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FYI for Perth readers: There’s a protest at the WA Parliament on Saturday for those who think Western Australia needs coal power and free choice about medical procedures. Shouldn’t citizens be able to decide what gets injected? 10am – 11:30am, Saturday 6th March, Parliament House Perth, Western Australia. Click for more information. Keep reading → March 4th, 2021 | Tags: Archibald (David), Protests, Western Australia (WA) | Category: Australia, Event, Free Speech, Politics |  Print This Post | | A group of teenagers want to stop the expansion of a coal mine in Australia. They have taken a class action out against the Government because we all know Governments are supposed to manage the weather better. Well you’d be cross too, if you thought careless old folk were going to bring you slightly warmer weather! A duty of care’: Australian teenagers take their climate crisis plea to courtThe Guardian Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun head to an Australian court on Tuesday to launch what they hope will prove to be a landmark case – one that establishes the federal government’s duty of care in protecting future generations from a worsening climate crisis. If successful, the people behind the class action believe it may set a precedent that stops the government approving new fossil fuel projects. Because the last thing you’d want is democratically elected Ministers to chose how we use national resources. As with any novel legal argument, its chances of success are unclear, but the case is not happening in isolation. So it is an ambit claim, backed by someone with money. Who? This could be a form of lawfare, and we all know who the beneficiaries would be if this case “gets lucky”. The case is a response to a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to extend its Vickery coalmine in northern New South Wales. The expansion of the mine could lead to an extra 100m tonnes of CO2 – about 20% of Australia’s annual climate footprint – being released into the atmosphere as the extracted coal is shipped overseas and burned to make steel and generate electricity. “The decisions that they make right now will impact us in the future. We’re the ones who are going to have to live with the decisions, we’re going to have to raise the next generation under those decisions, and we just want a future that is guaranteed to be safe for us,”… So teenagers want a future that is “guaranteed safe”, but think they should be able to make heating and air conditioning unaffordable for senior citizens, right now? There’s another Duty of Care here. The case hinges on the idea that if we stop digging up our coal, other nations will copy us. Otherwise if we keep our coal underground, all we are doing is creating great reasons for other people to dig up their coal and sell it to our customers. One Guardian commenter, Sandra says “ the climate crisis cannot be entrusted to political players. Ideology, vested interests, political donations and fear of losing seats means that the Australian Government is compromised and decisions made are invalid.” Climate must be depoliticised she demands! Too true. But she wants totalitarian rule by PhD: “It [control of the weather] must be given completely over to the climate scientists.” Depoliticize climate science says Jo? Yes please. But who gets to pick the people who call themselves “a climate scientist”? We can’t leave that to Vice Chancellors who will sack any professor that threatens the money flow and sends a satirical email. But hey, these are big decisions with many stakeholders. So let’s ask the voters. They can pick representatives…. we could call that “Parliament”? The Duty of Care Method for ruling a country could get right out of hand. Old folk could sue Governments for risking their health, then young workers could sue the government for destroying their jobs. Croakey — for those who want a little more information on the legal side: Keep reading → … Hmmm. What one thing might unite the polarized sides of the USA? Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck is a former US Marine who has worked in Thailand and Taiwan in academia and military intelligence. He writes that the West thought they defeated communism in 1990. They assumed China would play nice, but they were very wrong. Instead China studied the West and Russia, and is waging a Political War. There is a whole PDF book linked under that book image. Democracies still don’t understand CCP’s political warfare: Kerry GershaneckThe SundayGuardianLive Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck  Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck China is an expansionist, hyper-nationalistic, militarily powerful, brutally repressive, fascist, and totalitarian state. It is essential to understand each word in that indisputable description. The CCP poses an existential threat to the freedom and democracy that India and the US represent. Failure to understand the nature of the CCP regime undermines our countries’ ability to fully understand the danger the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) PW poses and to build our capacity to combat it.
