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President Xi will be delighted that so many industrial competitors are sabotaging their electrical grids with erratic, unreliable solar and wind power. Right now, The People’s Republic of China is the biggest platform in the world for the deployment of nuclear power technology. In twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 48, with 11 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57: By the end of the twentieth century, France’s mature nuclear energy industry operated over fifty nuclear power reactors to supply about 80 percent of the electricity consumed by its population of 60 million people.1 By contrast, when China connects its fiftieth nuclear power reactor to the grid, which is expected in a few years, China’s nuclear power plants will contribute only about 5 percent of the electricity demanded by its population of 1.4 billion.2 At the moment the USA has the largest nuclear generation in the world, with more than double the production of the nearest competitor — France. But China began stockpiling uranium in 2007, and in the last five year plan released in 2016 — China aimed to double nuclear power by the end of 2020. It looks like falling short this year — but by 2030 plans to outdo everyone including the USA. China poised to overtake US in nuclear power by 2030by Kotaro Fukaroka, Nikkei Asian Review. TOKYO — China is on track to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top producer of nuclear energy as early as 2030, reflecting hesitance to build new capacity in Japan and Western nations even as emerging economies move ahead. The trend reflects diverging approaches to nuclear power after the March 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. While the U.S., Europe and Japan grew risk averse in response to public fears, emerging nations have been keener. Indonesia and Philippines are among the countries dusting off old plans for reactors. And China and Russia have emerged as the main suppliers. Nuclear Belt and Road:China is competing with Russia to provide nuclear power in strategic deals, and already has agreements or MOU’s with Pakistan, Romania, Argentina, UK, Iran, Turkey, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Sudan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan. There are fingers in many pies. China would also have a dominant role in the nuclear industry. The bigger China’s nuclear power footprint grows, the more say China will have in global nuclear governance. If China in the coming decades becomes the leading nuclear power country, it will demand and obtain a commensurate role in members’ decisionmaking concerning multilateral technical rulemaking compacts and organizations, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). If China closes the nuclear fuel cycle, global governance mechanisms related to nuclear security and nonproliferation may be adjusted to reflect that accomplishment. David Archibald calculates that China is burning through its coal quickly, but obviously they are well prepared for the next step to nuclear. There are 451 nuclear plants on the planet. Australia has largest uranium reserves in the world but has no nuclear power plants. Given the inevitable rise of nuclear power one way or the other — perhaps we should dig up and burn our 300 years supply of coal while it is still worth digging up? If I were President Xi, I’d be donating to Greenpeace, funding The Greens, and sponsoring Greta to help hobble the competition.
September 1st, 2020 | Tags: China, Nuclear Energy | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear Power |  Print This Post | | Ronald Reagan: “I’m sick and tired of the argument about whether some effort to enforce law and order is going to escalate anything at all…”
Nice civilization you have there. Shame if something happened to it.As Kamala says with a smile: “…they’re not going to stop, and nor should they”. Are the Democrats basically running on extortion: Vote for us so unhappy Democrat voters don’t tear the country apart? She’s talking about protestors (theoretically) but doesn’t seem to mention the rioters, and as the BLM say “silence is violence”. Things the ABC / BBC probably won’t mentionThe Democrats don’t seem to want to stop the mobs. Tucker Carlson explains… Keep reading → … The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in AustraliaAustralians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery. If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”? Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names. Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels. He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to consumers in their purchases. Those frozen peas at Coles have a hidden carbon tax. Labor likes to say “make the polluters pay”. But in the end, it’s always people who pay, no matter how the charge is hidden. But the Liberals are complicit too (with a few brave exceptions like Craig Kelly). What happened to the free market? Why are solar and wind “the way of the future” but twenty years later and people still need to be forced to buy them or they’d go out of business? Enough’s enough. Buried costs in the rise in electricity prices Electricity Cost, Australia. Alan Moran: The average wholesale price for the years 2008/09 – 2014/15 was $45.4 per MWh and more than doubled to over $92.5 per MWh in 2018/19. This increase is purely because of the effect of climate policies and renewables. The cost of coal is not a factor: the limitless supply of Victorian brown coal is not transportable and is priced at its mining cost plus the state tax, which is incorrectly called a royalty and was trebled in 2016, imposing a cost of $2-3 per MWh; black coal of the quality required for domestic generators is also abundant and its price is not markedly influenced by international trends  That’s a lot of money that Australians could spend on other things. Press Release:$13 billion hidden cost on households revealedA landmark economics report shows that climate policies and renewable subsidies cost Australian households around $13 billion per year, or $1300 per household. Senator Roberts commissioned economist Dr Alan Moran to use all existing government data to examine, for the first time, the true cost of climate policies. Senator Roberts said, “Australians will be shocked to know the additional cost of climate policies on our power bills is a staggering 39%, not 6.5% as the government claims. Using the government’s own data means that the report cannot be sensibly refuted.” Dr Moran’s report, The Hidden Cost of Renewables on Electricity Prices, takes an all-inclusive accounting approach, including hidden costs of higher energy prices passed on by business. Senator Roberts stated, “Governments have blatantly distorted and excluded key facts to keep Australians literally in the dark about inflated costs and future unreliability of our electricity. What is abundantly clear is the true cost of electricity would be $13 