The eye-opening video about Chinese people in Ukraine, who weren’t evacuated, and who were “permitted” by the CCP to be excited at the arrival of Putin’s tanks, even hanging out Chinese flags to welcome their Russian comrades until suddenly they realized that wasn’t such a good idea. The CCP Flags were hurriedly packed away and some went so far as to pretend to be Japanese… because some of the malevolent intent here is just so toxic and word was spreading.
The commentator here, SerpentZA (Winston Sterzel), did videos of what was happening in China that I also posted on during the earliest days of the Wuflu — literally Feb 2nd, and Feb 8th, 2020.
A South African who lives in China — he has unusual insight.
Strategically, Russia would be crazy if it weren’t funding Green Groups to scare the West out of using its own resources and hobbling its own energy grid.
Russia has the motive, the means and the opportunity. Ask not whether Putin was funding some Greens, but whether Putin would not be.
These dark money trails across international borders are almost impossible to pin down, but there are clues, leaks and links suggesting Russia was sending hundreds of millions of dollars to support anti-fossil-fuel Green environmentalists.
Yesterday Russian troops did a hostile takeover of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. So in that spirit it’s time to ask if Russia was funding Western Greens was it preparing for War or just worried about walruses?
Would Good Global Citizen Russia say No Thanks to a chance to gain dominant control of a key strategic market?
A mere 15 years ago, countries in the EU produced more gas than Russia exported. Yet European production has plunged by more than half during the past decade. Putin has happily filled the supply gap.
In 2020 Russia exported nearly three times more gas than Europe produced. What’s amazing is that Europe increased its reliance on Russian gas even after Gazprom repeatedly suspended pipeline exports to Ukraine.
Europe still had the gas, it just needed to be convinced not to use it:
Europe had an estimated 966 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable wet natural gas resources as of 2013, about enough to supply the EU for 60 years. Much of this is located in eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. But France, Britain, The Netherlands and Germany are also sitting on shale deposits.
In 2014, a NATO bigwig and former Prime Minister of Denmark claimed the Russians were fuelling the opposition to frakking.
Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen blamed Russia for fuelling the fracking opposition. “Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” he noted in 2014.
“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” said Rasmussen…
According to DeSmog (remember them?) this was revealed at a London’s Chatham House event in 2014 and was not supposed to be leaked (or maybe it was?). DeSmog’s entire ammunition against this quote is that Rassmussen later said “it was my interpretation”, which confirms that he said it.
Four years later US congressmen were releasing reports describing potential funding chains from Russia to non-profit environmental groups.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who chairs the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, released a report in March that explores Russia’s motives for disrupting America’s energy sector.
“Russia benefits from stirring up controversy about U.S. energy production,” Smith said in a press release. “U.S. energy exports to European countries are increasing, which means they will have less reason to rely upon Russia for their energy needs. This, in turn, will reduce Russia’s influence on Europe to Russia’s detriment and Europe’s benefit. That’s why Russian agents attempted to manipulate Americans’ opinions about pipelines, fossil fuels, fracking and climate change. The American people deserve to know if what they see on social media is the creation of a foreign power seeking to undermine our domestic energy policy.”
Smith’s report describes the Russian scheme to use nonprofit entities to influence and sway U.S. public policy and public opinion against fracking. The evidence in the report shows that Russia has been using U.S. environmental groups to spread what Smith aptly describes as “propaganda” to undermine America’s natural gas revolution.
Росгвардия
The SeaChange Foundation, in San Francisco has apparently given out “about $400 million” between 2007 and 2015 to “environmental groups that have worked to block fracking and pipeline construction that make natural gas development and distribution possible.” Downstream recipients include the Tides Foundation, which received $8 million, and the U.S. Climate Action Network ( $7.3 million). SeaChange also gave $30 million to the Energy Foundation which then funded the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
A 29-year CIA veteran Kenneth L. Stiles analyzed the links, and followed the money, as much as anyone could. The dollars track back from local Virginia green groups right through one or two layers of NGO’s and back to opaque Foundations in Bermuda which were set up by people who also used to work with a Russian Minister and friend of Putin.
