Nigel Farage: Many people were skeptical about the concept of a “Deep State” — they’re not any more.
” The World Is ‘Bewildered’ By The ‘Politicization Of America’s Justice System'” says Farage, and “It’s a war to save Western Civilization”, but despite that, Farage is cautiously upbeat.
I do think… the Democrats have completely overstepped the mark. … and whilst it’s a very bad thing that’s happened, I think this will play very very well for Donald Trump.
It’s a shocking day but it may well prove for all of us on the nationalist, populist cause, to be a good day.
Trumps populist message could be more potent now than it was in 2016. (Not half!)
All fingers are pointing at the FBI now
There was no FBI before 1908. But once it started, it was inevitable that the FBI was going to serve the government that feeds it. And since Big-government pays better than small government, it was also inevitable that the FBI would become a tool of Bigger-Government. Following the same trajectory, it’s just a matter of time before the FBI becomes One with Big Government and then we get Tyrannical-Government.
Monday’s raid on Mar-A-Lago is not the first time in this nation’s history that the FBI has been involved in using its law enforcement authority to benefit the political party in power. For 48 years, J. Edgar Hoover used the offices of the FBI to create political intelligence reports that were given to the president. It did not matter if you were a Republican or a Democrat; Hoover misused his power to benefit the president so that the president would ensure that the FBI expanded its scope, budget, and authority.
Congress created the FBI, and Congress has the full authority to reorganize, modify, or disband the organization. Nothing in the United States Constitution requires this nation to have an FBI. In fact, the argument could be made that the Constitution does not permit an FBI since the Tenth Amendment reserved the power to enforce the health, safety, and general welfare of the people to the states (police powers).
The Big Question is of course, can the US vote it’s way out of this and disband the FBI before the FBI becomes the fully fledged Stasi?
“We’re a Collapsing Empire”
Worth watching — Mark Dice who points out that Ron Paul said way back in 1988: It almost looks like the FBI was designed to spy on Americans who might be disagreeing with policy…”
The most dangerous power of prosecutors — is the selective choice of who to investigate.
The first major issue of prosecutorial discretion is the decision to investigate. Justice Robert Jackson (former Attorney General of the United States) called that “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor, because it enables the prosecutor to “pick people he thinks he should get rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
Irving Younger observed,” …that a prosecutors power to damage or destroy anyone he chooses to indict is virtually limitless.”
When a prosecutor focuses on a person, Jackson said, it is “not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him“. At that point, law enforcement “becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group…”
A few perspectives on the FBI Raid of Mar-a-Lago that we didn’t hear on the ABC news tonight.
The word of the day is “Banana Republic”
There are two legal systems in the US now. If you’re on the same team as the Regime, the FBI will happily go slow on your laptop investigation, even if it implicates past Vice Presidents, and potential Presidential candidates and in an election year and on matters of national security. Likewise, using private servers while being Secretary of State and getting a subpoena and bleaching 33,000 emails. That’s OK too.
It’s my view that after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I’m being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in jail. So, when he launches the ‘Trump News Network’, it’s gonna need to be based out of Costa Rica or the Turks and Caicos or somewhere.
…it’s not enough for him not to be president, they don’t want him to be a former president either. They don’t want the Grover Cleveland scenario, where he comes back in four years. So it’s important to them, as I said this morning, that he be the most ex ex-president ever, more ex- than Nixon. Nixon they still invited when they had these photo ops in the Oval Office, where all the presidents get together and stand around the desk with the incumbent. They’re not gonna be inviting Trump to that. They want Trump to be an ex-president, they want to put him in jail…
This may backfire badly if it galvanizes Americans against corruption and injustice:
“If they raided his home just to find classified documents he took from The White House,” one legal expert noted, “he will be re-elected president in 2024, hands down. It will prove to be the greatest law enforcement mistake in history.”
Assuming that voting still matters, and Trump and his supporters are not in jail, this will turn Trump into an icon.
But was this more about provoking Trump supporters rather than just erasing Trump? If Trump supporters “take the bait” and do five percent of what the George Floyd fans did, that will be a handy excuse for the FBI to hike up the “War on Domestic Terrorism”. Beware, the brazen injustice of it may be the point.
