NIH money to the lab, also lied and helped them to cover it up.
In 2017 the Chinese Academy of Science admitted that ten years earlier, no one in China had known how to do this biosecurity research. The French (and presumably US collaborators) taught the Chinese how. They clashed all the way, and the Chinese threw the French out as soon as the lab was finished.
French and US intelligence knew there was a high risk of bioweapons. But they didn’t tell the world, nor prepare for it. Instead they’ve done everything they can to cover it up.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology viral databases went missing on Sept 12, 2019, before the virus started to spread. This was blamed on a cyber attack, but the databases were never restored.
All told, the WIV collected as many as 19,000 bat samples to study.
We’ve known since the early days that the bats this virus originated in came from Yunnan, some 800 km away from Wuhan and there was never a trail of infections connecting the native bats to Wuhan. Nor was there any bat soup at the Wet markets. The Chinese didn’t need live bats to create an infectious disease once they had the samples to start with. But they didn’t have to lie about the bats either.
We return to the question, Was the leak deliberate? The lost database just before the pandemic starts is awfully suspicious, but if it was a planned attack, why did they wait til Jan 1 or 2 to destroy all the samples? Or could it be that there was a splinter faction within China that wanted this “loose” just in time for the US election year? There are two defectors who claim it was not an accident.
The French and US experts helped China to build the Wuhan Lab”
It states there were difficulties behind-the-scenes during the construction phase of the level 4 laboratory. The lab was initially meant to be a joint undertaking between the French and Chinese governments.
“Our collaboration with France on this project went through more than a decade of intense clashes resulting from our different cultural backgrounds and understandings,” the video says. After it was built, the French scientists and officials were evicted from the laboratory, sparking concerns among French intelligence about the type of biological research China planned to undertake there.
Wasn’t this eviction a “pretty bad” sign? Shouldn’t someone in French intelligence told the world?
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has now collected 19,000 bat samples, with coronaviruses detected in 2481 samples.
Much of this information was unearthed by a group of volunteers called DRASTIC who achieved so much more than all the worlds media and most of their spy agencies.
Citizen Scientists win again…
Sharri Markson has written a book: What Really Happened in Wuhan.
The Swiss just voted down their governments plan to change the weather with increased car and airline taxes, albeit by only 51.6 to 48.4. That nearly half the population voted yes is testament to thirty years of non-stop propaganda, and the near complete suppression of skeptics.
Imagine what the vote would have have been if they allowed skeptics equal air time and funded skeptical scientists even at 10% the rate the believer-modelers get?
The no-vote to limiting emissions is a huge shock. The Swiss government drafted this law carefully. The plan: to cut greenhouse gases to half their 1990 levels by 2030, using a combination of more renewables and taxes on fossil fuels.
Voter rejection undermines Switzerland’s entire strategy to comply with the Paris Agreement. Today’s results are a devastating blow for environmentalists.
Some analysts suggest the Swiss – who traditionally pride themselves on their green policies – are nervous about taking any economic risks while the country recovers from the pandemic.
Now the government must go back to the drawing board, as Switzerland falls behind its European neighbours in efforts to tackle climate change.
It was an urban versus rural divide again, and supported by all the political parties but not the right wing “People’s Party”. How telling. The politicians wanted it, but the people didn’t.
During the referendum campaign, 160 Swiss parliamentarians stood together for a “Yes” vote, saying the CO2 law was “feasible, reasonable, and necessary.” More than 90 civil society organisations and 200 companies also campaigned in favour of the law. For the supporters, the bill was a “good compromise” after a tough parliamentary debate.
Switzerland’s major parties expressed disappointment at the outcome.
As my Swiss friend reports:
This Swiss referendum was since long time prepared with an avalanche of climate horror propaganda in all mainstream media, specially in the Swiss state controlled TV and Radio. At the same time German part of Switzerland had the coolest spring since 100 years.
