If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?
Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.
Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac
Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.
But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the weather would never get that cold again. Like perhaps they were afraid of endless droughts, more cyclones, and deadly heatwaves, but not Arctic ice storms?
Renewables fans will point to this as mere incompetence. But if the government had built the “fifth largest nation” of windmills with all the cold bells and whistles, it would make them even more unaffordable. Anyone with infinite money can make wind plants more useful in cold weather, but it makes them more expensive all year.
… this is Texas . . . so the need for winterizing assets has always been an afterthought. Other parts of the country that deal with colder temps annually have solutions for a lot of these issues. For example, natural gas power generation can have heat tracers on pipes, valves, and various connections; insulation around key equipment; indoor power generation vs. open to the elements. Insulation would be near impossible to implement in Texas due to the heat, but the other components could be installed as a retrofit or at the time of construction. The only problem is, it costs money. Wind turbines can be outfitted with insulated turbines, oil and fluid heaters, resin covered blades to limit ice buildup, and other high-grade components to protect the asset . . . but again, it costs money. Wind also decreases in the winter months due to the physics of how wind is created, so ERCOT already had a massive range of expected wind output: 12%–43%, and in really bad weather 6%–7%. Many of Texas’s wind turbines (except for those along the coast initially) ended up freezing, limiting total output, while solar panels were covered with snow or ice, limiting capacity. Most of the renewables in the country (especially in Texas) are backed up by short-cycle gas turbines, which are assets that can turn on in 2–3 hours. These assets are called peakers, or peak shaving, and can come online quickly to fill a growing electricity need during peak hours or surging demand, such as heat waves or cold spells. Coal can be used as peak shaving, but there are limitations: it is costly and timely to maintain because it can take 24–48 hours to bring it online, coal piles can freeze together if not rotated, etc. All of these restrictions make natural gas the preferred and cost-effective method.
Texas paid for unreliable energy, not for spare capacity
Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).
ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well.
And Planning Engineer spells out just how this set the grid up for failure:
Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down.
And he asks the key question, and the answer is “renewables”:
Why has Capacity been devalued?
If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources.
So the core values of a strong grid were eaten away in the haste to make the grid “renewable friendly”. Those same artificial forces pushed coal plants below profitability — and now having destabilized the grid, when the trainwreck occurs, the Greenblob wants to blame the failure on fossil fuels.
To paraphase Planning Engineer: — why would anyone build a perfectly good power plant to sit around most of the time doing nothing and just waiting for the wind turbines to fail?
More emergency peaking units [gas plants that can be brought on at a moments notice] would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
On Monday night that is an awfully sharp fall. That was a sharp loss of 10GW in the dead of night. Did all the gas wells freeze at once, or was there some common safety feature of automatic shut downs triggered? (I’ve seen no suggestion that there was, I just wonder). Perhaps it was the middle of the night when lots of people in Texas suddenly put their gas heater on and took the supply from the power stations?
Texas energy generation
These blackouts wouldn’t have happened if Texas hadn’t shut down so much coal power.
The Green blob is trying to tell us that the ghastly blackouts was all the fault of fossil fuels — mainly because gas powered plants went offline. But the truth is that if Texas hasn’t swapped coal plants for wind towers the grid would have been fine. They certainly couldn’t run a 100% wind and solar grid. But we all know they can run just fine on 100% fossil fuels.
Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that’s a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.
“It’s mind-blowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said.
“It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”
Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.
“There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” Pierce said, adding that if the virus pandemic hadn’t affected his work, “we could have taken care of this.”
Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated.
Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months
A few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.
Daylan Cook, 18, said he had built a fire inside a ceramic pot in his apartment living room, aided by hand sanitizer and gasoline. … The local emergency medical services department said it had responded to 63 carbon monoxide exposure calls in 2 1/2 days.
People are being told to boil water on outdoor gas BBQ’s to fill hot water bottles to keep themselves warm, and advised to stay in one small room, and to seal the doors and windows.
Civilization on the edge
The water supply network in Austin was being drained because pipes in houses without electricity had burst, water mains had broken and customers were both storing water and also leaving taps dripping in an effort to stop their own pipes bursting. The demand for water was so great it exceeded supply in some areas by 250%. That meant the water pressure dropped below the minimum needed for sanitation. On Wednesday the City of Austin issued a water-boil notice because Austin’s largest water treatment facility, the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant, lost power. They described it as just precautionary, but it meant that many people without power now had to find a way to sterilize water, and people with power added more of a drain to the system.
St David’s hospital in Houston has no water pressure or heat. They can’t transport patients to other hospitals as the others are facing their own issues.
Meanwhile there were dozens of water main pipes also leaking, but Austin Water couldn’t drive out to fix some breakages because of the ice, and sometimes they didn’t even know where the breaches were, their instrumentation wasn’t working, the data wasn’t coming in, and snow was obscuring everything. There were warnings that some fire hydrants wouldn’t be working due to the lack of water pressure.
And so the chaos spread.
How would Texas have fared if they were 100% renewable?
About an hour ago ERCOT said that most power was “able” to be supplied
The grid is now up to 58 GW of capacity. Wind power is now back to 6,800 MW (some more turbines have thawed out).