Never in the entire history of the United States has a former president been indicted for any criminal conduct. This has not been because there was never such an incident. Most importantly, the historic precedent is that post-term indictment is NOT legally allowed.
Up until now, both political parties, as well as the public, see the prospect of post-term immunity as a guarantee that the country’s politics will remain civil and that power will transition peacefully from one party to the other. All of that is now crumbling before our eyes. That very percedent is what drove President Gerald Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. It was also the reason why the Office of the Independent Counsel decided not to indict former President Bill Clinton for perjury.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. … Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. — read it all
The FBI and DOJ are already known political players:
It’s also a provocation to get Trump to declare his candidacy for President before the midterms. Democrats would love to turn 2022 into a referendum on Trump rather than the deliberate destruction of the national borders and inflation.
Would the FBI and DOJ do such a thing? Aren’t they “above” politics? The then FBI Director James Comey admitted to trying to set up the new President Trump by alerting him to the Steele Dossier, and then leaked the story of the briefing to CNN, which gave license to report on the false allegations in the dossier. So yes, the FBI and DOJ would do such a thing, and have done such a thing to Trump.
It appears to be out of all proportions: Is this really just about “archive material”?
Reports are suggesting that this raid may be in relation to classified documents that they think should be with the National Archives. But if that’s the case, it’s an insane overreaction rather than just pursuing the documents in a normal manner. The family said they had been cooperating in reviewing documents that the National Archives might want. But to send in agents and just grab documents right and left, even breaking into the safe in the home is just wild and it sounds like a fishing expedition. Is it to try to find other things, with that as an excuse?
Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz is calling it “misconduct.” According to him, in an appearance on Newsmax, such a raid should be the method of last resort, unless they can’t get the documents through subpoenas or any other lawful methods.
Can Trump be ruled out of running for President in 2024?
There was a burst of excitement on Democratic legal Twitter after MARC ELIAS pointed out that one of the penalties for violating the statute on improper handling of government records is being “disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
But as NYT’s Charlie Savage expertly explains, that issue was well-ventilated back when conservatives wanted to throw HILLARY CLINTON in jail for allegedly violating the same law, and many scholars concluded that, as applied to a presidential candidate, it’s unconstitutional because the Constitution alone sets the eligibility criteria for the presidency. (Former A.G. MICHAEL MUKASEY was a fan of this theory, but Savage notes that he later recanted.)
There is nothing the Biden administration and the left at large want more than another January 6th moment before the mid-terms. They long for it, and they are willing to do anything to try to manipulate a reaction out of the right to feed into their narrative. Why? Because they believe it can save them from certain destruction in November.
Further, the FBI specifically wants justification to fight its war on “domestic terrorism.”
To add another new flavour of potential corruption to this cake: Apparently the Judge that signed the warrant is likely to be Judge Bruce Reinhart, who was also a donor to Barack Obama, once worked at the US Attorneys Office and left to become an attorney who represented employees of Jeffrey Epstein. By apparently flipping sides in the Epstein legal battle he was then accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein.”
It’s like a movie script.
h/t Mike of NQ, Johnny Rotten, Scott of the Pacific, Old Ozzie, Fuel Filter, and Bill who moved from AZ.
How many people have died of a vitamin D3 deficiency in the last 20 years?
If you are deficient in Vitamin D3, you may reduce chronic inflammation just by taking this five cent supplement and getting a bit of sun. A new study finds evidence that low levels of Vitamin D are not just linked, but cause the dreaded chronic inflammation which is so tied to aging that researchers talk about inflammaging in medical papers. The term captures the diabolic systemic effects of inflammation that accelerate aging, dementia and heart disease and a whole alphabet of other conditions. But don’t wait for your CDC, NHS, or AHPRA-approved-doctor to tell you. The global anti-inflammatory drugs market was worth USD 94 billion a few years ago. Imagine what it would do to that market if everyone sorted out their vitamin D levels?
Since Covid exacerbates inflammation, and people who are obese find it very hard to get their vitamin D blood levels up, it fits that aging, inflammation, obesity and low vitamin D3 make for a bad combination with SARS-2. And if inflammation causes some cases of Long Covid, then it seems to me that vitamin D3 may help with that too.
