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!
For those without much time, watch (below) from 1 hour 36 mins where Mary Fanning goes through forensic evidence listing logs she claims shows foreign interference. The data offered allegedly shows the timestamp, the IP, the attempts, which county and the ID of the computer they broke into, how many votes were switched, the method used, and whether there was a firewall intrusion. Apparently “there are thousands of pages of documentation like this.” Fully 66% of the attacks or intrusions are apparently coming from China, from Hauwei, Cloud service, Alibaba, China Unicom, U cloud, China mobile T-tong etc.
Youtube and Twitter have deleted Lindell’s video and banned him. Isn’t it better if these claims gets aired and discussed in detail so the voters of the US can feel assured that elections are free and fair, or that if this is real, problems with elections will be resolved.
Details of “vote adjustments” done by foreign IP addresses.
UPDATE: See the note at the base * checking these IP’s.
Unless someone went out there faking up thousands of pages of details, this would be warfare.
_____________
UPDATE: If these logs are faked it presumably would be easy for people with accurate records to point out the errors or misalignments. These are extraordinary claims. Clearly this needs a lot of discussion and corroboration.
The New York Times claims there are three false claims in the documentary. Though most of Kellen Browning and Tiffany Hsu’s points appear to be the same generic assertions that have been made many times in the last month or two. They are not detailed discussions of the evidence. Most of the rebuttals make the claim there is “no evidence” but they don’t acknowledge that proper audits could not be done, the ballots and machines were often not provided, and the recounts usually did not check signatures. It’s like wearing a blindfold and saying “there is nothing to see”. That doesn’t make Lindell’s claims correct either, but leaves us back at the start. Why is any ballot machine or ballot not easily available for examination under public scrutiny with observers from both sides? How is it that the leading democracy in the world has questions like this hanging over the outcome when in large part they could be resolved?
The New York Times
Dominion files were not manipulated. The Times says many of these claims come from Antrim County and that a hand counted audit affirmed the outcome there. (Though in the video, there are many counties involved).
Foreign countries did not interfere with voting machines. The NY Times links to this politifact story It says that there is no credible evidence ” according to federal agencies, state election officials and numerous court decisions. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it was the most secure election in history, but it didn’t explain most of the anomalies. John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence argued there was more Chinese involvement than was written in the Intelligence Report Donald Trump requested. The Ombudsman agreed with Radcliffe that the report appeared politicized. Material was kept out ‘because Trump could have used it to make “misleading” claims.’ As far as the legal decisions go, we know most of those courts didn’t consider any evidence and ruled the cases out on technicalities. It would be more useful if the NY Times investigated the ownership of Dominion and found no basis for the Lindell claims.
Biden votes were not counted multiple times: They are referring specifically to claims by Ms. Carone, “whose testimony was ruled “not credible” by a Michigan judge in November, told Mr. Lindell that when ballots jammed inside the machine, people tabulating the votes were re-scanning dozens of ballots and counting them twice.”
____________
The Mike Lindell Documentary “Absolute Proof”:
The presentation claims the vote totals are subtracted from Donald Trump and if it is correct he really won 80 million votes compared to 68 million for Joe Biden.
Intrusions mostly came from China but also from the middle East, Iran, and Eastern Europe.
There was a lot of foreign “help” for voters in Michigan and Georgia who clearly didn’t know how to vote correctly.
…
UPDATE: One America News showed this documentary with an extensive ninety second disclaimer that said effectively that Mr. Lindell was “solely and exclusively responsible for its content,” and noted that “this program is not the product of OAN’s reporting” and was “presented at this time as opinions only.”
At 16 minutes Phil Waldron claims to have documentation that there is Chinese company ownership of the private equity firm whose board controls Dominion. He claims that a President of a Chinese communist bank is involved, and the only company with code and testing for Dominion is in China and it is CCP controlled.
Dominion and Smartmatic, no doubt, deny that any votes were changed. It is such a shame the winning Democrats did not allow forensic auditing of votes, or machine analysis and duplication of hard drive records to show how false all these claims are and to put everyone’s mind at rest. Dominion (and Smartmatic) must lead the charge to insist that all ballots and machines are immediately made available for a proper check so everyone can see how secure and unhackable these machines are.
UPDATE #2:Checking those IP’s. Perhaps someone who knows more about IPs than me, can tell me if there are good reasons they don’t necessarily all match or whether there is a better IP identifier. Here are the top 6 IPs in the “Target” column of the first image on this page above.
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock founder, billionaire, and man who took on the worst of Wall Street around 2005 (and won) has written up — for history’s sake what he saw during the wild weeks of the Election that just unfolded. Byrne is also an award winning business, investigative journalist, in 2008 Deepcapture.com was voted the best journalism regarding corruption in the US.
History scholars will be reading it for years to come, assuming there still are history scholars.
The Trump war room was not exactly what Byrne expected.
