Bad news for athletes born as baby girls – unless they start testosterone therapy straight away, it’s hard to see how they can win against babies with 18 years of DIY hormone “treatments” that help them grow six inches taller, with lower body fat, and larger hearts and lungs.
The old rules were silly, but the new ones are worse:
The previous rules for the participation of men in women’s sports were already unfair, with male athletes having to show that their testosterone levels were below 10 nmol/liter of blood for 12 months or more. Women’s standard amount of testosterone is .09 nmol/liter of blood. Even with the application of testosterone during a British medical study, women were only able to increase to 4.3 nmol/liter. The normal, healthy range for men is 9.2 to 31.8 nmol/liter.
Overturning the entirety of human history and understanding about biology, the IOC states that “No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged, or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”
At this point, it makes more sense to just drop women’s events entirely and make each race open. May the best human win.
Why have separate sex medals if there are no separate sexes?
Or were we hoping to inspire little girls to excel in sport, and perhaps stop women from being injured on the Rugby field…
One transgender rugby player who is six feet tall has been nicknamed “Beast” by teammates on the Porth Harlequins Ladies squad in Wales, BBC Sport reported.
We don’t want to offend anyone, but crushing dreams of girls is fine:
The IOC said testing athletes’ testosterone levels to verify that they are able to compete against women, who have far less testosterone than any male person, is “invasive” and “disrespectful.” They did not issue a statement on how invasive or disrespectful it is to force women to compete against bigger, stronger, men, or to allow men to take women’s places in athletic competition.
It’s not binding, so only countries that want to win medals will make the most of the opportunity.
These rules are not binding, but they do mean that every country can essentially decide whether they will send women to women’s Olympic sports events. “What we are offering to all the international federations is our expertise and a dialogue, rather than jumping to a conclusion,” said Keveh Mehrabi, IOC director of the athletes’ department.
In an open human competition which events will baby girls hope to grow up and win medals in? On a page called Great examples of women competing against men. There are examples from Horse racing, sailing, equestrian events, motorbike racing, and darts. But in sports outside those, there’s …
Billy Jean King v Bobby Riggs
How great a moment is it when a 29 year old woman beats a 55 year old man in three sets of tennis? Even the “great moments” list includes the story of Venus and Serena in 1998. The Williams sisters, at the peak of their game, thought they could beat any man outside the top 200. But Karsten Braasch, ranked 203 beat them both separately by 6-1 and then 6-2. Good on the Williams sisters for giving it a go.
One sport that the average woman can do better than the average man is ultra long distance swimming.
There’s something special about ultra-swimming, it seems. In 2014, for example, Knechtle published a paper looking at 30 years of finishing times for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim, a 28.5-mile loop around the perimeter of Manhattan. On average, the best women were 12 to 14 percent faster than the best men. Another study, published in 2015, looked at 87 years of finishing times for the 20.1-mile Catalina Channel Swim, and found that when “the swimming times of the annual fastest women and the annual fastest men competing between 1927 and 2014 were compared, women were 52.9 minutes faster than men,” Knechtle and his colleagues write.
Steven Munatones [is] considered one of the foremost experts on open-water swimming. A few years ago — purely to satisfy his own curiosity — Munatones analyzed the finishing times of men and women who participated in the biggest ultra-distance swims around the world. He did this for three years, keeping track of “12 or 13” races — he can’t remember exactly. He never intended to publish these results anywhere; again, this was for his own curiosity, as a coach and as an open-water swimming fan. Here’s what he found. “If you’re looking at the average times — the average woman is faster than the average man,” said Munatones, who is the founder of the World Open Water Swimming Association. “Which, frankly, I was surprised to see.”
The reason women have an advantage in the water is because body fat floats better than bone and muscle. It’s easier for women to stay horizontal and reduce drag. It’s hydrodynamic.
But don’t get your hopes up. The fastest longest swims are still won by men. Munatones points out that at the most elite levels of ultra long distance swimming, like, in English Channel Swims, the fastest men still usually beat the fastest women. The events Knechtle studied, he claims, don’t attract the Olympian types. It’s interesting that at the highest level, in the English Channel Swims, the average women were 33 minutes faster than the average men. But males have wider distributions on most bell curves. At the thin tail, there may still be more men.