Officials in democracies such as India and the US have been too easily deceived about PRC’s political warfare for several key reasons. When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990, many in our countries naively believed there would be no more expansionist, totalitarian threats. They were wrong, of course. Chinese communists still quietly harboured plans for regional (and ultimately global) hegemony. As PRC rulers proclaimed China’s “peaceful rise”, they built massive economic and military strength and engaged in global political warfare operations to subvert the democracies. All’s fair in love and political warfare:
It’s important to understand that PRC’s PW—this unrestricted warfare—is designed to get others to do what the CCP wants them to do. The PRC says unrestricted warfare means “the battlefield is everywhere” and there are no boundaries between “war and non-war, and between military and non-military affairs”. In essence, the PRC says that everything, legal or illegal, is permissible in order to achieve its ends. Specific examples the PRC gives of how to conduct its unrestricted warfare include biological and chemical warfare and terrorism, means particularly pertinent to note and consider in the Covid-19 era. The list of weapons the PRC employs is long. It includes propaganda, psychological warfare, media warfare, disinformation, corruption, economic and sexual enticement, and coercion. It also includes active measures such as hybrid warfare, proxy armies, assassination, kidnapping, and brutal physical attacks. The PRC’s PW doctrine also includes concepts such as lawfare (using international and national laws, bodies and courts to shape decision making in the CCP’s favour), cyberattacks, terrorism, espionage, bribery, censorship, deception, subversion, blackmail, enforced disappearances (kidnapping, abduction), attacks by criminal gangs, and hybrid warfare. The CCP’s Troll Factory and 300,000 workers:A noteworthy recent addition to this list of PW weapons is social media warfare. The PRC uses social media to amplify its psychological warfare, intimidation, coercion, and propaganda. With social media, the CCP floods societies with propaganda and disinformation to weaken people’s faith in democracy and create political instability. In pursuit of social media dominance, the PRC has established a PLA cyber force of perhaps 300,000 soldiers as well as a netizen “50 Cent Army” of perhaps 2 million individuals who are paid a nominal fee to make comments on social media sites supporting CCP propaganda and coercion. In conjunction with the PLA Strategic Support Force, many of these so-called “netizens” use social media to intimidate and coerce multinational corporations, celebrities, foreign governments and organizations, and critics of PRC genocide and expansionism. This is all part of the CCP’s totalitarian thought control. In general, the PRC’s rulers wage political warfare for three key reasons: (1) to achieve regional and global hegemony; (2) to maintain absolute control over China’s subjects internally; and (3) to co-opt or coerce other nations into becoming vassal or tributary states and to destroy states perceived as adversaries. Download a free copy of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck was a Visiting Scholar (Ta Keep reading → Where did Tuesday go? We’re in a Culture War, and there has been no name to label the group who are driving this war. The old Left-Right canard isn’t working. The DINO-RINO’s are one and same Swamp-creatures. The left-leaning Bernie fans got screwed by the Upper Class as much as the Trump fans did. It’s not about the rich versus the poor either: Donald Trump is a billionaire but he isn’t upper class. Green hippies in XR Superhero-Monk costumes needn’t be wealthy, but they aspire to be in the popular upper class. It’s about status and the pecking order. The same is true of the high school students who lecture grown ups on climate change. They might be poor but they’re aiming to climb class rungs. Words matter. People can unite behind an idea that has no name, but the movement is fragile, prone to fragmenting. But here, in a rather scathing blast from someone who isn’t Republican and doesn’t even like them is a suggestion that’s got a lot going for it. Bring back a new version of the class war, against the Upper Class, and a war on classism. It is something that can unite the Deplorables, the workers, the minorities, and even the Occupy and Bernie Sanders fans. A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word “Class”by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten Dear Republican Party: I hear you’re having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. … You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you’re not sure why, and you don’t know how to build on this success. So here’s my recommendation: use the word “class”. Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism. It’s not about economic class warfare, it’s about cultural class warfare.Trump won by being anti-establishment “but which establishment”? Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won’t even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, “expertise”, mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, “fast food”, SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too. (full disclosure: I fit like 2/3 of these descriptors) Aren’t I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, grad students, and starving artists may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon. Trump attacked the Swamp, and one of his most popular phrases in the 2016 debates was when he responded to the baiting questions by ignoring the bait, and saying “we have too much political correctness”. But “Politically Correct” doesn’t roll off the tongue, nor bring out a historic class war. The coalition of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, concerned citizens are being played and divided by semantic word games. They need to identify the target and unify against it. There is some broad appeal to fighting against the Upper Class: (it’s not exactly a new idea, is it?) It could appeal to poor people who just want to get jobs. Point out how DC Democrats passed a law saying all child care workers must have college degrees, and how this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead. Tell them that this is class warfare, that their side is losing, but that if you are in power they will win. It could appeal to small-government libertarians. Argue that the Democrats and the government are a jobs program for the upper class. All those Institutes For X and Public Service Campaigns For Y, all those regulations that require two hundred lawyers just to move a potted plant, all those laws that mean every company needs fifty compliance offers working full time just in order to not get sued, they’re all a giant jobs program for college-educated people who refuse to work with their hands. Alexander has some great material, though as great as this idea is (the War on College) it needs a lot of fleshing out. Colleges need to be razed and rebuilt, but — again — without a free media, the parasitic grant-getting machines known as “universities” will ultimately always serve their gatekeeping funders — Big