Dr Peter Rost explains that the Big Multinational Corporations buy influence from every angle. Firstly they pay out grants for research. They help develop the research with academics. They also pay individuals directly — they pay them a speakers fee, $1,000 – $2,000 a day.
You establish friends. You make them beholden to you…
You give them money for programs, educational programs, ones they make a profit from.
They are supposed to be third party and independent from the company, but everyone knows that the institutions that Big Pharma is more generous with are the same institutions that happen to say the things the company is happy about.
Even if you can officially claim — this is at arms length — they can do whatever they want with it. Reality is they are not going to continue to get money if they are not saying the things you want them to say.
They know it, you know it, it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.
…
Thus do awkward experiments never get started and inexplicable results get left in the desk. Young researchers may not even be aware of the veil that filters the work. They come up with a great idea, the senior researcher pours cold water on it, because it sounds a bit risky, or controversial, and the real questions never get asked. And in the tea-rooms everyone else murmurs in agreement.
At best, our public institutions churn out press releases that are half the truth and mostly not what we really need to know.
At worst, they are disguised advertising machines. They appear to serve the public while they betray them. It is safe and effective.
The US will not be able to meet the 2030 targets without this legislation (and all those subsidies)
After seven months of negotiations, and the big plan being rejected then shaved and sliced and diced, Senator Manchin has rejected all climate and energy rules. Inflation is to high and too painful…
WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, pulled the plug on Thursday on negotiations to salvage key pieces of President Biden’s agenda, informing his party’s leaders that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs…
Without action by Congress, it will be impossible to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions roughly in half by the end of this decade. That target was aimed at keeping the climate stable at about 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to preindustrial levels.
“Political headlines are of no value to the millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries and gas as inflation soars to 9.1 percent,” said Sam Runyon, a spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin….
Because Democrats hold the Senate by a bare 50-50 majority, Mr. Manchin has been able to effectively exercise veto power over the domestic policy package, which the party had planned to move under a special fast-track budget process that would allow it to bypass a filibuster and pass with a simple majority. With Democrats bracing for losses in midterm elections this fall, the package could be the party’s last chance to enact substantial spending and tax legislation while it still holds the White House and both houses of Congress.
Subsidies and boondoggles are also known as “federal investments”:
In rejecting any climate and energy provisions, Mr. Manchin appeared to have single-handedly shattered Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate agenda and what would have been the largest single federal investment in American history toward addressing the toll of climate change.
Here come the snowflakes:
…it was particularly devastating for those who had championed the climate and energy provisions. In calls to various climate activists on Thursday night, Mr. Schumer and his staff sounded shellshocked and said they believed until just a few hours before that a deal was still possible, said one person who spoke with Mr. Schumer.
Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of California Santa Barbara who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation, sobbed on Thursday night as she described the months of work she and other activists, scientists and legislative staff had poured into negotiations. “The stakes are so high,” she said. “It’s just infuriating that he is condemning our own children.”
It’s just an investment: Big Pharma spends twice as much on advertising as it does on developing cancer drugs.
Think about that. Most drugs are only prescribed by doctors so why advertise on TV at all? It’s not like patients are wandering through Walmart looking for a Pfizer. Should I get the Glaxo instead?
It turns out that the advertising money is not buying customers it’s buying the media. And it’s not paying to show the world something, but to hide it instead.
As Mark Steyn says, for the first time in history every person on Earth needs the same medicine, and four doses of it, no questions asked. The silence is complete: There are $15,000 million reasons why MSNBC, CNN, and all the rest didn’t ask the FDA or the TGA to “show us the data”, or even to explain why the data had to be hidden for 55 years or even 75 years. When politicians signed secret deals on our behalf the media didn’t demand to see the contracts, they wanted to know why it wasn’t done sooner. It’s the same reason they mock cheap drugs that reduce Covid by 63% but get excited about every new patented wonder-drug which just reduces hospitalization by a couple of days:
When people say the media loves scandal and sensationalism they’re wrong. The media loves money:
Maybe the silence comes from the fact that the pharmaceutical industry spends more on lobbying than any other industry group. In 2020 big pharma spent over $300 million lobbying officeholders and government officials. It clearly pays off. The research to develop the COVID-19 vaccines was nearly all funded by taxpayers. The distribution of the vaccines, once developed, was further funded nearly entirely by taxpayers. The record-keeping and reporting on the vaccines is also at the expense of taxpayers, and the new repurposed Pfizer drug Paxlovid, used to treat COVID, has been paid for by taxpayers.
This total of nearly $15 billion spent by Big Pharma on advertising is more than twice what is spent on new cancer drug research. In fact, nine out of 10 of the largest pharmaceutical companies in America spend more on advertising than on research and development.
But there is more. The U.S. government is pushing COVID-19jabs harder than the companies would ever likely choose to do on their own. This might be the reason: Almost half of the funding that supports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration comes from the very industries it is mandated to oversee.