The Swiss also voted down a plan to give farming subsidies only to organic farmers by 61 to 39. Clean green drinking water was also rejected:
[ABC News] Another initiative to improve the quality of drinking water in Switzerland was rejected — it would have made it harder for farmers to get state subsidies if they use some types of pesticides and antibiotics. A ban on the use of pesticides was also rejected.
A majority of Swiss voters supported an initiative to grant police enhanced surveillance powers and take preventative actions to help fight terrorism.
Other isolated nations as well as Australia and Switzerland include India, China, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa.
Two is two all over the world, no matter the language. Maths unites humanity — that is, until someone decides to un-race-ify that which isn’t racist. At this point in the nonsense-time-continuum everything they do to make it less racist will only make it more.
And so it comes to pass that profoundly racist people are telling us maths is white supremacist. It’s not just a one-divided-by-zero moment in rhetoric and reasoning — it’s as if Asians don’t exist, or aren’t human, or don’t set records in Maths SATs? Whatever it is the Wokerati are protesting, it’s not about the group “the system favours most”. Instead it’s a scorecard in a secret social bingo and the winning numbers are W-H-I-T-E.
The most racist people in the world are not the ones doing differential geometry, it’s the ones dividing their community by their lowest common denominator — their skin.
What could be more racist than telling children that their melanin-type can’t get the answer right? Not only does it set them up to fail, it destroys their success if they manage it anyway. Did they really deserve that spot, that prize, or that degree?
Nothing entrenches racism like judging people by their race….
California education officials are considering applying a social justice paradigm to teaching K-12 mathematics that would erase “White supremacy” from the subject and eliminate gifted classes for students.
How disabling to grow up watching adults debate “your handicap”?
Proponents of new math say the way the subject currently is taught is suffused with White supremacy. They say it handicaps some minority students by insisting on what they consider racist concepts — such as arriving at correct answers.
And the poison chalice of low expectations shall pourth forth to shackle the children with failure, even before they start.
Children who are mathematically gifted apparently shouldn’t be taught gifted maths. Presumably we don’t want any sports supremacy either?
Behind every social justice mathematician is someone who can’t do maths. Luckily Will Happer can, which is why he is a climate skeptic too.
Some scholars say the idea that math supports or is based on White supremacy ignores the fact that mathematics is a universal language discovered and developed by diverse cultures over millennia.
“It is absurd to accuse mathematics as being ‘racist,’” said William Happer, a professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University. “We use Indian numerals that come to us through the Arabs. There are still lots of distinguished mathematicians in India who speak the same worldwide mathematical language as mathematicians in North America, Europe, the Arab world, India, China, Japan, Africa, South America, etc.
“Greek geometry, much of it borrowed from Egypt and Mesopotamia, is still one of the most sublime human achievements,” Mr. Happer said.
But “three plus three equals a Government Grant for Me?”
h/t Charles M, and Bill
Dear commenters, be kind to the mods. There are many words which will trip the filter on this topic, and approval may be slow. Apologies. Best phrase things carefully, not color-fully. They know not what they do (most of them). A race war might be exactly what a few are secretly hoping for. We, on the other hand, aren’t really interested in the color of anyone’s skin, we’d rather judge each by their character…
The world faced the greatest global health crisis in one hundred years, but it’s taken a whole year to write up a small study that shows hydroxychoroquine could improve the survival rate of people on ventilators by a factor of three, and that the dose matters.
If anyone says “but this is not a big study”, that’s exactly my point. Why is it so hard to get a large study of a drug that was already known to be useful against SARS-1 fifteen years before SARS-2 arrived. A drug that even the President of the US was talking about in the earliest days? In January 2020 we already knew that the three drugs that were “fairly effective” were Remdesivir, Chloroquine and Ritonavir. On February 13, the South Koreans were already recommending hydroxychloroquine and telling us the anti-virals should be “started as soon as possible”. We had that head start, we threw it away.
Apparently the kings-of-compassion in the commentariat would rather see deaths than admit Donald Trump was right. And the experts in Pharmaceutical Giants only cared about the profit line.
