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Just like that: Germany U-turns, and wants unfashionable energy like nuclear, coal, and gas

All it took was a War.

Policies based on fashion can be dead-set one day and gone the next. Until Saturday Germany was about to close its last nuclear power plants, gas production had been falling for 20 years and it planned to phase out coal plants by 2030.

Germany was the largest energy consumer in Europe, but was also determined to pursue Energiewende, the policy of transitioning from fossil fuels.

On Sunday all that changed:

Nuclear, coal, LNG: ‘no taboos’ in Germany’s energy about-face

By Christoph Steitz, Riham Alkousaa and Maria Sheahan, Reuters

In a landmark speech on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz spelled out a more radical path to ensure Germany will be able to meet rising energy supply and diversify away from Russian gas, which accounts for half of Germany’s energy needs.

“The events of the past few days have shown us that responsible, forward-looking energy policy is decisive not only for our economy and the environment. It is also decisive for our security,” Scholz told lawmakers in a special Bundestag session called to address the Ukraine crisis.

This will include building two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, one in Brunsbuettel and one in Wilhelmshaven, and raising its natural gas reserves.

Graph, gas production, Germany, 1998 - 2020

Graph, gas production, Germany, 1998 – 2020 | Statista

An energy crisis is also a security crisis.  Germany cancelled the Nord Stream gas pipe that would have brought even more gas from Russia.

Germany follows the UK and France in shifting energy policy away from unreliable intermittent green power. Last September the UK announced they were getting into small modular reactors. By October they were putting nuclear power ahead of the intermittent unreliables as a way to transition to “Net Zero”. Late in 2021, France decided to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors.

As of Sunday, Germany is also spending a lot more on their military.

In 2018, one World leader did warn Germany that they were too dependent on Russian gas, and they should have spent more on their military.

Note the reference to the corruption that plagues all of the West: “The Former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that is supplying the gas” … “you tell me, is that appropriate?”

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The Free world fights back. Anonymous hacks Russian state TV and government sites. Twitter is part of the war effort: #Ukraine

The World watches Ukraine. As the citizens are turning themselves into an army, they are being trained on Twitter, on how to beat tanks, pick strategic targets, and of course, there will be a propaganda campaign. Nothing can be verified.  Except for the remarkable bravery of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who knocked back an offer to be evacuated, and is fighting with the army. He is being treated as a hero — the new leader of the free world.

Winning hearts all over the world has a material benefit. Hackers are working to punish Putin, theatening an unprecedented cyberwar that will cripple his websites and expose all his secrets. “We are Anonymous. We are legion. Expect us”. There are reports #Anonymous has already taken down six Russian government websites, and have even hacked into Russian state TV stations as well, showing what is happening in Ukraine. “Soon you will feel the wrath of the worlds hackers many of which may reside in your country.”  Elon Musk has also offered the Starlink Satellites for Ukraine to use.

While Russia used Shock and Awe, the Ukrainians appear to be winning now. Though if Russian armored columns make it through to Kyiv that may change. Putin cannot afford to lose.

With Russian fertility being so low for so long, the people of Russia will not bear many sons lost.

The people of China and Taiwan will be watching too. If Ukraine wins, it may slow Xi.

From #Ukraine




Russian special forces disguised as Ukrainian soldiers captured. Under Geneva convention, they lose the rights to be treated as POW. Ukraine can execute them.

Russians protesting en masse to stop the war.

There are many tweets claiming to show captured Russian soldiers Eg: Getting a cigarette, being allowed beds, described as young new recruits who were told they were on a training mission. Obviously it is in the interest of Ukraine to convince Russians to surrender.

There are instructions on Twitter for people in Ukraine to turn off their geolocation phone trackers because the Russians are using them to identify gatherings.  There are also strategic directions telling Ukrainians to identify and stop the unarmoured fuel transports so that the tanks will run out of fuel.

Meanwhile people in Kyiv are reporting that the Russian tanks made it inside the city on the first day when fog stopped the Javelins from destroying them, and the Russians also had paratrooper support to protect them. The Ukrainians are asking for suggestions on how to stop the  T-72 tanks when they don’t even have fuel for molotov cocktails, and commenters are providing lists of ways to defeat them. Anti T-72 suggestions include using barbed wire to clog tracks, and wires across roads so the tanks have to keep “buttoned up”.

I’m no fan of Twitter, they are no friend of the Free World in the West. But at the moment, the new wars use social media, and it marks an important point in the battle of the people against State power. If people find these links on alternate social media I will replace them. We all need an exit plan from the tyrannical Tech Giants.

It is not all Ukrainian wins:


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Sunday Open Thread

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Might be some downside there: Stock market bubble bigger than 1929

John Hussman warns that people may not realize how much stocks are likely to crash

Dr David Evans supplied some interesting links and adds “The biggest theme in markets is that ratios eventually revert to their mean (or average). No, it’s not different this time. A return to average on this graph implies a drop of about 75%.”

 

Hassman Margin-Adjusted P/E (US stock market price-earning ratio (adjusted))

John Hussman: Investors are paying top dollar for top dollar

Why is it so hard to accept that speculative bubbles can burst? Interest rates were driven to zero for a decade. Yield-starved investors chased stocks to valuations beyond the 1929 and 2000 extremes. That speculation front-loaded more than a decade of future market gains into the present. Those gains are now behind us, embedded in breathtaking multiples. If history is any guide, a collapse in valuations is likely to return those gains to the future.

The process of losing speculative gains and recovering them over time is what I’ve often called a “long, interesting trip to nowhere.” It bears repeating that the S&P 500 lagged Treasury bills from 1929-1947, 1966-1985, and 2000-2013. 50 years out of an 84-year period.