All this effort to find sports that women might, maybe, possibly could outdo men in — really brings us back to the point of the post. Ultra-long events are the only events without machines, tools or horses that people-born-as-women might have an advantage in.
Women will win Gold Medals for the ultimate in long distance events, longevity. Otherwise, biology is what it is:
It’s not likely that women, at either the amateur or elite level, will be sprinting faster than men any time soon, whether that’s on land or in the water. “Women have lower hemoglobin levels, lower oxygen supply to their limbs, a smaller stroke volume in their hearts, and generally less power in their muscles,” Eveleth explained.“But even if it’s unlikely that a woman will break into the mens’ world record circle for the 100-meter-dash, at mile 100, they are catching up.”
We’re following the science all the way to oblivion. Genes don’t matter. Hormones don’t count, and science is just a PR tool for tribal politics.
And how much do you really need to read if you are short of time and shelf-space?
Everyone will have favourite books and people who read a lot will have a lot of favourites but you might be unwilling nominate any, in the way that you are not supposed to express favouritism among your offspring.
To get the ball rolling I nominate two books that could in principle substitute for most of the climate books on my shelf, at least to get a thorough overview of the field before deep diving into selected topics.
This question came to mind because I am reading Michael Hart’s Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change and I nominate this book alongside Ian Plimer’s Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Rip-Off. It runs to 600 pages but it treats practically the whole range of issues in the field. Ian’s book provides some scientific depth that goes beyond Hart and it also covers the power situation in Australia. I see the impact of climate policies on the power supply as one Achilles heel of alarmism. The other is the impact of those policies on the environment.
Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.
Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a charity project, losing money from start to end. The GWPF highlights a new Norwegian report that shows that the Net Present Value of Dogger Bank is “minus £970 million.”
Britain’s biggest, newest offshore wind farm still isn’t profitable. It may be killing eagles and hypnotising crabs, but it isn’t cost effective at making energy, and it isn’t cost effective at changing the global weather either.
The report confirms as series of findings published by the GWPF and others [1–5], which show that offshore wind costs are very high, at best are only falling slowly, and are far above the auction strike prices being agreed.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch said:
“We have been warning since 2017 that there has been no revolution in offshore wind costs. Every time we get new financial data from offshore wind farms, the cost estimates go up. Just this week, our estimates for the Seagreen 1 wind farm have increased by nearly 20%, and those for Dogger Bank by a similar amount.”
The Government’s Net Zero plans rely on a five-fold increase in the wind fleet, mostly from offshore developments, and an extraordinary decline in the cost of the power it produces.
The latest findings mean that the costs of delivering Net Zero will increase by hundreds of billions of pounds, and probably by trillions.
The wind might be free, but collecting it over vast kilometers of ocean is not so easy.
There is something very cool, very curious, about being able to tune in to any station in the world. Spin the globe and pick a green dot. Hear Cher play in Novosibirsk, Russia, or Knights in White Satin in Port Chambers, New Zealand, and hear the same Uber Ads we hear in Australia in Peterborough, UK.
Radio Garden is a great talking point for the next family gathering.
Marvel at how many stations there are in America, and how few there are in China. Seriously. Are a billion people listening to the same ten stations in Guangzhou? Turns out there are a few more than it appears. A larger dot may link to 15 stations in the menu on the left.
But still, there seems a empty space there waiting for a civilizational mind to share.
Any station in the world…
There are not many stations in Africa. It’s a heartbreak kind of empty…
Somehow the world seems so much smaller.
On radio and in music English is the cultural paradigm. Many stations are not in English, but no other language appears on every continent, in so many songs.
Back in the eighties people laughed at scientists who talked about the threat from asteroids. Then we got better tools, and started tracking them. Now we are finding more every night.
Not only are there 27,000 near Earth asteroids that we know of, in the rest of the solar system we have found a few more, like 750,000. All this since the late 1990s.
Some computer somewhere is tracking all those orbits and arcs into the future. How often do these rocks run into each other and generate surprises?
“If you talk to the scientists who were studying this in the ’80s, there’s a phrase they often refer to called the giggle factor,” Carrie Nugent, a planetary scientist at Olin College in Massachusetts, told Space.com. “They’re basically saying that they couldn’t talk about this scientific topic without people kind of laughing at them.”