This isn’t speculation, it’s big money. Consider: Pfizer expects $32 billion in COVID vaccine sales in 2022. Moderna is forecasting $19 billion in COVID sales with the vaccine being its only current commercial product. Moderna had never produced a vaccine before it developed its COVID shots. Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are reported to be making $1,000 in profit every second of every business day
Mark Steyn gives a voice to the people who don’t exist: the Victims of the Vax
After the intro he starts at 8:20. There are some truly shocking stories.
The UK is now offering compensation.
The Wall-of-Pharma-Silence is built on more than just adverts and sponsorships, otherwise the BBC, ABC and CBC might have even been useful. The Big-Pharma financial octopus is so much more than just ad money. There are research deals with universities and medicos, and royalties for researchers. And behind the scenes, there are conflicts of interest, like the way Alphabet owns Youtube, Google and 12% of company that makes AstraZeneca Vax. And Big Pharma also spent $4.7b lobbying Big Government. Lucky that never affects rules, regulations or drug prices, right?
Whether the news is about vitamins, sunshine or Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, don’t ask if the media is interested and the audience wants to know — just ask if it will help Pfizer.
The threat of the Russians cutting off gas completely through Nord stream 1 has focused Europe on the blessings of coal and the reality of surviving winter with only windmills and solar panels to keep warm.
Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, and the UK have already changed plans to shut coal plants or have plans to revive old ones. Poland is buying coal directly for homes. Hungary has now also declared a state of emergency and said it will boost gas production and stop exports. No sharing allowed now.
Only two years ago Greece was going green — phasing out brown coal but now the Greek power corporation has been told to stop the phase out of coal. Last year lignite provided only 5% of the electricity in Greece, now the aim is 20%.
Budapest says it will boost its annual production of natural gas from 1.5 billion cubic metres to 2 billion cubic metres. The EU member state also plans to increase the extraction of coal and restore an offline lignite-fired power plant in Matra.
Energy exports will be banned, and Hungary’s only nuclear power plant will extend its operating times to increase production, Gulyás said on Wednesday. Citizens have also been ordered to “moderate their consumption or pay the surplus at the market price”. The measures — which go against Hungary’s climate commitments — are set to go into effect in August.
Earlier on Wednesday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó also announced that Hungary would seek to buy an additional 700 million cubic metres of gas from an unknown country.
Greece is planning to ramp up the use of lignite as an alternative power source to natural gas, which has become extremely expensive in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Lignite, or brown coal, is formed from naturally compressed peat and has a carbon content of around 35 percent. Greece is the tenth largest producer of lignite while Germany is the first. In 2020, Mitsotakis announced a plan to cease the burning of lignite in all of the country’s power plants by 2023, save for at the Ptolemaida 4 power plant, which would be shut down by 2028.
Yet, the Greek Public Power Corporation (DEH) has already been asked to stop its efforts of phasing out lignite, and Mitsotakis himself ordered lignite mining to be ramped up by 50 percent in April. Kostas Skrekas, Greek Minister of the Environment and Energy, told DEH to up the percentage of lignite in its electricity source to 17 to 20 percent from 5 percent, as it was last year.
Australian exports account for 58 per cent of the global seaborne trade or metallurgical coal, a vital ingredient in steelmaking. China meanwhile loves to make steel, accounting for 57 per cent of world steel production in 2020. However, there are rumours that China may be preparing to reverse its unofficial ban on Australian coal imports in August or September.
Nearly every decision Joe Biden has made just happens to be the same as what President Xi would have preferred.
The keystone pipe, energy dependence, the Afghanistan debacle, the end of tariffs, jailing critics of China, and allowing Chinese companies strategic control and access. Then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop…
It’s excellent to see Tucker packaging this message so well.
Last summer, a group of American intelligence analysts working for the U.S. government issued a report on the origins of COVID.These people work at CIA, NSA, a bunch of other agencies, and they concluded that the coronavirus may very well have been manufactured in a lab by the Chinese military.
America has been the dominant power in the world for more than 100 years, since the end of the First World War, when Europe destroyed itself. Empires destroying themselves always pave way for new empires, something we should keep in mind at the moment.
The coronavirus reshuffled the global order. It crushed the American economy. It made China preeminent. If China takes over the world and that appears to be coming, COVID will be one of the main reasons it was able to. So, by definition, you would think we would want to know where COVID came from. That’s a meaningful question, but Joe Biden doesn’t want to know. He ignored the report he ordered. He ignored the findings of his own intelligence agencies. That’s bizarre when you think about it and if you think that’s weird, how about this?
This February, Biden canceled a counter-espionage program called the China Initiative. Now, the point of that program was stopping the rampant threat of our national security secrets by the government of China. But the White House decided to very little fanfare that somehow that program was racist and therefore it had to end. That means the Chinese government can now spy and steal with impunity. Not since Franklin Roosevelt colluded with Joseph Stalin has an American president done anything like that, but Joe Biden didn’t hesitate. And then he kept doing things like this. Now, Biden says he plans to end tariffs against China, tariffs that Donald Trump put in place and that China has been complaining about ever since. And not only is Joe Biden ending tariffs against China, Joe Biden’s Justice Department has just arrested the man responsible for those tariffs. His name is Peter Navarro.