Combine it with Vitamin K2 as well to make sure the calcium ends up in your bones, not your arteries. (Though, people on blood thinners like warfarin need to get medical advice).
The study examined the genetic data of 294 ,970 participants in the UK Biobank, using Mendelian randomization to show the association between vitamin D and C-reactive protein levels, an indicator of inflammation.
“This study examined vitamin D and C-reactive proteins and found a one-way relationship between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of C-reactive protein, expressed as inflammation.
“Boosting vitamin D in people with deficiencies may reduce chronic inflammation, helping them avoid a number of related diseases.”
Supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and published in the International Journal of Epidemiology the study also raises the possibility that having adequate vitamin D concentrations may mitigate complications arising from obesity and reduce the risk or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component, such as CVDs, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.
From the study itself (below) we get some idea of just how intricately tied D3 levels are to our immune system and all those inflammatory cytokines. To make life difficult, medical papers are always acronym-hell, and blood levels of vitamin D3 are referred to as “serum 25(OH)D”. And interleukins, which are the master messengers of the immune system are listed as IL-x. These molecules rapidly spread out and activate different white blood cells. There are 15 different interleukins in the human body, and at least 5 are affected by vitamin D.
Having sufficient Vitamin D might even neutralize some of the downsides of obesity or reduce the damage caused by CVD (cardiovascular disease), diabetes, allergies, etc. There’s no end to the sunshine good news, except that there is an obvious way to benefit millions of people, but our governments won’t do it.
Vitamin D is a pro-hormone. Its anti-inflammatory property captured by our analysis could be mediated through its hormonal effect on vitamin D receptor-expressing immune cells, such as monocytes, B cells, T cells and antigen-presenting cells.4 Indeed, cell experiments have shown that active vitamin D can inhibit the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8 and IL-12, and promote the production of IL-10, an anti-inflammatory cytokine.4,5 Further, the anti-inflammatory effect also raises the possibility that having adequate vitamin D concentrations may mitigate complications arising from obesity and reduce the risk or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component, such as CVDs, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative conditions, among others.1 If the related effects are indeed true, given the high prevalence of serum 25(OH)D levels of <50 nmol/L across the world (≤40% in some European countries),36,39–42 population-wide correction of low vitamin D status (e.g. by food fortification) could potentially be a cost-effective measure to reduce the burden of chronic disease. In fact, in linear MR analyses higher 25(OH)D concentrations have been associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes43 and multiple sclerosis (a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system),44 with recent non-linear MR analyses providing evidence that correction of vitamin D deficiency can decrease the risk for CVDs15 and all-cause mortality.16
A recent study came out suggesting Vitamin D wasn’t any use to prevent broken bones, (see also Stop taking Vitamin D already!) but if researchers combine participants with high and low serum levels into one group, the results will be blurred to nothing — because people who are not deficient won’t benefit. I note neither story includes any mention of Vitamin K either (it almost looks designed to fail?).
In this experiment done at the University of SA, people were separated into high low and medium groups and the effect was clearly seen in the lowest group of <25nmol/L (which is a very low 10ng/ml level). [Convert your level here].
Having a severely low Vitamin D level sends the CRP levels through the roof
CRP or C-Reactive Protein is the standard marker of levels of inflammation. (Ask your doc, it’s a common blood test).
Click to enlarge. The biggest changes in CRP (a marker of inflammation) were found in the people with the lowest Vitamin D3. Grey bars are the 95% confidence interval.
A massive fire broke out in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar electric vehicle parking station. A total of seven fire tenders reached the spot to douse the raging fire.
The authorities are yet to conclude the reason for the fire. However, it could have happened because of a short circuit. As per reports, nearly 100 vehicles parked caught fire in the accident. But no one got injured.
As many as 30 new e-rickshaws, 50 old e-rickshaws, 10 private cars, 2 scooters and a motorcycle were gutted due to the fire spreading through the parking lot. The Delhi Fire Department received the call at 5 AM.
This is not an electric vehicle-related fire. … There are several hazards in the fuel pumps as well. We have seen several gruesome accidents in the fuel pumps and it is over the years that regulations have made them safer.
