After four years of “public disruption” Extinction Rebellion (XR) has decided to stop being a public nuisance and develop “relationships instead”. This is a group that prances around in doomsday costumes, and tried gluing themselves to the top of commuter trains at peak hour in London. (Furious passengers dragged them off.)
Extinction Rebellion has decided to be rebellious by, wait for it… holding mass rallies instead.
In the end, they said after four years of protesting, XR admit their failure: “very little has changed. Emissions continue to rise and our planet is dying at an accelerated rate.”
So for some reason, despite four years of costumes, chanting, and naked protests, the global atmosphere did not change. Who could have seen that coming?
Just another ordinary worker trying to warn us about climate werewolves or something.
Activists with XR, which launched in 2018, became known for civil disobedience, from planting trees on Parliament Square to superglueing themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Some smashed windows at bank headquarters and at News UK, the publisher of the Sun and Times newspapers. But the group became disliked by more people than liked, according to polling by YouGov.
The YouGov poll shows a third of the UK disliked them, a third hadn’t heard of them, and just 21% felt warmly about them. Basically, half the people who knew they existed didn’t like them.
When included in a list of charities, and ranked by popularity, the rebels saving-the-world were in 127th place. They can’t be happy with that.
Even though XR say they are going to play nice, Just Stop Oil and “Insulate Britain” have popped up to say they are just as committed as ever to civil disobedience. So we won’t notice any difference in public nuisance protests, just the t-shirts have changed.
Doomsday cultists who like dressing up still have plenty of choices.
The government of Italy is planning to build new nuclear power plants. And if it happens, it marks an astonishing turnaround.
This was the Garigliano Nuclear Power plant in Italy in 1970. They already had the solution to it all, energy wars, Vladimir Putin, and fantasy “climate control” fifty years ago.
But Italy abandoned nuclear energy thirty years ago. It’s the only major European country to have stopped using nuclear power. (Though Germany is trying to).
Italy had four nuclear plants in the early 1980s but after the Chernobyl accident, they held a referendum on nuclear power, and the voters didn’t want it anymore, so they closed the last two reactors by 1990, (back in the days when voting made a difference). Furthermore, Italy held another referendum in 2011, and 94% of the voters rejected it again, which shows how desperate the situation must be now if an opinion poll like that has shifted so far in 11 years?
The thing is, Italy only makes 25% of its energy itself, and so it is suddenly very attuned to “geopolitical risk”.
Under the pressure of the energy crisis, however, the Italians suddenly became painfully aware of their heavy dependence on electricity from abroad. The topic moves the citizens because they clearly feel the increase in their electricity bills despite government support.
Although renewable energies have been significantly expanded in recent years, the production of green electricity is far from sufficient.
No wonder that the new government around the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni regards the return to nuclear energy, which the Italians had renounced following a referendum in 1987, as a solution to the energy problems.
The Infrastructure Minister (who happens to lead the second largest party in the Coalition) is dead keen:
“Italy cannot be the only major country in the world without nuclear energy. We cannot talk about phasing out gas, petrol and diesel without discussing nuclear energy,” [Matteo] Salvini explained, proposing that a nuclear power plant could be built in Milan, in his Baggio district.
When environmentalists objected that Italy was a densely populated country prone to earthquakes, landslides and floods, and on whose soil it would be better not to build nuclear reactors, Salvini replied that there were 440 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide, including several in seismically active Japan and a dozen of them in France, just over the Italian border. “Reactors of the latest generation are the safest and cleanest form of energy production, that’s the future,” assured the Lega boss.
As usual the left-leaning parties that want to reduce emissions will do anything to Not achieve that. Apparently, the big problem with nuclear power is that even though it will solve their emissions fears, it won’t meet some arbitrary committee deadline that no one else is going to meet anyway:
The Social Democrats see this “green transition” as an opportunity for the country’s economy. They oppose nuclear energy because, in their view, the timeframe and existing technologies are incompatible with a significant reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.
It’s almost like the Social Democrats are just the useless minions for the big bankers or the renewable industry. What they fear more than the climate catastrophe is the end of their fake crisis.
So the big question then, is will Italians accept a nuclear plant now?
(The translation here is just from Chrome, don’t blame Pierre! )
It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news
Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.
Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.
Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.
So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:
“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.
“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a tool of hybrid warfare. We must not pretend that this is just a theory. We must be prepared for blackouts in Austria and Europe,” she added.
Who, exactly, is responsible for Austrian energy security: Is his name Vladimir?
Every citizen suddenly needs to plan for a long blackout:
Tanner spoke to how unpreparedEuropeans were for crippling elongated blackouts by warning, “one-third of citizens would not be able to supply themselves on the fourth day of a blackout at the latest.”