Two of these local environmental groups “are, without a doubt, agents of influence to Moscow through [a] networking system of shell companies and foundations,” Stiles said.
The Russians “executed a political agenda with little or no paper trail,” the letter explains, by using a Bermuda-based shell company, Klein Ltd., “to funnel tens of millions of dollars” to a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Sea Change Foundation that focuses on climate change.
The Sea Change Foundation then moves the money in the form of grants to other nonprofit environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund.
Klein Ltd, the shell company that supplies the money operates out of Bermuda and isn’t required to disclose the identity of donors. Klein itself was formed by a law firm in Bermuda called Wakefield Quin. The top administrators of that, in turn, apparently have also held top positions in investment groups owned by a Russian Minister and friend of Putin:
The Russian connection with Klein, and from there to Virginia, comes in the form of Bermuda-based law firm Wakefield Quin, which was instrumental in Klein’s formation in March 2011. The law firm shares the same address with Klein and 20 other companies, congressional investigators determined.
Wakefield Quin’s top lawyers and administrators have held what the lawmakers’ letter to the treasury secretary describes as “directorship positions” with an investment group owned by Leonid Reiman, “a Russian minister of telecommunications and a longtime friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Having friends of Putin helping you save your environment takes on a whole new flavour now.
One day when the ABC finally gets the Internet they’ll be able to find official pages like “Known Floods in the Brisbane and Bremer River Basin“. And one day the half billion dollar BOM agency will be able to update graphs like this within a week of a new flood peak, like bloggers did (above).
Ken Stewart went looking for lost Rain Bombs and found them
As Ken reports the ABC made a fuss over three Queensland sites recording more than 1 metre of rain in just four days. But neither the ABC or the BOM is telling Australians that there have been at least nine similar “Rain Bombs” before and most of them were more than one hundred years ago.
I went looking at Climate Data Online for four day rainfall totals over one metre, to compare with the recent totals above at Mount Glorious, Pomona, and Bracken Ridge. For a start, Pomona’s BOM station has been closed for years, and Bracken Ridge is not listed at all, so those reports are from rain gauges external to the BOM network and can’t be checked. That’s OK. In about half an hour I found the following four day rainfall records.
Crohamhurst
4/2/1893
1963.6mm
Yandina
3/2/1893
1597.8mm
Tully Sugar Mill
13/02/1927
1421.3mm
Palmwoods
4/2/1893
1244.6mm
Buderim
3/2/1893
1150.3mm
Bloomsbury
20/01/1970
1141.8mm
Dalrymple Heights
6/04/1989
1141mm
Innisfail
3/04/1911
1075.8mm
Nambour
11/1/1898
1013mm
1893 was a wet year! Crohamhurst had 2023.8 in five days, and Brisbane had three floods in two weeks in February and another in June.
And there is no such thing as a “rain bomb”, a term invented to make it sound unprecedented. This was an entirely natural and normal rain event. Slow moving tropical lows drift south every few years in the wet season, producing a large proportion of Queensland’s average rainfall.
It’s another Redpill moment. Spread the news. Australians need to know the media and the BOM are not giving them the whole truth. Has anyone in the BOM called up the ABC and corrected their mistake? Isn’t that their job?
At least eight people have died in dreadful flooding in South East Queensland and Brisbane. The slow moving rain system moved south through NSW, inundating towns, and has arrived in Sydney and surrounds, where evacuations have begun.
Despite the pain, some are already exploiting the situation for their climate religion or their retirement plan. What was torrential rain is now a rain-bomb, and to stop floods they yell at us that the Climate Change Emergency must be our priority!
A few days ago the floods in Brisbane peaked at 3.85m. Apparently this was due to a surplus of coal fired power or a lack of wind turbines, or something like that. But this photo below, was taken in Brisbane 129 years ago, when there were almost no coal turbines anywhere in the world, and CO2 levels were ideal, yet floods reached 8.3m.