Apparently they don’t know what caused the fire, but they *know* it wasn’t the EV’s.
Naturally this was not reported in the western media. It was just a bunch of e-Rickshaws and a short circuit. It bears no relevance to national policies banning ownership of vehicles that don’t spontaneously combust. Gasoline burns too. There is no reason we should talk about charging stations, or parking lots filled with explosive lithium batteries or the particulate aerosols you may or may not think you see in this unverified photo.
What will electricity companies do if a million UK customers say they won’t pay their bill? We might find out in six weeks or so.
A group called Don’t Pay UK are gathering pledges from fed-up UK consumers, and so far 75,000 Brits have signed up. The Twitter account @dontpayuk started in June, and already has 91,000 followers. The group draws inspiration from the Poll Tax protests thirty years ago which likely ended Margaret Thatchers reign as PM.
With 12 million people in the UK facing energy poverty, there may be plenty of takers in the civil disobedience movement. The nation is only 6km away from 1,000 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. OK, so it’s 6 kilometers of solid rock, but if it were war-time, how long would that take? (Especially when the hole is already drilled. The hardest rock apparently is the paperwork just to stop it being concreted back in.)
It’s simple: we are demanding a reduction of energy bills to an affordable level. Our leverage is that we will gather a million people to pledge not to pay if the government goes ahead with another massive hike on October 1st.
Mass non-payment is not a new idea, it happened in the UK in the late 80s and 90s, when more than 17 million people refused to pay the Poll Tax – helping bring down the government and reversing its harshest measures.
The group DontPayUK, looks pretty polished. They are organizing mass leaflet drops, signing up local volunteers, and promise that they will only do this if a million people sign up and agree to cancel their direct debit payment if the price hikes keep coming.
Ofgem begs customers not to boycott paying their gas bills
While all the rats are jumping off the Unreliable Wreck, Australia is leaping onto it. Every country that uses electrical-generators for magical Global Climate Control has expensive electricity. They’ve lost industries, jobs and sovereign power as well as hot showers.
Our energy prices are already a train-wreck, but Super-Albo is here to take that failure and double it. While Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, Poland,China, India, Hungary, Greece and the United Kingdom are all ramping up their coal, we’re going to use less to fend off the floods and hold back the tide. It’s pretty much just down to us and our friends, those crazy Canuks and the cockoo-Kiwi’s to save the world. All doing the climate voo-doo.
Magical pagan symbols and messages
The term “action” doesn’t mean any actual activity — apart from lots of paperwork:
Albanese told parliament: “Passing this legislation sends a great message to the people of Australia that we are taking real action on climate change.”
Instead of a message, Australians were hoping to get a $275-a-year cut in their electricity bills.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is sending a message to Australia — and they are saying: We Want Your Fossil Fuels.
That’s a loud signal there in the price of coal and gas:
How exactly is Australia going to cut emissions even further? It’s through a hidden bomb called the “SafeGuard Mechanism” which a secret Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) designed to punish the biggest corporate emitters — which of course means they’ll pass on those costs to the sucker consumers. It was legislated in secret on the last night before Christmas in 2015. Thank Malcolm Turnbull for that gift buried in the fine print that apparently almost no one in Parliament even knew about.
Remember in July 2014, when Al Gore flew out to cuddle up to coal miner Clive Palmer, who held the last vote Prime Minister, Tony Abbott was waiting for so he could Axe That Carbon Tax? Palmer had forced him to add in a proviso for a review of an emissions trading scheme that would only happen if and when all the major players signed up. The Australian ETS came into force the day before the 2016 election, yet almost no voter knew. The dollar values were small and symbolic — but the legislation was locked and loaded just waiting for the Labor Government to win. And now all they have to do is turn the knobs up — adjust the targets, and the money will start to flow as a subsidy feeding unreliable energy in Australia. But its also possible that money will head offshore and subsidize jobs and unreliable projects overseas.
It was a brilliant piece of political maneuvering. Having brought in the hated ETS through the “conservative” Coalition, the conservatives could hardly campaign against “an ETS” they themselves had legislated, and presumably, neither could Clive. It thus neutralized and prevented a rerun of the landslide 90 seat victory Tony Abbott scored in 2013. It’s not clear how critical the Clive Palmer condition had been — perhaps it just meant Turnbull could say “it was part of the Abbott legislation” and Turnbull would have got it through anyway, but it might have stopped Abbott and other Liberals rebelling against it or even looking closely at it?
