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 Image by AngMoKio For anyone trained in genetics the news that China warned of the potential for race based genetic bioweapons in 2011 is just stating what any good SciFi writer has known for years. But the macabre detail may help wake up the rest of the world to the idea “What if”. What would a New Biotech Cold War look like, and does it look like this?
China was spelling out some toe-curling recipes: warning that new biotech could pump up the virulence of infectious agents; it could neutralize antibiotics and vaccines, or potentially make the “target” population more vulnerable by disabling specific genes. Theoretically, adversaries could add genetic material covertly. How about some involuntary “Gene Therapy”coming to an airconditioning system near you?
But hey, they were just speculating right?
Funnily enough, a guy called Miles Yu was working for Mike Pompeo, advising him on China, and he raised the existence of the Chinese submission with the US State Department last December. Pompeo ordered an investigation, but they couldn’t find a copy of China’s original submission at the time (it’s only a global UN convention, yeah?). But when Joe Biden was sworn in, the investigation was shut down. (They don’t call him Xiden for nothing. ) But Sharri Markson, or someone at The Australian, found it.
And Mr Yu said: “it send chills up my spine”.
How’s that UN Treaty against Biological Weapons going?
 Beijing’s own 2011 declaration to the UN, Biological Weapons Convention reads rather chillingly in hindsight. Though The Australian is not suggesting Covid-19 was a biological weapon or that China has carried out an attack.
China’s warning on man-made viruses
by Sharri Markson and Jack Hazelwood, The Australian
The Chinese government admitted research to create man-made viruses posed “a huge latent threat to mankind” – and said “accidental mistakes in biotech laboratories can place mankind in great danger”…
Chinese authorities also spoke of the “increased threat of biological weapons” and discussed using viruses as “genetic weapons” saying systems biology “can also create the potential for biological weapons based on genetic differences between races”…
..research could “significantly increase the destructiveness of biological weapons” by “making biological attacks more stealthy”.
So there was China in 2011 admitting to the Biological Weapons Convention that there might be trouble complying with the rules. So much for UN State Party agreements which grew out of a 1972 declaration, and is now a major treaty that is reviewed every five years.
By 2016, China was talking about a more sophisticated problem:
It says “foreign genes or viruses can be introduced into the target population asymptomatically by means of gene-therapy vectors, enabling a biological weapon attack to be mounted covertly”.
This could mean a two stage event where stage one was silently introducing a section of code to a target population, that could be used later.
And admissions like this in 2016 sit a little awkwardly with 2020 protests that lab leaks don’t need investigation:
“Accidental mistakes in biotech laboratories can place mankind in great danger,” it states.
Righto.
Hands up who thinks UN inspectors would be able to stop clandestine government laboratories from creating Black Death 2.0 even if the UN inspectors wanted to…
Even if they had an implementation body to assess compliance, which they don’t, they would also need an enforcement process.
Time to ditch the UN, and get serious about assessing the threat and how to respond.
Just another cold war
The weapons are different, but the rules stay the same.
 Lassa virus, Photo Credit: C. S. Goldsmith Translate a few tactics from the last cold war:
Firstly, there’s always deterrence — misbehaving nations need to feel some heat.
We don’t need to know if the virus was deliberately released, we already know that China did not play good global citizen in warning the world and stopping the spread in January 2020, when it could have been stopped so easily. Global trade and travel sanctions are a threat to a corrupt leadership. There should be a price when a nation doesn’t report a new contagion with honesty and openness.
Secondly, there’s Part I of the Biotech Arms Race — You have one nasty virus, we have 1,000: The MAD doctrine in the cold war meant both sides had obscenely powerful weapons to unleash. The problem was and is that destructive weapons sometimes destruct. Nuclear accidents happen, and so do laboratory leaks. Not a sweetness-and-light kind of world to live in. But it might slow down a nation tempted to post out a new Pox.
Thirdly, there’s Part II of the Arms Race: Build the “Star Wars” of Biotech: For every nasty virus there will be ways to intercept. While China was dreaming of bioweapons in 2011, I was advising we dump the Clean Green renewables fantasies and get into the real medical revolution instead. All that money on windmills and expensive green electrons could be spent curing diseases.
We need a mastery of medical science. That means finding faster ways to detect new viruses, and building molecular tools that chop up viral sequences. We can already screen antiviral cheap chemicals in a matter of weeks (though we might want to clean up the medical swamp bureaucracy that stops us using them). We could get very good with CRISPR and go right into cells and cut the offending code out, or we might swamp the code with anti-sense RNA that sticks to offending sequences and renders them harmless. Then there are monoclonal antibodies, or nanobodies that do the work our immune system is supposed to do, but in the lab, pre-prepared, rather than waiting to make it happen in a sick body.