He was the most effective China hawk in the Trump administration. Last month, Peter Navarro was handcuffed at a Washington, D.C. airport and dragged to jail in leg irons. Why? Supposedly because of January 6, but Peter Navarro had literally nothing to do with January 6. He wasn’t even there, but Joe Biden didn’t stop there. Steve Bannon was the other notable voice in the Trump administration, warning about the growing power and malicious intent of the Chinese government. In November of last year, Steve Bannon was also arrested by the Biden Justice Department, also on absurd pretexts. So, take a step back. What’s the message here? Well, it’s unmistakable. Don’t criticize the Chinese government, or we will throw you in jail.
Now, if you happen to be watching all this from Beijing, as Chinese leaders definitely have been, you would be applauding. Joe Biden just arrested your loudest critics. How gratifying is that? Things are going well for you. You already control Canada, whose brain dead, prime minister is effectively a Chinese lackey. Now the most powerful country in the world is doing exactly what you want it to do. You’d be thrilled by this. You’d be especially thrilled to see Joe Biden destroy America’s single greatest asset, which is its domestic energy supply, and make the United States entirely dependent on Chinese technology for wind and solar projects. If you’re the Chinese government, this is the masterstroke. This is the checkmate. Once you control a country’s energy grid, you control that country. And you would know that because you didn’t go to Yale Law School and you know something about reality as a result and by the way, if you’re watching all this from Beijing, you would find it especially amusing to have the president of the United States sell you his country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, even as he declared oil and gas off-limits to his own population.
The West’s green fixation, and crippled scientific and media organisations are just part of a deep decay.
Australia has added more unreliable wind and solar than anywhere on Earth but when an energy crisis strikes, and those prices are still on fire, the solution is more of the same.
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
[The energy regulator’s] recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW’s Hunter Valley shut a 400MW unit in April. Its other three units (a total of 1200MW) will shut next April. Then, in 2025, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, also in the Hunter, is due to shut.
By the end of the decade, our energy regulators warn, almost two-thirds of our coal-fired power could shut.
And Victoria is just one state.
Indeed, across the world there are 345 new coal-fired power stations being built. What is the argument against Australia building just a few to guarantee our energy supplies?
A new ultra-supercritical coal-fired power station built in Australia would increase our emissions by about five million tonnes a year. That would mean global emissions would go up by 0.014 per cent. The world has warmed around 1C after 600 billion tonnes of emissions. So this new coal-fired power station may increase the temperature by 0.0001 of a degree over its life.
Yet we are told a new coal-fired power station would worsen climate change and create more bushfires, floods and all manner of other natural disasters. These arguments are nonsensical yet go unchallenged in polite society.
Matt Canavan is a Liberal National Party senator for Queensland and deputy leader of the Nationals in the Senate.
Starfish Prime was the largest Nuclear test conducted in space. The 1.4 megaton explosion at 250 miles above Johnson Atoll was a US mission that launched on July 9th 1962. The Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it generated was much bigger than expected, and knocked out a few satellites, which presumably wasn’t part of the plan. (Future tests were smaller.) The explosion and the aurora it generated was visible nearly 900 miles away in Hawaii where some street lights were blown, some phone lines went down and surges were recorded on planes. Apart from war, it’s hard to imagine this experiment could be done ever again.
The aurora itself lasted less than 15 minutes, but created a belt of MeV electrons. And as many as five years later some of those electrons were still being detected in the atmosphere.
On July 9, 1962, the US military detonated a thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean–a test called “Starfish Prime.” What happened next surprised everyone. Witnesses from Hawaii to New Zealand reported auroras overhead, magnificent midnight “rainbow stripes” that tropical sky watchers had never seen before. Radios fell silent, then suddenly became noisy as streetlights went dark in Honolulu.
From a Spaceweather post last year:
A new paper just published in the research journal Earth and Space Science .. (by) Love et al describe how a high-altitude nuclear blast jerks Earth’s magnetic field. First, the EMP ionizes a layer of air underneath the bomb. This layer presses downward, pinning Earth’s magnetic field lines in their pre-blast locations. Next, as the ionization subsides, the magnetic field springs back. It’s a sort of heaving, lurching geomagnetic storm.
Handy for finding submarines too apparently?
At twilight after the burst, resonant scattering of light from lithium and other debris was observed at Johnston and French Frigate Shoals for many days confirming the long time presence of debris in the atmosphere. An interesting side effect was that the Royal New Zealand Air Force was aided in anti-submarine maneuvers by the light from the bomb. — Wikipedia
As Earth’s magnetic field caught ionized radiation from the Starfish Prime test, it created a new artificial radiation belt that was stronger and longer lasting than scientists had predicted. This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite.
“It came as a surprise how bad it was, and how long it lasted, and how damaging it was to satellites that flew through that area and died,” Sibeck says.