And so it comes to pass, finally, that we find out what happened to 255 patients in May 2020 who were treated for Covid in a hospital in New Jersey. Sadly, 78% or 201 patients are described as “expired” — as if they reached their use-by dates. It was that bad. Just 54 survived. Only 3.5% “walked out of the hospital”. These were very sick people.
The research team hunted through the data to try to figure out what was different about the group that survived. But mostly the “alive group” and the “expired group” were similar. The research team considered many different risk factors like their blood pressure, weight, age, and conditions like diabetes. They trawled laboriously through all the medications they were given as well. Convalescent plasma (blood from survivors) was one of the few things that helped, boosting survival by a factor of two. But one drug combination finally stood out even more and that was Hydroxychloroquine and and Azithromycin. (Essentially very similar to The Zelenko protocol).
The WHO, funded by taxpayers in the West, long after these patients were saved, was working to stop HCQ from being used.
The WHO was busy “helping” to stop people using HCQ.
The beneficial effect of HCQ and AZ wasn’t obvious because people had received such different doses, but the higher the dose patients were given, the more likely they were to survive:
Initial lasso and Cox proportional hazard model regression analyses showed
that higher cumulative doses of HCQ were associated with a lower mortality
rate. With every natural log increase in HCQ cumulative dose, patients were
1.12 times less likely to die [p<0.001]. Accordingly, 3,000 mg HCQ cumulative dose had a survival OR = 2.46.
Hydroxychloroqine is a very unusual drug in that our bodies are very slow to get rid of it. The half life is 40 days. Therefore a repeat dose will accumulate for quite a while. So researchers started to look at the cumulative dose and it was the key:
When AZM and HCQ were given together, the association with survival
greater than when HCQ was given alone. We finally noticed that patients, who received cumulative doses HCQ > 3,000 mg and AZM > 1,000 mg, had a much higher survival rate than all others.
The dose dependent relationship is quite telling. Only 37 patients received the highest level of 3 grams (as a cumulative dose) of HCQ and 1 g of Azithromycin. Of those, 18 survived (48%). Of the 218 patients who got less than that dose, only 36 would survive (16%).
In other words, most patients just didn’t get a high enough dose.
Patients receiving three grams of hydroxychloroquine, and one gram or more of Azithromycin had 3.26 times lower risk of dying. And the researchers then figured that dose per bodymass weight could also be important. They found that people need a dose higher than 80mg/kg. This is hardly a surprise, since nearly all medicines known to man are dished out on a per kilo basis. The bigger mystery is why other studies did not use HCQ on a per kilo dosage?
…
Despite all the warnings, they found no evidence that HCQ caused the longer QT Boundary side effect that the FDA worried about. Though they also note that the FDA itself didn’t seem too concerned about this effect in 150 other medical trials, only for Covid:
On April 24, 2020, the FDA issued a warning about the possible effects of low HCQ on QTc interval (47). Since 2010, the FDA has approved over 150
clinical trials, which include HCQ treatment. The FDA did and does not
require monitoring for cardiotoxicity. In each of these trials, the total HCQ
dose and expected tissue levels are markedly higher than used or seen in
Covid patients. This discrepancy lacks logic or explanation.
This is all the more poignant given that after doctors were warned about the long QT risk they reduced doses. Even in this short trial, Smith et al noticed the effect the warnings had.
The decisions to co-administer AZM were made primarily by the ID consultants. The use of AZM with HCQ was more common in the first half of this 6-week period. During mid and late April, AZM was administered less frequently with HCQ. This decrease occurred after reports that HCQ/AZM caused QTc prolongation were published.
And marvel that weight-adjusted doses are standard practice yet no one thought to test HCQ that way?
The trials, which concluded HCQ caused QTc prolongation, did not show
that a dose-based effect. Given the weight range of hospitalized Covid
patients, it is difficult to understand how weight-adjusted dosing was not considered in these reports.At a minimum, the studies on HCQ’s effect on QTc interval in Covid patients need to be redone and the extant data reanalyzed.