Government. We have to change those incentives or the parasitic phoenix will just rise again: 1. War On College: As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can’t be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees’ knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can’t actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination. Likewise, the War on Experts — good idea. He’s hunting for a way to get accountability of Expert Predictions. I’m not sold on this, but it’s a tough task. Should we, could we, sack Professors who can’t out-predict the mass prediction markets? I’d rather pick winner based on public debate. Call it free speech… 2. War On Experts: Argue that you love and support legitimate experts, but that the Democrats have invented and propped up a fake concept of expertise as a way of making sure upper-class people who can game admissions to top colleges control the discourse. Your solution will be prediction markets. Yes, really. Repeal all bans on prediction markets and give tax breaks for participating in them, until they have the same kind of liquidity as the S&P500. You’ll get a decentralized, populist, credentialism-free, market-based alternative to expertise. When the prediction markets outperform 75% of experts, fire them … But once upon a time Experts had a reputation and if they kept getting it wrong, the throngs would laugh at them and their reputation would crumble. Can’t we get back to that? What we really need is free speech and a competitive media. Instead we get Tim Flannery and years after his predictions failed dismally, he’s awarded Australian of the Year. The problem is The Media. The problem is also that the government can create Instant Experts with every new QANGO. Alexander has a plan for The Media too: 3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for “mainstream media”. Being against the “mainstream media” sounds kind of conspiratorial. Instead, you’re against the upper-class media, which gains its status by systematically excluding lower-class voices, and which exists mostly as a tool of the upper classes to mock and humiliate the lower class. You are not against journalism, you’re not against being well-informed, you’re against a system that exists to marginalize people like you. Tell the upper-class media that if they want your respect, they need to stop class discrimination. 67% of US families watch the Super Bowl – what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly – how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately. And the free speech battle: Insist that working-class people have the right to communicate with each other without interference from upper-class gatekeepers. Make sure people know every single fact about @Jack and what a completely ridiculous person he is, and point out that somehow this is the guy who decides what you’re allowed to communicate with your Twitter friends. There’s an emptiness in the quest to get to the top of the pile no matter how many bodies are on the staircase. Some beautiful phrases here: 4. War On Wokeness. …wokeness is a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you. Why are they so sure that “some of my best friends are black” doesn’t make you any less racist? Because the whole point is that the only way not to be racist is to master an inscrutable and constantly-changing collection of fashionable shibboleths and opinions which are secretly class norms. The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying “colored people” is horrendously offensive but saying “people of color” is the only way to dismantle white supremacy. You should make it clear that this is total balderdash, you could not be less interested in it, and you will continue befriending colored people of color regardless. Great finale: There’s a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa. If the theory’s right, we’re in the middle of an equally big switch. Wouldn’t it be great if the Republicans became the racially diverse party of the working class? You can make it happen! Read it all. Be a part of hammering out the solution. We only have a small window to get a new narrative and give it flight… h/t David E March 2nd, 2021 | Tags: Australian Politics, Language, Psychology, US Politics | Category: AGW socio-political, Language, Media-matters, Politics, USA | Print This Post | | Just another anti-viral There was a good but small (tiny) study that came out of Israel three weeks ago about a drug called EXO-CD24. The professor in charge claims to have treated 30 out of 30 people who had moderate to severe cases and had near universal success. All, bar one, were able to leave hospital very quickly. CD24 is normally stuck on the outside of immune system cells. By getting EXO-CD in, apparently they can stop the cytokine storm. Any day now, the mainstream media will let us know. The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24 and according to Professor Nadir Arber, could be scaled up and mass produced within a few months and they could provide enough doses for the World. Has Israel found the cure for Covid? “To date, the preparation has been tried with great success on 30 severe patients, in 29 of whom the medical condition improved within two to three days and most of them were discharged home within three to five days. The 30th patient also recovered but after a longer time,” the hospital reports. “The drug is based on exosomes, [vesicles] that are released from the cell membrane and used for intercellular communication. We enrich the exosomes with 24CD protein. This protein is expressed on the surface of the cell and has a known and important role in regulating the immune system,” explained Dr. Shiran Shapira, director of the laboratory of Prof. Nadir Arber, who has been researching the CD24 protein for over two decades. “The preparation is given by inhalation, once a day, for only a few minutes, for five days,” Shapira said. The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24, can work in hours, not weeks. This is only a phase one trial (just proving it does not hurt the people it is given to). It may not survive Phase II and III. But if it does, will we see prime time daily reports of the latest results. Or how about free advertising to get people to enroll for trials, with breathless excitement when a planeload arrives with another delivery? Or is that just what happens with vaccines? Welcome to the Age of Antivirals. If CD24 isn’t The One, there will be something else. If CD24 doesn’t work against Covid, it may help against many other viruses (or immune disorders). The researchers have a mechanism in mind. So this is not just a random drug from a test tube array, though now is not the time to talk about 95% cure rates. Netanyahu is calling it a miracle drug. Jair Bolsonaro is already seeking emergency use for this. The Greek President is interested. But Big Pharma don’t seem to be. Imagine a cheap reliable treatment was available that helped most people. Getting vaccines might not seem quite so important. If some respectable countries start to achieve something very meaningful on national scales, will that be the day the Western Media and medical swamp have to admit we have all kinds of tools at our disposal. Not just vaccines. h/t Charles.