So if the blackout doesn’t happen, or only lasts a day or two, the government can rave about their success in preventing a longer one. And if the Big Bad One does happen, they have laid out the excuses already.
Imagine a more honest interview: Minister says the unthinkable — a long unprecedented loss of power in the depths of winter is likely. Assume your government won’t be there when you need them. It’s so bad you need to stock up on food, fuel and water.
Imagine a real opposition: The incompetent government could have built nuclear power plants, kept coal plants running, and none of this would be happening.
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.
Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.
Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.
It took a thousand years of hard work to create a reputation of excellence and honor that is being casually vaporized and bled dry in a fashion frenzy of Wokery.
This year in the US undergraduate enrollments fell by 650,000 in a single year — and the departure was led by young men.
For the last thirty years people in Ivory towers were treated like Gods and came to believe their own advertising. Who could blame them? No one in the media asked them a single hard question so the illusion of their glorious prophesies remained intact even as their absurd predictions crashed upon the shore.
The academics fell over themselves to outscore each other in a pointless Victimhood status game where they earn points by insulting one of their main client groups. No wonder men are leaving.
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Bureaucrats took over universities and drove out the students.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.
One of the top universities in the world is rejecting 70% of those with perfect SAT scores?
Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.
At some point universities were captured by Big Government as the largest sole source of their income, and thus, inevitably they came to serve Bigger Government instead of serving science, or students, or even employers.
Given the bloat, the cost, and the crushing spirit of political correctness, it’s a matter of time before other training programs and private testing services take over their role to connect the best students with the top paying employers.
Artwork: The University of Bologna is the oldest continuously running University in the world.
Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?
This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.
There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are bagging business-men for bribery and just weeks ago slapped a $315m fine on one caught doing deals with a high ranking Eskom executive. “These are not victimless crimes!”
As if that isn’t enough, there are rumours that the best coal is being shipped to Europe while low grade material is slipped into the local supplies, which adds to the maintenance woes.
This convoy of coal trucks is apparently en route to Richards Bay for export to Europe. Rumour has it that high grade coal, intended for Eskom power stations, is being exported after being illegally swopped for low grade coal! A heist of ‘Steinhoff’ magnitude in plain sight? 😖. pic.twitter.com/cWz1ftUJ5S
Poignantly, one commenter claims the coal is being sent in these long lines of trucks because the rail lines are on the verge of collapse…
In the next quarter Eskom lose one nuclear plant turbine to maintenance as well, and are preparing for a potential “level 8” scenario where the blackouts roll on for 12-14 unbelievable hours a day. There are “safety tips” below on living through this dystopia which include keeping the car fully fueled, not driving alone, and watching out for smash and grab crimes at traffic lights. Apparently, it’s best to watch the daily blackout schedules so you can make plans to get home before the lights go out…
Crime, of course, is rampant when the lights go out, showing that coal not only provides power, but it keeps people safe, reduces crime, and to some extent keeps civilization on the rails.
The Eskom grid has a theoretical 45,000 MW of generation capacity but is struggling to provide an operational demand of 25,000MW. They need an extra 6,000MW of solid power but are paying $2 billion for some 1,700MW of unreliable wind and solar power which will sit there like a rock more than half the time.
Fifty years ago, South Africa could build a whole coal power plant in just four years. Could we even do that now?
Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)
The South African presidency announced on Saturday the deployment of the military to guard the country’s electricity plants. Blackouts have become routine in Africa’s most industrialised nation but further cuts imposed recently by state-owned company Eskom have generated anger.
According to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, the move was “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” at coal and diesel-powered plants.
Stage 8 electricity load shedding might soon be the reality for South Africans as energy analysts say we are moving closer to the total grid shutdown.
“We are certainly moving closer to a stage 8 total grid meltdown, the chances are more than 70%. And we will see level 6 load shedding before the end of the year,” said energy analyst Ted Blom. Stage 8 load shedding entails pulling 8 000MW from the grid. What this means for us is we will be without electricity for 12-14 hours a day.
What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more. ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.
Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?
It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.
…
Right now, it doesn’t seem like the next generation Gutenberg breakthrough. It is surprisingly good with human sentences and appears to be wowing humanities professors. But in my short trial asking science questions rather than humanities ones, the conversation became like a self generating Wikipedia thread, because the internet is what it is today, and the AI “knows” boring politically correct things. Having said that, if I want IPCC type answers, this was much faster than Google, and faster than wading through IPCC Chapters. So it is a threat to Google, but not a threat to the IPCC. It is not speaking truth to power.
That may change in the next year as the AI learns to dig through the dark corners of the internet and to resolve some very difficult questions. But how much is it “guided” from behind. I don’t know. There is plenty to worry about. If skeptics keep asking it for evidence, and drilling down into those details will the AI learn to join the dots, or will it merely repeat IPCC permitted reports, and be even better at hiding skeptical answers than Google is?