It looks like we’ve probably found all the big one-kilometer-wide asteroids that might pose a problem. And the little rocks will just burn up on entry. So it’s the middle sized ones (140m – 1000m) that we don’t know about which pose the biggest threat.
Despite finding 27,000 near Earth objects, the experts guess that we still don’t know where 60% of the “half kilometer” type ones are.
For a change, it’s nice to talk about a science that’s not political.
If a big rock were on the way it would put Woke science back in its box.
Here’s another unpatentable, natural, safe molecule that appears to work against Covid and will probably never be mentioned by any Chief Health Officer who wants a cushy job with the WHO or Pfizer.
The Melatonin Molecule by Jynto
An Iraqi group enrolled 158 Covid patients, and gave half of them 10mg of Melatonin a day. All patients got “standard care”, meaning they all got remdesivir, dexamethasone, and an anticoagulant, but some 82 lucky patients were randomly picked to get melatonin as well. The average age of participants was 56 and most of them were men (70%).
By Day 17 a quarter of the control group were suffering from blood clotting (or thrombosis), but only 11% of the melatonin group were, or half as many.
By Day 11, eight patients in the control group had developed sepsis. Only two patients taking melatonin did. Sepsis is a systemic condition where basic things like blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature are running awry, and things are getting out of control. By Day 17, a third of the control group had sepsis, but only 8% of controls the test group with melatonin did. It’s the kind of condition that kills people.
Indeed mortality in the melatonin group was 1%, but in the control group it was 17%. These study numbers are small, but no one needs to do a Chi Squared test to see if that’s significant. (p=0.001) All up, thirteen people died in the group that didn’t get melatonin, but only one person died in the group that did.
The authors (Hasnan et al) stay very calm and merely conclude, Adjuvant use of Melatonin may help reduce thrombosis, sepsis, and mortality in COVID-19 patients.
I feel a bit sorry for the unlucky sods in the control group. But in reality, I feel sorry for all of us. Many of the aspects of melatonin that make it appealing as a potential helper against Covid have been known for a long time. Melatonin is not just a sleepy-hormone, it’s also anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-viral and immunomodulatory. Yet here we are, discussing tiny Iraqi studies 23 months into a global pandemic because there aren’t large controlled studies of tens of thousands of people in the West.
These patients took melatonin for two weeks. The total cost is around $1.20 for the full course.
These numbers could be affected by other factors the researchers didn’t know about. But they tried to control for things like asthma, heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.
For a long time the FLCCC Math protocol has included melatonin 6 – 12mg at night “until discharge”.
Melatonin is an ancient hormone that our pineal glands produce each night. Children make a lot of it. As we get older, we make less. It’s quite likely that this is one of the reasons children cope better with Covid infections than older people do.
I’ll have more to say about this soon. There are other papers…
h/t Scott for prodding, Old Ozzie, Peter C, FatAl, Hanrahan, and Bill in Oz, Sunni bakchat, Conan Kirtan, Dave in the States for mentions a long time ago.
Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.
And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies
by John Smoke, im1776
by Freestocks-photos
Charities are as large as the entire University sector.
Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.
John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.
It starts so gently:
Imagine a billionaire. He’s an apolitical man. The driving purpose of his life has been to create goods and services for consumers and to provide shareholder value. He’s seventy years old, and suddenly realising he won’t be around forever starts thinking about his legacy. He consults his younger wife. She is also apolitical. After a few days or so of consulting each other they decide to find a way to donate 800 million to charity. They set to go and speak to their wealth advisors, to consult on where to go from here.
by hansLinde
Gradually the mildly left leaning middle managers attract the moderately left, who employ the passionate left. Each round of funding attracts the harder-hard-liners, and gradually reaches more edgy projects. What starts off as “child poverty” becomes a plan to “counter digital hate”. Before long it’s a communist enclave pulling on the levers of power, armed with lawyer-sharks, millions of dollars, and professional fund managers to leverage the long term advantages of a large fund. It’s legal, but crazy.
Then there is way these machines may be handed to the spouses of said Billionaire after they expire or divorce. And thus some people driving national policy are not accountable to the voters, or the shareholders, but only to their own whims, or the whims of those who manipulate them.