billion per year less, if cheap reliable coal production was not lumbered with policies that distort the market towards expensive and unreliable wind and solar. Artificially high energy prices savage our living standards and undermine our economic resilience and competitiveness, particularly during our COVID recovery.” Dr Moran found that the weather-dependent wind and solar currently cost the taxpayer $8 billion per year and continue to receive increasing subsidies after two decades. Senator Roberts added, “In terms of a true market economy renewables still remain unviable after 20 years and have become a parasitic malinvestment on our energy systems. These renewable subsidies distort low cost coal-based power generation and increases the wholesale price of electricity from $45.5 per MWh to $92.5 per MWh, at our cost.” Further scrutiny of the job creation in the renewables industry shows renewable subsidies causes a net loss of jobs in the economy, because every subsidised “green” job created, 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy. Full report: The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables Just some of the hidden costs: …  … Follow the money:Those who own the renewables investments make the profits from forced payments from unwilling customers.  Where do the Australian subsidies end up? Australian subsidies employ a lot of people in China, and some people in Australia. But for every Australian who gains a job, two lose theirs as companies move out of Australia to places that don’t pay hidden Climate Taxes. August 28th, 2020 | Tags: Carbon Tax, Moran (Alan), Roberts (Malcolm) | Category: Big-Government, Cost, Electricity, Free markets, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | South Australia has built unreliable generators on one third of all homes in the state. They are expensive, encased in glass, and all fail at the same time, usually for breakfast, and definitely for dinner. They randomly fail when clouds roll in, but consistently fail all night long. When they do work, they all work together, producing an excess of energy when no one need an excess. In order to pretend that this surge is useful, a billion dollars of working infrastructure has to switch off, scale down, spin its wheels, and toss money out the window. A few weeks ago, the State Energy Minister of SA, Dan van Holst Pellekaan, warned that the state is only a few years away from reaching “net negative demand” which is a fancy-pants way of describing the moment that solar power makes more energy than the whole state can use. His reassuring comment was “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.” With 250,000 unreliable generators in the state the midday excess is now so large it threatens to break things, drive up voltages, drive out reliable generators and generally muck up what was a finely tuned system honed over 50 years. There is already so much excess at lunchtime that the Energy Czars want to remotely switching off people’s solar panels at their most productive time, much to the outrage of hapless homeowners who thought they were buying something useful. Rooftop solar destabilising South Australia energy supply, says Dan van Holst Pellekaanby Perry Williams, The Australian, August 5, 2020 One third of the state’s households have rooftop solar systems installed but the strong uptake has created issues for the renewables-heavy grid, with solar at times generating so much surplus energy that demand falls near zero, destabilising the power system. Residents with solar now face the prospect of their rooftop panels being switched off remotely to ensure the grid stays stable and secure. “If the grid reaches net negative demand which under current operations is forecast in South Australia only a few years away, that’s not a political issue, that’s not a market issue, that’s not an environment issue. It’s actually a physics and engineering issue,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told a Smart Energy Council forum on Wednesday. “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.” South Australia has also accelerated a timeline for renewables to provide 100 per cent of its electricity needs with plans to hit the ambitious target by 2030. It didn’t have to be this wayThe entirely artificial rise of solar panels in South Australia:
No wonder South Australia is in so much troubleThe conservative party is in charge now in SA, but here’s the sensible party, telling us how practical they are, while they are trying to change the global weather with green electrons. “We are not philosophically or ideologically constrained in our governance in South Australia,” Mr van Holst Pellekaan told the forum of Australia’s state and territory energy ministers. “We are constrained by a firm conviction that we must move forward with regard to harnessing renewable energy and it must be in a practical way that works for everybody who participates in the market. We’re not locked into ideology. We’re locked into continuing down a path of making sure it’s a practical way to do it.” We’re not ideologues, my foot. It’s projection all the way down. Money, money,moneyIt’s an expensive game — global weather tweaking. The cost of managing the grid is rising fast. The costs of managing the power system soared to $310m in the first quarter of 2020, more than double the previous record set in 2008,consuming 8 per cent of all energy costs for the three month period compared with just 1-2 per cent historically, the Australian Energy Market Operator said. Are these $310 million dollar new costs being borne by the wind farms and solar panel owners? The solution to the destabilization-by-unreliable-generators, is to add more unreliable generators and on top of that — spent $1,500 million dollars on a giant interconnector emergency IV line to NSW. The report also highlights the benefits of a greater interconnected grid as levels of renewable energy increase. In South Australia’s case the proposed EnergyConnect project will dramatically reduce security challenges and allow South Australia and NSW to take advantage of their geographic diversity through their ability to share resources when it is to their economic advantage. This will drain unreliable energy out of South Australia at lunch time and windy days. That way, the surge can destroy the baseload economics of New South Wales as well. It also means South Australia can pretend to be 100% “renewable”, even though it won’t be able to do it without the billion dollar extension cord. August 28th, 2020 | Tags: SA (South Australia), Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | … When the hollering throng comes demanding strangers raise their fists, good people at dinner might agree, and take the path of least resistance. And if everyone did, it becomes another advertisement for a political terror group. “Look everyone supports us!”. But it only took one woman to refuse and the propaganda moment suddenly flipped. If you can’t see the video, you can watch it here.