Hypothetically, if someone were trying to divide a nation this survey is PaydirtIt’s almost like a team is winding up the young and impressionable, stoking their fears. Republican Voters worry about policies, but Democratic voters are just scared of Republicans. h/t David for the “school of fish”. Look at the top four concerns: Matt Margolis, PJ Media According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, Democrat voters are more concerned about “Donald Trump’s supporters” than anything else.  Democrats Democrats are less concerned about policy issues than they are about people with whom they disagree politically. To them, Trump supporters are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, a more pressing issue than gun violence, and even more important than issues that affect their various constituencies, like discrimination against LGBT Americans, sexism, student debt, alleged voter suppression, etc. To these voters, Trump supporters are a bigger issue than all of those and more. Imagine being a store owner minding your own business and thinking that the Democrat voters around you think you are a bigger issue facing this country than anything else, even more than the issues that directly affect their own families. Who runs the national conversation — the media, the tech giants. Who controls the fish? No one and everyone. They are just following the cues fed to them every day on TV and Facebook. Once the ripples of hate start, they are amplified by “Friends.” Meanwhile the GOP worry about foreigners, taxes, and media biasWhat don’t you see on the chart? “Joe Biden’s supporters.” And why not? Because Republican voters clearly care more about real issues. Democrats, on the other hand, are still obsessed with Donald Trump and the people who voted for him. They would rather whine about Trump than actually solve the problems facing this nation. That’s why Democrats went through not one, but two bogus impeachments.  Republican’s greatest concerns. If someone were fomenting fear the last thing they’d want is a healthy national conversation.
February 28th, 2021 | Tags: Psychology, Survey, US Politics | Category: AGW socio-political, Media-matters, Politics, polls, USA | Print This Post | | … Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deathsThe main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS). The Big Black hole in medical research?I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm. The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to the idea that public funded University science could be a foil against profit hungry large corporations? Instead, it’s almost like they’ve jumped into bed with them. It’s not a radical new idea that B6 could reduce lung infections. The mouse study, forgoodnesssake, was done in 1949. Potentially people may have been getting sicker than they needed to be for 70 years. That’s a crime. A B6 tablet costs about 7 cents or practically nothing compared to $3000 a dose Remdesivir. Great comment, Mike Jonas: The western world is being destroyed by a sickness – corruption. The coronavirus is bad, but it pales into insignificance beside corruption. The coronavirus can be combatted with a vaccine or with vitamins or with various cheap drugs (get a Budesonide inhaler prescription now, take as instructed as soon as you get a coronavirus symptom). Corruption can be combatted with a free press or with genuine universities or with integrity in government, or even with open social media. We now have none of those defences. The researchers make the case that a B6 deficiency is also associated with lots of the conditions which predispose people to severe covid-19 Vitamin B6 may help keep COVID-19’s cytokine storms at bayby Chris Melore Along with promoting healthy blood cell creation, study authors say there’s evidence vitamin B6 can also protect the body from chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. Their report finds B6 can suppress inflammation, inflammatory proteins from the immune system, oxidative stress, and carbonyl stress. “Coronaviruses and influenza are among the viruses that can cause lethal lung injuries and death from acute respiratory distress syndrome worldwide. Viral infections evoke a ‘cytokine storm,’ leading to lung capillary endothelial cell inflammation, neutrophil infiltration, and increased oxidative stress,” researchers explain. Kumrungsee adds there are two serious symptoms which can lead to death in COVID-19 patients, thrombosis and the cytokine storm. This storm, or hyper inflammation, takes place when the patient’s own immune system goes into overdrive and attacks healthy cells. Thrombosis, or blood clotting, can block off capillaries and damages organs like the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. Scientists say vitamin B6 is a natural anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting nutrient. Vitamin B6 is involved in around 150 reactions in your body involving energy, fat, sugar, DNA, neurotransmitters — you get the idea. There are six different forms of B6 (things are never that simple in biochemistry). Best to look for the PLP form of B6, not the cheap multivitamin form “Pyridoxine”. B6 may or may not help with Covid, but it’s an experiment worth doing. B6 seems to play a role in protection against diabetes and cancer and heart disease. It helps to regulate homocysteine levels. Even if it doesn’t help against Covid, it seems pretty handy. Don’t remember your dreams? — if you don’t, try B6. Best is to eat more, rather than just pop a pill, but people with gut inflammation, IBS, women on the pill, or long term cortiocosteriods, and alcoholics need more B6 than the other people. The richest