Now, it’s not impossible to “grow your way out” of extreme valuations, but the arithmetic can be daunting. For example, given that our most reliable valuation measures are about 3.6 times their historical norms, consider this. Even if these valuation measures were simply to touch their historical norms 30 years from today, prices would have to grow about 4% slower than fundamentals for that entire period (1/3.6 ^ 1/30 – 1 = -0.0418). When you realize that S&P 500 revenues, nonfinancial gross value-added, and nominal GDP have all grown at a rate of only about 4% over the past 10, 20, and 30 years, that 4% valuation headwind would combine to leave the S&P 500 unchanged over those 30 years.

Mish Shedlock: Most People Have No Idea How Much Stocks are Likely to Crash

Is there any escape? In aggregate no. For every seller there is a buyer. In this case a buy-the-dipper. Someone must hold every stock every step of the way down, and pension funds will do just that.

Individually, investors have a choice. You can cash out, lighten up, or try to buy value. … But most won’t. It is extremely difficult to believe what … Hussman is saying, and what I am saying. …

The upcoming decline will shock most bears. Many will buy the dip, then that dip and then the next dip. Some hedge funds will do this with leverage and blow up.

If you just retired and think you have a big next egg and can ride it out in equities, expect your portfolio to fall by 50%, minimum.

If you are age 24 with few assets, you should be rooting for an epic decline. …

For sure, the Fed will “try” to halt the decline. And so will Congress by sloshing money everywhere.

The beneficiary of fiscal and Fed stimulus is highly likely to be gold.

Faith in the Fed is a key driver for gold. And it blew the third major bubble in just over 20 years.

The Fed has no credibility and that should already be obvious. Soon it will be unavoidably obvious.

David Evans also often points out that gold is the currency that competes against the central bankers: “It’s an anti-cheating device”. It’s a rare currency that government can’t print from nothing, and ease into quantitative oblivion.

Though Big Bankers have other tools, such as shorts on a paper-gold market, which discourage punters from running away from fiat dollars into other stores of wealth, like precious metals. And surprise, just as War breaks out, uncertainty goes through the roof and for some reason the price of gold falls $100. None of which make sense but works out well for the Big Bankers. Conveniently.

Dr David Evans: Jo’s other half, mathematician and founder of GoldNerds.

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As the US, EU shrink, Russia grows: In 2020 the US was the worlds largest oil and gas producer

Marc Morano is On Fire

The man from Climate Depot


Morano: ‘In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance’

MORANO: “We are already seeing – the first part of it is in California, $6 a gallon. Gas is already up a dollar. Estimates are seven, $8 a gallon possible with recession if Putin, who we’ve given all of this power to by literally shutting down U.S. domestic energy.

Just a little history lesson here. In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance. We were the world’s largest oil and gas producer. More energy exports and imports, more energy production than consumption and we hadn’t done that since Harry Truman was president. Joe Biden came in at he said the first thing he wanted to do was jail fossil fuel executives. Biden’s energy secretary had done a video singing about no more gasoline, The is world aflame due to global warming.

Keep reading  →

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Hm? A tiny part of the Covid spike is the same as something Moderna patented in 2016

Just another day in a cold Biotech War?

“The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.”

Coronavirus structure

Image: Scientific Animations

To put this in perspective the whole virus is essentially a code with 29,000 bases in a row, and this story is about a sequence of 19.

The code is in the same four letter “alphabet”, more or less, as all life on Earth — A, T*, C and G. But in this new discovery there are 19 particular bases (or nucleotides) in a row. These are the bases that were so useful that Moderna patented the sequence in 2016.  Oddly, no other coronavirus has that sequence. Indeed, nothing else in a virus or animal cell does either.

The reason these 19 bases are so interesting is that they make up the critical point called the “Furin Cleavage Site”. Furin is an enzyme inside our cells that acts like a specialist scissor, cutting only certain proteins in an exact way. A number of nasty germs sneak in and use our Furin snippy tools too —  like HIV and Ebola, and also influenza, dengue and now one coronavirus.  The “Furin Cleavage Site” is the part of the virus spike that has a target painted on it for the Furin enzyme to find. It’s the exact right configuration to get “the snip”.And this snip or bit of pruning is “vital for human and ferret transmission”. It also seems to make the disease more severe.

h/t to OriginalSteve and Will

Now scientists find virus contains tiny chunk of DNA that matches sequence patented by Moderna THREE YEARS before pandemic began

Connor Boyd, DailyMail

It is the only coronavirus of its type to carry 12 unique letters that allow its spike protein to be activated by a common enzyme called furin, allowing it to spread between human cells with ease.

Twelve of the shared letters make up the structure of Covid’s furin cleavage site, with the rest being a match with nucleotides on a nearby part of the genome.

Writing in the paper, led by Dr Balamurali Ambati, from the University of Oregon, the researchers said the matching code may have originally been introduced to the Covid genome through infected human cells expressing the MSH3 gene.

The exactly 19 letters are CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, since you asked. The researchers write that this is “very rare in the NCBI BLAST database. (That’s the huge US government collection of gene sequences). Indeed, they say, it is absent “from any eukaryotic or viral genome”Eukaryote being the word that describes any life on Earth more complicated than a bacteria.

So the exact 19 letter sequence is only found in the Moderna patent and SARS-2 which is, well… “odd”.

As an aside, in this story, the DailyMail is pushing the upper bounds of science communication. I’ve never seen a newspaper get this interested or this detailed in genetic codes — it’s all the more surprising given it is also the kind of newspaper which has several clickbait bikini-clad news stories every single day.