In the latest update ERCOT says that a “Majority of customers are able to be restored.” Apparently, it’s a theoretical restoration. It’s now up to electrical retailers to connect the dots. There is no longer any forced load shedding although they also say 40GW of generation is still not operational. How does that work? Rolling blackouts are expected to continue and people are being warned not to turn everything back on.
At the peak demand on Sunday in Texas the people were using 70 Gigawatts of electricity — an all time record. Then both wind and gas generators failed. Currently the ERCOT Grid is using about 42GW of electricity and ERCOT reports of up to 46 GW of generators being out of action. Total wind output is still under 3GW out of 30GW* of wind capacity.
The gas was the back up to the Wind, but Wind power can’t be a back up to the gas (or anything else).
“As of 9 a.m., approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.”
It’s not clear to me how they arrive at only 18,000 MW missing of wind and solar. Perhaps they are only counting the 6 or so GW they expected to be able to use of windpower?
There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t even rotate the blackouts between suburbs without dropping out critical infrastructure. Apparently the wind has stopped and the wellheads are frozen over. The amount of coal power in Texas has halved in the last decade, while the amount of wind power has tripled.
I expect right now ERCOT might be happy to hear any proposal to Build A Gas Line from, say, Canada.
Two days without electricity or water in sub-zero temperatures is not just a blackout
With 20 dead already, there must be more to come. Life in Woke World 2021. Tragic in so many ways:
Here’s an idea: bring gas to Texas. Call it Keystone…
Robert Lewis, 40, a cook and retired Marine, said he and the friend he was staying with had been without heat or water for more than 48 hours. They had had little to drink. His cellphone died, so he had no way to call for help.
“All we could do was grab every blanket, every jacket that we could, and huddle up,” he said.
He had heard people tell of a lone 7-Eleven that was open, so he walked there, only to find a line around the block to get in and the shelves cleared of food, he said. He added that he got the last cup of coffee for sale. He was evaluating his next move, saying he would keep looking for supplies.
Wind production isn’t the only problem Texas faces but that 30GW of infrastructure isn’t there when Texans need it. What kind of infrastructure operates at only 3% of capacity randomly?
Wind power output in Texas.
Some people are getting the extended not-so-rolling form of blackout. They are the ones who live in places without hospitals, fire stations, and other important infrastucture. There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t rotate the blackouts without dropping out critical infrastructure.
If a new drug reduced deaths by 10% it would almost get a Nobel Prize — that is, as long as it made someone rich.
A free antiviral shining down on you?
At the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona 930 people who turned up with Covid were randomly asked to take a vitamin D3 (calcifediol) treatment or a placebo. Of them, 551 were given four doses of Vitamin D3 over the next four weeks. The other 379 luckless people got the chance to be randomized controls..
The lucky ones got 20,000IU (or 20 normal vitamin D3 tablets) on day one, then 10,000 IU (ten normal tablets) on four other days in the next month. (Technically, the big dose was given was given on day one followed up with half doses on day 3, 7, 15, and 30.)
In the hapless control group as many as 80 people (21%) would go on to need Intensive Care (ICU). And 57 people of the original 379 would end up dying, or about 15%.
Of the 551 people given five dollars worth* of Vitamin D (that’s the cost online) only 30 (5%) would go on to need the ICU, and all up 36 people died (6.5%).
So, proportionately, more than twice as many people died in the group that missed out on Vitamin D3. Which loosely suggests that of the 57 deaths in the placebo group, possibly 34 of them could have been saved by a cheap vitamin available at chemists around the corner from their home. People can get D3 from the sun too, though not so much in northern Europe in winter.
If you are a normal sane person, this could make you very angry. Lives could have been saved and many hospital beds emptied at almost no cost. Even before Covid arrived – we already knew a lot about Vitamin D3 .. As I said in April, deficiency in D3 is a pandemic we need to solve.
D3 is used to activate or influence about 200 different genes,Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma,heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities.
And here’s another kicker — this study was done way back in March April and May last year. It’s a Spanish study and it’s only just been published. And the thing that will make you grind your teeth was that nearly a year after this started there are still no good big studies. It’s almost like this one slipped under the radar in the early days and forever after, despite the billions in costs and the millions of patients, no one wants to do a larger follow up? This was an idea so obvious it was organised within weeks of the outbreak, yet one year later, … crickets?
There are caveats
In most studies the people that benefit the most are the ones who are deficient. This study didn’t even measure those levels. CORRECTED: (Sorry, this study did measure D levels at the start, and found the most deficient people were the most likely to get a bad outcome.)
All the patients in both groups were also given HCQ and AZ. Perhaps this improved all the outcomes? On the other hand, doctors didn’t know a lot about Covid back then, and that undoubtedly meant higher death rates.
The standard treatment for everyone at the time:
All hospitalized patients received the same standard therapy, consisting in hydroxychloroquine 400 mg/24h
first day and 200 mg/24h 4 days with azithromycin 500 mg/24h 3 days, plus ceftriaxone 1 or 2 g/24h 7
days when there was bacterial superinfection. Patients with severe or critical conditions of pulmonary
inflammation or clinical suspicion of cytokine storm were additionally treated with dexamethasone bolus
(20 mg/day x 4 days) according to hospital guidelines.
What we desperately need are bigger better studies, though who would want to be in the placebo group?
The billion dollar question is why they haven’t been done.