So now we have a 43% carbon reduction target, but no one really knows the details:
Yet, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen had to concede there will be changes to the mechanism, which will be subject of a discussion paper “later in August” and which provides an opportunity for the Greens to meddle.
“We’ll be releasing a discussion paper on the detailed design mechanism on the safeguard mechanism in August, probably. That will be up for consultation. The Greens have indicated they will probably have feedback on that,” Bowen said.
It is the treatment of this mechanism, not nearly as clear as Albanese makes out, that is creating deep concern within the resources sector and the 215 industries and entities subject to the rules.
The threat of technicalities about various types and classes of emissions ruling out new gas and coal projects or even nullifying existing projects is real and yet to be addressed as the government revels in its climate change success.
The cheapest way to generate carbon credits in Australia was the bargain auction system Tony Abbott organised. But those tons of “carbon” avoided were a mere $14 a ton, nothing like the cost of wind and solar projects. Presumably the Labor Government will have to curb that, or their co-dependent friends in the Renewables Industry and foreign banker traders won’t have much fun in the market. We can’t have farmers earning too many carbon credits can we?
Meanwhile the new “target” and labyrinthine carbon laws make bureaucrats absolute kingmakers. Should your coal mine go ahead? (Don’t run an election campaign against the ruling party.) Clive Palmer’s mine got axed today, (the irony) because even though the Great Barrier Reef is healthier than AIMS has ever measured, his coal mine (and not all the ones in China) threatens the reef. Perhaps if the Labor Party had needed the one Senator Clive has, it’d be different…
The mine would have seen the annual production of up to 10 million tonnes of thermal and coking coal for a quarter of century, creating up to $8.2bn in export revenues and employ as many as 500 people. The project is 130km northwest of Rockhampton – and just 10km from the Reef World Heritage area.
The new AIMS annual survey is in with the shocking result that not only was last year a record, but this year is even better. There is more coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef than ever recorded. We’ve had four bleaching events in the last seven years, and record hottest ever heat, the highest CO2 levels recorded since we invented ways to record CO2, and yet, despite all that, the reef is thriving.
The Great Barrier Reef has set a new record for hard coral cover over two-thirds of its 2300km length, results of the Australian Institute of Marine Science official long-term monitoring program show.
AIMS program leader Mike Emslie said the results were “good news” and showed that the Reef had “dodged a bullet” in bleaching this year.
“But the fact we have had four bleaching events in seven years is a major concern and highlights the impact of climate change here and now,” he said. “We are in uncharted territory and still trying to understand what this means.”
Or rather it highlights how irrelevant climate change is. If it had been a lowest ever year, they would have blamed climate change, yet when it’s a highest ever year, we still blame climate change as if great coral cover is a … bad thing?
Peter Ridd, of course, fearlessly speaks the truth and says the bleeding obvious — that we should have “a national celebration”:
“This brilliant result is proof that many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the Reef,” he said.
Bleaching happened in 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022. The World Heritage Committee is still deciding if it should be listed as officially endangered. Possibly we should worry that rampant coral growth might deprive us of bare ocean spaces in between.
Peter Ridd congratulates AIMS on its data collection, and they really do look like they are doing a good job. They monitor 87 reefs, do 3,888 mantra ray tows (as the technique is called) which covers 881 kilometers of reef. (See this video). They tow people along behind a boat over the same reefs each year and record the amount of hard coral cover. As long as the technique appears so comprehensive and honest, it appears to be public money well spent.
The worst recent bleaching was in the northern Great Barrier Reef, yet this section has the most spectacular recovery.
…
Yet defying all the odds, the Northern Reef has recovered so well.
…
And which marine biologists predicted this kind of recovery? How well do we understand coral growth if we cannot explain why these natural cycles appear to dominate and describe which factors are driving it?
I’m rating this a full instant BINGO on the climate change propaganda card.