It’s a strange moment we are living in. I’m glad the DailyMail is looking.

Furin Cleavage Site

Furin Cleavage Site

 

But don’t forget that it’s the 12 nucleotides in the middle of the 19 that especially matter, because they are the new nucleotides that weren’t in SARS-1.

CT|CCTCGGCGGGCA|CGTAG

So, what are the odds of these bolded 12 new bases appearing. The paper tries to calculate and the authors estimate the odds of these occurring naturally are one-in-[thirty-one-billion**]. I never get too excited about  declarations of that sort. But the paper authors feel this is ” highly unusual and requires further investigations” which is definitely true.

The DailyMail found some other experts who are not so sure at all — viruses are, after all, mutation machines, and an infected person might be making a trillion viruses per ml in their saliva, so even one-in-three-trillion odds can be all in a days work. Nonetheless, as The DailyMail recognises, those who do know what’s going on have lied about every part of this epidemic from the start.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, an eminent British expert who publicly denounced the theory as a ‘conspiracy’, admitted in a private email in February 2020 that a ‘likely explanation’ was that the virus was man-made.

The then-UK Government adviser said at the time he was ’70:30 or 60:40′ in favour of an accidental release versus natural origin.

In the email, sent to American health chiefs Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, Sir Jeremy said it was possible Covid had been evolved from a Sars-like virus in the lab.

He went on that this seemingly benign process may have ‘accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans’.

But the British scientist was shut down by his counterparts in the US who warned further debate about the origins of the virus could damage ‘international harmony’.

And this is possibly the Crime of the Century, so we ought pay attention. If WWIII has bioweapons, the more of us that understand them, the better.

________________

*Yes, in RNA the code letter T is really a U. That’s a long and interesting story for another day.

**Corrected from 3 trillion, which the Dailymail got wrong, and I carelessly copied. Thanks Robert and Leo.  Not that “trillion” or “billion” matters much in the silly game of “what are the odds”.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Webinar (Tues): Is the Great Barrier Reef in danger (or is it just a marketing tool to raise funds for the Green Blob?)

Join Peter Ridd, Jo Nova, Walter Starck and Alan Moran for the Great Barrier Reef Webinar

Tuesday March 1: Sign up here: AEF Webinar: Is the Great Barrier Reef Dying or Thriving?

Corals, Fish, at Flynn Reef, Great Barrier Reef, Photo.

Photo: Wise Hok Wai Lum

One side of politics has just spent another billion dollars to “save the reef”. The other side of politics may spend even more. But how much is our national policy set by scientific data and how much is controlled by scenic-disaster-shots? Do Australian academics and media activists craft a false notion of a fantasy Reef-Nirvana where bleaching never occurred, where cyclones were gentle, and where corals are supposed to live in aquarium-like conditions with constant pH and temperature 24 hours a day? Is the reef really in worse condition now than thirty years ago when half of our man-made emissions had not been emitted?

Walter Starck wants to know why we have one the largest fishing zones per capita in the world but most families struggle to afford to eat Australian fish?

A STICKY POST. Details below.

Keep reading  →

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Green weakness enables wars. Punish Russia by burning more Coal, Gas, Shale and Nuclear power

While the West went weak-Green, Russia became the 2nd largest gas supplier on Earth

Extinction Rebellion protester

“The Eco-Hair-Shirt of Climate-Changey sufferance comes at a terrible price”

The Renewable-West is toothless to stop Russia doing whatever it damn-well wants.

Energy is power. As the West gave up the power to run its own factories and keep its own people warm, it also gave up the power to influence world affairs. The fashionable Eco-Hair-Shirt of Climate-Changey sufferance comes at a terrible price.

Weakness invites wars

Without its own energy supply, amidst an energy crisis, the West can’t help but buy gas from Russia. The only sanctions we can apply are weak and thus the West pays top dollar for Russian gas, and sends more tank-money to a nation with power because it’s selling a product that everyone wants. Nobody wants a wind farm unless someone else pays a subsidy.

The best thing the West could do now is run their old coal and nuclear plants at top speed, launch the UK Shale industry, and get serious about the North Sea. Then the price of gas would fall, the EU could use sanctions that mattered.

Instead Germany is shutting nuclear plants, Britain is pouring concrete down the its only shale mines, and much of the EU is gas-deprived from subsidizing unreliable energy and demonizing gas.

Some of these nations won’t be cutting off Russian Gas very quickly:

Graph, countries buying Russian Gas

https://www.statista.com/chart/26768/dependence-on-russian-gas-by-european-country/

Greens enable wars

How the Greens Brought War to Ukraine

Clarice Feldman

It has been the equivalent of a poker player discarding a royal straight flush and then trying to bluff his opponents with the pair of deuces remaining in his hand. Only with dumb opponents is he likely to take the pot. And Russian President Putin is definitely not dumb.

Indeed, the weak sanctions proposed by the West to induce the Russians to pull back were so unimpressive the Russian stock market which has been collapsing rose 6.5 percent after President Biden announced them.

Lawrence Kudlow:

Mr. Biden did follow Germany in not certifying Nord Stream 2, but that’s just a temporary, paper contract issue. It’s not a long-term or permanent shutdown. He basically hit a couple of banks tied to the Donbas region. The GDP for the whole of Ukraine is about $160 billion, maybe. The GDP of Donbas is less than $6 billion and the GDP of Lugansk is $1 billion, also maybe. Delaware’s GDP, just to pick a random comparison, is $76 billion. So, to call Mr. Biden’s sanctions small beer is understating it.