…
There are plenty of reasons for human incompetence, but there are serious financial incentives that needs to be addressed. There are huge profits in finding new drugs and almost none in solving the problem with known cheap and unpatentable molecules.
Follow the money. This is exactly the kind of research that our government funded universities and hospitals ought be doing. Yet where are they? Trapped in some public-private agreement? Worried that if they speak up they might be cancelled? Think of Craig Kelly MP — he’s under attack for talking about Ivermectin.
The Covid pandemic is a virological bomb, but a lot of the damage is due to a pandemic of corruption and government incompetence.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to start protesting for real government funded research on vitamins and antivirals. Raise awareness that people need to check their Vitamin D levels, and we need to make sure those with darker skin know about their higher risk for being deficient.
Do Black Lives really Matter? Does your Health Minister even care less? Just ask…
*That’s the USD price of 60 tablets of 1,000 IU — enough to treat one person. People taking Vitamin D would be wise to also look up Vitamin K levels.
REFERENCE
Nogués, Xavier and Ovejero, Diana and Quesada-Gomez, J. M. and Bouillon, Roger and Arenas, Dolores and Pascual, Julio and Villar-Garcia, Judith and Rial, Abora and Gimenez-Argente, Carme and Cos, ML. and Rodriguez-Morera, Jaime and Campodarve, Isabel and Guerri-Fernandez, Robert and Pineda-Moncusí, Marta and García-Giralt, Natalia, Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes. SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3771318 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3771318
While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.
Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without electricity for hours had no certainty about when the lights and heat would come back on, as the state’s overwhelmed power grid began imposing blackouts that are typically only seen in 100-degree Fahrenheit
‘We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,’ said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.
Poweroutage.us reports on blackouts across the US. Texas has its own grid called ERCOT.
Texas more than four million people are still without power.
Reuters: Real-time wholesale market prices on the power grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were more than $9,000 per megawatt hour late Monday morning, compared with pre-storm prices of less than $50 per megawatt hour, according to ERCOT data.
If there’s one thing you would think Texas would be able to do, it’s keep the lights on. Most electricity comes from natural gas and Texas produces more of that than any place on the continent. There are huge natural gas deposits all over the state. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.
Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state’s vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy.
So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas — it’s a great state, actually — but to give you some sense of what’s about to happen to you.
There are already claims that it’s not the lack of Wind power that matters, and that gas plants and others have failed due to a lack of “winterization”.
While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, wind only comprises 25% of the state’s energy mix this time of year. The majority of outages overnight were plants fueled by natural gas, coal and nuclear, which together make up more than two-thirds of power generation during winter.
“The wind is not solely to blame,” said Wade Schauer, research director of Americas power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie. He estimates that about 27 gigawatts of coal, nuclear and gas capacity is unavailable, in part because the cold has driven up demand for natural gas for heating. “That’s the bigger problem.”
UPDATE: Trying to figure out how many MW of Wind versus Gas/Coal/Nuclear went down
ERCOT is at EEA 3 Emergency Warning currently with reserves of less than 1,000 MW.
ERCOT announced Sunday night that it had set a winter record for power demand, reaching 69,150 megawatts between 6 and 7 p.m. ERCOT said Monday morning that 30,000 megawatts of power generation had been forced off the system.
The ERCOT Real time demand at this point: 46GW. Wind is 4GW now. But Proletariat Chris reported Texas wind power was just 900MW out of 31,000MW as of about 6 hours ago. Ryan Maue reports that there was almost no wind in Texas today.
Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not only is López Obrador is betting big on fossil fuels, he is also curtailing clean energy.
The CFE’s current investment plan forgoes clean energy projects entirely. And a bill for overhauling the electricity industry that was recently sent to Congress would force the CFE to purchase power from its own facilities, including coal plants, before renewables.
Renewables were blamed for a blackout in December that hit 10 million people
Pemex Mexico
The shift back to coal appears to have been accelerated by a mass blackout in December which left 10 million in the dark for a couple of hours. The electricity commission blames an excess of renewable energy.
“In addition, the CFE noted that at that time there was a historical maximum of integration of renewable energy into the national system, of 28.13 percent of the total national energy, which affected the support of the system.
In a virtual press conference, Mario Morales Vielmas, CFE’s general director of Legacy Contract Intermediation, indicated that if renewable energies had not contributed so significantly to the system, the failure would have been isolated and dealt with in a different way.
Straight after that the hashtag #Venezuela started to trend — in reference to the infamous Venezuelan electricity grid. The Panam Post called it a “Massive Blackout” and warned that the Chavista Ghost Scared Mexicans.
A lot of this is about money and power. Mexico is the sixth-largest oil producer in the world.
But it shows yet another country that isn’t buying the fake forced energy transition and will be increasing emissions, while the last few patsy nations on Earth try to reduce theirs. If renewables were so cheap and wonderful why is Mexico going back to coal?
Is there a better badge to show the intellectual collapse of The West than the idea, from a NATO chief, that we should put solar panels on battlefield tanks? One hundred years from now, there will be a stage in the collapse of civilization called the “Solar powered battle tank” phase. An idea so radioactively stupid that any science writer’s first question is “is this satire?”
Apart from the whole power to weight ratio non-starter, there is the problem of night time and rainy-day warfare, camoflaging a shiny surface, and the general vulnerability of glass and electronics in a situation known to “have bullets”.