In the latest news the Cities and Municipalities Association is urging local officials to plan for public halls to be used as emergency “warm up spaces” when winter comes. With families needing to find an extra €3,800 to pay the energy bills many people won’t be able to afford electricity or gas.
Welcome to the renewables future where lights are dimmer, there’s no hot water at schools and public swimming pools are closed, but town halls are open so people can survive the night.
Germany’s Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) said on Monday that renewables had covered around 49% of gross domestic electricity consumption over the period.
The claim of “half” is still inflated. If we remove hydroelectricity and biomass, in the last six months all forms of wind and solar power have produced 35% of the electricity (on a random come-and-go basis).
Cities across Germany are planning to use sports arenas and exhibition halls as ‘warm up spaces’ this winter to help freezing citizens who are unable to afford skyrocketing energy costs.
Bild newspaper reveals how the the nation’s Cities and Municipalities Association has urged local authorities to set aside public spaces to help vulnerable citizens in the colder months.
Germany has already seen its gas supply from Russia significantly restricted as a result of its support for sanctions and the war in Ukraine.
“We are currently preparing for all emergency scenarios for autumn and winter,” Jutta Steinruck, the city mayor of Ludwigshafen told Bild, where the Friedrich-Ebert-Halle arena is about to be converted into a warm up hall.
Meanwhile in Australia the CSIRO has modelled the long term energy costs and concludes that wind and solar are the cheapest and getting cheaper too!.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of covering up epidemics within China, and then carelessly — or deliberately — allowing them to spread around the world.
The fall of 1957 saw an outbreak of what came to be known as the Asian flu. It was first reported in the cities of Singapore and Hong Kong, but this new and deadly influenza soon went global.
…even as tens of thousands of Chinese lay dying, the epidemic was kept hidden from view by the Communist authorities.
When infected travelers from China later carried it to Hong Kong and Singapore, the World Health Organization and other public health authorities were caught flatfooted. Thanks to Beijing’s perfidy, quarantines and vaccines came too late. Before the Asian flu had run its two-year course, it had killed well over a million people.
The same scenario played out again 10 years later. In 1968, an unknown influenza had quickly spread throughout the world. It came to be known as the Hong Kong flu, infuriating that city’s Chamber of Commerce, the members of which knew quite well that an epidemic was raging in Mainland China just across the border. Once again, the Communist authorities had refused to alert the world, and another million people died.
SARS-1 was the prequel:
But the Communist regime lied about the disease for months, silenced whistleblowers, doctored data, duped global health authorities, and even accused “outside forces” of carrying out a “bioterrorist” attack.
They did not inform the WHO about the outbreak until February 2003, three months later, and only after Canadian intelligence had already detected and publicly reported on a “flu outbreak” in progress in China.
Like the Spanish flu, SARS could easily have killed tens of millions worldwide had the Canadians not forced Beijing to reveal its existence before it had spread outside of its borders. Its containment was aided by the fact that, while it was highly infectious, it was not airborne. As a result of its early detection and relatively low transmissibility, by the time the SARS epidemic ended in June of 2003, there had been a total of only 8,469 cases reported.
But the lethality of SARS impressed China’s bioweapons experts, and they began discussing how to genetically engineer a SARS-like coronavirus that could easily be transmitted from person to person. The kind where a single sneeze can infect an entire roomful of people.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute. This New York Post piece was adapted from his new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery), published on July 26.
Readers may recall his (horrifying) field research on China’s one-child policy for his book Broken Earth (1984). He was condemned by the Chinese government and expelled from his Ph.D. program at Stanford in 1983 just short of achieving his doctorate. The Washington Post covered the story here and here.
PS: The China expert Steven Mosher is not the climate commentator some people may know from other debates. Two different men.
Remember Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible” investing at HSBC who was suspended when he pointed out that climate risks were distant, irrelevant hyperbole? This was at once shocking impermissible and the bleeding obvious. He also dropped the bombshell that the central banker models of climate risks buried massive GDP shocks and interest rate rises so they could find the economic disasters they were looking for.
Thanks to the Streisand Effect of his suspension for a 16 minute speech, tens of thousands of people wrote to him to agree. But despite being such a drawcard HSBC didn’t appreciate his new popularity, and he has now resigned under duress. His letter says all the right things below. He’s a man to follow…
h/t Tallbloke
Stuart has now resigned his post, and issued this statement:
Today I wish to announce that I have resigned as global head of responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management.
Ironically given my job title, I have concluded that the bank’s behaviour towards me since my speech at a Financial Times conference in May has made my position, well, unsustainable.
Funny old world.
Over a 27-year unblemished record in finance, journalism and consulting I have only ever tried to do the best for my clients and readers, knowing that doing so helps my employer too.
Investing is hard. So is saving our planet. Opinions on both differ. But humanity’s best chance of success is open and honest debate. If companies believe in diversity and speaking up, they need to walk the talk. A cancel culture destroys wealth and progress.
There is no place for virtue signalling in finance. Likewise as a writer, researcher and investor, I know that words or trading shares can only achieve so much. True impact comes from the combination of real-world action and innovative solutions.