The verdict was that past studies on HCQ are so worthless they need to be redone.
The good news is that there is a way out of the new mutant load. The bad news is the Swamp is in the way.
India’s caseload has continued to shrink since we last looked at it. Which is great news, but instead of endorsing the approach that worked, the health ministry is now writing to doctors telling them not to use Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
Indeed the new recommendations even go so far as to say that zinc and multivitamins are out too. Even zinc?
Ponder that Ivermectin is so powerful it even destroys multivitamins.
Is the day coming when we see antivirals suddenly accepted like the Wuhan Lab theory was? Lives depend on it, but vast piles of money do too. The medical censorship swamp is well equipped, and I suspect, has years of experience. There are so many anti-viral medicines, they’ve been around for years and all the financial incentives not to use cheap out-of-patent drugs have always been there.
Here are the graphs of infections in some states of India:
New Delhi: The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) under the Union Health Ministry has revised the COVID-19 management guidelines and decided against the usage of certain strong medicines for mild or asymptomatic cases of coronavirus. According to the new guidelines issued on May 27, the health ministry has written to the doctors’ community to drop drugs like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, doxycycline, zinc, multivitamins etc from prescription.
As the Frontline Doctors say, psst! Want to save $650 million dollars? Merck don’t.
,,,
About a week ago a group in India decided to take the Indian WHO scientist to court to stop her suppressing the use of Ivermectin.
According to the notice, Dr. Swaminathan has ignored the extensive studies carried out by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. They add that Dr. Swaminathan has “deliberately suppressed the data regarding the effectiveness of the drug Ivermectin, with an intent to dissuade the people of India” from using the drug.
Since we’re talking about Ivermectin, here’s Slovakia too: After ivermectin was started, Covid cases fell dramatically.
,,,
Japan, meanwhile, must be watching the Indians. Things are so desperate with the Olympics coming that it is now rushing through emergency approval for Ivermectin. The irony is that the drug was originally isolated from soil in Japan.
The censorship continues. Many subreddits have been closed but r/ivermectin is still there.
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.
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 Chinese presumably know more about the design of Covid than anyone, and they are not aiming for herd immunity.
The rate of spread or R0 of the Delta strain is around 5, meaning one person infects five others on average. This is twice as fast as the original Covid spread was in 2020. It is quite a different disease. It means that once it gets loose in the community, we’d need stricter restrictions to reduce the R0 to 1 or less. — the point where the number of cases starts to shrink. It will be much harder to put back in its box.
Hotel quarantine has to keep up with the variants
The more easily these viruses spread, the more stringent the hotel quarantines will have to be. Victoria, Australia was probably lucky (in one sense) that the newest hotel breach occurred at the same time as restrictions were already running. So one lockdown has slowed both escaped strains. Like a two-for-one deal. Hopefully long-suffering Victorians will get more freedom back on Friday.
Given the astronomical costs and pain of another lockdown — we could throw a billion dollars at building new facilities for quarantine and still come out far ahead. China built hospitals in ten days. Can’t we put mining demountables or Glam-camping type tents in a hot dry location and prevent the breaches?
Coronavirus: Double-strength Delta strain to dominate
Natasha Robinson, The Australian
The Delta variant, also known as B.1.617.2, is about 50 per cent more infectious than the Alpha strain that first emerged in Britain last year, according to the latest data from Public Health England. The Alpha strain was about 40 per cent more infectious than the original Wuhan strain, making the Delta strain almost twice as infectious as the original wild type of the virus.
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.
What does the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) do? Fund research into deadly viruses that may leak.
How’s that Threat Reduction working out?
The US military was more closely involved than they let on. What kind of crazy pays adversaries to research deadly weapons?