We have so many tools, but right now, they are the planes and guns of pre-World War I.
Covid is a baby biotech weapon. The next ones could be so much nastier.
 Ebola Virus budding from a African Green Monkey kidney Cell. Author BernbaumJG REFERENCES
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, UNODA, UN Office for Disarmament Affairs.
https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/un/disarmament/bwc/conf1112.pdf
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Science of Civilization Lesson #2: What’s the most deadly kind of government on Earth?
“Big Government”
One third of millennials approve of communism, probably because they don’t know what it is:
January 2020: Poll of young Americans found 70% will “vote socialist” and half of them think communism is OK
 Gulag in Latvia | Image Rakoon. According to a poll commissioned by the Washington, D.C. area nonprofit Victims of Communism, 70 percent of Millennials say they are likely to vote for a socialist while one in three view communism favorably.
The same poll also reported that 27 percent of people believe President Donald Trump is the biggest threat to world peace. The survey placed the U.S. president over North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
According to YouGov, 36 percent of millennials say they approve of communism. That percentage is up almost 10 percent from 2018.
Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, has a plan that students in his state should understand why Cubans swim to Florida more than Floridians swim to Cuba:
Douglas Ernst, Washington Times
“We have a number of people in Florida, particularly southern Florida, who’ve escaped totalitarian regimes, who escaped communist dictatorships to be able to come to America,” Mr. DeSantis said Tuesday. “We want all students to understand. Why would somebody flee across shark-infested waters, say, leaving Cuba, to come to southern Florida? Why would somebody leave a place like Vietnam? Why would people leave these countries and risk their life to be able to come here?”
At a guess, the move is likely to unify immigrants and non-immigrants more than burning down Wendy’s does.
University diversity test coming:
How radical. Instead of marking universities on their diversity of skin color, DeSantis wants to mark them on their diversity of ideas. Florida will require universities survey staff and students on beliefs.
The survey will examine “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented” in the state universities and colleges — and seeks to find whether students, faculty and staff “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom,” according to the bill, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Think of it as a scorecard for the university, with the promise of financial support for universities that pass:
But DeSantis and bill sponsor Sen. Ray Rodrigues suggested that budget cuts could be imminent if universities and colleges are found to be “indoctrinating” students.
“That’s not worth tax dollars and that’s not something that we’re going to be supporting moving forward,” DeSantis [said].
Imagine a situation where a university has an incentive to teach both sides? Spread this idea around….
Western Civilization is not dead yet.
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Well here’s a surprise. A year and a half later and now we find out that Australian labs were also helping China?
 And tonight, 520 days after China shared the genetic sequence of SARS-2, Australian scientists are suddenly very concerned about how Australia might still be doing gain-of-function work with viruses? Minister Greg Hunt is asking for a “review” of gain-of-function research in Australia? Did he even know?
It’s amazing what the power of a good reporter can achieve. Hail Sharri Markson and The Australian.
For 500 long pandemic days some publicly funded scientists had millions of reasons apparently, not to talk about how the virus might have been a lab leak. These public servants may have been publicly scoffing at the idea the virus may have leaked from a lab, but they didn’t think to mention that they’d worked with bats, and gain-of-function viruses and even the Wuhan lab itself?
They were ethically bound to speak up. Did they say nothing, or did they talk to Morrison and Hunt in private? After which, given the government’s role, possibly none of them wanted to let that bat out of the bag?
Public trust in these institutions might be about to dive…
The CSIRO has even been forced to correct itself. Somehow it didn’t tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the Senate Estimates Hearing.
Sharri Markson and Liam Mendes, The Australian
The CSIRO has been forced to correct evidence it gave at a Senate estimates hearing after initially denying its researchers had undertaken work on live bats with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of growing international concern it was the source of Covid-19. CSIRO chief operating officer Judi Zielke admitted the organisation had “undertaken research on bats previously”.
“Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness did undertake research on bats in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016-17,” Ms Zielke said.
The same organisations with the same grant games to play wouldn’t have an interest in not telling the whole truth on climate models? Different researchers, but the same process, same incentive, and same organisations?
Go Matt Canavan:
Under questioning from Nationals senator Matt Canavan on June 3, the CSIRO initially gave evidence that it “does not undertake research on live bats at ACDP”. However, Senator Canavan later presented the CSIRO with an excerpt from a scientific paper written in conjunction with the Wuhan lab stating: “Wild caught P Alecto bats were trapped in Southern Queensland, Australia, and transported alive by air to the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Victoria, where they were euthanised for dissection.”