Oh the dilemma: how to camouflage solar panels and also collect sunlight?
Not only are these Solar Powered Tanks at risk of being immobilized by a stray shot, they could be struck down with a paint bomb.
The Nato chief [Jens Stoltenberg] suggested that militaries should advance research into low-emitting vehicles because of the advantages they bring, at an online seminar titled New Ideas for Nato 2030.
“Nato should do its part to look into how we can reduce emissions from military operations,” he told the Chatham House event. “We know that heavy battle tanks or fighter jets and naval ships consume a lot of fossil fuel and emit greenhouse gases and therefore we have to look into how we can reduce those emissions by alternative fuels, solar panels or other ways of running our missions.”
The carbon emissions from a 60-tonne US Abrams main battle tank are calculated to be the equivalent of 10 Mercedes-Benz cars.
Jaime Carrasco: The Russians and Chinese would love that.
Nick DuCate: How woke do you need to be to suggest “zero-emissions warfare”?
Payal Hindu says “What next … “biodegradable nuclear weapons ?”
Jon Salero: The worlds first sail-powered aircraft carrier coming right up…
EEF [describes Jens Stoltenberg as] “A Labour Party Norwegian who lives in a country with no sunshine 1/3 of the year, geographically some of the most inimical to tank warfare and possesses some of the greatest oil reserves on earth.” [Shows video of Putin dissolving into laughter].
Antonio Panardi:In a battle between my daughter’s kindergarten class and 2030 NATO forces, I’d probably put my money on the kindergarten.
To solve supply line issues, surely the answer is — find more fossil fuels on your own land.
If the aim is a greener military, the answer is — a/ go nuclear (where possible), and b/ get a new commander in chief.
In Stoltenberg’s defense, (if that’s not abusing the word defense any more than he already has) he’s probably not talking about pure solar powered tanks but a kind of Hybrid Tank and while his aim is unmistakably “climate warfare” (how evil are those Mercedes Benz?), he argues that it would also reduce the need and risk of supply lines. Given that tank MPG is about half a mile per gallon on a country road, the sheer wattage required to move a 60 ton object makes the “savings” in the order of 0.2% of total requirements or so. It’s not clear the benefits are even measurable on the same scale as the costs of complexity, components, and failure rates.
Willis Eschenbach calculates: 1 gal. diesel = ~ 40 kWh. Solar panel, ~ 1 kWh per day. Solar panel ~ 17 sq. ft. You MIGHT fit four on an M1 tank. Plus 4 Tesla Powerwall batteries, 1/2 a ton. Every 10 days you could move your tank 0.6 miles … in summer.
The U.S. military is the largest institutional consumer of fuel in the world, accounting for 2% of our nation’s petroleum use and 93% of the U.S. government’s energy use. For every $10 rise in the price of oil, the Department of Defense must come up with an extra $1.3 billion annually, which must be diverted from training, maintenance, and other mission-essential items in the DoD budget. That means our reliance on oil directly threatens the readiness of our troops.
Best way to reduce emissions in the military is to have such a big military in such a powerful economy that you never have to fight a war. Burn those fossil fuels!
According to a Rasmussen survey the people who say they will watch the whole impeachment proceedings are much more likely to be Biden voters.
Rasmussen: Among voters who strongly approve of Biden’s job performance, 55% say they’ll watch either all or most of Trump’s Senate trial on TV. Only 22% of those who strongly disapprove of Biden’s performance as president expect to watch either all or most of Trump’s trial.
Which is probably a good thing as some of this will be new to them.
Democrats created false representations ot tweets:
Democrats inciting violence:
Democrats objecting to the 2016 election:
The Very Fine People Hoax at Clarlottesville:
..
Phillip Kline
@PhillDKline
Raskim & leftist logic: but for Trump there’d be no violence, but for an election there’d be no protests, but for the Constitution there’d be no election, but for those dangerous founders there’d be no republic. Such dangerous & shallow logic, perhaps revealing the aim of some.
It seems a major reason for impeaching Donald Trump “no matter what” is to make sure that even if the majority of American voters wanted to get him back in office, they will not get that choice. After all, if Trump incited a violent coup against a legitimately elected government, and it was broadcast every night on prime time sympathetic news for the next four years, how could he ever win again? What population would be insane enough to vote for that?
Hypothetically, though, imagine a government was elected through late night vote dumps, fake ballots, dead votes and electronic flipping? That same government would surely be vulnerable and possibly afraid that if word were to spread, protests would mount and State legislatures might be forced to fix the gaping holes in the system – at least in some states. All of which might give the cheated leader a chance to be re-elected.
I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected. If we don’t impeach him, he will say he’s been vindicated. He will say the Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the House and they didn’t take up impeachment. He will say that we had a constitutional duty to do it if it was there, and we didn’t. He will say he’s been vindicated … Here’s what I say, we’re confronting a constitutional crisis as I speak to you…. We must impeach him.
No hiding that there then.
Though there are other advantages. The Democrats can pretend there is a reason, sort of, for keeping tens of thousands of the National Guard on site in Washington long after the inauguration riots that never happened. A deployment that has cost more than $500 million. Was the real reason the National Guard was there to deter any protests at the 40 Executive Orders signed in sweeping reforms, or the purge of the military to remove wrongthink?