Climate change just isn’t scary enough. The Merchants of Panic want to find the climate change equivalent of the Nuclear winter Bomb Scare “to compel” people:
Catastrophic climate change outcomes, including human extinction, are not being taken seriously enough by scientists, a new study says.
We know if they set up a committee to find “human extinction events” they will find them. We get what we pay for:
The authors say that the consequences of more extreme warming – still on the cards if no action is taken – are “dangerously underexplored”. They argue that the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of what they term the “climate endgame”.
We need these doomer studies apparently — because people have written pop science books predicting doom:
According to this new analysis, the closest attempts to directly understand or address how climate change could lead to global catastrophe have come from popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth and not from mainstream science research.
Essentially they are telling us we need to panic because there are no scientific papers telling us to panic
See how this works? Peer reviewed science is the only thing that counts except when it isn’t. They’ve done a peer reviewed study on the lack of peer reviewed studies. Whatever you do, worry a lot, call it science, and send us your money.
Feeling cheeky, I could point out here that people have also written pop science books about how climate models are skillless monstrosities — and maybe we should study that first? You know “More studies needed on how climate models threaten Western Civilization, helps totalitarians, wastes billions and contribute to wars?”
But that would defeat the purpose, which is to help some bureaucrats get more funding. Wait for the call:
To properly assess all these risks, the authors are calling on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to carry out a special report on catastrophic climate change.
The threat may or may not exist, that’s irrelevant. It’s all a public relations quest:
Focussing on the worst-case scenarios could also help inform the public – and might actually make the outcomes less likely. “Understanding these plausible but grim scenarios is something that could galvanise both political and civil opinion,” said Dr Kemp. “We saw this when it came to the identification of the idea of a nuclear winter that helped compel a lot of the public efforts as well as the disarmament movement throughout the 1970s and ’80s.”
This is a case of wild headlines seeking to scare money up, to fund wild studies that will “find” more wild headlines.
The Australian capital city Canberra in midwinter is often minus 1 to 5 degrees C in the morning. Australian homes can get very cold and with heating bills rocketing, things are defacto becoming like life in Berlin, which is in a pre-War energy crisis. No one labeled Canberra public halls as “warm spaces” and they definitely aren’t open at night (it’s the public service!), but crowds are arriving at libraries just to escape the cold.
The ACT Government are a Labor-Green alliance, and are proudly, exuberantly “100% Renewable”, but won’t dare cut the cord to the coal plants that keep the lights on, making the claims of being 100% renewable a form of 100% false advertising. Even the ABC admits that the ACT itself only generates 5% of its own power, and 80% of the energy coming to the ACT through the wires is from fossil fuels. They pay off some distant wind farms to balance the theoretical gigawatt-hour tallies, and sponge off the states around for cheaper backup and stability that the coal plants provide.
Public libraries in the National Capital are now considered, by staff and patrons alike, to be ‘community centres’ where people come to read, use the computers, charge their phones, and use the toilets. It’s where clients of the NDIS, escorted by carers, are brought and propped up in their wheelchairs in front of computers or seated in deep armchairs by the magazine stands. Some, abandoned by their carers, shout incoherently for attention. Newly arrived migrants – Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians – jostle for attention of the library staff, asking for translation assistance with various forms and declarations.
Our libraries, warm and welcoming, have a crowd at their doors before the 10 am opening.
Groups of women discuss where they go to get warm:
One [woman] who recently ‘VR-ed’ (Voluntary Retired) still goes back to her old workplace, usually late morning, when the security guard who remembers her gives a nod and a smile as she settles into one of the comfortable settees in the reception area.
How sad is that — going back to her old workplace foyer just to stay warm?
A recent report showed woodfire heater smoke is the largest source of winter air pollution in Canberra. Currently, around 14 per cent of people in the ACT use a woodfire heater as their main source of heating.
So everyone “believes in climate change”, but they apparently don’t want to buy the fake-meat that is going to save us from storms, floods and droughts. It’s another mystery of post-modern life that’s solved by assuming that people say “Yes” to meaningless poll questions but “No thanks” to propaganda.
No one really believes their burger will stop cyclones in ninety years time.
McDonald’s announced that it has concluded the U.S. trial of its McPlant burger, which is made with the plant-based protein manufactured by Beyond Meat (BYND).