Is this the point the BLM groupies back up at least on this approach? In comments under this tweet, there are many droll comparisons of Brown Shirts and RedGuards. But even BLM supporters know this went too far: @saletan Anyone who stages this kind of mob aggression is doing the Trump campaign’s work for free. @LAppiah This is just bizarre. I sincerely believe white people need to take a big step back and consult black leaders about what is and isn’t helpful… These comments win the internet today:@GreerMcVay said “I’m convinced these are right wing plants. I just don’t believe BLM advocates would do this.” @RidgePlaysGames: This was a psyop. No one on the left is doing something this stupid and baseless. Others take the mickey: @MichaelTanuvasa How many of these kids have Parents they wont say this shit, too? Honestly they should be looting and burning stuff. Not pulling stunts like this. If you are going to alienate ppl with no plan at least wreck some rich peoples money flow Funnily enough, apparently Lauren B. Victor, the women who wouldn’t accede, explained “It just didn’t feel right” though she could understand their anger. She revealed, “I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching for weeks and weeks.” So these are BLM supporters harrassing a BLM supporter. Civilizations need to discuss these moments, even if the ABC and BBC might not want to. Skeptics know that if people give in to bullies, the mob just asks for more. The new coercion-for-dinner event has gone viral on twitter, but word is only just spreading now into some mainstream news sources. Good people need to be prepared. Speaking of which, if you think the BBC is doing its own form of racism by banning the words to Rule Brittannia and The Land of Hope and Glory, you can sign the petition, and do your best to learn the words and sing these as often as possible. Teach the children. Britain abolished slavery in 1807. Let’s celebrate that.
The first case of a definitive reinfection was reported todayBefore we look at whether a cold gives us protection let’s point out we don’t know how well a SARS 2 infection gives us protection. A 33 year old man in Hong Kong was tested positive nearly five months after his first infection, and with a slightly different variant of the virus, so it’s very likely this was a second infection rather than a resurgence of the first. It hints that Covid may be a bit like the common cold, and our immunity may be partial and temporary which is not good news for the herd immunity idea and the vaccine plan, but it’s only one case. On the plus side, he had a three day fever, cough and sickness in March, but is asymptomatic this time, suggesting that maybe there is enough residual immunity to help him beat the second infection. There have been other reports of people getting reinfected but none of the previous cases had genetic testing of both infections to show they were different. But 13% of 4,000 doctors who were surveyed in May (even at that early stage) believed that at least one of their patients had been reinfected, so it is not that rare. UPDATE: Already today two other cases of reinfection have also turned up in Belgium and the Netherlands. More coming soon… Predictably, vaccine makers are rushing to say that these are not unexpected and probably don’t matter, but other researchers are more concerned. Vaccines are less likely to work for long if our immune systems can’t achieve it with a natural infection. How about Herd Immunity?Keep in mind we don’t know if the second-timer in Hong Kong was infectious this time. His immunity may have helped him feel better, (or it could be that his Vitamin D level was higher in summer) but he may still be able to infect others. This makes all the difference. If people can still reinfect vulnerable family members their immunity is not protecting the herd. Some people are hoping that Herd Immunity may be reached at 20% infected but an asymptomatic infection is not the same as immunity. Asymptomatic people shed just as much virus as symptomatic people. (Seungjae Lee et al) The whole point of herd immunity is the kind of immunity that stops the spread of the virus. After mild Covid-19 infections antibodies seem to fade fairly quickly, with a half life of 73 days. But could that protection be hiding in T cells, rather than antibodies? Our immune system — like the armed forcesT cells are the deep controllers of white blood cells, and in one of their many roles, they activate the B cells that make the antibodies. Normally we test for antibodies to see if people have immunity because that’s the cheapest way to tell if the whole army of immune cells knows what to look for. A fully fledged antibody response is a mature, armed-and-ready response. It is usually assumed that if we don’t have antibodies we don’t have protection.