And this research helped us, how?
The CSIRO and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on several projects on bats’ antiviral immunity in 2011. The purpose of a study was to understand why bats remained asymptomatic to viral infection that was capable of spillover to other susceptible mammals “with lethal consequences”.
Indeed, the ten projects were spread over ten years but one researcher at the University of Queensland was involved with that Wuhan Institute of …”Bioweapons” itself as recently as August last year. US intelligence had already warned the whole pandemic might be due to a lab leak, and yet Dr Hume Field was working with the very same Professor Shi (the Batwoman) and Peter Daszek (the Fauci favorite). Dr Field is an advisor to the infamous “EcoHealth Alliance”.
 Spot the names… Something about the way we fund our scientists is seriously screwed.
Professor MacIntyre said there needed to be more community consultation on this research.
You don’t say…
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The new super meta review of Ivermectin is out. It’s 27 pages of fine print detail and 144 references, and it’s very impressive.
 Ivermectin…. by Fvasconcellos Bryant et al soaked themselves in 24 studies involving 3,406 people and found that ivermectin use reduced deaths by a very nice 60% with “moderate certainty”. But ivermectin appears to be at its best when used to prevent infections in the first place. There was “low certainty” but with prophylactic use Covid infections were reduced by an average of 86% . But by the time patients were “in need of mechanical ventilation”, the data, while muddy, suggested ivermectin was not much help.
The bad thing about Ivermectin is that there are not many bad things. It’s too good, too cheap, too safe, and too far out of patent to be profitable.
Given the evidence of efficacy, safety, low cost, and current death rates, ivermectin is likely to have an
impact on health and economic outcomes of the pandemic across many countries. Ivermectin is not a new
and experimental drug with an unknown safety profile. It is a WHO “Essential Medicine” already used in several different indications, in colossal cumulative volumes.
We can almost hear the frustration as Bryant et al compare how easily other drugs get approval to treat Covid:
Corticosteroids have become an accepted standard of care in COVID-19, based on a single RCT of dexamethasone.1 If a single RCT is sufficient for the adoption of dexamethasone, then a fortiori the evidence of 2 dozen RCTs supports the adoption of ivermectin.
RCT means a Random Controlled Trial. Sometimes one trial will do, other times 24 trials isn’t enough.
h/t to Ian and Phillip
Meanwhile, the BBC has announced that Ivermectin will be studied as possible treatment in UK
Hold off on the champers. The Principle Study appears to be a holding pattern to fend off questions about “why they weren’t studying Ivermectin”. Good reporters will want to ask why the trial will allow people to join up to 15 days after they get symptoms when the best results come with early treatment and even prophylactic use. If only there were good reporters left at the BBC.
The trial will also allow people who are vaccinated to join which is a good way to dilute the results. If we compare 2000 vaccinated people with 2000 also-vaccinated people the difference between placebo and drug may not be very significant. And if the vaccine “is the ticket to freedom” why invite vaccinees to join the trial? Is it, perhaps a back route to reducing deaths in vaccinees who get breakthrough infections? Let’s just hope for the vaccinees sake, that the docs don’t wait until they’re on the ventilator.
If the UK Ministry of Big Pharma Health really wanted to test Ivermectin, they’d offer it to people in high risk areas who weren’t sick and weren’t vaccinated, and compare like for like cases without Ivermectin in the same area.
But that might show good results.
h/t Steve,
Indonesia however is poor enough to approve Ivermectin use. Without access to $5000-dollar-a-day ICU beds, or mass experimental vaccines, Indonesia is looking down the Delta variant barrel. They have been given Sinovax, the Chinese vaccine, but seemingly that’s not much (as it wasn’t it the Seychelles, or in Chile either).
Production capacity of Ivermectin is said to be 4 million per month. (Presumably they refer to doses?). But with 270 million people, that might not be enough, even if they are dished out to the highest risk people. With 15,000 new daily cases and doubling fast, they are racing against the tide. They would probably need a few million doses just for the current contacts.
Indonesia doesn’t just have two new variants of concern, they have 211.
Watch this space…. (and pray for the people of Indonesia). We have lift off. 🙁
We have to admire both Craig Kelly and Malcolm Roberts in Australia.