In November 2021, McDonald’s began testing the meat-free burger in eight restaurants across America. In February this year, the company introduced the McPlant burger at around 600 locations. According to third-party reports, the experiment ended as a failure. In a recent note, according to CNBC, JP Morgan analyst Ken Goldman cited employees from McDonald’s revealing that the burger did not sell well enough.
This is a complicated way of saying “nobody wants to buy our product”:
During the first-quarter earnings call in May, Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown explained that the company is finding it difficult to pass on rising costs to customers. “You see all these new entrants coming in, and many of them are using price as a way to try to capture early market share,” Brown said, according to the earnings call transcript published at The Motley Fool.
“And so while the animal protein industry has been able to substantially increase pricing to essentially offset significant reductions in volume, in our sector, we have not had the opportunity to do that.”
Meat costs were rising too, but customers were willing to pay.
I have nothing against fake meat (apart from shortages in iron, zinc and B12), but it’s become a culture war thing. The same people who want to profit from forcing it on us are often the ones telling us to panic about climate change, or selling us carbon credits, or coercing governments to restrict fertilizer. It’s the conflict of interest that stinks.
Bill Gates invested in Beyond Meat. Other investors include the usual suspects: Blackrock, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs etc. It’s bad news for them, the share price has fallen from $125 to $34 in the last twelve months. Ominously (for BYND shareholders) fully 34% of the shares are currently held by short sellers. So one third of the shares in existence are on loan to people who think the price will fall further, and who will sell them with glee if it does.
What were the marketing gurus thinking? The vegans who want to save the planet are not shopping at MacDonalds. The health zealots that want to avoid meat for health reasons won’t want to eat the bun, the mayo or the spray-on-margarine. For them it needs to be a McBurger-free-burger. Nothing about this makes sense.
Presumably the McBug Burger is coming soon. Cricket-burgers cool the climate?
For 2022 as a whole, we expect global coal demand to increase by 0.7% from 2021 to about 8 billion tonnes. This would match its all-time peak reached in 2013…
Worldwide coal consumption in 2021 rebounded by 5.8% to 7 947 million tonnes (Mt), according to our data, as the global economy recovered from the initial shock of the Covid pandemic and higher natural gas prices drove a shift towards coal-fired power generation.
Current coal price tonight: $407.90. Also almost a record. So we have highest volume at the highest price, and people want you to believe that no one wants coal.
China burns 53% of the world’s coal:
Coal demand in China, the world’s largest consumer by far, increased by 4.6%, or 185 Mt, in 2021, reaching an all-time high of 4 230 Mt.
India becomes the second country in the world to join the billion-ton-coal-club:
India consumed 1 053 Mt of coal in 2021, a new all-time high and the largest amount consumed in a single year by any country other than China.
One country in particular, isn’t trying to reduce coal by 2030:
So how high was that 2013 peak record? Strangely, the IEA doesn’t tell us, perhaps because it was just 8,002 Mt — which they thought then was a “historic high”. They even said that “global coal consumption will not return to its 2018 levels”.
In Hanover and Munich people won’t get hot water in museums, swimming pools, sports halls, and other public buildings. But hey, hospitals and schools will still have hot water. In Berlin, the lights around public buildings and monuments and the fountains will also be switched off. Germany is in a world of trouble, and the cut-backs are just starting, mid-summer, to avert the tragedy that will be winter, if Russia blocks all gas. Germans have cut gas by 5-6% in summer, but in a normal year they get between 30% and50% of their gas from Russia. All the talk of a 15% cut across the EU disguises that many of the other nations don’t want to do it, and Germany faces an extra difficult situation if they can’t get alternative gas supplies.
Cities in Germany are switching off spotlights on public monuments, turning off fountains, and imposing cold showers on municipal swimming pools and sports halls, as the country races to reduce its energy consumption in the face of a looming Russian gas crisis.
Hanover in north-west Germany on Wednesday became the first large city to announce energy-saving measures, including turning off hot water in the showers and bathrooms of city-run buildings and leisure centres.
GERMAN breweries have been told to stop the production of beer amid fears Oktoberfest will be cancelled after Russia cut off gas supplies. … It was axed in 2020 and 2021 for the pandemic.