foods in Vitamin B6 are Salmon and Tuna, meat, potatoes, spinach and bananas. Keep reading → February 27th, 2021 | Tags: Coronavirus, Vitamins | Category: Diet, Evidence, Health | Print This Post | | Just trying to see if this is useful. h/t Leo And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world. It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not. So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver? Meanwhile last year China built three times more coal power than the rest of the world. The super-factory of the world can’t be too disappointed if the patsy competition vows to try building silicon chips with solar power. US and Australian voters may not want this, but President Xi applauds John Kerry. Who does he work for? US Climate Envoy, John Kerry, calls for a faster exit from coal powerThe Guardian Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, has publicly acknowledged “differences” between the United States and Australia in tackling the climate crisis while calling for a faster exit from coal-fired power. Kerry’s comments highlighted the increased pressure on Australia to commit to do more before this year’s Glasgow climate conference even though the Morrison government maintains it is “playing its part”. Kerry would say he is doing it for “the climate” but we all know, if that were true, he’d be leaning on China instead of helping it to gain more factories. It’s never about the actual emissions. There might be a pattern here: Just days after Joe Biden nominally won* the electoral college, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison had officially given up the battle to use the spare carbon credits that Australia earned long ago. The nation had met and exceeding the Kyoto agreement, but now the extra credits would be tossed away. Australia didn’t need them to reach the target, he said. But we could have used them, and scaled back on the headlong rush. Within two weeks of Joe Biden being inaugurated as President* before any public leverage, the Australian PM Scott Morrison was already talking of his “hope to achieve net zero emissions by 2050”. Sometimes US elections influence Australian policies more than Australian elections do. Meanwhile, in an odd footnote, even as China has spurned Australian coal of late, John Kerry’s home nation was selling 500% more coal to China to fill the trading hole that was left. Though the US was not a big exporter of coal to start with, only sending 200,000 tons each quarter before the rush up to 1,000,000 tons in late 2020. (What is startling is how small the exports are from the US. They ramped up to 1Mt. We export 400MT each year.). In the end, as Eric Worrall says, more coal will be burnt than ever under Joe Biden’s time as President*: John Kerry disappointed Australia wants to keep exporting coal. WUWT Far from cutting coal use, I strongly suspect the Biden administration will preside over the greatest surge in coal demand the world has ever seen. China and Japan, for all their faults, are doing what the West refused to do – building thousands of new coal plants, helping Africa, Asia and South America to rapidly industrialise, helping them to raise their standards of living to Western levels. In a decade, the smoke of Australian, South African and South American coal will rise over new industrial heartlands in what today are some of the poorest places in the world. Elections matter. h/t GWPF
… Tucker: Left’s ‘disinformation’ campaign is destroying AmericaThe world would be a better place if everyone saw segments like this. Not to convert them to a cause, but just to open their eyes to the gaslighting in the media. We’re in an Information War and the first salvo is just to let people know there is a War and their news service is being weaponized against them. Lighting the Rascism Fire helps bury “other stuff” in the smokeHow to stop discussion about corruption at the highest levels — yell “racist” [Zack] Goldberg looked at every time the term “racism” was used in America’s largest newspapers and noticed a trend. There was a noticeable spike just after 2011, which not coincidentally was right around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement. When people are starting to talk about what Wall Street actually does in public, all at once journalists agree that the real problem with America is racism. America is not a place with a screwed-up economic system that rewards a tiny number of emotionally damaged grifters who possess otherwise useless skills applicable only to finance while everyone else gets poorer. That’s not a problem. No, America is instead a place where the rest of us must hate each other at all times because of our skin colors, which, by the way, cannot be changed. That way, once we’re all yelling and aggrieved and angry about irresolvable race questions, once we’ve picked the wound until it won’t stop bleeding, we won’t have the time to ask even the most basic questions about economics — questions like “Why are all these billionaire hedge fund guys paying half the tax rate I am? Who precisely is getting rich from the Federal Reserve? Where’s all that money going?” You don’t see a ton of stories about those questions in The New York Times. They’re too busy talking about race. It’s a pretty sophisticated operation. Vladimir Putin could never pull it off. He’d buy a few dopey ads on Facebook and call it a day. No, it takes a sophisticated operator to take the central problem of American life, the agonizing death of our middle class, and cover it up with a smokescreen of manufactured race hatred. You’d really need to be, as CNN would put it, a “disinformation network” to pull that off. It’s interesting