Which is why I’ve been gathering a crack group of like-minded individuals together to deliver what is arguably the greatest sustainable investment idea ever conceived. A whole new asset class. Sounds fanciful – but I am not one for hyperbole, as viewers of my presentation know well.
To be announced later this year, the first project will underline the central argument in my speech: that human ingenuity can and will overcome the challenges ahead, while at the same time offering huge investment opportunities.
Meanwhile, I will continue to prod with a sharp stick the nonsense, hypocrisy, sloppy logic and group-think inside the mainstream bubble of sustainable finance. Follow me on LinkedIn if you want to learn the right way to think about ESG – and let me tell you, most of what’s out there is bonkers.
Finally, can I take this opportunity to thank the tens of thousands of people – from chief executives and congressmen to scientists and mom and pop investors – who contacted me from around the world offering their support and solidarity over the past two months.
You have given me strength during what has been a tumultuous time for me and my family. It is for you that the next chapter in my career will be devoted. Please forward this to anyone you know who cares about money and planet earth.
It’s summer and yet some parts of Germany are already dimming lights and reducing the temperature, restricting shower times or even closing swimming pools. Meanwhile in the UK, energy prices are up four fold compared to a couple of years ago. Both nations are bringing back coal power, which is unthinkable enough on its own (in a 2021 climate-religion kind of way) yet even that isn’t enough. Winter is coming…
Germany is rationing hot water, dimming its street lights and shutting down swimming pools as the impact of its energy crunch begins to spread from industry to offices, leisure centres and homes.
A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.
Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.
“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German housing enterprises GdW. “Germany’s social peace is in great danger.”
As tensions over Russia’s war in Ukraine escalate, officials fear the situation could get worse. On Monday, Russia is shutting down its main pipeline to Germany, Nord Stream 1, for 10 days of scheduled maintenance. Many in Berlin fear it will never reopen.
Energy prices are expected to rise by up to €3,800 for four people, compared with 2021 levels. Wow.
‘We are talking about millions, if not 10 million people moving into real poverty this winter, the worst winter we have seen’. Martin Lewis today warned that the UK is facing a ‘cataclysmic’ energy crisis this winter as the price cap is set to reach £3,000.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, the Money Saving Expert founder has said that we are heading for a ‘bleak winter’ with millions, if not 10 million people moving into real poverty. He says that it will be the worst winter we’ve seen since the 1970s or earlier in terms of finances.
UVC is the kind of UV that’s more energetic than the UV we get in sunlight. It’s shorter wavelength. Paradoxically, at around 222nm the light is so energetic it is stopped by almost anything — even the layer of dead cells or fluid on the surface of our eye. But for a naked virus floating in the air, UVC is deadly — it will damage all nucleic acids to the point where the viruses and bacteria are unable to replicate. In contrast, for our skin cells, photons of the far UVC wavelengths (200 -230nm) can’t penetrate far enough to cause any damage that matters.
Far-UV-C radiation: An emerging tool for pandemic control. Blatchley III, Brenner et al (2022)
The UVC coming off the sun is stopped by the ozone in the stratosphere, so it doesn’t reach us on the ground. The kind of UV that causes burns, cataracts and skin cancer is from longer wavelength UVB and UVA which can penetrate the surface and damage our DNA.
“Far-UVC light has the potential to be a ‘game changer,’” said David Brenner, professor of radiation biophysics and director of [Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research]. “It can be safely used in occupied public spaces, and it kills pathogens in the air before we can breathe them in.”
Far-UV-C radiation: An emerging tool for pandemic control. Blatchley III, Brenner et al (2022)
The team previously found the method effective in inactivating the airborne H1N1 influenza virus, as well as drug-resistant bacteria. And multiple, long-term studies on animals and humans have confirmed that exposure to far-UVC does not cause damage to the skin or eyes.
Here’s the thing though. That press release was from way back in April 2020. And plenty of papers were released on UVC before Covid-19 even appeared, yet the only nation doing mass installation of UVC, two years later appears to be China.
Do we get the feeling Western Ministry’s of Health don’t actually want to stop this virus – or any virus — spreading? Are they even trying?
The Chinese are.
Intro to far-UVC air-cleaning from a non-expert. Ultraviolet light has been used to sterilise objects for decades and has been used to clean air in rooms since the 1940s, with TB being a big driver of that. It's called UR-UVGI – upper-room UV germicidal irradiation.
To protect the health of their athletes from the threat of airborne pathogens, the Chinese national team relied on patent pending Lumenizer filtered Far-UVC light technology, announced Scott Gant, Lumenlabs, LLC President and Co-Founder.
In addition to having all of their Olympic athletes and staff vaccinated, to provide a comprehensive layer of protection, the Chinese national team installed advanced Lumenlabs Lumenizer far ultraviolet disinfection light fixtures throughout their housing and training facilities.
Brenner et al figured out the benefits of far UVC back in 2013, and published a paper on it in Nature in 2018. So Chinese health departments are reading our papers but where are all the well funded institutions like the FDA, CDC and TGA, UK NHS?