Not climate change: the flood waters rose to 8.3m.
And in the land of flood, fire and drought, it keeps happening. In 1974, floods in Brisbane reached 5.45m. In 2011 the waters were 4.46m deep. Obviously things have changed a bit: the Wivenhoe dam wasn’t there during the first two floods, and the hydrology of city streets is not like it used to be. Nonetheless the flood of 1893 was shocking.
The 1893 Black February Flood was not just one flood but three floods in a row in one month that caused 35 deaths. Another 190 were hospitalized.
The tide gauge in the city reached 8.35m, which was almost as high as the 8.43m rise recorded in floods in 1841. (Imagine how bad that flood was?)
Both the Victoria bridge and the Indooroopilly Railway bridge collapsed.
Trove. National Library of Australia.
Indigenous people, apparently knew of the risks of flooding and built their camps on higher ground. Probably, flooding has been going on since time began. It is said that they tried to warn the settlers not to build to close to the river but the settlers did it anyway.
.
Shocking footage though a few days ago:
Brisbane.
terrifying moment houseboat smashes into ferry terminal before capsizing forcing man to swim through dangerous waters to safety – as #floods continue to ravage #Queenslandpic.twitter.com/YVSyCHQ2m8
By 2050, the world will be throwing out 2 million tons of wind turbines and 6 million tons of solar panels every year.
One reason the world may be throwing away so much not-so-renewable waste is that recycling it costs ten times as much as what is recovered.
Who would have thought that collecting low density energy in extreme environments would create megatons of tough, non-biodegradable infrastructure, embedded with toxic heavy metals?
Graveyard of the green giants: It’s the hidden cost of our dash for windpower – thousands of decommissioned blades that are so difficult to recycle, they are just dumped as landfill,
writes TOM LEONARD, DailyMail
Scientists at America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have warned that in the next few decades, the world faces a ‘tidal wave’ of redundant blades that will number ‘hundreds of thousands, if not more’.
By 2050, it’s predicted that the world will need to dispose of two million tons of wind turbine blade waste every year. In the UK, the volume already exceeds 100,000 tons per year.
The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, up to 78 million tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life and the world will create another six million tons of photovoltaic waste every year. Where to put all of that is potentially an even bigger headache than the turbine blades. It’s very complicated to recover the more valuable materials, such as silver and silicon, used in solar panels.
Research suggests the cost of recovering the materials outweighs the cost of extracting what can be reused by a ratio of ten to one. In other words, if the cost of recycling is $10 you get only $1 back.
And unlike wind turbine blades, solar panels contain toxic materials such as lead that can contaminate the ground as they break down, so dumping them in landfill sites poses serious issues.
And what about the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars? Here, too, there’s a money issue. Japanese researchers say the value of the materials that can be recycled from them is about a third of the cost of the recycling operation, while it’s five times cheaper to mine new lithium than extract the old lithium from batteries.
Did you know that when you virtuously shelled out £45,000 on a Tesla Model 3?
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.
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 | Statista
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?”
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.
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.
Pravda Brewery, based in Lviv, #Ukraine, has suspended its beer brewing operations and is now making Molotov cocktails for residents to use against invading #Russia forces.
As #Ukraine continues to embarrass the bear keep this in mind….If they pull it off this is next level impressive folks. It’s never about the gear, it’s about the heart. pic.twitter.com/ESJZjHIrm7
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:
this current map shows very rapid Russian progress from the south. Previously, I commented that, in Syrian war, established fronts moved very little, if at all, and that advances occurred by coming from different direction. Already at Zapor and about to put Mariupol in a pocket. https://t.co/bnMiY8M8tG
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))
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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” — Eukaryotebeing 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
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.
**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”.
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?
While the West went weak-Green, Russia became the 2nd largest gas supplier on Earth
“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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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Strategically, Russia would be crazy if it weren’t funding Green Groups to scare the West out of using its own resources and hobbling its own energy grid.
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