that Carlson is going after the Fed Reserve. The mainstream media almost never does. Fiat currencies and unaccountable central bankers is where the corruption starts and is the river that feeds it. Fake money feeds a fake economy and eventually fake news. As I said a decade ago: The money – you earn it, they print it. Welcome to the world of Corruption. Tucker Carlson calls them on the “diversity” cardTo paraphrase. Tuckers advice to the Woke Professional Class who make diversity a mantra: If you are serious about dismantling systems of power — why not start at the top. At the centres of power? The ideas of this revolution come from colleges. But what hasn’t changed at all are the rich kids that go to Ivy League institutions. The medium family income at Yale is $190,000. So beginning immediately the top 50 colleges in the US should be reserved exclusively for the children of people who never went to college. The whole episode: Watch from 22:20 This revolution is the “Diversity Equity Inclusion” Unlike other revolutions this one is not for the Workers. This is a revolution designed to empower the already powerful.
February 25th, 2021 | Tags: Media bias, USA | Category: FakeNews, Media-matters | Print This Post | | Surprising no one: lumpy expensive electricity does not make for a High Tech Paradise It’s another example of how more green jobs means less real ones. A German High Tech Chip maker driven to Singapore by renewable energy prices  Emden, Germany by Gritte To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally. h/t GWPF
Keep reading → February 24th, 2021 | Tags: Germany, Jobs, Renewable Energy, Unemployment, Wind Power | Category: Cost, Electricity | Print This Post | | Hard to find some good news out there today. But here’s a bit: People are immune to climate hopey gloomResearchers tried to figure out whether to make their climate propaganda more scary or more uplifting but found instead that they might as well show 500 people “the history of smartphones”. (That was the control video). Nothing works anymore. It was a complete wash. No new activists were made. However, despite these emotional responses, neither [doom nor hope] video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated… After watching the online movies, nobody thought climate change was scarier, nobody want to change anything they did, and no one wanted to be climate activist either, unless they were already one to start with. After 30 years of propaganda, people have heard it all. Pounding them them with more isn’t going to work. It didn’t matter which movie they saw.  Neither doom, hope nor placebo did a thing. The multi-billion dollar industry of climate propaganda was hoping to tweak their advertising and find the right point on the Dial of Fear. Instead they showed it’s all a waste of money. Just like research like this. If they had shown something new, like, say, a skeptical video that the audience had never seen, that would have shifted perceptions, risks, and activism. (Remember when a one hour debate with Christopher Monckton shifted fully 9% of the audience?) There’s a lot of upside there to Red-Pill people with a story that many haven’t heard. Which is exactly why climate believers have to turn up the censorship screws. So get out there, share the message. This paper was submitted last April, but not accepted for eight months. It must have been hard to figure out how to spin those dismal results: Keep reading → February 24th, 2021 | Tags: Science Communication | Category: Global Warming, Media-matters, Psychology | Print This Post | | …  Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips Texas toyed with cascading crisesThe Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too. ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart: Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday. — by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds of rebooting to get back in action. (Read all the gory details thanks to Lance at the link). But there was a potential gas powered disaster in the works too. As the cold bites, and everyone with a gas heater switches it on, the flow in pipes ramps up, and pressure falls. If gas powered plants also swing into operation, the gas pressure can fall so low that air can leak in to the pipes. The system has one way valves but at low pressure any faulty valves in the system allow air with oxygen back into the pipes. As Vic Hughes warns “Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.” So when a big freeze arrives, the wellheads may be icing up and reducing supply at the same time as demand is exploding. In New England in 1989, gas supply fell 95%. Hughes reports that the decisions that came next were gambles on major scales. On the one hand, the low pressure might lead to deadly suburban explosions, but cutting the gas to areas might be even worse. When every home in that area then switches on their electric heaters, the grid faces an electricity blackout as well. As blackouts spread, homes switch on their gas heaters, and so it unravels. An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Powerby Vic Hughes, American Thinker To maintain safe gas pressures, the operators wanted to shed load with localized gas shutoffs. Since all non-critical gas loads had already been shutoff, only critical loads were left. This included houses and hospitals. To save the gas grid, the operators had to cutoff gas to a very large number of customers. Whose gas to shut off? After the gas was shut off: The houses without gas would rapidly lose heat and quickly become unlivable. Anyone who had any kind of electric space heater would plug it in. That would blow the electric grid. An electric