[The] leaders of western Europe—bamboozled by the prospect of “climate change”—have made themselves poorer and weaker by eviscerating conventional fuel production. While they without ample reason were discarding a very good hand, Russian president Putin was improving his by exploiting and selling to us and Europe his nations’ fossil fuels. In 2020 the U.S. was a net exporter of petroleum. In 2021 we imported between 12 million and 26 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum from Russia every month. In November 2021, the most recent figures on record, the Energy Information Agency reports that the U.S. took 17.8 million barrels.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president could not restrain himself. “Welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon have to pay 2,000 euros per thousand cubic meters.

The green dream goes lethal

Melanie Phillips

So now Putin, with his hand on the gas spigots which he can open or shut at will, has the power  to restrict gas supplies, send the price of gas shooting up and inflict on western nations both power outages and eye-watering increases in their cost of living.

Western countries are already paying dearly for their supreme green folly.

US president Joe Biden’s decisions to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline and not renew drilling leases helped caused American gas and energy prices to spike in recent months.

At the same time, last year Biden green-lighted the final construction of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany which bypasses Ukraine and, if it comes on stream, would give Putin a devastating weapon with which to blackmail western Europe with the threat of cutting off its energy supplies.

This gas weapon is all the more ludicrous given that both America and Britain have the natural resources to be energy-independent.

Green religions are a luxury only the richest nations can afford

Top producers of Natural Gas, Graph, Countries, 2018

Back in 2018 | Statista

Russia would be crazy if it wasn’t funding Western Greens.

Tucker is on fire on the whole Russia-Ukraine messy issue

h/t Bill in AZ. David. Glenn Reynolds

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Thursday Open Thread

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Oops. Who wants a Bank Run? Canadian Government unfreezes some accounts, after accidentally revealing no Canadian bank is safe

Justin Trudeau froze bank accounts of bread-winners who had committed no crime, in order to stop a protest that had largely been stopped. Everyone could see this was wanton partisan spite. But in a financial system built entirely on trust Trudeau was sticking giant public pins in Banking Voodoo dolls. If banks are just tools of partisan petty Ministers to use on political opponents, no one’s money was safe. Even if Trudeau reverses all the theft, people can’t un-see the Voodoo Doll.

Canadian banks became a bad joke:

 

Trudeau wasn’t trying to stop the current convoy, he was trying to scare away all the future ones. It’s all about intimidation, to scare future donors from supporting future events. Canadians, we, all of us in the West have a choice now — to be scared into serfdom or to donate twice as much. 

Google is on his side: identifying all the donors on a live map

In an extraordinary breach, Google published a map today for some hours with every hacked donor name and address, even including people who just donated $10. The link was here, but it’s just a “404 error” now. As @alberta_cw says “This is war”. Don’t feed the machine. Don’t click the ads. The only reason to have a g-mail account now is as a decoy.

The one good thing about this gross breach of privacy is that the 92,000 supporters can now find each other and get organized.

 

h/t to JoJoDogfacedboy and SmallDeadAnimals

Donors accounts will be unfrozen, but not so the Truckers. They have been found guilty and sentenced without a trial to be un-citizens until such time as they prove their innocence.

Canada Instructs Banks to Unfreeze Freedom-Convoy Accounts

Paul Vieira, The Wall Street Journal

On Monday, Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland defended the freezings, which some financial-law experts warned could affect people unaffiliated with the protest.

“These measures were put in place to disrupt illegal activity in Canada,” she said. “We were very clear that we would be following the money, that we would be using financial tools to disrupt illegal blockades and occupations. The focus absolutely has been on leaders and on the vehicles that were such an important part of the illegal blockades and occupations.”

“The way to get your account unfrozen is to stop being part of the blockade and occupation,” she added.

The protesters get it:

The organizers of the Ottawa protest said in a statement posted on social media that the freezing of bank accounts and other financial assets has shocked Canadians. “The more severe implication, however, is that by using [emergency powers] as financial warfare, it will sow mistrust in both the banking system and the government and the repercussions will be felt for years to come.”

Keep reading  →

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Still no free lunch: 62,000 people bankrupted by Spain’s solar subsidy-industry

The Socialists in Spain offered bonanza subsidies to build solar plants. People accepted them. Too many people accepted them.

Then the Socialist-rulers realized they could not pay them all. But the solar panels had been built. The debts were all accrued. All that was left was for investors to learn the true value of surges of surplus energy at the same time of day.

Sadly people faced losing their homes, in what must have been a grueling realization.

If only Socialists could do maths, they could have seen this coming. It’s not even quantum mechanics, it’s just arithmetic.

If only investors researched their investments and remembered that if it looks too good to be true, everyone else will pile on, and supply will wildly exceed demand, especially because no one really wants extra electrons for lunch.

Teach the children. The government should not be picking winners, but if it does, buy something else.

h/t Jim Simpson

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Clueless: 2nd richest man in Australia thinks we have a free market in energy

Mike Cannon-Brookes might be an Australian tech-billionaire who wants to buy out one of our biggest energy companies and get rid of coal, but not only does he apparently not understand electricity grids, he doesn’t even know what a free market is.

In a free market customers could choose not to buy green electrons:

FreeMarket Electricity Bill

If we had a real free market in energy, we could a tick-that-box on our plan that said “100% coal fired, cheapest available reliable electricity”. Instead, all Australians are forced to buy electricity from a hobbled patchwork grid which has been repurposed as a Global Air Conditioner.