Don’t let the stupid voters hear dangerous points of view either
Ouch: Tucker Carlson on the personality type that wins power and gets more violent.
But it’s not censorship, “it’s harm reduction”.
“When they come for you they will talk like social workers”
Apparently the last thing Democrats want is to give the voters democracy.
Watch this space. The Western Australian election is four weeks off and the new young Liberal (“Conservative”) opposition leader has just made this a “climate change” election and launched himself to the left of the Labor Party by suggesting the state can close all government run coal plants by 2025.
Epic loss coming. The opposition leader may even lose his own seat (Dawesville, in Mandurah, held by only 0.8%). The National Party and minor conservative parties could do well from the aftermath.
Aiming for political correctness in a politically incorrect state?
[ABC News] One major party is making the case that renewables are the way of the future, the other is warning they will cripple jobs and send power prices skyrocketing. …it is politics as usual in Australia for the past decade. Except in this case, it is the WA Liberal Party calling for coal to be tossed aside and wind and solar to take its place, with Labor blasting the idea as “reckless”.
The Liberal Party were on a hiding to nothing before this announcement. The local Labor Premier hit 90% approval at times in 2020 with his policy of closing borders, keeping out the virus, thus letting West Australians live like Covid doesn’t exist for most of the last year. The economy is booming.
Public polling has been next to non-existent, but at least one private poll has put Labor’s two-party preferred lead at 61 per cent to 39 per cent.
The new Opposition leader, Zac Kirkup, 33, has decided to burn off his base, just in case there were still supporters who might have handed out how to vote cards on election day. He is apparently trying to win over Green voters who may give him a token thumbs up but never vote Liberal, no matter what he says, because its against their religion.
The best outcome conservatives or skeptics can hope for is that the Liberals lose so badly they drop the young green Kirkup leader the day after the election (assuming he doesn’t un-elect himself first).
Former federal Liberal MP Dennis Jensen knows how to vote:
This is the reasoning — it’s the past, the future, a rainbow colored vision! It’s not how you run an electricity grid:
“This is exactly in the vision of Sir Charles Court and Sir David Brand — it’s in the Liberal Party DNA to make sure we position WA for the future,” he said. “It is ambitious, but it is obviously something we need to do or we will be left behind.”
Left behind in what? A race to peak lefty fashions?
Apparently big subsidies for uncompetitive industries are now a part of the Liberal Party DNA too?
Mr Kirkup promised $400m of direct investment by a Liberal government into what he said would be the largest renewable energy project in Australia’s history.
Zak Kirkup has managed to make the Labor Party speak the same lines climate skeptics do:
The Labor leader sounds like Craig Kelly!
The plans were slammed by WA Premier Mark McGowan, who said they would be disastrous for the state. “All it would mean is many, many billions of extra debt, a huge increase in family power bills, rolling blackouts across the state and huge job losses,” he said.
“The time frame they’ve put on their policy is totally unachievable and everyone should be very fearful about what they’ve just put forward.”
The WA Greens said the Liberals couldn’t be trusted on the environment.
The New Energy Jobs Killing Plan: Note the detail — the Liberal plan only involves government emissions, not private generators.
Build a 1500 MW solar and wind energy project in the Mid West to power Perth, the South West, Wheatbelt and Kalgoorlie.
In conjunction with the private sector, construct a further 4500MW of wind and solar energy by 2030 to convert water into over 250,000 tonnes of clean, green and safe hydrogen for export per year and to power a new green steel industry.
Underpin our goal of 200,000 new jobs over the next five years and generate the next 50 years of jobs and prosperity.
Cut power bills for households and businesses by partnering with industry to build the Mid-West Energy Hub, which will deliver cheaper, cleaner energy for WA.
As well as this, there are millions of dollars raining for “investments” in retraining coal workers ($100m), a zero emissions Taskforce ($50m) an International Market Diversification Fund ($100m) and an Industry Attraction Fund ($100 to get businesses to go to Collie, the town where the coal power is based). Plus $50m for the Critical and Strategic Manufacturing Fund (which means PPE and “fuel security” or something like that).
I reckon this was all Morrison’s idea: Scomo to Kirkup: “Hey Zac, you take this radical climate change plan to the WA election – billion dollar renewable projects, dead coal industry, zero emissions targets, the full monte. You get smashed at the polls. Six months later I call a federal election and say: West Australians have categorically rejected radical climate action – so it won’t happen!”
But it might be a stupid plan by the Gas and Oil industry.
Watch Western Australia: It’s a small islanded grid with no interconnectors to rescue it
As well as being a showcase for how to destroy a conservative party, WA is headed to be a Renewable Energy debacle too. Current coal generation is about 30%. Four years to go!
The South West Grid serves about 2 million people, has about 6 GW of total generation and generates about 18TWh per annum. It is permanently “islanded” by ocean and deserts, and there are no interconnectors across Australia.
In the past, this has saved the WA grid from stupid experiments because it was too small to mess with. However the grand solar power experiment has run away with itself and about one in three homes have solar panels. As subsidized green power policies pushed up electricity prices, West Australians, predictably, had little choice but to add solar power as the only legal way to keep costs down. Solar PV spread across roofs everywhere is within ten years will be the largest single generator on the grid. Too bad when those cloud banks roll in…
The Duck Curve (below) continues to grow a fat belly and a wildly big dinnertime tail. The lunchtime demand has fallen to record lows averaging about 1.5GW. But the dinner time peak is still 2.5GW. Meaning a whole coal plant or many gas turbines are required to sit around unprofitably all day so they can be ready to rescue the grid every night as the sun goes down on all the solar rooftop panels.