I should explain what I expected to find. I expected to find a command post staffed by lawyers and quants. The quants would be doing the statistical work, driving answers that would feed lawyers being notified of the research into such irregularities as I have walked through previously, and would be availing themselves of whatever remedies the law surely provided. I figured there would be a war-board, with the states in question having boxed out all relevant data, progress, and to-do’s. There would be an information loop, obviously, such that the campaign headquarters in each state would be on a daily conference call to receive updates on progress. Thinking that may be a fair bit for one 76-year-old gentleman to manage, I imagined Rudy might have some strong COO, perhaps a lawyer, or perhaps an executive, who might be keeping assignments on track.
What I found is this:
The place was 20% empty, and another 30% were packing out their desks.
One conference room held a large number of lawyers around a table. At least 3 of them were good. These lawyers were the mules of the operation. They were each assigned one or more states. Yet there were things going on at the state level or below, bubbling up organically, and local lawyers jumping in filing actions. I came to learn that between Rudy’s legal team and the campaign staff there was 0 communication, even though they jointly occupied 2/3 of an office story. And between the campaign staff and the activities of those local groups and their lawyers, there was also 0 communication. I did not know if that was for a legal reason or just the way they operated. In time, I came to realize it was the latter.
Byrne details his interactions with Sidney Powell, and Rudy Guiliani and another person he refers to as “the Mediocrity”. In the wash Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell come off as sharp and productive, but sadly — not so Guiliani. Byrne had his own team crunching numbers, statistics and drilling through data. But he was unable to convey the import or significance of that to Guiliani no matter how hard he tried. The descriptions of him fighting the last war, and with several scotches too many, are hard to read. It would have been a pressure cooker atmosphere. And if Guiliani, or Trump himself, had had the right powerhouse deputy, perhaps the good plan might have rolled. Instead the clock ran out, the plan was unplayed. It may just be that the priority list was stacked badly, the cards were played in the wrong order, and the best and biggest play was missed while people waited for the Intelligence Report that didn’t quite come, or the resolution of any case, or the almost-maybe-nearly best option of the State Legislatures overturning their own certifications — and we know those state legislatures were calling for sessions at the last minute to reconsider as the Capital Hill vote unfolded on January 6. Too little too late, though Mike Pence could have given that a chance.
Byrne’s thoughts on Rudy Guiliani:
I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. As I spoke he occasionally grunted stoically, and it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. After about 10 minutes Rudy started checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat together. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention…
Giuliani was still fighting the last war…
There was chaos in the office as well, a S***-show as Byrne describes it. But one telling paragraph suggests that Bryne found out later, that before he even arrived, Guiliani had already decided that they wouldn’t be trying election fraud in any of their cases:
Rudy had declared, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had insisted that it was not going to be part of their legal strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14 Amendment.”
And probably, in past elections where games with electronic machine had not played a large role, there may not have been grounds to win a case in the past. But this time might have been different.
That Friday afternoon, November 6, the first time I arrived there just days after the election, I had, in fact, stumbled in on Sidney just as she was recovering from that exchange. And Sidney had sent me to talk to Rudy because she needed someone else to explain what she was herself just realizing: a new form of election fraud had emerged that was not about hundreds of dead people voting in some city but was about the possibility of severalhundreds of thousands of votes being injected into each of several certain locations. Rudy had just not been processing any of it from her, and probably did no better from me, and that was why he kept trying to talk with me about how Joe Frazier (1944- 2011) was still voting in Philadelphia.
Though, it has to be said that the US judicial system might not have dealt well with that kind of case anyhow.
Sidney Powell understood:
I found Sidney was well-informed, open-minded, and it became clear she was on top of things. In short, she was an equal with whom I could have an intelligent conversation. … she understood what we were saying, and we quickly tied things into what she already knew. It was a highly-productive first conversation, and she ended it by telling me that I needed to go to the other side of the office, find Rudy Giuliani, and immediately tell him everything I had just shared with her.
Byrne has a team of cyber-heads who “enjoy geeking-out to each other in technical acronyms”. He calls them dolphin speakers. He also came across one member of the team who was so counter-productive, Byrne refers to him only as The Medocrity. To get an idea of how dysfunctional things were at times, there’s the story of the one-page explanation. After trying to convey his team’s math and stat analysis the junior staffers in Rudy’s office insisted he provide a one page explanation. “With bullet-points”, “and graphs and data”, but “no more than one page!”
Byrne spent hours distilling the dolphin-speak of the quants to produce a one-pager to try to get through to Guiliani. But when it came time to deliver it, it was 11pm at night, Guiliani was on the third scotch, the the Mediocrity was at the table (but Byrne was not allowed to be). The Mediocrity joked about the one-pager: “can you believe … this is all he wrote”. That was the night before one of the Big Press Events — the one which became the running hair-dye day in the news. Guiliani talked at length about all the usual well known forms of fraud, but Sidney Powell was meant to discuss the new epidemic of electronic and systematic problems.