 T-cells activate B-Cells, which make antibodies. | Image adapted from Mikael Häggström. A flurry of studies have dug deeper and are finding that it’s possible to have T-cells specific to virus without having any detectable antibodies to it. Antibodies are like small sentinels and look outs, sweeping our mucosal surfaces and blood for threats. They offer fast protection, ready to raise the alarm. T-cells, perhaps are the Colonels and Generals as well as the SAS. They can get activated within hours. Albeit, hours can matter with exponential invaders. Can common colds and T-cell memories give us protection? Maybe.One fifth of all our colds are coronaviruses. People are estimated to get a coronavirus cold on average every two to three years. Protective antibodies wane between colds, but cellular (T cell) immunity “could remain”. People appear to get less severe infections after the initial rounds. Sette and Crotty reviewed five studies on T-cells that showed that between 10 and 50% of people who have never been exposed to Coronavirus nonetheless carry T-cells that recognise parts of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. It’s possible that T-cell recognition is useful and gives us a head start, but the authors warn that it might be good, irrelevant or even a bad thing. If the antibodies are aimed at the wrong parts of the virus they may send the immune system out on a dead end path. That’s the ‘original antigenic sin’. Think of a distracted army aiming for the wrong target. It’s also possible that the antibodies themselves are a pest, clogging up the works, or worse — even helping the dang virus get inside immune cells themselves (known as ADE) thus making the infection worse. (It is known to happen in Dengue, Zika, Ebola and with some Coronaviruses). It is frequently assumed that pre-existing T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2 might be either beneficial or irrelevant. However, there is also the possibility that pre-existing immunity might actually be detrimental, through mechanisms such as ‘original antigenic sin’ (the propensity to elicit potentially inferior immune responses owing to pre-existing immune memory to a related pathogen), or through antibody-mediated disease enhancement. [ADE] While there is no direct evidence to support these outcomes, they must be considered. A detrimental effect linked to pre-existing immunity is eminently testable and would be revealed by the same COVID-19 cohort and vaccine studies proposed above. — Sette and Crotty. It is a war out there. We already knew around 45% of the population don’t seem to get any symptoms to Covid-19, so they are protected (from symptoms at least, though half show signs of lung damage). That may be because of their T-Cells, but it may not. Asymptomatic infections may occur because the initial viral load was low (masks help), or because they had a lower expression of ACE2, or higher Vitamin D levels, or high NK (Natural Killer cell) activity. It may be better cytokine production. And it may be something else entirely. T-cells are mostly targeting the side of the spike, not the active endStick with me. We can learn a lot from Braun et al. They looked at which parts of the virus the T cells were reacting to, which matters. As we already know survivors seem to have more antibodies against the spike – not against the nucleocapsid shell. Braun et al used 68 blood samples taken before the epidemic.They exposed their stored blood to the novel virus for 16 hours and found that 24 of the 68 samples proved to have T-cells that reacted in some way to the Coronavirus that they had never come across before. So 35% had some immune recognition. These are probably left over units from past battles with two of the common cold coronaviruses. We even know which two coronavirus common colds, namely 229E and OC43, are the top candidates because they have a few short amino acid sequences that are identical to sequences on the spikes on Covid viruses. To figure out what the Tcells were aiming at, the researchers split the spike into S1 and S2 zones. But most of the T cells were reacting to the S2 part, and only 6% of the total sample carried T-cells that recognised the S1 part — which is probably the most important part as it contains the RBD (Receptor Binding Domain) at the active end of the spike — that’s the zinger hot spot that sticks to our ACE2 receptors. This quiet line in Braun et al seemed important: ” Most COVID-19 patients with critical disease exhibited no reactivity to S-I “ Could it be that sickest patients were extra sick because they are not targeting the S1 area? Perhaps their immune systems were aiming at the wrong part of the spike? It’s not clear that T cells against the S2 area will help. This may be the antigenic sin Sette referred to, though Sette reviewed the Braun et al paper but did not comment on the S1 and S2 ratio. The Braun et al paper was hard work to decipher. This diagram from Meirson et al helped explain what was going on. (My explanation of what this means is below).  Figure 1. Structural comparison of SARS-CoV-2 S protein conformational states. (A) Surface diagram of SARS-CoV-2 homotrimeric structure in the unbound- closed and open conformations. (B) Structural illustration of S protein, including functional domains (NTD, N-terminal domain; RBD, receptor-binding domain; CTD2, C-terminal domain 2; CTD, C-terminal domain 3; and proteolytic cleavage sites (S1/S2, S2’). (C) S trimer with one RBD in the open conformation and (D) RBD-ACE2 complex shown as a cartoon. (E) Superposed structures depicting the conformational changes between the unbound-open (left) to the ACE2-bound state. (Meirson et al, 2020)
Deciphering the spike picture above: A/ Shows the spike in an open and closed form. The RBD means Receptor Binding Domain. That is the key spot that sticks to the ACE2 receptor. Obviously we don’t want that to happen. The “key” that clamps onto our cells is a way to open the door. B/ Shows the genetic map. One spike is made of three repeats of this code string. The RBD is on the first part of the coding string (which the researchers call S1). Looking at picture D, we see that the N terminal end starts near the virus membrane then reaches out along the spike to the important RBD. Then the string folds back on itself so that the C terminal ends up close to the starting point. The middle of the string sticks out on spike. C/ One of the spike sections hinges open. D/ The skeleton of the long string molecules, plus the ACE2 molecule the spike sticks too. Everything in biology is done in strings — that’s how they are read from the code. E/ Some pretty tricky engineering changes happen as the spike bites the ACE2 receptor. The spike proteins are quite different in the different coronaviruses, but there are a few common sections and some people have antibodies to parts on what is called the C-terminal. The question that matters — are these T-Cells that recognise this part of the spike useful in preventing a bad disease. Do they neutralize the virus, or just clog up our antibody tests? Here’s another image below, a bit like the one above. The skinny part of the spike is connected to the virus. The fat part is seeking out your ACE2 cells and wants to clamp on them. The two orange parts are probably the most important targets of antibodies.  N terminal, C Terminal, SARS CoV2, graphic, spike, Covid. Rahman et al