The WA Duck Curve as solar PV eats away at lunch time demand but causes wilder ramp up demand for dinner as it shuts down.
The Muja Coal plant in WA is state government run and currently producing 850MW with units C and D. But units C are already planned to close by 2025. The D units are two 227 MW turbines, which were (or are) expected to run for decades.
There is a privately owned coal plant in WA called Blue Waters which was built in 2009. It has two 208MW turbines. The owners have written off the value of the asset to $0 from $1.2b because of the rapid forced rise of intermittent renewables which have eaten away the profitability for reliable power.
Unlike many other “renewable stars” the one reliable renewable source — hydro — isn’t coming to rescue the green plans. The last big viable hydro plants in WA closed a billion years ago when the Darling scarp eroded into low hills. There is no hydro industry to speak of, and probably won’t be until the next continental uplift.
The STOIC study gave an asthma drug to Covid patients, but it worked so astonishingly well, they had to stop the trial early, as it was unfair to keep giving the placebo to people who were ending up in hospital ten times as often as people who got Budesonide.
“We were hoping for 50% reduction [in severity]. We got 90%, which … is off the charts”
Though to keep some perspective, out of about 140 people enrolled, 70 got the drug and 70 got the placebo, with 10 of the placebo group going to hospital and only 1 in the Budesonide group.
You’ll be shocked to know that giving the drug early works better than waiting for the virus to replicate wildly. You’ll also be shocked that there were some doctors using this 7 or more months ago, and yet the media didn’t mention it Apart from Newsmax. (Eg See Dr Richard Bartlett talk about this back in July last year, who talks of using a nebulizer, not an inhaler. )
Common asthma drug slashes Covid hospitalisation by 90%, experts say
Vanessa Chambers, The Sun
A COMMON asthma drug slashes the likelihood a
Image: by Felipe Esquivel Reed
Covid patient will need to go to hospitalisation by 90 per cent, experts say. Budesonide, which is sold as Pulmicort, also shortens recovery times from the infection, according to new research. The steroid is typically given to people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is sold under the name Pulmicort.
Essentially, people noticed that asthma and COPD patients were not ending up in hospital in Wuhan as often as we’d expect. This was not like past pandemics — Eg in H1N1 influenza. One of the common things about asthma and COPD is that patients often use some form of oral cortiocosteroid. The big question is why-o-why did it take a whole year to do a small study like this one?
The main manufacturer of Budesonide is AstraZeneca which has also invested millions in making a vaccine. Could that have something to do with it? Notably, the researchers mention how significant this discovery might be for “low and middle income countries”. In wealthy countries it apparently is merely an “adjunct” until “widespread vaccination can be achieved.” Don’t hurt the cash cow, eh?
An asthma drug with 90% efficacy would be as good as best vaccines and may also create immunity to some extent. Though it may not last long. (Neither might the vaccine generated immunity).
The treatment group had slightly less fever and got well slightly faster. Treated people were less likely to still be sick on Day 14 or 28. So this should help reduce long covid too.
Former Professor Peter Ridd was sacked for criticizing his university colleagues at James Cook Uni. He won a $1.2m claim for wrongful dismissal, but JCU appealed, and won the appeal. So Ridd is taking his case to the High Court. Today’s small win merely means they will hear his appeal.
Meanwhile academics all over Australia know that right now, if they spotted fraud, poor reasoning, or incompetence they can’t point that out publicly. Our academic system is corrupt to the very core, seeking not the truth, but just more grants and to act as a machine to elect the kind of governments that will give them more money, easier conditions and suits most of their personal political tastes too. James Cook Uni has wasted a million or two of taxpayers funds seeking to protect the Vice Chancellors ability to sack anyone she damn-well likes for spurious reasons like “not being collegial” or daring to write a sarcastic line in an email. A few months ago, JAmes Cook still hadn’t got far investigating the actual alleged fraud, nor in releasing data about the Great Barrier Reef that they profess to care so much about. What matters to JCU? Not science.
“I think it means that academics are going to be really fearful of saying anything that’s robust on any matter and of course, the left wing and the right wing are now agreeing on this,” he said.
Dr Ridd said that if the universities weren’t for robust debate then “what the hell are they there for.”
“Universities are the only organisations that have the academic freedom … We have it for a very good reason because we want our academics to debate and argue to come up with ideas and some of those will be bad ideas and there’ll be shut down.”
“People have always been upset, people were upset with Martin Luther, people were upset with Martin Luther King and, you know, these robust discussions need to be had.”
Publicity over Peter Ridd’s case meant that the Australian Government has changed the law to make sure that Academic free speech is written into employment contracts (though even that banal necessity took several years to achieve).
Though even if Ridd win’s again, in the end, what academic would want to hope that they too could raise funds to take their case to the High Court. As Mark Steyn says, the Process is the Punishment.
Those responsible at JCU must lose their jobs at the very least.
How many unnecessary deaths does it take til people get angry? Angry that the Chief Medical Officers and Health Ministers didn’t ask for studies to be done. Angry that most academics sat by and said nothing. And angry that the media just parroted the institutions.