utility call confirmed a sudden, albeit short-lived, increase in electric load for space heaters would probably blow the already critically strained electric grid. The electric grid in areas well beyond the gas shutoff area probably would be blown also. Widespread blackouts would impact not only shut off gas customers. It would kill the electric blowers in furnaces that could still get gas. How many? No way of knowing. Lots and lots of people are in the cold and in the dark. Many would probably get in their cars for heat and try to drive somewhere, although in reality there is nowhere for that many people to go. All the traffic lights would be out, creating a massive traffic jam, trapping many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands)? Since the blackouts killed the electric gasoline pumps, filling your tank would be impossible. As cars ran out of gas, abandoned cars would block traffic and create massive traffic jams, possibly for days. In the end, it was only luck that the gamble paid off: The decision was made to just let the gas system pressure drop and hope it would stay high enough to get by. If it didn’t, a few blown up neighborhoods would be less damage than a gas shutoff. Luck saved them. An unexpected break in the weather lowering demand, along with some unexpected supplies, saved the city. If you aren’t properly scared, all this relates to the short-term deaths. Longer-term deaths from a gas shutoff were incalculable. Hughes goes on to explain that shutting off the gas en masse can take as long to reboot as a blackstart. Frozen houses get burst pipes, basements flood, things ice over, then every furnace and gas line needs to be individually cleaned and inspected… His last words: Wind power did this to Texas. Be very afraid of the Green New Deal. Read it all at American Thinker. h/t to Bill in AZ. PS: Hanrahan sent in an excellent long comment from an Engineer in Texas. I would like to post that, but am hoping to find out if we can get permission, or if it is published elsewhere. I’m hoping Hanrahan will check his email, or perhaps someone else has seen a forum with perhaps “Goatboy” and these words: “ I’ve been an engineer in the Fossil Power Generation industry for over a decade. I am based in Texas, but have worked at plants around the US and even around the globe. I literally know these plants inside and out. ” He mentions AEP Turk. And AEP Walsh and “Sickening Schadenfreude”. PPS: While the media has roasted Ted Cruz for leaving the state during the crisis, they are praising Joe Biden for not turning up. Andrea Widberg, American Thinker On Sunday, the Washington Post enthusiastically relayed that the White House’s pronouncement that Biden is “eager” to visit Texas and might even go there this week. According to the WaPo, Biden’s hands-off approach is a virtue: Biden is taking a notably low-key approach to the storm relief process. It’s a marked contrast to predecessor Donald Trump’s habit of making himself the often-hostile center of attention during natural disasters. It all makes sense if you understand that the American media are Pravda West – except the media are actually worse than the original Pravda. Soviet “journalists” lied and propagandized because they’d be imprisoned or killed if they didn’t. Our American “journalists” lie and propagandize because they want to. February 22nd, 2021 | Tags: Blackout, Electricity Grids, Texas | Category: Electricity, Energy, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Grids | Print This Post | | Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2. Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame). This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.  The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/ Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew in New Zealand, and people got quite excited to find this log in 2019. They have now published a paper on it. (Yes, we are talking about tree rings from 40,000 years ago, and by teams that don’t want to talk much about cosmic rays in the modern era. ) What’s more exciting than a flipped field? It’s having almost no field at all. As far as the climate goes, if they are correct, this would have been a very tough and wild era. Around 42,000 years ago — in the lead up to the flip, they estimate the magnetic field was so weak it was at barely 0 – 6 % of current strength. Earth’s shield would have been down, gone, and the ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation was flooding in. Presumably, the ozone layer and jet streams, cloud cover, it all changes. This is assuming that the dating is right and the layers mean what they think (and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical). Anthony Watts asked Willie Soon, who is dubious. Cooper et al are talking about modeling some of these aspects (which I am ignoring). Even if their assumptions on the ozone layer are wrong, if the magnetic field dropped, it would be hard to believe that this would not change all kinds of events — like ocean cycles, cloud cover, and the sea surface temperature. The real point of this paper that interests me and should not be lost under the personalities or junk modeling, is the Be10 and C14. Was there a point when Earths Magnetic field fell? If so, when and what flowed from that? Somehow our ancestors survived this. Though the Neanderthals and some other species may not have. Indeed, a magnetic flip or fail, would be a decent candidate for the Neanderthal extinction. It was thought that the last of Neanderthals may have lived until 35,000 or even 28,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, but better data suggests it really did all end “around 40,000” years ago. In which case, the timing coincides with what must have been a dreadful time to live — an ice age, plus magnetic shocks.  