Universities set the culture, but the Charity Machine makes it real
Charities are the main intermediary unit between academia and journalism. They can imbibe whatever is coming out of universities, turn the issues in question into campaigns, and then use those campaigns to secure coverage in media outlets. This all serves to exert pressure on liberal-democratic legislatures, getting them to copy-paste the charity’s findings into legislation which lawmakers can rubber-stamp.
The Charity industrial complex can go on indefinitely, long beyond their creator:
Unless we collectively do something to stop them, these charitable foundations are set to go on indefinitely too. Assuming their investments are managed prudently (most hire professional investment managers), there is no reason for them not to continue splurging billions for years to come. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was founded in 1904 by a Quaker pacifist. By the 1970s it was funding Communists in Mozambique. It’s now one of the biggest charitable foundations in the UK, funding racial demagogues and cybertron armies alike.
Same goes for the Ford Foundation, set up of course by Henry Ford, who at least judging by the international grants it made in 2021 ($656 million worth), has also gone Communist. When George Soros dies, do people really expect his influence to suddenly stop? It won’t. It will be continued by the same machine that is currently in place, and probably going even crazier and more unhinged once the old man kicks it.
While personalising attacks on oligarchs such as Soros can be useful, what we are dealing with here is a structural problem.
This excellent essay does not describe the evil spawned by easy money from corrupt currencies based on thin air and IOUs — but the power of the billionaire flows downstream from that.
While some billionaires are gifted and wise, the Easy Billionaires who grew rich through predatory capitalism and monopolistic control might not be the kind of people we want running the country.
Note from Jo: This is a change from the last 5,000 posts. Rafe has written and edited this entirely a guest. Given the dearth of independent blogs in Australia since the end of Catallaxy, it seems an experiment worth trying.
Introducing myself. Jo has taken me on board as an occasional contributor after the old Catallaxy Files closed down and I was homeless. Due to the break I have not got back into the routine of posting four or five times a week on a wide range of topics and I am now spending more time wind-watching with the Energy Realists of Australia. You can see how we are taking on the renewable energy farce here. My thoughts on other issues can be found on my personal website.
Back to the topic.
Why are supposedly quality journalists so misguided on climate change?
Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan have clearly taken on board the alarmist global warming narrative. To explain the context for overseas readers, Kelly and Sheridan are very senior and respected journalists on The Australian, the one national daily that Rupert Murdoch established in 1964. That paper along with a handful of other metropolitan dailies represented the quality journalism in the country. The Australian maintained that reputation longer than several others but the situation had changed since the woke offspring of Rupert Murdoch have assumed more control.
Never mind the performance of the hacks, what has gone wrong at the top of the profession and the once-were reputable newspapers?
Global warming and the reduction of CO2 emissions will probably be seen as the signature issue of public policy at the start of the third Millennium alongside the emerging role of China.
In this situation it behooves journalists who have access to a large readership among the educated public to obtain the best grasp of the issues that they can manage, given their training and their capabilities.
Huge protests were held all over the world. Here in Perth, Western Australia with a population of 2 million, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a not a political town, has had barely 30 cases of Covid in the community (in total) and yet, the central mall was packed wall to wall.
Walking in with placards, strangers in the traffic were shouting approval through open car windows.
The best video is at the bottom of this twitter thread, but can’t seem to display it without the first two. (Perhaps a twitter genius will tell me how?)
It’s another great day in science. Marshall Shepherd, once a meteorologist at NASA GISS, warns us that a cold snap will destroy reading skills. Don’t let the kids out!
Luckily this only happens in Thanksgiving week, eh?
As the climate cycles turn to cooler trends, expect to see a lot more of this kind of bizarre conjecture and weapons grade excuses. There’s a flock of believers to guard from reality.
Shepherd seems to be trying to preempt and inoculate believers who might get exposed to skeptical comments at Thanksgiving dinner when they meet all those relatives:
Like clockwork, I will also start to see Tweets and Facebook posts claiming that global warming or climate change is not real because its cold. These types of Tweets belong in the Hall of Fame (or Shame) of Climate Illiteracy.