One good antiviral changes everything. If the world had a safe cheap drug, we could not only reduce deaths and disability, but also slow the rate of mutation down and probably slow the appearance of new mutations down.
…
The Chamie-Quintero study from Peru shows the West could be only weeks away from reducing the Covid death toll if we used the safe cheap sheep-dip, lice-killing Ivermectin like less wealthy countries do.
A study across the states of Peru found that after Ivermectin was introduced, deaths started to fall about 11 days later, and within a month after that, deaths were down around 75%.
Ivermectin is a drug so useful early researchers got a Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on it. It’s so well known that in the last thirty years more than 3.7 billion doses of Ivermectin have been given out. It’s so safe we can use it on cats and dogs and even toddlers. It’s dirt cheap and its use in Ag-science is measured in tonnes. The cost of Ivermectin is around 15c in the third world, and $50 for one round for a human in New York. (It’s a lot cheaper than a $5000 a day ICU bed.)
Ivermectin first showed promise against Covid in a lab dish back in April. It wasn’t clear if it would work as well in people, but it was so cheap and safe that the rich world …o, pretended it didn’t exist and tested expensive drugs instead. (Big-Pharma don’t make big profits from old cheap drugs that are out of patent.) Meanwhile less wealthy countries were desperate enough to try it en masse. And Ivermectin has had remarkable success.
Something like 3 out of 4 people who were on the road to dying appear to have been saved.
“… excess deaths at +30 days dropped by a population-weighted mean of 74%.
But this is not a neatly controlled experiment. The mortality curves may have declined anyway for other reasons. But then there is this:
…each drop beginning within 11 day after MOT start” (MOT stands for Mega-Operación Tayta.)
Bear in mind that this doesn’t mean Ivermectin will save 74% of people who are already sick. The lags in this study suggest it partly works to limit the spread of the disease. People with less virus, may shed less, die less and not infect so many other people.
It shows what doctors can do: Ivermectin was already nationally approved in Peru by May 8th and it was rolled out across the nation between April to August. As is the way, the last people in Peru to get easy access were the unfortunates in the the Capital city Lima. Things were delayed there by four months by some strange practices like “restrictive measures on IVM distribution, including police raids on pharmacies.” Thank Big Gov.
Such was the severity of the pandemic that in May excess deaths in Peru were running at twice the mortality they ran in January and February (in winter, doh,summer).
Each line below is a state of Peru and they are all lined up at day 0 – which was the peak day of deaths — the day the inexorable rise suddenly ended. The only state without a rapid decline was Lima (red) which didn’t get Ivermectin til four to five months after most other states. By which time people had quite possibly been smuggling Ivermectin into Lima, smoothing the curve out.
B) COVID-19 case fatalities tail off quickly everywhere except Lima (red).
The tell-tale lag pattern
The pattern keeps repeating. Death are rising. Ivermectin starts and within 11 days deaths start to fall.
I. D) Excess deaths for nine states having mass IVM distributions in a short period through national operation “MOT” (see results section for sources). ● MOT start date; ▲peak deaths; ■ day of peak deaths + 30 days. Junin (yellow) distributed IVM to health centers beginning on July 22, 13 days before MOT start. Population-weighted mean deaths for these nine states dropped sharply, -74% at +30 days, beginning (except for Junin) 1 to 11 days after MOT start. All y values are 7-day moving averages, ages ≥ 60.
At a higher dose Ivermectin may be 90% effective:
Doses in Peru were quite low, and Ivermectin may save even more lives at a higher dose.Get a load of these numbers:
In surprising news, KvonComedy hasn’t been banned yet.
Don’t underestimate how useful it is for you to just join in — Subscribe, comment, share, and speak your mind. Support those who are swimming against the tide.
If people can find his program on other forums I’ll add those links. Anything But Google.
Let the bragging begin — Who manipulated the election to “Save Democracy”? A Corporate Cabal!
Now that the Left have the main levers of power, it’s safe for them to come out and tell the world how important they are. Indeed the race to the top of the vanity pile is on. This is not an accidental admission. When the real game is to get to the top of the pecking order, bragging is part of the plan.
The Cabal decided the “proper outcome” of the election.
“Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
Photo by Darren Halstead, Unsplash
Which rather flies in the face of that quaint old idea that the government is meant to be by the people and for the people? If it isn’t self executing, it’s done by outside design. Do we need to say that it’s profoundly un-democratic to pick rulers by secret cabals?
But the participants want this story told, mostly for their own personal aggrandizement. See how important I must be, pulling the levers of power?
That’s why the participants [of the cabal] want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream – a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
It sounds like a paranoid fever dream, because it is one — a cabal of shadowy powerful people are manipulating what people think by “controlling the flow of information”. That’s not what a good work colleague does, it’s what a predatory office narcissist uses as their main tool of oppression. It’s the idea that holding back information is better for the punters.
Who rules you? The person who decides what information you are allowed to hear. The lie-by-omission is still a lie. This is not the whole truth and nothing but — it’s the authoritarian dictocrat who lords themselves over you.
Say this with a straight face:
“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.“
Essentially democracy is fragile because the dumb punters might have voted for someone The CabalTM didn’t want. Fortifying our outcome means stopping them picking theirs. Autocrats with a conscience tell themselves they were fortifying things to make them feel better. Autocrats without a conscience tell it to the world as a public relations message.