Ever get the feeling that our Western Institutions are completely captured by the Big-Pharma finance project?
UVC seems especially well suited to killing Coronaviruses
Blatchley and Brenner have just released a new paper last month showing that UVC radiation is probably useful for many viruses, and especially for RNA viruses with long genomes (that provide more target material and are therefore more fragile), which is exactly what Coronaviruses are:
UV222 irradiation is at least as effective as UV254 irradiation for inactivation of viruses, with approximately 1 log10 reduction of coronaviruses achieved for each 1 mJ/cm2 of delivered UV-C fluence or less. In other words, irradiation at 222 nm provides roughly twice the rate of inactivation as observed at 254 nm.
Genome size and make-up are key factors governing the response of viruses to UV-C radiation (Lytle & Sagripanti, 2005; Pendyala et al., 2020; Rockey et al., 2020; Sagripanti & Lytle, 2020). In general, larger genomes provide more targets for photochemical damage; therefore, viruses and other pathogens with relatively large genomes tend to be inactivated relatively quickly. The type of genome (either single-stranded [ss], double-stranded [ds], RNA, or DNA) also influences the response of viruses to UV-C exposure. Coronaviruses have the largest known genomes among ss-RNA viruses; this is likely an important contributing factor to the facile inactivation of coronaviruses by UV-C exposure. Viruses with ds DNA genomes are often relatively resistant to UV-C exposure because the complementary nucleic acid strand can facilitate repair within its host (Boszko & Rainbow, 1999; Rodriguez et al., 2014; Shin et al., 2009). The presence of a viral envelope can influence the susceptibility of viruses to exposure to some physical agents, such has heat or shear forces. However, the presence of a viral envelope may not have any influence on the response of viruses to UV-C exposure.
Coronaviruses have strings of RNA that are 26,000 to 32,000 nucleic acids long. It’s enough to encode for about 30 genes (or proteins). So coronaviruses come with more tools than other viruses, but the disadvantage for them is that they are more fragile with such a long chain of RNA. The smallest RNA viruses are Hepatitis D with a genome of only 2,000 nucleic acids.
Handy: UVC also kills MRSA (Multiple Resistant Golden Staph) in about 5 minutes:
As a neat side effect, the use of UVC would probably reduce the worst kind of bacterial infections in hospitals as well. MRSA are the dreaded “Golden Staph” bugs that are resistant to most of our antibiotics.
The bad news for Sydney-siders is that floods have been happening to them for all of history and probably a lot of prehistory too, though the ABC and BOM don’t mention it. This week the flooding in Windsor appears to have peaked at almost 14 metres. But in 1867 the water peaked at 63 feet or an amazing 19 metres.
Not to dismiss any of the suffering of the current flooding in Sydney, because I’m sure it’s horrible. Just people need to know the Bureau of Met isn’t telling them the whole truth, and climate grifters are exploiting their pain so they can nab a few more grants, or sell some solar panels.
The Guardian laments that For Hawkesbury residents flooding is now a part of life and blames climate change. But nothing has changed since 200 years ago. For the first thirty years of European settlement, floods hit the Hawkesbury river one after the other, people died, and houses were washed away. Back then, people were in danger of starving when the crops failed. Flooding would have been a very big deal.
A little book called The Early Days of Windsor, by James Steele was published long ago in 1916. It tells us that early flooding for the first European settlers in Australia was frequent, and was so bad on the Hawksbury in 1798 the Governor even limited the sale of rum (it must have been serious). The first Government House in Windsor was said to be “swept away” in 1799. This was followed by another flood in 1801 and a much worse one in 1806 when seven people died. The plucky residents only had to wait three years to be besieged again in 1809. By then people were getting so fed up of being flooded they moved Windsor and other settlements to higher ground in 1810, which was a jolly good thing because it flooded again in 1811.
In 1817 things were so bad, it was reported that the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers had inundated the buildings on the banks “three times within nine months”.
After that, everything dried out for a few decades. Droughts struck across Australia instead. That was until the late 1850s when flooding came back into fashion, climatically speaking. Symbolising this shift, a neat little church at Clydesdale was built in 1842 and lasted til the great flood of 1867 when things got so bad there was “driftwood on the roof”. The book drily notes: “This church is now closed.” By 1872, flooding was again so common the people of Windsor even formed “a water brigade” so they were ready to rescue people and knew how the manage the flood boats. It sounds a bit like an early inland version of the Royal Life Saving Society that wouldn’t even start work on Australian beaches for another twenty years.
The whole book is available online, and even though Australia was almost NetZero when it was published a hundred years ago, it already had 67 mentions of the word flood.
On account of distress caused by floods the Governor curtailed the sale of rum during the year 1798.
For the first twenty-five or thirty years of the settlement of New South Wales, the Hawkesbury was looked upon as the granary of the colony. When floods came the greatest anxiety was caused in Sydney and Parramatta, and floods were fairly frequent in those days…
There was another Government House earlier still, erected at the time of the first settlement in the district. This was reported to have been swept away by flood waters in 1799.