So now believers are primed to gasp or snigger at the right moment round the dinner table. Marshall goes on with a longwinded explanation of how it’s cold now because a rock hit the Earth when it was a baby-world and made winter. He even links to a childrens page at NASA — possibly because most believers are child-like, or he thinks they are not too smart.
Then he winds up to the clincher moment of social shame:
“Friends don’t let friends draw conclusions about climate
based on one day or week”
Of course they don’t. And if Marshall Shepard was my friend I’d ask him when he last wrote to the journalists and politicians who keep saying that the hottest day ever means something about climate change? Isn’t he concerned that the constant junk science reporting about short hot trends only fuels this feeling that short cold trends are valid too?
So if anyone leans on you, ask them which friends of theirs they have they saved from humiliation and ignominy. Or did they let them make unscientific pronouncements that one hot week, day, night, or long weekend was “caused by a coal plant”? Friends don’t let friends embarrass themselves, after all.
And if he wants to talk long trends, let’s talk long trends. The Earth has been cooling for 2,000 years. It’s cooler than it was 7,000 years ago, 120,ooo years ago, and 120 million years ago.
Friends don’t let friends worry about minor changes in an ever changing climate.
PS: Our British Friends don’t have thanksgiving, but spare a thought for them. Minus 17 is being mooted, and a newspaper has even used the phrase “a potential mini ice age winter”.
The FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine in August but hasn’t released the data and documents the decision was based on. So lawyers filed a suit against the FDA to make that information fully available to the public.
Aaron Siri, a lawyer at Siri Glimstad explains that the FDA has now asked the judge to allow it to drip-feed out the information at a pace so slow that the complete set won’t be available until 2076.
Remember, the vaccine is totally safe and has astonishing efficacy, right?
The federal government shields Pfizer from liability. Gives it billions of dollars. Makes Americans take its product. But won’t let you see the data supporting its product’s safety and efficacy. Who does the government work for?
To date, almost three months after it licensed Pfizer’s vaccine, the FDA still has not released a single page. Not one.
Instead, two days ago, the FDA asked a federal judge to give it until 2076 to fully produce this information. The FDA asked the judge to let it produce the 329,000+ pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license its vaccine at the rate of 500 pages per month, which means its production would not be completed earlier than 2076. The FDA’s promise of transparency is, to put it mildly, a pile of illusions.
It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021). Taking the FDA at its word, it conducted an intense, robust, thorough, and complete review and analysis of those documents in order to assure that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective for licensure. While it can conduct that intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public.
With so much “misinformation” out there about vaccines, you’d think Pfizer and the FDA would want to get the correct information out there ASAP.
In other news, as many as 27 US States have sued the Biden Administration to stop the vaccine mandate, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld its decision to temporarily suspend that.
Commenters please add links to your local events or national information pages. France: #Liberte
Rallies start at 12:00 at the following Australian locations:
Adelaide: Rundle Park |Brisbane: Brisbane City Botanic Gardens | Bundaberg: Lions Park | Cairns: Muddys Northside | Darwin: The Esplanade (15:00 ACST) | Gympie: Lake Alford Park | Hobart: Parliament Lawns | Mackay: Bluewater Quay? | Melbourne: Parliament House | Mt Gambier: Vansittart Park | Perth: Forrest Place | Sydney: Hyde Park | Townsville: Strand Rockpool | Warrnambool: Civic Green
I suggest people subscribe on Telegram for information and to find a local protest. More info here.
…..
UPDATE: Obviously, all protests need to be peaceful. Not only is violence bad in and of itself, but it works against everything the protest aims to achieve. It only serves those who want to create division, paint the protesters as dangerous, and distract the world from the polite and civil pleas for simple medical freedom. In fact the real problem with all these street protests now, is that false flag incidents are so easy to stage.
The Will of the People has been replaced with a Rule by the Bureaucratic Class.
The Bureaucratic class dress themselves in fake charity — to help women and children, minorities, and trees, but these are the lies they tell themselves while they oppress the poor, raze the trees and use sexist, racist policies to line their pockets.
It’s a trend occurring all over the West. But nowhere was it more obvious when the people elected Donald Trump, and the all-knowing Bureaucrats did everything in their power to extinguish the people’s votes.