Time Magazine admits it was a conspiracy between Big Gov and Corporate Giants to take the election
Remember the days when elections were about persuading the most voters that you had the best policies? Now, it’s about who is in bed with with the biggest Corporations.
Remember the days when elections were about persuading the most voters that you had the best policies? Now, it’s about who is in bed with with the biggest Corporations.
Once upon a time, corporations were evil capitalist bastards, then they started colluding with unions and Greens to wring more power and profit out of the people, and that makes them “good”.
They admit they expected violence after the election (it’s how they themselves react eh?) They admit there is a cabal.
They admit Trump was right about the Big Corporate-Government conspiracy working against him:
Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
When the workers vote to keep out the corporate cabal, that’s an “assault on democracy”.
Isn’t a cabal between Corporates, Unions and one side of politics exactly what “the Media” is meant to expose to scrutiny before the election, not to help “keep it a secret”?
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.
For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
Translated, protecting democracy means getting more money, making laws that suit their cabal, not the voters, and censoring information they didn’t like. At no point does Molly Ball brag about reaching the people with policies that mattered to them, with ideas to lift them from poverty, help them get jobs, stop crime or even do one survey of voters to find out what the people wanted.
The nitty gritty of intense Psy-Ops to “save Democracy”
The hero apparently is a guy called Mike Podhorzer, who worried that Trump might “win by corrupting the voting process”. Somehow the Left always projects onto their opponents exactly what they do themselves.
The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, he wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.”
Podhorzer was head of the AFL-CIO — (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations ). Others approached him to join forces, including a group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. That was probably the Democrats who read the Executive Order 13848 — and knew that if there were foreign interference in the election, Trump could respond. Presumably, that EO would only concern a group who happened to think there might be foreign interference designed to help them win.
So the Democrats gamed out those scenarios, and came up with a plan which amounted to non-stop Psy-ops on a level of detail and a scale never seen. Rather than trying to appeal to millions of voters, the main game was to appeal to the few gatekeepers who might decertify results that looked … dubious.
Election boards were one pressure point; another was GOP-controlled legislatures, who Trump believed could declare the election void and appoint their own electors. And so the President invited the GOP leaders of the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, to Washington on Nov. 20.
It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.
Image by Aaron Cass
They had activists on tap to surround key people at airports at both ends of the flight path. They knew their schedules. They had lawyers ready to frame everything to intimidate the two people who were critical to warn them they would be investigated “for bribery” if they voted Trump’s way. They had media liasons to report and amplify these stories. They even arranged for street artists to project their images onto buildings outside where they were drinking, with the words “The World Is Watching”. When the normally small time boards were meeting Twitter was there with a special hot hashtag to get thousands of onlookers to add to the pressure. They gas-lit everyone constantly, certifying junk results was really “affirming democracy”, “respecting voter wishes”.
The bullies who doxxed people and threatened their children called Trump the bully, over and over, and defenceless normal Americans caved under the weight of relentless pressure. Humans are gregarious, after all, and few are evolved to withstand this kind of group, cultlike attention.
After that, the dominoes fell. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and the rest of the states certified their electors. Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trump’s bullying. And the Electoral College voted on schedule on Dec. 14.
Time Magazine didn’t mention the intimidation done by the Cabal. They didn’t mention that in Michigan two Republican canvassers only certified under duress, and only with the agreement that there would be a full audit of the ballots, which never happened. The Time authors don’t mention the two canvassers decided to rescind their votes and signed affadavits to that effect.
It’s all about controlling your flow of information isn’t it?
Another tight situation was the Capitol Hill vote, and the hero Podhorzer even admits that they strenuously arranged and organised so that there would be no counterdemostrators on the day lest they be blamed for the mayhem. Given that Trumps supporters almost never caused mayhem, nor tore down statues or set fire to Wendy’s — they barely left litter behind, it rather says a lot that the Cabal knew there would be mayhem that day. Molly Ball forgets to tell readers that there were BLM and Antifa guys there but they were disguised as Trump supporters while they broke windows and incited the crowd to “Burn it down”.
Rioters on Congress
If hypothetically, someone had set up a false flag event, they really would be afraid their own mad mob might turn up and steal the show:
HOW CLOSE WE CAME
There was one last milestone on Podhorzer’s mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally.
Much to their surprise, the thousands who answered his call were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators. To preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem, the activist left was “strenuously discouraging counter activity,” Podhorzer texted me the morning of Jan. 6, with a crossed-fingers emoji.
The Time Magazine article is a feature (unwittingly) on how Democracy has been destroyed. Even if we ignore the evidence for corruption, cheating and flipping of votes, the entire article is a back-patting propaganda article demonstrating that winning elections has nothing to do with policy or what the voters want. It’s about manipulation, games, psychological warfare, and deception.
None of this, not a thing, was about respecting the voters wishes.
And while I’m sure some fact-checker will have qualms with me describing what this group did as manipulation, I believe the objective definition of that word more than applies here. When you seek to stop people from having information that could affect their vote, that’s manipulation. When you go and lobby to get certain laws changed specifically to help your side, that’s manipulation. It is what it is.
Meanwhile, Republicans can get in the game or get busy losing again.
h/t to David Maddison, David E, Bill C, others too. Thanks!
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