On 23rd March, 1806, there was a great flood in the Hawkesbury, which rose ten feet higher than the flood of 1801 and reached to within eighteen inches of Dr. Am dell’s home at “Catty”. The Governor appointed a commission, consisting of Dr. Arndell, Rev. S. Marsden, and Mr. N. Bailey, to visit and report concerning the damage done by this flood, and afford relief where necessary. They reported the loss of wheat, maize, barley, live stock, and buildings valued at £35,248, in addition to the loss of seven lives.
Extract from Government and General Order, dated 15th December, 1810:—
“The frequent inundations of the rivers Hawkesbury and Nepean having been hitherto attended with the most calamitous effects, with regard to crops growing in their vicinity, and in consequence of most serious injury to the necessary subsistence of the colony, the Governor has deemed it expedient (in order to guard as far as human foresight can extend against the recurrence of such calamities), to erect certain townships in the most contiguous and eligible high grounds in the several districts subjected to those inundations for the purpose of rendering every possible accommodation and security to the settlers whose farms are exposed to the floods.
Back then when floods destroyed crops, people starved, but charities saved the day:
“The rivers Hawkesbury and Nepean, having inundated the various settlements on their banks three times within nine months, and swept away great quantities of wheat and stock of all kinds, as well as totally destroying the growing crop of maize, which was nearly ripe, a most lamentable scarcity of grain prevailed, and hundreds in the districts of the Hawkesbury were reduced to a state of starvation: and to alleviate these distresses the Magistrates and other gentlemen at Windsor and the surrounding districts raised the sum of five hundred pounds by voluntary subscription, on the 28th June, 1817, which was lain out in the purchase of provisions, chiefly rice, and issued weekly to upwards of five hundred distressed persons, by Mr. Harpur, at the Public Schoolhouse at Windsor, until the harvest commenced, November 23rd, 1817.”
From Mr Tebbuts Observatory notes:
Highest Floods at Windsor.
We give herewith a list of the biggest floods, that is, such as rose thirty-five feet or more. This would be at least fifteen feet over the present Windsor bridge, and would encroach a considerable way up Bridge, Baker, Kable, and Fitzgerald streets on the north side, whilst a forty-eight feet rise would bring the water right across George Street near New Street. Such rises occurred in the years 1864 and 1867. The highest flood recorded was that in 1867, June 23, which rose sixty-three feet. All Windsor was covered excepting two spots; an island about two hundred feet wide, and extending from Johnston Street, near the Gazette office, up to the School of Arts and a little beyond. Another island started near New Street, extending along the Terrace past St. Matthew’s Church, taking in Tebbutt Street and part of McQuade Park, and from the railway station about a mile back along the Penrith Road.
Richmond was half under water. An island was formed about the old Clarendon House to near the Roman Catholic Church. Another island started from about the Black Horse Hotel, and extended back through part of “Hobartville” to Yarramundi. Pitt Town was also an island two hundred chains long and the same wide. The whole of the road to Pitt Town and Cattai was under water, except a small portion in Pitt Town. The Parramatta road was under water out to Vineyard. Most of the Riverstone Meat Company’s paddocks were also flooded, and all the low laud away towards Blacktown.
The flood measurements in the accompanying list, from 1855 to date, are taken from the meteorological observations of Mr. J. Tebbutt, F.R.A.S., made at his private observatory on the Peninsula, near Windsor, and may, therefore, be accepted as correct. Those given before that date are, we fear, not so accurate, and at times are much exaggerated.
1799, March 3—Rose 50 feet. (15m) One life lost.
1800, March—Rose 40 feet. (12m)
1806, August 26—Rose 47 feet Five lives lost. Hundreds of haystacks floated away.
1809, August 1 —Rose 48 feet. Eight lives lost. In consequence of floods Windsor and other towns were laid out on higher ground in 1810.
1811, March 25.
1816, June 2—Rose 45 feet.
1817, February 26—Rose 46 feet. Two lives were lost. A large relief fund was raised.
1819, February 20—Rose 46 feet.
1857, August 22—Rose 37.7 feet. The first big flood for thirty-eight years. Penrith bridge swept away.
1860, April 29-30—Rose 37.4 feet. Cornwallis bridge swept away. November 19—Rose 36 feet. Three big floods this year.
1864, June 13—Rose 48 feet. July 16—Rose 36.1 feet 55.03 inches of rain this year.
1867, June 23—Rose 63.2 feet (19.3m) Six lives were lost. Record flood, fifteen feet above the highest known.
1869, May 9—Rose 36.8 feet.
1870, April 28—Rose 45 feet. May 13-14—Rose 35.5 feet. Record wet year, 62.51 inches of rain falling. Seven big rises in the river.
1871, May 2—Rose 36.9 feet.
1873, February 26-27—Rose 41.6 feet.
1875, June 7—Rose 38.9 feet.
1879, September 11—Rose 43,3 feet.