It’s a national grid crafted through “Renewable Energy Targets”, and pure hopium. Hidden in our electricity bills, taxes, and frozen-pea packets at Coles, are multiple subsidies to help wind and solar power.  Poor Australians have paid to help put discounted solar panels on their rich neighbors roofs, and are paying for back up, storage, stabilizers, unnecessary two-billion dollar interstate transmission lines, and demand management plans.

Every windless minute at night the poor pay more for electricity than they would have — if the Agents of Weather-changing Sorcery were not allowed to romp freely through the energy market. Once upon a time the cheapest, most reliable generator won the bids to supply and set the price, every day and every hour. Then came the Renewable Energy Target which chooseth the Saintly Green Electrons and now we have a grid surging with over-and-under supply, erratic voltage surges,  $14,000 price spikes and frequency chaos. Where once massive infrastructure was tuned to run cost effectively 24 hours a day, now it starts up and shuts down, rarely running in the profitable zone, and so is forced to charge more to cover the same costs in the fewer hours it runs.

Poor Australians are paying extra for electricity so the rich can brag about how they’re saving the planet.

Billionaire environmentalist Mike Cannon-Brookes is asked if he will pay YOU for power price hikes after $20BILLION green scheme

Stephen Johnson, DailyMail

Australia’s second richest man Mike Cannon-Brookes has promised more renewable energy will make electricity cheaper – despite a warning from Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

The 42-year-old billionaire co-founder of software giant Atlassian has refuted Mr Morrison’s suggestion the early closure of coal-fired power stations would cause consumers to pay more for their power.

Presenter David Koch asked him if he would pay consumers if their bills rose.

‘We have a free market for energy prices: we have a logical plan that shows why prices would go down as we have more and more renewables in the grid.’

Just like no place on Earth. No nation ever added more unreliable renewables and got cheaper electricity.

The man reasons like a kid with a lego set and $20 billion dollars. When Minister Frydenberg points out that shutting the old coal Hazelwood plant raised prices by 85%, Cannon-Brookes insists “it will be different” because they have eight years notice (enough time to invent batteries that work?). Then forgetting that Hazelwood was replaced by newer renewables, he claims that it can’t get more expensive, because the new renewables are “new” — not like things made when man landed on the moon. The magic of “New” failed in 2017 when Hazelwood closed, and physics hasn’t changed much since then.

Give us a free market

Let Australians opt out of renewable subsidies, and opt in to buy fossil fuel power, and new coal fired plants will be built and old ones will be restored. The wholesale rates of coal fired power are just 3c per kWh — they fell for 40 years until Kevin Rudd tried to change the global climate.

Now, if Olympic Dam wanted to build its own power plant to save on electricity costs, they would not be allowed to do it. That was Audrey Zibelman’s* big fear — that prices would rise to the point that the Big Energy Customers would leave the grid entirely.

If ten million Australians set up a Co-Op to build a Big Coal Plant and pay for it themselves, the government would ban them or force them to buy chinese carbon credits to offset the free-fertilizer produced by the plant.

The only thing stopping Australians from getting cheap electricity is The Government.

We know that because when Chinese Crypto Miners did a private deal with Redbank power in NSW    —  they got 100% coal-power direct for just 8c a kilowatt hour, while the Australians running the local newsagent had to pay 28c for the same thing.  The loophole they slid through was to be within 1km of the power station with their own cables.

But that 1km rule is only a rule because a politician said so.  That can change…

h/t Great Aunt Janet, Earl, Furiously Curious, David-of-Cooyal, Dave, KP

______________________________________

*Zibelman — Formerly the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Organisation (AEMO)

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Things are bad when even Romanians are warning you that your leader is a tyrant

Cristian Terhes of the European Parliament: “he’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania”

If even you raise doubts, about the vaccine, you are outcasted.

What’s the difference between what he does and what happened under the inquisition? See on one side they say, we should not believe in God, and on the other they say “we should believe in science. “

Science is not about belief…

Kings and Emperors ruled by Godly decree. Today tyrants rule by “science”. And The Science says whatever they want. If the Archbishop of Science finds the wrong thing, he will be sacked until the new Archbishop gets it right.

 

In 2014 Daniel Dickin warned that Canada will become a dictatorship under Trudeau. He observed that Trudeau had no respect for democratic processes and rigged or tampered with Liberal nominations. Some candidates were mysteriously disqualified, paperwork went missing, and Trudeau ordered candidates to vote exactly the way he wanted.

Then there are those immortal moments when Trudeau admired the dictatorship in China.

h/t David, PeterS.

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It’s just a ship full of luxury cars on fire, and no one can put out the lithium batteries

Do EV’s make good reefs?

h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.

The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:

German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.

It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.

According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.

“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent

 Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.

Felicity Burnt, Cargo Ship.

Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters

Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now

March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.

 

Thankfully, in both cases all 22 and 27 crew members were rescued.

In December 2021, UKP&I Insurance Group prophetically issued a warning  about bulk carriers and the new risks they face with EV’s.

Though  it did not specifically blame EV’s for starting these fires, it listed some recent car carrier fires:

Grande America suffered a fire in March 2018 and subsequently developed a starboard list, causing it to capsize and sink in a depth of around 4,600 metres. The resulting oil spill stretched for 10km and the ship was carrying 2,000 cars and 365 containers, of which 45 were deemed to hold hazardous substances.

Sincerity Ace caught fire in the Pacific on New Year’s Eve 2018 with more than 3,500 cars onboard.  The crew had to abandon the vessel, and whilst 16 crew were rescued, five tragically died as a result of the incident.

In June 2019, Diamond Highway had to be abandoned by its crew in the South China Sea, due to fire, whilst carrying 6,354 cars. Thankfully, all 25 crew were rescued.