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’
The Grants were going to a group called EcoHealth Alliance which got $123 million in total from the US Government from 2013 – 2020. Indeed it got as much as 90% of its money from the US government. It’s almost a government department, but without the accountability. It funneled some of that $123m to the Wuhan lab. The man running Eco Health — Dr Peter Daszak was the one who helped whip up the Lancet paper saying Covid was absolutely definitely natural — about four weeks after most people first heard of the virus. The useless World Health Organisation then invited Daszak to come along on the “investigation into the origin of Covid” in China. Bravo U.N.. Daszak went on to thank Fauci in emails for supporting the “natural origin theory”. One nice friendly circle.
The US Defence Department has fingers on this from several angles.
Federal data seen by DailyMail.com reveals The Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded a lab in Wuhan, China, between 2013 and 2020
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is accused of being the source of Covid-19
The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks’
Federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government in total
EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
EHA has also funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells
The Deep State is far too deep:
In 2014 the Obama administration outlawed gain of function research, such as the experiments funded by EHA, after concerns were raised among scientists that it could lead to a global pandemic from a genetically enhanced virus escaping a lab.
But EHA reportedly continued to legally fund the practice, using a loophole that allowed for the research in cases ‘urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.’
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?
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 just a weather balloon traveling at about 30–40 knots. “Because of the extreme zoom and because the camera is locked onto this object … the motion of the ocean in this video is actually exactly the same as the motion of the jet plane itself. You’re seeing something that’s actually hardly moving at all and all of the apparent motion is the parallax effect from the jet flying by.
Seriously, these are much better videos than I expected. Very well done.
…Flir1 and Gimbal, says [Mick West, a columnist for Skeptic magazine], are what one would see if a jet were flying away from the camera, thus accounting for the eyewitness accounts that the object showed no directional control surfaces or exhaust. The apparent saucer-like shape of the Gimbal object, West continues, are due to glare on the lens of the camera. As he told the San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Andrew Dyer, “What we’re seeing in the distance is essentially just the glare of a hot object,” most likely that “of an engine — maybe a pair of engines with an F/A-18 — something like that.”
The odd pyramid aliens spring from an unfocused triangular aperture.
Pale Horseman: This sounds exactly like what a pyramid-flying alien would want us to think.
NeoRetro: Cant believe the aliens went back in time, invented triangular lenses and changed our timeline just to hide their identity from us and allow someone like you to debunk This credible sighting :0
So sophisticated cameras can make spooky anomalies. Perhaps that’s why there are so many UFO sightings now?
For the true geeks, there is some avid debate under the Gimbal video in comments, with Mick West getting into the fray.
So what is it with the military? Did they really miss these explanations? Is it a measure of their stale incompetence, or are they playing a game of public relations hoping to raise more funds. Or wildly — after all these years of covering up the aliens, perhaps there are so many sightings and so many cameras that the DoD had to say something. 🙂
It seems a bit hard to believe that with millions of high quality cameras in everyone’s pockets, along with military grade cameras that can resolve newspaper text from space, that we still do not have any clear images of UFOs as yet.
But why not argue that ET is actually a traveler from across the vastness of space, from a distant planet? Wouldn’t that be a simpler answer?
“I would argue it’s the opposite,” Masters responded. “We know we’re here. We know humans exist. We know that we’ve had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I’m just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation.”
He calls it Archaeological Tourism — is that where future-people can fly back and watch democracy unravel?
Pale Horseman: This sounds exactly like what a pyramid-flying alien would want us to think.
It seems a bit hard to believe that with millions of high quality cameras in everyone’s pockets, along with military grade cameras that can resolve newspaper text from space, that we still do not have any clear images of UFOs as yet.
Funny about that huh?
I like the idea from Prof Michael Masters — that aliens might be time-travelling humans from the future coming back to study us. (h/t El gordo)
But why not argue that ET is actually a traveler from across the vastness of space, from a distant planet? Wouldn’t that be a simpler answer?
“I would argue it’s the opposite,” Masters responded. “We know we’re here. We know humans exist. We know that we’ve had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I’m just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation.”
He calls it Archaeological Tourism — is that where future-people can fly back and watch democracy unravel?