Earth’s Magnetic Field during a flip (right). NASA A climate catastropheProf Chris Turney describes a bad era (this is the climate scientist who was once stuck on a cruise-in-thick-Antarctic-ice). [Update: Though let’s not let personalities cloud what we might find in the data.] Ancient relic points to a turning point in Earth’s history 42,000 years ago The temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study co-led by UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum shows. During the magnetic field breakdown, the Sun experienced several ‘Grand Solar Minima’ (GSM), long-term periods of quiet solar activity. Even though a GSM means less activity on the Sun’s surface, the weakening of its magnetic field can mean more space weather – like solar flares and galactic cosmic rays – could head Earth’s way. “Unfiltered radiation from space ripped apart air particles in Earth’s atmosphere, separating electrons and emitting light – a process called ionisation,” says Prof. Turney. “The ionised air ‘fried’ the Ozone layer, triggering a ripple of climate change across the globe.” “End Days”There would have been auroras all over the Earth, and many lightning storms. Dazzling light shows would have been frequent in the sky during the Adams Event. Aurora borealis and aurora australis, also known as the northern and southern lights, are caused by solar winds hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. Usually confined to the polar northern and southern parts of the globe, the colourful sights would have been widespread during the breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field. “Early humans around the world would have seen amazing auroras, shimmering veils and sheets across the sky,” says Prof. Cooper. Ionised air – which is a great conductor for electricity – would have also increased the frequency of electrical storms. “It must have seemed like the end of days,” says Prof. Cooper. It may have caused many extinctions and changes in human behaviour It’s a leap into pure speculation, but hey: The researchers theorise that the dramatic environmental changes may have caused early humans to seek more shelter. This could explain the sudden appearance of cave art around the world roughly 42,000 years ago. “We think that the sharp increases in UV levels, particularly during solar flares, would suddenly make caves very valuable shelters,” says Prof. Cooper. “The common cave art motif of red ochre handprints may signal it was being used as sunscreen, a technique still used today by some groups. “The amazing images created in the caves during this time have been preserved, while other art out in open areas has since eroded, making it appear that art suddenly starts 42,000 years ago.” If human art did leap 42.000 years ago, I think there would have been a bit more to it, than time indoors. If times were so tough, there would also have been a major genetic bottleneck, similar to the one circa 70,000 BC when the volcano Toba exploded and nearly wiped humans off the planet. Earth’s magnetic field is wandering now. Maybe that matters? The Earth’s magnetic field does seem to be wandering around | Courtesy of John Hillhouse, USGS The whole 1.5 degrees of apocalyptic warming won’t seem quite so apocalyptic if Earth’s magnetic field shrinks. We might miss our satellites and electric power grids… An accelerant like no otherWhile the magnetic poles often wander, some scientists are concerned about the current rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere. “This speed – alongside the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field by around nine per cent in the past 170 years – could indicate an upcoming reversal,” says Prof. Cooper. “If a similar event happened today, the consequences would be huge for modern society. Incoming cosmic radiation would destroy our electric power grids and satellite networks.” What does this mean for the current climate scare machine? It means lame excuses. Prof. Turney says the human-induced climate crisis is catastrophic enough without throwing major solar changes or a pole reversal in the mix. “Our atmosphere is already filled with carbon at levels never seen by humanity before,” he says. “A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants. “We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again.” So if Earth’s magnetic shield is about to collapse don’t build underground bunker-cities inside Faraday cages — get cracking installing solar panels as fast as you can. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this paper and the Adams Event in the wash… In the meantime, it’s a spectator sport to watch how the Apocalypse Science absorbs some conflicts of catastrophe. UPDATE: There are criticisms that not all extinctions are occurring at 40K years ago as stated in the paper. This would be the weakest part of the claims of environmental catastrophe. Also: The lead author Alan Cooper got sacked recently for allegations that he bullied staff. He denies it. Skeptics ought be aware but also wary that this necessarily means much in a debate about data and observations. Ad homs are still ad homs. h/t Willie and Eric for further info. REFERENCECooper, A et al (2021) A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago Science. 19 Feb 2021: Vol. 371, Issue 6531, pp. 811-818, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8677 February 22nd, 2021 | Tags: Paleoclimate | Category: Fauna, Geology, Global Warming, Paleolithic | Print This Post | | … |
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