“I have witnessed the death of democracy” says Michael Pack, the man Donald Trump put in charge of the $850 million dollar institution called the U.S. Agency for Global Media which reaches 350 million people each week in 70 languages. Pack was selected two months after Trump took office, but the Democrats and bureaucrats stalled his appointment for three long years. Pack finally took office in June 2020. His experience exemplifies the control of the faceless Blob of Bureaucracy.
In a sense, we all witnessed it. From the moment Donald Trump was elected president until the day he left office, government officials refused to follow his orders that conflicted with their own views, in spite of their obligation to serve whoever is president. The permanent bureaucracy felt they knew better. After all, they were experts, while the president, in their estimation, was an ignoramus, or worse, unfit for office.
My goal, my only goal, was to return the news services to their legally mandated mission: to report news that is “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” (in the words of the VOA charter, which is U.S. law), and to promote American ideals like democracy and human rights around the world. In this modest, nonpartisan goal, I was doomed from the start. The USAGM permanent bureaucracy was ready to undermine every move of my administration, with the help of their allies in the media, Congress, and the courts, as well as pro bono lawyers. After all, they had been preparing for years while my nomination languished.
The Voice of America ran a repackaged advert for Joe Biden during an election year, with no context, as if it were reporting.
Everyone knew this violated the VOA charter, which is U.S. law that we all are required to uphold, and possibly other campaign and broadcasting laws. When we called this to the VOA’s attention, they took it down, though reluctantly. A week later, we discovered an audio version was still available. As CEO, I decided to launch an investigation to determine who was responsible …
When is the law, not the law. Whenever it suits the bureaucracy:
However, never before I became CEO had there been any consequences for breaking the law. My inquiry was a shock to the system, but I felt I had to uphold the law.
My actions were immediately attacked by the legacy media and by concerned congressmen, all in touch with the people I had fired. They charged that I was interfering with journalists and, once again, trying to turn the VOA into Trump TV.
Lies go unpunished:
One reporter mocked me for saying that the VOA spot was targeted at getting out the Muslim vote in Michigan for Biden, citing how few Urdu speakers there are in Michigan. But the VOA spot was in English, as he well knew, and he also knew that his readers would not know this.
Those who show no respect for taxpayers, voters or the President are promoted to spend more taxpayer dollars to show less respect…
The most senior person responsible was Kelu Chao, then the head of VOA language services. In her case, I merely gave her a verbal reprimand that did not appear in her personnel file. She, too, immediately signed on to a suit against us, alleging a violation of her first amendment rights. Today, she has been rewarded by the Biden administration and is the acting CEO of USAGM, my old position. All others involved in this scandalous misuse of taxpayer funds have been rehired and many promoted.
This is only one of a long list of similar stories. In short, there was no way for me, a Senate-confirmed agency head, to assume authority over this mid-sized agency. The permanent bureaucracy and their allies simply would not permit it. Bad as it was for me, it is so much worse at bigger agencies like the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence agencies. No matter that Donald Trump was the duly elected president of the United States, federal bureaucrats did not accept that. After all, they knew better how to run the country, so that is what they did. This is tyranny, pure and simple — government by unelected bureaucrats, subverting the will of the majority.
Pack does not think the two most obvious plans to claw back standards or balance can succeed:
The first group says the problem is that Donald Trump did not get enough qualified, experienced, government professionals in key political appointments soon enough. Next time, we need to have a government in waiting, ready to serve. Surely, this is a good idea, but far from sufficient. In my agency of 4,000 people, I could bring in about 10 political appointees. We were outnumbered 400-to-1.
Pretty much all mid and senior level bureaucrats are partisan open political agents.
Even immediate mass firings are unlikely to work:
I highly doubt that this ambitious objective could be achieved, given the size and nature of the modern federal bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats have powerful civil service protections. In eight months, I could not fire a handful of people whom career adjudicators recommended terminating for cause, such as gross mismanagement leading to security lapses. I put them on administrative leave with pay and then started the process of removal. All have been brought back.
Even if the new administration could institute a 30% across-the-board cut, the wrong people would likely be fired. The best at scheming, the most committed ideologues, are the most skilled in surviving reductions in force.