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Privacy? Dissidents get doxxed and abused but supporters of the State can hide away

The Canadian government is so loved that the people who work for it want to hide their faces and names.

What government transparency means now: The whistleblowers will be exposed

The riot squad dress like Antifa and have no name badges. And the tow trucks in Ottawa were allowed to hide their truck branding so they suffer no pushback for towing away peaceful protestors.

Not the Canada you thought you were living in…

Who are these men hanging around as the tow-trucks took the trucks in Ottawa?

It’s hard to tell from the video, but there are a lot of people in halloween costumes doing something during the day the trucks were towed away.

Are these guys the tow truck drivers?

Which trucking companies did the towing in Ottawa. Source: Yahoo

If most Canadians really did want the truckers gone surely some tow-truck drivers would be happy to help and soak up the free advertising. Or maybe all the polls are wrong?

Government critics get abuse and death threats

The team with the army, navy, jails and the billion-dollar budget is so afraid of the unarmed family men with trucks, tractors and hot-tubs that they have vowed to hunt them down “for months”. Not only that, but they will pursue anyone who gave them $20 for fuel to get there. Trudeau won’t say it, but he’s afraid of truckers, tractors and cars rolling on, and protests popping up everywhere.

If trucks just started to carry free advertising mocking Trudeau — they’d be free moving billboards across the country — like the ultimate bumper-sticker campaign. Though no one needs a slogan — cars and trucks just need to carry the Canadian flag and let it be known, that that’s the protest. He can’t ban the flag.

Some 92,000 donors who supported the peaceful protest were publicly outed by cyber hackers. The State propaganda outlet — the CBC — is being paid by taxpayers to contact critics of the government, let them know they had all their personal details,  and harass them to explain why they donated.

If ever there was an argument to end state funded media, this surely is it.

Will the cyberhacker criminals ever face justice — or is that kind of crime not a priority like tracking down people who gave a burger to a trucker?

One Cafe owner had to close her shop after death threats and abuse, and of people throwing bricks through windows

We have been called terrorists’:

Tearful Ottawa gelato shop owner whose name was released in GiveSendGo data hack describes being hounded with death threats and says she’s been forced to shut her shop

MattMcNulty, The DailyMail

    • An Ottawa gelato shop owner whose name was released in the GiveSendGo data hack after she donated to the Freedom Convoy claims she has been forced to shut her store after receiving death threats, abusive phone calls calling her a Nazi – and a sign has been hung outside her store saying ‘Tammy supports terrorists.’

      Tammy Giuliani, who owns the Stella Luna Gelato Café, spoke to Fox News‘ Jesse Watters on Thursday about the backlash she’s faced since she donated $250 to the group of Canadian truckers protesting against COVID-19 mandates.

      ‘I think never in my 56 years have I ever experienced a country so divided…  ‘You know, we have been called terrorists. For the first 60 to 36 hours, we were inundated with hatred, with threats of violence. People threatened our team on the phone, telling them, “We’re coming to get you. We’re going to throw bricks through your window. You’ll pay for this, you Nazi supporter.”‘

That’s Justin Trudeau’s communist paradise of love and worker contentment?

The Ottawa Police Chief commits to hunting down and punishing peaceful protesters for months to come.

Even if those protestors broke no law, his job is to make sure they live in fear, and the rest of Canada knows how risky it is to speak up against government rules that most people don’t want.

Once upon a time the police were there to protect shop owners from mafia style threats.

And laws are so complex now,

That one Swastika flag at the protest was mocking Trudeau for being a Nazi

Is this flag the source of all the minion haters calling the protestors terrorists and Nazi’s? Notice the flag above it says Truck Fudeau (or something like that. )

Swastika Flag and Fuck Trudeau.

The only Swastika anyone can find was warning what Trudeau’s Canada would become.

Trudeau gaslights the nation that these are neo-Nazis marching because they carry the Swastika. It’s as if Greenpeace carry banners of a burning Earth because they want to burn it.  Now, somehow, the Nazis are the ones that stand for “medical choices”? And all the misleadia just rinse and repeat the nonsense as if Nazi medical experiments never happened.

For the moment, Trudeau’s maneuver will effectively slow down protestors pointing out the similarities. If protestors are going to use the toxic Swastika symbol, they need to make sure Trudeau’s name is printed all over it — with the words “show us your papers” or a huge needle and syringe symbol. Of course, if they do that well, the media won’t show it at all.

9.9 out of 10 based on 88 ratings

Trudeau weighs up whether to stop forced injections, but decides to trample with horses

Trudeau faced a tricky choice: he could stop forcing people to get injections-they-don’t-want and the Truckers would all go home, problem solved, but he would look like a loser. Or he could trample, spray and beat them, and steal their money instead. So he did.

It’s for their health:


When journalists and old women are attacked and police bear down on protesters with the cavalry, pepper spray and batons, we would expect most Western leaders to speak out, and most serious mastheads.  Here’s the Wall Street Journal. Note the others in the coming days (or lack thereof).

Trudeau’s Destructive ‘Emergency’

The truckers protest could have been handled without abusing the law.

The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal

Protests aren’t emergencies, and Western leaders had better get used to handling civil disobedience firmly without traducing civil liberties. Mr. Trudeau criminalized a protest movement, deputizing financial institutions, without due process or liability, to find and freeze personal accounts of blockaders and anyone who helps them. These extraordinary measures are a needless abuse of power.

Toronto limited the problem by closing downtown roads. Blockades at crucial border crossings were allowed to drag on and cost the North American auto industry hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet when police finally acted, border blockades dispersed peacefully, no emergency powers needed. One ended with handshakes between police and protesters.