The big questionsCan T-cells protect us from a bad Covid infection? Are they the reason about 45% of people appear not to get any symptoms at all? But if these T cells are useful why do so many medical workers catch Covid? Why are the ranges of T cell responses here so wide? There is the puzzle that children suffer worse colds, yet get better protection from Covid, though have at least as much virus in their noses and throats. Will people with reinfections of Covid shed less virus than the first time?
Keep reading → … The low carbon idea is a frivolous fashion, but could airships take some freight from container ships? Seems unlikely but there are visions here of giant caravans of airships lifting into jetstreams and travelling perpetually eastwards. And there are already models competing for start up funds. Airships use a lot less fuel than jets do, but a lot more helium, which is a point that gets a mention, but not much of an answer. How airships could provide the future of green transportAmbrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph A Boeing 747 requires at least 70 tonnes of aviation fuel to cross the Atlantic. Mr Handley says his ARH 50 model has the same cargo payload but needs just five tonnes of fuel for the same journey, yet can still reach 300 km/h at high altitude. Airships can land anywhere there is a flat space — they don’t need the runways and airports. They can get closer to their destination. Even landing on a river. An academic paper from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis In Austria proposes using the Jet Stream to transport cargo on transcontinental routes without any need for power beyond the initial lift and descent. The cargo ships would float on high winds above 40,000 feet at an average speed of 160 km/h, displacing fleets of container shipping at sea. The study claims that they would cut fuel use by 96pc. The circular flow would always be from West to East – Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York to London, or Frankfurt to Mumbai – rotating in a perennial circuit. It would take eight days to cross half the world by the northern Jet Stream, and seven days by the southern route, beating maritime shipping on time as well as emissions. These unmanned super-Hindenburgs controlled by artificial intelligence could be over a mile long, spectral airships passing far overhead in caravans along regulated bands near the troposphere, emitting no sound or CO2. Is there enough helium in the world to sustain a big airship industry? We know a low carbon fantasy (with subsidies) can support an uncompetitive industry for a long time. But do airships make sense without the subsidy? Some Australian researchers visiting China turned out to be effectively Chinese researchers funded by Australians.What does it mean to be an Australian citizen paid by Australian taxpayers if it’s “OK” to take $150,000 extra from the CCP, plus benefits for the wife and kids, and in some cases also keep that a secret from the Uni in Australia that they work for? How about having a cloned research project in China studying the same high tech topics and producing patents owned by the Chinese government? The “Thousand Talents Plan” has been described by FBI director Christopher Wray as “economic espionage”. It includes military technology, drone automation, AI, biotech, and many high tech areas. To put a fine point on it, some of these researchers are signing up to agreements to obey Chinese laws, and which require them to ask permission from the CCP before they disclose these arrangements to their Australian employers. We might be tempted to call this all sort of names, but this sort of activity is apparently legal. It’s just a loophole being exploited. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s new report: Hunting the phoenix: The Chinese Communist Party’s search for technology and talent. Remember Peter Ridd can be sacked for being uncollegial, but it appears that academics who may undermine national interests and give away intellectual property are acting within the law. Where were the Vice Chancellors? What were they thinking: Employment contracts stop Australian professors from speaking freely in Australia, but allow them to serve the CCP at our expense? Looks like one civilization is fast asleep at the wheel. Some things matter: China exploits Australia’s lax laws to sign up researchers for secretive programSharri Markson, and Kylar Louisikian, The Australian The Chinese government is actively recruiting leading Australian scientists for a secretive research program that offers lucrative salaries and perks but requires their inventions to be patented in China and obliges them to abide by Chinese law. The Australian’s investigation has exposed that universities do not know: how many Thousand Talents Plan recipients are in their employ; if their academics are lodging patents in China; and whether their academics are being paid second salaries by affiliated Chinese universities. Thank goodness for The Australian newspaper which has a large feature story today. Where was Our ABC?Andrew Hastie M.P. has called for an “urgent” inquiry into the Thousand Talents Plan. The Australian’s summary:
It works out pretty well for interested researchers: Professor Yu specialises in drone automation and artificial intelligence, and has been working on an area of intense interest to the Chinese government: aerial warfare and co-ordinating thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles to co-operate in the air. Chinese-language reports state he is part of Chinese government recruitment programs including the Qianjiang Scholar of Zhejiang Provincial Talents program and the Taishan Scholars Project, Shandong Province. Despite being on full-time pay at Curtin [in Western Australia], where he receives a 60 per cent loading on a professor’s salary and his research institute has been funded to the tune of $4m, The Australian understands he has spent most of the year in China. After The Australian contacted him and Curtin University, Professor Yu’s Hangzhou Dianzi profile became unavailable for public view. Curtin declined to answer specific questions about him, despite issuing a press release with great fanfare when it appointed him to the role of Optus Chair of Artificial Intelligence in May last year. … Some in the US woke up to this late last year:Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, Dec 2019 Officials are concerned about spying and intellectual-property theft. U.S. officials say TTP encourages economic espionage and theft of intellectual property, the issue at the heart of President Trump’s trade war with China. Was any of this a secret? Hardly. Until last September, China published the names of recruits on an official website. That all ended when a Chinese American engineer (and TTP participant) working for General Electric Co. was arrested for allegedly stealing tech secrets from the company. That’s a lot of patent applications:  Patent applications from China and the US. : Bloomberg
The CCP have been recruiting scientists all over the world:Ben Packham in The Australian Chinese Communist Party uses ‘talent stations’ to lure scientists: reportThe Chinese Communist Party has at least 57 talent recruitment “stations” in Australia to lure the top scientists to work for Beijing on Xi Jinping’s goal of global dominance in critical technologies, a new report says. The ASPI report says an estimated 1000 Australian scientists are believed to have been recruited to participate in its overseas talent plans, with many working on technologies that can be harnessed by the Chinese military. China’s talent program recruiters are paid up to $40,000 for each scientist they recruit, plus annual operating costs, the report by China analyst Alex Joske says. They are part of a web of more than 600 such stations located in technologically advanced countries. In the highest profile example of alleged misconduct by a Chinese talent plan scientist, Harvard Professor Charles Lieber, a nanotechnologist with no Chinese heritage, was arrested earlier this year for allegedly failing to disclose a US$50,000 monthly salary from a Chinese university. Notably, China doesn’t want to adopt many of our climate scientists, I can’t think why. But there are several that are claimed to be involved. For example, Wenju Cai at CSIRO is named in many Chinese sites as being a part of the Thousand Talents Plan, though the CSIRO says this is not true. He works at CSIRO in Climate and marine science, and officially also at the Qingdao National Marine Laboratory in China. That lab has 3,000 researchers and some of them are involved in satellite mounted laser detection of submarines at depths of 500m. Professor Cai admits to being a part of the Aoshan Talent program, a different Chinese program which The Australian tells us can pay up to $200,000 a year with research funds of up to $1m, and includes help for some to buy a house if they sign up for the 6 year plan. The Australian does not specifically claim any benefits in Professor Cai’s case. There is also Huijun Zhao, Griffith University, director of the Centre for Clean Environment and Energy, which researches chemical and microbiological approaches to pollution. The Australian only says he receives a daily allowance for expenses when he is in China. Also Dai Liming University of NSW, a specialist in carbon based, metalfree renewable energy technology. Professor Andrew McMinn, Uni of Tas, who is a researcher of sea ice ecology and environmental change. His university knew about it. How about Professor Zhaoyang (Joe) Dong, University of NSW, who is a specialist in power system planning and stability and is director of the UNSW Digital Grid Futures Institute. Professor Dong heads one of Australia’s largest energy research projects — the ARC Hub for Integrated Energy Storage. “As a consultant he also leads the development of the load models for Western Power Corporations daily usage in operations and planning of Western Australia;s transmission network. He further leads the gas and electricity network co-planning for the $12.6m CSIRO Future Grid Project.” Then there is Professor Guoxiu Wang at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) who denies being a Thousand Talent recruit. He specialises in energy storage and batteries. UTS says that China is loosely referring to him being in the Thousand Talents program and it is merely a mark of respect, not that he is part of the official program. The Australian discovered his name was on 11 patent applications, but Professor Dong says he had no knowledge of 10 of those applications. He has asked for his name to be taken off them. If there are weaknesses and vulnerabilities in Australian energy grids, China is possibly very well informed of them, and if we did discover an efficient battery we might end up buying them from China and paying for the royalties on their discovery too. * * * Commenters please note: “The Australian is not suggesting the academics have acted inappropriately.” That goes for Jo Nova too, and I ask commenters to refrain from suggesting this behaviour is illegal. It may be unethical, unAustralian, shortsighted, naive and selfish, but it is not illegal. More fool us. There are plenty of targets to blame for enabling this behaviour and allowing this to go on for years. Solar Power, not-so-sustainable?Solar panels need a special kind of recycling that costs 4 to 8 times as much as the recycled bits and bobs are worth. And the first major generation of solar panels will hit their use-by date soon. Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash Maddie Stone, Wired By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. The solar sleeper awakes:Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel take-back and recycling, collects several thousand tons of solar e-waste across the European Union each year… In the EU the producers have to recycle the panels they make. Rules to deal with solar remnants are apparently in progress in Australia, India and Japan, but there are almost none in the USA. At a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely. Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.” At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill. Second-hand solar panels are being sent to the third world. Makes a cheaper form of landfill… h/t Enoch R August 24th, 2020 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable, Solar Power | Print This Post | | A satirical take on the media.