1889, May 29—Rose 38.5 feet.
1890, March 13—Rose 38.9 feet. Three floods this year. 45.67 inches of rain fell.
1891, June 26—Rose 35.5 feet.
1900, July 7—Rose 46.2 feet.
1904, July 12—Rose 40.1 feet.
Conversions: 40 feet is 12.2 meters. 45 feet is 13.7m and 50 feet is 15.2 m. 63 feet is 19.3m.
Snippets from flooding in the later half of the 1800s:
In the year 1842 a neat brick church was built at Clydesdale and named St. Phillip’s, the parish being from then known as “Windsor and Clydesdale”. Unfortunately, this church was built on the flood area, the big flood in 1867 leaving drift wood on the roof. This church is now closed.
…the Big Flood, 23rd June, 1867, when the river rose to the extraordinary height of sixty-three feet, and six lives were lost.
The Rev. H.T. Stiles died on the 22nd June, 1867, within two days of his sixtieth birthday. His death occurred while the big flood was at about its greatest height, the water having entered the Presbyterian Church in George Street, where large numbers of refugees had slept the previous night. The last duty performed by the dying minister was to order that the church doors of St. Matthew’s be opened in order to let the homeless people find a shelter from the rising flood.
A water brigade was formed in 1872, to be in readiness in case of flood, and to become proficient in the management of the flood boats. The members were Messrs. J. A. Dick, Wm. Moses, R.D.W. Walker, W. Gosper, W.F. Linsley, W. Alderson, and E.J. Tout.
THE danger from floods is always a source of anxiety to the occupants of the low-lying lands along the banks of the Hawkesbury; the river may rise and overflow its banks at any time during the whole year.
The tragic stories of families lost due to NSW floods is written up in Family Tree Circles.
See also History of the Floods of the Hawkesbury (J.P. Josephson), 1795-1881.
Why is nuclear power Green today when it wasn’t yesterday? Because it was never about the science.
Nuclear power has been the NetZeroiest energy on Earth since the sun formed from collapsing interstellar gas. Nuclear plants don’t produce any CO2 at all, but that wasn’t good enough because it was never about CO2 either. It was always about power and money and profits for friends.
And the best friend of a bureaucrat is a captive-dependent-industry, one that survives on handouts. Those in need of Big Government largess always lobby for Big Government, donate to Big Government causes and cheer on everything Big Government wants them to cheer on, even if it’s a naked man in high heels.
Yesterday gas was a fossil fuel, but today it’s a sustainable one:
Lawmakers in the European Union voted to include nuclear power and natural gas in the bloc’s list of investments deemed sustainable, a move it hopes will trigger more funding of those sectors but that critics said would slow down the EU’s shift to greener energy sources.
Just like that — sensible flexibility pops out of the cake:
Under the plans, gas can be classed as a sustainable investment if “the same energy capacity cannot be generated with renewable sources” and plans are in place to switch to renewables or “low-carbon gases”. Nuclear power can be called green if a project promises to deal with radioactive waste.
Greens are furious, not realizing that it was their work that made the EU an energy basket-case pouring money into Russia:
Campaigners are now vowing legal action. WWF said that with its fellow NGO Client Earth it would “explore all potential avenues for further action to stop this greenwashing and protect the credibility of the whole EU taxonomy”.
Two anti-nuclear states, Austria and Luxembourg, have already announced they will take the commission to the European court of justice.
The Washington Post sees the light that renewables can’t make it without help, but credits The War for their awakening and forgets that Donald Trump and a million skeptics were right all along. Excuses, excuses…
The war in Ukraine added new complexities to the debate. The war has made Europe rethink its reliance on Russia, particularly when it comes to fossil fuels, and has amplified calls for an accelerated energy transition.
And they amplified what exactly — an energy transition to gas and nukes?)
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WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, pulled the plug on Thursday on negotiations to salvage key pieces of President Biden’s agenda, informing his party’s leaders that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs…
Think about that. Most drugs are only prescribed by doctors so why advertise on TV at all? It’s not like patients are wandering through Walmart looking for a Pfizer. Should I get the Glaxo instead?
Remember Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible” investing at HSBC who was suspended when he pointed out that climate risks were distant, irrelevant hyperbole? This was at once shocking impermissible and the bleeding obvious. He also dropped the bombshell that the central banker models of climate risks buried massive GDP shocks and interest rate rises so they could find the economic disasters they were looking for.
Germany is rationing hot water, dimming its street lights and shutting down swimming pools as the impact of its energy crunch begins to spread from industry to offices, leisure centres and homes.
We are talking about millions, if not 10 million people moving into real poverty this winter, the worst winter we have seen’. Martin Lewis today warned that the UK is facing a ‘cataclysmic’ energy crisis this winter as the price cap is set to reach £3,000.
Nuclear power has been the NetZeroiest energy on Earth since the sun formed from collapsing interstellar gas. Nuclear plants don’t produce any CO2 at all, but that wasn’t good enough because it was never about CO2 either. It was always about power and money and profits for friends.
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