As Byrne says of Guiliani, “Nine hours earlier, he had had nine shots of whiskey in under 90 minutes.”
US Congress: Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash
Chaos and obstacles from within and without
Byrne writes of chaos where opposing lawyers intimidated Trumps legal team, and Trumps lawyers pulled out. Their behaviour was so unprofessional, the opposing lawyer pulled out too. At the last minute the Trump team found a stand-in lawyer, and cases were filed, but they didn’t mention election fraud.
Rudy’s team sent an emergency request for Byrne to fly his cyber guys to Georgia so they could analyze some machines. Apparently all the legal details, the locations was all sorted. But when Byrne sent his team who were given the run around, driven from place to place, never quite getting the right machines, the right paperwork, or to see the right people. No doubt the deep state was being as unhelpful as possible. Rudy’s team perhaps would have to have had superhuman organisation.
As Byrnes team were driven away they saw 17 police cars drive past to enter the building they had just left. Seventeen.
But witnesses, volunteers and help was flooding in
In the weeks after the election Patrick Byrne was deluged with offers of help and information. Somehow people gathered in to clusters and groups and found a way to reach him from across the country. These were the whistleblowers and witnesses. None wanted to be paid. Byrne covered expenses and flew many across the nation. He was fashioning what he expected to find in Rudy’s office. There were so many they set up operations in hotels scattered across Washington. People with a military background created a system to gather stories and summaries which were fed up a chain of analysts.
On Michael Flynn and spies:
Conversing with Mike was like meeting and speaking with another entrepreneur: we finished each other’s sentences and saw what needed to be done almost without conversing.
Michael Flynn was head of the intelligence agencies in the US. He immediately ordered the whole team out of Washington DC and into the countryside. Though Byrne found a a variety of odd people with no discernible role, who “gave him the creeps”. One man promised to pass on three messages for Byrne, but could remember none of them 2 seconds after declaring he “got em all”. Another women made up excuses for hanging around, got caught, and eventually admitted she was working for someone else. After they left a wired device was found in one of the key room.
The Mediocrity
The Mediocrity had evolved into our point of contact with Rudy’s team, and nothing seemed to flow well. On November 26, Thanksgiving Day, we were all sitting together in a restaurant in DC, and discussing their problems. Sitting there eating our turkey dinner, they gave me quite an earful. How the Mediocrity was super-controlling about information, plans, access. How the Mediocrity seemed to think they were peons, were telling them, “Go here, go there,” with no explanatory information, no sense of “Hey teammates, this is what is going on, and we are going to work on it together!”
The Mediocrity had told them all to go to Antrim County in Michigan in two days. Patrick had many questions about the why’s and wherefores, but the Mediocrity turned up and stood over them at late Thanksgiving Dinner and replied abstrusely:
“First, what is your corporate structure?”
We all looked at each other, male and female, 75, Weaponized Autism and others, not previously having given the matter much thought. We were just a bunch of people who had found each other and were trying to expose what looked like a world-historic election fraud together. Finally I said, “Our corporate structure is that we’re the Bad News Bears. I’m team coach.”
“Ok Patrick,” Mediocrity continued. “Here’s what’s going on. I’ve told you where you need to be in Michigan on Saturday. Be there. Or tell us you cannot, and we’ll find someone who can.”
Whereupon there was some determined talking over the top of each other til the Mediocrity blinked, and Byrne hit back:
I politely said, “Where in the f— do you get off? We don’t work for you. We are volunteers here offering to help you do things you have no clue how to do. Go find someone else anytime you want. The way you people work in this city is astonishing. If you ever try to work at a modern company like Google, or Facebook, your ass will be fired in a New York minute. You suck.”
I saw Mediocrity was crestfallen, and realizing I had overdone it, I gently escorted Mediocrity away from the table. I tried to soothe things over a bit, and put a nice façade on things, and not leave Mediocrity embarrassed. As we parted, Mediocrity turned to me and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be with the President. I’ll make sure you get full credit for all of this.”
Exasperated, I returned to my seat and friends.
It will turn out the The Mediocrity and Rudy Guiliani were key gatekeepers controlling the information flow to the White House. Byrne got Guiliani’s number that night (Thanksgiving), but though he called, he never got through. So the future of the West was at a critical juncture and it hung heavily on three people in their mid seventies. Ultimately the boss chooses the staff. Trump’s greatest flaw might be his loyalty. No doubt Guiliani would have his own version of events, and always came across as a knowledgeable wise man in his videos. It could be argued that if Pence had not folded on Jan 6, and one state decertified their Democrat electors, that others may have flipped like dominoes. On January 5th both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were asking for time to hold another vote. 88 legislators from 5 states were asking for a delay. But it was all so late, so last minute. This was a new war, a different battle, with spies, threats, strong personalities, extreme stakes and above all — with deadlines approaching at mach speed. And all the while the Deep Swamp was working to make nothing easy for the Trump team. It would bring out the worst of many people.
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