Weak responses to civil disobedience have hurt Canada for years. New gas pipelines are increasingly stymied by blockades, often by green or aboriginal activists. On Thursday men wielding axes attacked a pipeline drill site and its workers in British Columbia. That’s worse than anything the truckers have done.

Yesterday, 20 masked people, some with axes, attacked a gas drilling site in British Columbia, casing wanton destruction, risking serious injuries:

Coastal GasLink site in B.C. left with millions in damage after ‘violent attack’ by masked assailants wielding axes

RCMP are investigating what is being described as a “organized violent attack” on pipeline workers, police and equipment at a Coastal GasLink drilling site near the Morice River in northern British Columbia.

The Coastal GasLink pipeline, which will connect B.C.’s shale gas resources to LNG Canada’s export project in Kitimat, is almost 60 per cent complete.

“In one of the most concerning acts, an attempt was made to set a vehicle on fire while workers were inside,” said the company in a statement. “The attackers also wielded axes, swinging them at vehicles and through a truck’s window. Flare guns were also fired at workers.”

It’s not clear which group did this violent assault but they aren’t truckers and nobody seems to care. Will their donor’s bank accounts be frozen?

 

 

Fittingly, the US Convoy starts next week:

US Trucker Convoy Organizer to Newsmax: Thousands Expected to Join

Thousands of semitruck drivers are expected to take part in the coast-to-coast “People’s Convoy” to protest government COVID-19 mandates starting Wednesday, Feb. 23, says organizer Maureen Steele.

“We have well over 1,000 truckers. I’ve lost count right now and I know it’s going to grow,” Steele told Newsmax’sEric Bolling: The Balance.

“Our support staff is enormous. We have the Unity Project and they have hundreds of nonprofits that are under them so they literally have thousands of people helping pull this event off.

 

h/t jojodogfacedboy, Lance, bobby b, MM From Canada, many more.

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Truckers threaten to bust up the narrative that the Socialists care for the Workers

Managing people with bullying and coercion is a brittle and fragile tool

When it starts to break, it collapses.

Adam Mill:    Why They’re So Afraid of the Truckers

Russian. Flag, Map.

In 1981, the Soviets seemed invincible. Yet their power was fragile, vulnerable to a single fissure of courage that started in Poland. That crack lengthened and spread until the entire system crumbled. It must have seemed impossible to defeat an ideology that controlled every institution—the press, the education system, the military, etc. Yet, without firing a shot, a courageous protest in Poland did just that.

In September of 1981, the Soviet Union seemed an uncrackable monolith. On its frontiers stood a NATO force that would last only a few weeks were a conventional war to break out. The Soviets could rely upon apologists in Western academia and the media to amplify their propaganda and stifle voices demanding freedom. Yet the opposition of a labor union to Soviet Communism powerfully undermined its claim to legitimacy

The Soviet Union, like modern leftism today, appropriates and exploits the struggle of ordinary people while simultaneously making things worse for them. Their soft hands and arrogance set them apart from their supposed clients in the “real world.” Their only skill is to feast upon the fruits of other people’s labor. When real labor awakens to the true parasitic nature of the Left, the whole system comes crashing down.

No wonder they’re so afraid.

Families are being torn apart

This is a revealing write up by a former CBC reporter who feels like the protests are dividing the country and is dismayed and searching for answers. What she has missed is that the divisions were there and growing for years. The peaceful flag-waving Truckers have arrived to fill the hole where healthy national pride and a sense of community had been exterminated with fashionable vanity-guilt competitions of hate and disdain.

If Trudeau orders the police to drag away the Freedom Convoy he’ll tear Canada apart 

Canada FlagTARA HENLEY (former CBC reporter) from Toronto, DailyMail

The use of the Emergencies Act has poured gasoline on what was already a raging fire.

I fear that Canadians are headed for the sort of volatile, drawn-out, intractable conflict that tears societies apart.

The act replaces the War Measures Act, last invoked by Trudeau’s father, Prime Minster Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in 1970, and it is widely known as the nuclear option. As a journalist, I have never seen a news event this polarizing. And as a citizen, I have never seen my country this divided. For the past two weeks, most conversations have revolved around the protests in the capital.

Families are being pulled apart, including the Premier of Ontario’s own. Ford said Monday at a news conference that ‘all of this has polarized us in a way that we could never have imagined.’ One of his daughters has publicly supported the protests.

This is a large part of why I left legacy media in January, working as a current affairs radio producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (In fact, it was our coverage of the vaccine mandates that proved a tipping point.)

She does understand there is something very unfair fueling this:

During the pandemic, Canada has become a less equal country. Billionaire wealth has increased a staggering 68 percent. Many, many people are struggling to make ends meet.

She doesn’t realize how close to the mark she is:

If one is to take the threat of the extremist far-right seriously, as I certainly do, then the Emergencies Act is the worst possible way of handling this crisis. It risks radicalizing peaceful protestors and confirming their worst fears about government.

Trudeau has indeed confirmed that the far right — who fear big Government will misuse and abuse power — are really the sensible center, who were correct all along. She fears the “extremists” but in today’s non-debate, the “far right” is anyone who just wants to be left alone.

Trudeau is so good at achieving the exact opposite of everything he supposedly wants because he relies on censorship and character assassination instead of free speech and well mannered debate. If Trudeau thinks he’s a God, thank the sycophantic media, and patsy academia.

All he had to do to be a good democratic leader was meet the people, instead of hiding amongst his status-climbing friends.  If he’d spent time with the workers in the last two years, he could have seen all this coming and averted it so easily.