Rosi Steinberger, a member of Bavaria’s regional parliament told the New York Times that the country’s Christmas markets could also be pulled.
And non-essential industries – including Bavaria’s breweries – could be forced to shut down in a bid to conserve energy amid rocketing gas prices.
Other European states are not happy about cutting gas to save Germany from its own energy mistakes, especially after the lectures during the financial crisis:
Habeck, of the [German] Green party, pointedly criticised the “strategic mistakes” of previous German governments and suggested his country could achieve “16 or 20%” of savings, depending on the severity of the coming winter.
The turning of tables in the bloc of European states has not gone unnoticed in German media. “Some states suffered heavily during the financial crisis and had to bear the lectures of the Germans,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “And now they are meant to massively save gas to bail out those same Germans, who have brought this situation on themselves with a misguided energy policy.”
Germany does not only need gas from Russia. BAFA showed that 34% of Germany’s crude oil came from Russia in 2021 and coal group VDKi said 53% of hard coal received by German power generators and steelmakers came from Russia last year.
*UPDATE: Twitter has halted the censorship after a flood of criticism, but not provided any explanation. It shows that speaking up works, but the incident still says a lot about Twitter, and whose side it’s on. They didn’t censor Chinese State media.
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Since Twitter decided to block the upstanding, excellent Epoch Times, I feel therefore obliged to make sure that The Epoch Times gets more attention, not less. Tell your friends, spread the word. If Twitter deems an Epoch page Unsafe, you definitely want to go there. Just click through. Or go straight to The Epoch Times. Who needs Twitter?
We’re in an information war. We must know the enemy. Shore up lines of communication.
If you find yourself self-censoring your commentary for fear of being cut off, remind yourself that that’s exactly what they want. Ownership of your mind…
Twitter Targets American Media, Not Chinese State Media
The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 by Chinese Americans who fled communist China and sought to create an independent media outlet to bring uncensored and truthful information to the world.
For years the average wholesale price was somewhere between $30 and $60 per megawatt hour for electricity on the Australian national grid. But for the entire 2,184 hours of quarter two this year, we were paying an average price of $264 per megawatt hour. It wasn’t just due to a couple of freakish spikes, instead it was a relentless burning average, like a lava flow arrived at your wallet.
At an average operational demand of 22GW, that’s a hefty $12.7 billion dollar price tag for 91 days of electricity. Last year the same period it cost $4b. Years ago, before we added all the unreliable generators, it would have cost $2 billion.
It would have been cheaper just to build a whole new power plant last year.
The graph below covers the century so far. It is that bad.
It wasn’t that there was a particular time of the day when prices were higher, instead every hour was a bloodbath. It was a phase change. There was no happy hour at this hotel.
And it didn’t matter whether a state was renewable-heaven or a den of black-coal. Prices were shocking in every state, suggesting that adding more unreliables won’t save us, just like they didn’t save South Australia or Tasmania. The whole system together is failing. (Isn’t unity wonderful?)
The one thing we know, the only path back, is to a time when the system was more flexible and had more inner strength — more reliable energy, where it had enough spare capacity to shift dependence away from gas and black coal.
Not surprisingly, it was mayhem on the bridge last quarter. The AEMO forecast more than 400 separate lack of reserve warnings (called LOR’s) in the second quarter, compared with 36 in the March quarter and 73 a year earlier.
And the pain just kept growing. Every month worse than the one before. Almost like we used up the slack in the system in April, then there was nothing to fall back on. The gas stocks were drained, the transmission lines couldn’t be fixed fast enough, and even the rivers were full, so we couldn’t run the Hydro dam without flooding the fields downstream.
I’ll have more to say soon. But while many are blaming a string of things, the truth is, there is one over-riding factor that screwed the Australian grid, and it was when someone decided to use it to control the weather. If brown coal plants were still respected, we could have left some gas in the storage vaults and saved enough money to build two hotter, cleaner new brown coal plants.
*Headline changed from “spent” to “price signal” to reflect the complexities of the Spot market prices being delayed, smoothed and spread through forward and other contracts. Total cost corrected from $12.7b to 12.1b. (typo).
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