Many of these institutions are beyond saving, and need razing and rebuilding. But when any part of the Bureaucratic Blob is attacked, all parts of the blob fight back. Cancel one institution and the rest will march in the streets, fearing they will be next.
That doesn’t mean we can’t split the hydra, setting up new institutions in parallel — ones with good people, clear focus, to hire good people. But we need to think carefully about the incentives. All organizations funded by Big Government will always and inevitably become tools to promote Big Government. Perhaps they all need a limited span, an end date. Perhaps Government jobs need a term limit and the Head of a national Health Body shouldn’t be allowed 30 years to build an empire? Just for starters…
Even better, without hunting for more rules on top of rules, what we all really want is just Real Media. With better mass media, we’d get better politicians and get rid of cheating Department Heads, who served themselves.
Think about how we make that happen. We know it could be a smashing ratings success.
The People still outnumber the Rulers:
So, what can be done? The good news is that about half of Americans know, in their gut, that the government no longer represents the will of the people. They need to rise up and demand an end to this tyranny. We did it before, in 1776. This time, we have a constitution and a rule of law, so we don’t need an armed revolution, but we do need an unarmed one, a peaceful democratic revolution. If a large majority of the people forcefully demand change and reflect this at the ballot box in a clear mandate, then and only then reform can come. Democracy will then return, and we will once again have a government of, for, and by the people. Many gave their lives for this. Now, it is our turn.
People need to stop hoping they can vote for one knight in shining armor to save them. No one man can defeat the Green-blob, the Bureaucrat Web, — whatever we want to call them, on his own. The March through the Institutions took decades and a concerted effort by a million footsoldiers. It takes a movement. But a movement is just a few percent of the population who are very very determined and who believe it can be done.
h/t to David E who also adds this ancient bit of television. Art in it’s purest form. The series Yes Minister never mentioned “Labour” or “Conservative” because it was not about one party versus the other but about the Bureaucrats versus the Politicians. That’s part of the shell game. The People are taught to see one or other Party as the enemy, when the real adversary rules from behind the curtain.
Errata: Apologies. Michael Peck corrected to Michael Pack.
He’s the highest paid public servant in the US, and has been in the job for decades, and he’s been able to direct nearly a trillion dollars worth of funding. Last year, he helped infect America when it could have been stopped, and this year he’s keeping life saving cheap safe drugs away from patients and their doctors.
Robert F Kennedy Jnr has just launched a sizzling new book called “The Real Anthony Fauci”. I haven’t got a copy yet, but the launch interviews are radioactive. Even worse than the Beagle experiments reported just two weeks ago, are the allegations of experiments on Dominican Orphans, and on sick Americans.
Will The Real Anthony Fauci be able to keep his job?
“Here’s what I would say to people. We have to stop this. This is the hill that we all have to die on.“
Kennedy claims the patterns repeat decade after decade. Cheap drugs are blocked, while expensive profitable drugs are promoted. Everyone in the chain gets rewarded, except the patients and heretic doctors who get stonewalled and sacked, or potentially very sick.
Fauci is the highest-paid federal employee in the U.S., and 68% of his $437,000 a year salary comes from bioweapons research
Instead of safeguarding public health, Dr. Anthony Fauci turned the National Institutes of Health into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, and essentially sold the entire country to the drug industry
Fauci has had a hand in creating the vaccine gold rush. In 2000, he met with Bill Gates, who asked to partner with the NIH in an agreement to vaccinate the world with a battery of new vaccines. In 2009, this agreement was rebranded as “The Decade of Vaccines,” the objective of which was to implement mandatory vaccinations for every adult and child on the planet by the year 2020.
Philanthropy Capitalism sounds like a cross between the Bankers and the Greens: Too Big To Fail, and too sacred to criticize.
The cloak of charity is a shield against serious investigation.
“Gates calls what he does philanthropy capitalism, [the idea that] you can use philanthropy to make money. He had a foundation where he has sheltered $50 billion in tax-free money. And, he continues to have absolute control over it. He uses that money to gain control of public health agencies in our country and the World Health Organization.