How to Sell Protest Footage to FOX AND CNN, by Ryan Long. So there’s still a bias, but if he’d used a sledgehammer CNN fans wouldn’t be laughing too, and they need to see this more than Fox fans do. …. It’s really quite a scandal.  Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin? Historians will marvel that societies that were advanced enough to stream reality-tv-shows at 100 million bits per second, were also so backwards that half the population was deficient in Vitamin D — something that costs 6 cents a dose or comes free from the sun. Nearly 60% of older Germans were deficient, and the ESTHER study puts a fine point on how much that matters. Almost 10,000 people were followed for 15 years in Germany, and during that time about half the people who died of respiratory illnesses might not have died if they had enough Vitamin D. In this German study 44% did not have adequate Vitamin D and about 1 in 6 people have levels so low they are clinically deficient. Imagine if someone found a drug that stopped nearly half of all influenza deaths? Right now, the Northern Hemisphere has higher levels of Vitamin D than most months which is quite likely reducing the death rates. The message needs to get out about Vitamin D before the next Northern Winter.
 Morethan half the population is deficient. In terms of respiratory diseases, those whose vitamin D was under the recommended levels were twice as likely to die. And those that were clinicially deficient were three times as likely to die. This was especially true for women, with the risk of dying as much as eight fold higher. As I said in April — Vitamin D affects 200 genes and is implicated in many afflictions: Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137299v1 The risk ratios are pretty astonishing: The Abstract Background. The COVID-19 pandemic goes along with increased mortality from acute respiratory disease, and measures to limit the spread of the infection go along with increased risk of vitamin D deficiency, especially among high risk groups. It has been suggested that vitamin D3 supplementation might help to reduce respiratory disease mortality. Methods. We assessed the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency, defined by 25(OH)D blood levels of 30-50 and <30 nmol/L, respectively, and their association with mortality from respiratory diseases during 15 years of follow-up in a cohort of 9,548 adults aged 50-75 years from Saarland, Germany. Results. Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency were common (44% and 15%, respectively). Compared to sufficient vitamin D status, respiratory disease mortality was 2.1 (95%-CI 1.3-3.2)- and 3.0 (95%-CI 1.8-5.2)-fold increased, respectively. Although significant increases were seen in both women and men, they were much stronger among women, with 8.5 (95% CI 2.4-30.1) and 2.3 (95% CI 1.1-4.4)-fold increase of respiratory disease mortality in case of vitamin D deficiency among women and men, respectively (p-value for interaction =0.041). Overall, 41% (95% CI 20%-58%) of respiratory disease mortality was statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. Conclusion. Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency are common and account for a large proportion of respiratory disease mortality in older adults, supporting suggestions that vitamin D3 supplementation might make a major contribution to limit the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among women. Don’t get caught without your vitamin D. (UPDATE: and if you take D3, best add K2 as well lest that Ca end up in your arteries instead of your bones). REFERENCEBrenner, Holleczek, and Schoettker, B. (2020) Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency and mortality from respiratory diseases in a cohort of older adults: potential for limiting the death toll during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137299v1 See also: Vitamin D deficiency affects so many health conditions. Some thought provoking insights from Yoram Hazony in The Challenge Of Marxism. I’m not inclined to read analysis of anything Marxist, but this moment in history has some uncanny similarities I was not aware of, and Hazony connects the dots from Karl to Kamala (so to speak). He paints a compelling pattern, even if I want to add details and patterns myself. It’s a springboard… Read it all. The Marxists have forced out the Conservatives, now the wheel has turned and they’re coming for the Liberals, argues Hazony. The Liberal world thought they were marching through the institutions but the momentum was with the Marxists among them, who have now forged ahead and are turning on their own. Will the liberals drop their liberalism and adopt marxism, or will they push back?Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition. This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals. This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. Language is a weapon, and they shalt not be known publicly as Marxists but by a shifting sea of names: …they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them. But they are Marxists: The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows: Hazony goes through the core Marxist concepts and we can see how so much of this framework is at play today: There is class warfare preying on people’s envy, the oppressors and oppressed. There is the invisible unknown hand of oppression that has been “AWoken”. 