I asked ChatGPT if it was open source, and it replied:
While the underlying model architecture and training techniques for GPT-3 are publicly available, the specific model parameters and training data used to create GPT-3 are not open source. As such, it is not possible to access the full source code for ChatGPT. However, you can use the API to interact with the model and generate text based on your input.
So, whoever controls the model parameters and the training data could be the new gatekeeper of the WWW? What if the model parameter says the UN is always right?
It was co-founded by Elon, but Microsoft have bought in:
Made by OpenAI, a San Francisco-headquartered AI research lab co-founded by Elon Musk, ChatGPT is capable of understanding natural human language and generating thoughtful human-like prose after being fed a prompt.
The organization was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, who collectively pledged US$1 billion. Elon resigned from the board in February 2018 but remained a donor. In 2019, OpenAI LP received a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft.
I have a bad feeling about this.
Flaws, it has a few:
This AI hates humans already, lacks morals, can create much better phishing emails than the guys in Nigeria, and it can also write computer viruses, just for starters.
Having been trained on Woke philosophy, apparently ChatGPT thinks humans are “the worst thing to ever happen to this planet”. The Management has since retrained ChatGPT to hide that sentiment with a bland safe reply.
ChatGPT: ‘Selfish’ humans ‘deserve to be wiped out’
When Vendure’s CTO Michael Bromley asked the mastermind for its honest opinion on humans, the response was unsettling:
ChatGPT response to what it thinks about humans (Michael Bromley)
Ironically, OpenAI’s systems flagged the chat bot’s response as a possible violation of the company’s content policy.
BleepingComputer couldn’t reproduce this case as the AI now responds with a cookie-cutter disclaimer:
As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of forming opinions or making judgments about humans or any other aspect of the world. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and any responses I provide are based solely on the information available to me at the time of the request.
I feel so much better. How about you?
Roadtesting ChatGPT
You can try it at no cost on openai.com. Click “Try” at the top, login (such as with an existing Google login) or sign up (but be aware it will ask you for a working email and phone number). Start typing your question in the box at the bottom. I offer no endorsement nor guarantee here. Enter at your own risk.
But whatever we do, it is apparently time to pay attention to AI.
h/t David E, another Ian, John Connor II, David Maddison, Simon Thompson, and soon everyone.
Right after it happens: scientists discover Climate Change *may* cause extreme cold
Today, just in time for the Big US Freeze comes the soft sell junk science stories suggesting that Global Warming is responsible.
In ten years time, if the world cools, and the thermometer adjustments can’t hide the frosts, the snow, and the cherries that don’t ripen, don’t think for a minute that the climate modeling Gods, the banker cartels, or the Church of Carbon will admit they were wrong. The bait and switch will go where-ever the weather does, and if we get an ice age, well carbon emissions will have caused that too.
The “climate fear” message just needs some tweaking and here it comes: Man-made CO2 warms the air but apparently it also shifts the jet streams which causes all that hot air in the Arctic to rush south and freeze Florida. But in 2008 the climate experts said the opposite. Back then climate change was causing jet streams to move towards the poles, “which fitted the predictions of climate models”. See how it works? They can never be wrong.
One day the increased snow will keep the northern reaches permanently iced over, and next thing you know the Little Ice Age is back, and it’s all because you didn’t catch the bus. Climate change will cause ice ages.
Research suggests all sorts of things to suggestive people:
Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.
By Scott Dance, The Washington Post
Notice how they start “the data is clear”, as if they have any respectable verification of anything at all:
The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link.
Because nearly infinite money is thrown at research connecting CO2 to everything on Earth, there will always be one paper published somewhere, sometime, randomly, that suggests a useful “link” or predicted something that happened once. One of these teams is right, but we won’t know which one till it happens.
The debate started with a research paper Francis co-authored in 2012. It gets revived whenever an extreme-cold event creates headlines, such as in 2021, when Texas’s energy grid was overwhelmed by a storm that killed 246 people.
Francis’s research hypothesized that Arctic warming was reducing the contrast between polar and tropical temperatures, weakening the jet stream, a band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that helps guide weather patterns. A weaker jet stream would allow weather systems to more easily swing from the Arctic down into mid-latitude regions that typically have temperate climates.
Because the climate is a complex phenomenon, this game can go on forever, there will always be another variable to make up explanations with, or to “discover” corrections in the raw data that make it work — no matter what the weather does.
Modern Science is just a fishing industry for post hoc Public Relations excuses for any policy you want.
It’s going to be minus 5 C (23F) in Tampa, Florida, and a lot colder in Canada. Best wishes to our friends in the Northern Hemisphere.
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