He’s created a lot of his own [organizations] with Dr. Fauci and a lot of these quasi-governmental agencies that people think are governmental. They’re actually front groups of the pharmaceutical industry like GAVI and SEPI …
He uses this battery and this control of the WHO to set pharmaceutical or medical policy, public health policy around the globe, in a way that maximizes the profits from his stakeholding in these big pharmaceutical companies.
The US government takes most of the risk, does a lot of the advertising, and guarantees the profits:
U.S. taxpayers funded the research while drug companies have made an estimated $100 billion in profits from the shots in a single year, all while having zero liability for injuries and deaths even as people are being coerced into taking them.
It can’t be good to put any one man in charge of such a huge pot of gold:
…between Fauci, Gates and the U.K. Wellcome Trust, they control 63% of the biomedical research on earth through their funding. Over his career, Fauci alone has distributed more than $930 billion in research grants through the NIAID. You could say they control all of it, really, because they also have the capacity to dry up funding to projects they don’t want done.
One one man holds the keys to a vault with so much money, how can it not become a corrupted process? What stops that sole man becoming so influential that many people within a whole branch of science start to perform for him.
This system is like a formalized pal review process in climate science.
“Between 2009 and 2016, about 230 drugs were approved by the FDA, all of which came out of his shop. So, he is an incubator for Pharma.
And here’s what he does: At his lab, he has petri dishes filled with every virus [imaginable], and he has scientists that are messing around with different molecules and different poisons, and they’ll drop those poisons into a petri dish and see if it kills the culture. If it kills the culture, then he has a potential antiviral drug.
The next step is, they give it to rats, and see if it kills the rats. If most of the rats survive, now you have a potential antiviral that may work in humans. Then, he farms it out to a big university. Now the person it goes to at the university is usually a very powerful person. It’s the dean of the medical school, or the chair of one of the departments, and they run the clinical trials, which is extremely lucrative.
So, they will do the Phase 1 trial, and they’ll recruit maybe 100 people for the trial. Fauci gives that principal investigator maybe $20,000 per recruit. The university skims off 50% to 75% of that. So, now, that university is hooked into the system.
Then, if the drug works in Phase 1 and Phase 2, then they have to bring in big groups of people — 10,000 people — and you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. And they have to bring in a pharmaceutical company that now takes control of about half the patent.
Tony Fauci’s agency keeps a share of the patent. For example, they now collect royalties on the Moderna [COVID] vaccine. [The NIAID] gets half the royalties, billions of dollars. The university researcher keeps some of the patent, so he is now permanently attached to Tony Fauci and will do anything he says, and the university itself is getting some of that patent.
If the pile of money is big enough it can silence whole universities…
So, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to these universities every year, in addition to the grants that he’s giving, and he can cut all that off if somebody at the university does the wrong study.
The most surprising thing about the Brandon government is that it hasn’t done this before the Babylon Bee.
…
“We have a deadly enemy out there,” announced General “Sparkles” McKenzie, “and it’s called carbon. The problem with modern-day weapons is that they take a lot of carbon to make. But if we get some nice bespoke swords or bows and arrows, that will help us stay carbon neutral, and you can all sleep safe at night.”
There are some problems with the new policy, though. Some military simulations have shown that swords and bows do put the military at a disadvantage against armies that still use irresponsible gunpowder and explosive weapons. “We have a modern weapon for that,” explained McKenzie. “It’s called the hashtag #StopTheBang.
Looks like the US Army will skip the Solar Powered Tank transition proposed by NATO. But swords, bows and arrows are easier to carry on carbon neutral sailing ships. And better for marines using attack-bicycles.
President Xi praised Joe Biden’s foresight and agreed China would switch to carbon neutral weapons by 2070 or straight after Xi is elected Supreme World Leader.
In response to a question of “which is a bigger threat, the climate or China?” [Pentagon spokesman retired Adm. John Kirby] said, “You’ve heard the secretary talk about the climate as a — a real and existential national security threat . . . And we considered China as the number one pacing challenge for the department. Both are equally important. Both are — are challenges that the secretary wants the senior leadership at the Pentagon to be focused on, as well as many others, too.”
After questioning Kirby was unable to state whether Climate Change or China posed the greater threat.
He appears to be 200 years behind the times. After a hundred thousand years of losing to climate change, living in caves and dying in blizzards, humans defeated climate change with fossil fuels.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
Recent Comments