1. Oppressor and oppressed “…people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another…” 2. False consciousness “…the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors,…. even the working class may not know that they are exploited. “ 3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society The oppressed seize control of the state. Revolution or war. 4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms Everything will be peace and roses again if they just throw out the Orange Man. Like Marx, it’s a wonderful future but no one has any idea how to get back to peace and happiness after the revolution. I can’t do it all justice without repeating much of it. Hazoiny argues that Marxists ideas are attractive because there is a little truth underlying the tension. Groups do form. Power relations between them do have different interests and it can resemble a ruler and slave, but in most normal times it is a symbiotic relationship, not pure exploitation. The shallowness of Marxism is the superficial appeal without the principles that go under and around it. I crave a slightly more biological model — one that uses evolution and an understanding of groups and battles from power. But Hazomy powers through some core contradictions that power the Liberals. I think the biggest problem with Liberals is that they are not liberal (when the crunch comes) on the most important liberty liberals are meant to defend — free speech. Hazony writes of a group that aims for an impractical Utopia, believes in reason rather than tradition, and thus the Marxists use every admission of failing as a way to control the Liberals. In 2020 the control has become hidden in plain view as nearly every opinion (other than the permitted one) is delegitimized. Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this: 1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights. 2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights. 3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights. 4. Return to #1 above and repeat. Liberals and Marxists are locked in this endless dance. I know that many liberals are confused, and that they still suppose there are various alternatives before them. But it isn’t true. At this point, most of the alternatives that existed a few years ago are gone. Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices. (Read it all). https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/ Hypothetically, can anyone think of a scenario where an honest win is still possible, and it will be seen to be an honest win?
Mail in votes can also be cast early — before even one debate. Sixteen states will allow voting before September 29th with people missing fully five weeks of campaigning and discussion. Isn’t there something deeply wrong about that — something that favors the lesser scrutinized candidate? Something that favours the candidate the media wants to elect and does free advertising for? Then there is the systematic problem with every man, woman and dog becoming effective electoral officers handling ballots with no observers present. We know Mail-in Voting offers a huge advantage to the Democrats and collectivists, and they know it too — just look at which side yells the loudest in protest at the thought that it might be fraudulent. The potential to cheat is so obvious most countries don’t allow mail-in ballots. Thirty seven US states have already changed their mail-in ballot rules, but overseas almost no country allows it without photo ID, or limit it to the disabled or people overseas. How is this not a recipe for disaster? Frank Miele: Election Roulette: How to Rig an OutcomeUnlike absentee ballots or early voting, which require active participation by the voter, universal mail-in voting means that every registered voter will be sent a ballot whether they want one or not — heck, even whether they are alive or not. Fact of the matter is that cheating on mail ballots is child’s play. Here, off the top of my head, are four ways to monkey with the vote: 1) A hard-core Democrat union-rep mailman is collecting mail from households in a neighborhood that skews Republican. He dutifully collects the ballots left for him, but then dumps them in the trash or (smarter) burns them in his fire pit later that night. What is the protection against this happening? Or any of the remaining scenarios below? 2) A hard-core Democrat nurse’s aide making 10 bucks an hour decides to monkey-wrench the system that she thinks is exploiting her. When she collects the ballots from 120 residents in the nursing home where she works, she volunteers to drop them at the post office “to make sure they are secure,” but then heads home and buries them in the backyard. 3) A pizza delivery guy enters an apartment building with a large pepperoni and leaves with a carton of blank ballots that were left in the lobby for pickup by the residents. The pizza guy happens to be a member of antifa and he has no problem filling out all the ballots against President Trump and the Republicans. Even if the fraud is discovered, it is highly unlikely that all the ballots will be disqualified. 4) A Democratic campaign aide who is working to “get out the vote” in a neighborhood with a high proportion of older people knocks on doors and offers to help voters mark their ballots. Not a citizen? No problem. That’s been waived. Not sure who to vote for? How about that nice Democrat! And if you do happen to vote Republican, no problem — I will deliver it for you … right to the Dumpster! So when Election 2020 is over, if the Dems don’t win, they’ll be outraged because the polls told them they would win. If the Trump supporters lose, they’ll know it was rigged, because there is no way it won’t be. It’s just a question of “how much”. When elections can’t be done so that either side respects the outcome, it defeats the whole point of an election as a peaceful way to sort out national differences. How is that not eventually the road to civil war? h/t David E
The “Aeronabs” are on the way?
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