On the Ottawa front-line Police send in SWAT teams to Stop the Mischief

Ottawa Police March On Freedom Convoy: It’s ‘Starting To Feel Like The Beginning Of The End’.

According to the protesters, tow trucks are stationed nearby and are believed to be waiting to clear the area of trucks.

“The tow trucks are not labeled, they’ve had their plates removed and their companies covered so they are hiding their identities from the world,” one of protesters on the livestream said.

19th February: Things are on a knife-edge unfolding. The two protest leaders Chris Barber and Tamara Lich have been arrested and charged with “Mischief”. All up 15 people have been arrested, and four vehicles have been removed. On the legal front  Trudeau already  faces more than one court case already.  Two agencies concerned with Civil Liberties and the Constitution have both started applications for judicial reviews. Interest is so large that both websites crashed. Meanwhile yet another Canadian province announced an end to mandates. Newfoundland and Labrador join Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

Police say the “media risks arrests if caught behind lines in ‘Red Zone’”. Thus, history is being made in a peaceful “emergency” and the media are banned? Where are the screams from the real journalists around the world…

They may evict the protesters but unless Trudeau ends the mandates, the protests will just find another outlet.

Marieke Walsh appears to be there watching things unfold.

Ottawa now has armed checkpoints like East Berlin did. Who is imposing more of a blockade on Ottawans, the protestors dancing in the centre or the man that fenced Parliament and added 100 checkpoints?

“The secured area includes almost 100 checkpoints that will have police presence to ensure that those seeking entry to that secure area for a unlawful reason, such as joining a protest, cannot enter the downtown core,” acting Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said Thursday.

But truckers are not worried.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors,” said Niagara-area trucker Harold Jonker, who drove the first truck in to the protest and plans to be the last truck to leave. “We are not doing anything wrong and they know that.”

Canada’s capital, operating under the Emergencies Act, now has ‘no go zones” similar to a police state.

The real crackdown is happening where you can’t see it — financial institutions

Tristan Hopper, National Post

One of the most far-reaching implications of the Emergencies Act is what it prescribes for the Canadian financial system. According to the government’s new Emergency Economic Measures Orderevery single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.

Under normal circumstances, private companies arbitrarily seizing the assets of their clients is a great way to get sued. But the order makes clear that “no civil proceedings lie against an entity for complying with this Order.”

Trudeau is giving every Canadian a reason not to use the banks. What could possibly go wrong?

He has overreached so far, even the Greens are warning this could backfire:

 In a widely circulated essay for the socialist magazine Canadian Dimension, former Green Party leadership candidate Dimitri Lascaris warned that leftist support of measures to crush the truckers could end up biting them in the end. “If we Canadian leftists endorse this government’s use of emergency powers to quell this protest, we may well be dooming our prospects of successfully mounting and sustaining the far more disruptive protests that will be necessary to preserve Mother Earth,” he wrote.

But rather than anger, this protest thrives on camaraderie and goodwill:

Lyndsay Kruisselbrink, who was on her third trip to the Ottawa protest on and planned to stay until Monday, said the feeling among participants was “very calm,” adding everybody was happy with “lots of love.”

“You have to be here to know the feeling,” she said. “You just don’t want to leave. You just love the cause and all the people. It’s like your family.”

No wonder the Truckers are willing to be so brave, and stay so strong.

_______________________________________________

Just like that: In Austria, Germany and Switzerland — most restrictions will be gone in March

The Austrian situation is the most incredible turnaround. They had one of the most brutal mandatory vaccination programs in the world only a few weeks ago and now even laws made a few weeks ago look like they will never be enacted.

With terrible timing the Austrian government only approved the draconian mandatory vaccination laws on Jan 20th, just in time for everyone to realize that the vaccines didn’t work, and Omicron wasn’t an emergency.  Strangely the all new monster mandatory vaccination rule technically still exists, but may be scrapped before it even starts. How can it be justified to let unvaccinated people into pubs and clubs where superspreading events occur but then also fine them €1000 ea month for being unvaccinated? The absurdity of it destroys itself.

So perhaps to avoid the look of a complete nearly instant backflip Austria has established a commission to decide on mandatory Covid jabs.

Just weeks after the nationwide Covid vaccine mandate was signed into law, the controversial measure is in jeopardy. Austria’s compulsory vaccination law – the first in Europe – is set to come into effect on March 16th, when “phase two” will mean police can also check vaccination certificates and report violations to the district administration authorities. The commission will make its first report the week before, on March 8th.

Germany announces end to most COVID restrictions on March 20

Feb 17th. BERLIN — Germany’s leaders on Wednesday announced plans to end most of the country’s coronavirus restrictions by March 20, a decision that coincided with moves by neighboring Austria and Switzerland to drop many of their curbs sooner.

A three-step plan was endorsed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the country’s 16 state governors as official figures show Germany’s COVID-19 infection rate beginning to drift downward.

Switzerland lifts most Covid-19 restrictions

The Swiss government has decided to drop most coronavirus restrictions from Thursday as the record levels of infections triggered by the Omicron variant have not translated into a peak of hospitalisations.

It’s amazing how fast a psychological state can unravel.  If the mandates had real benefits, they would not evaporate so fast.

Collecting stories of the ending of mandatory restrictions helps all of us still living under them. Good news in Western Australia today — the Great Unvaccinated will now be allowed to buy beer at drive through bottleshops. They can’t visit pubs, restaurants, clubs or gyms. The pandemic has barely arrived here — hopefully, it all shall pass.

The Canadians Truckers give us all hope.

Image: Russian Flag by Aivazovsky

*HEadline edited. “Blow” changed to “bust” lest anyone think there was any violent intent.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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