REFERENCES
Bryant, Andrew MSc1,*; Lawrie, Theresa A. MBBCh, PhD2; Dowswell, Therese PhD2; Fordham, Edmund J. PhD2; Mitchell, Scott MBChB, MRCS3; Hill, Sarah R. PhD1; Tham, Tony C. MD, FRCP4 (2021) Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection, A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines
American Journal of Therapeutics: June 17, 2021 – Volume Publish Ahead of Print – Issue –
doi: 10.1097/MJT.0000000000001402
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Perhaps Google just wanted to help some medical researchers?
There’s nothing to suggest the Google charity funded the Wuhan Lab, or Covid, and Google says they didn’t. But the Google charity did send money to Peter Daszek and his charity which in hindsight doesn’t seem like a good place to put money. The EcoHealth Alliance is the one that Fauci helped fund, which did send money to Wuhan. And Daszek was the guy who joined the WHO team to “investigate” the origin and tried to quash the idea that it was a lab leak. He helped author a paper on Nature that said it was natural based in nothing much last February.
So it’s an odd fish for Google to have company with. Somehow there are millions of dollars of what appears to be careless money sloshing around in the system — and being divvied up for things that the careless funders might not have thought too much about. The Big Tech companies are acting like Dictators of medium sized nations but without the accountability…
These viral studies occurred in places like Japan, the US and Malaysia. One team worked on Henipavirus, which is also a bat borne virus. Another team worked on Macacine Herpes-virus (MaHV1) which has a mortality rate in humans of >70%.
If Google has only honest intentions and wants to help — maybe it could stop censoring Doctors who have a different opinion?
 …. Some of this research probably needs to be done somehow. But can any one company play both a Global Medical Director, and Ruler of the Town Square?
We didn’t vote for that…
Daily Mail
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It was ten degrees below normal at Scott Base, in June, and usually July is the coldest month.
 Pitch black, minus 81C and a howling wind. Spare a thought for the hardy crew who are wintering down in Antarctica, experiencing near-record breaking cold temperatures.
They’ve come very near to the coldest ever recorded temperature of -89.6C.
Cap Allon at Electroverse points out that some of that Global Warming has made it up to New South Wales where it had the coldest June day in 122 years two weeks ago.
A few weeks before that, Dunedin Airport New Zealand hit a record of minus 8.8C in May. It was the coldest day ever recorded there in any month since records started in 1963. One cold day doesn’t mean a lot climate wise, but if Antarctica was close to record warmth would most of the worlds media have barely said a word?
Remember the poles are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
ht Climate Depot and Electroverse
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 Flynn Reef, Queensland, Photo by Wise Hok Wai Lum Ever since Australia asked for an investigation into the source of Covid, China has been accidentally-on-purpose sticking pins into our trade deals. Pop went the wine, coal, beef, barley and lobster markets.
Now after concreting corals reefs in the South China Sea and plundering the Galapagos, China is suddenly concerned about the Great Barrier Reef. Overnight Chinese players in the UN have pushed it to the top of a list that had 82 more fragile ecosystems ahead of it. Pop, goes the tourism trade as the headlines ring out that UNESCO says the Reef is “in danger”.
At the moment, the only tourists that could possibly be frightened away are a few New Zealanders, because no one else can easily get around the two week quarantine. But when flights reboot, Australia just needs to send photos of the glorious corals to the world and “pop” goes the UN and China’s reputation.
It’s time the West dumped the UN — it’s just a play tool for Sino power
That would “pop” some of the CCP web of influence. What’s a Veto of a dead committee worth?
How many other environmental scares have been pumped and carved to serve Beijing?
If China is so adept and willing to use fake environmentalism as a cold war weapon, what other environmental knobs have they turned?
Ben Packham, The Australian
Australia has been blindsided by a push by a China-chaired UN committee to declare the Great Barrier Reef “in danger” without proper consultation or scientific process.
Any downgrading of the reef’s status would threaten the 64,000 jobs and $6.4bn in tourism revenue linked to the natural wonder in a normal year.
Australia is a member of the 21-nation World Heritage Committee, but the body – under the chairmanship of China’s Vice-Minister for Education Tian Xuejun – is considered likely to accept the recommendation.
China also holds the position of UNESCO deputy director-general, the presidency of UNESCO’s International Union for Conservation for Nature, and is head of Asia at the World Heritage Centre – all three of which contributed to the World Heritage Committee’s draft decision.
The World Heritage Committee has not visited the reef since 2012, and there has been no mention of an “in danger” listing since 2015.
Commenters at The Australian get it:
Image: Wikimedia, author Wise Hok Wai Lum: Flynn Reef 2014.
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Strap yourself in: Solar Power and batteries made a whole town 100% renewable (for 80 minutes).
It’s an Australian first! Put out a press release. No seriously, they did:
Western Australia has again demonstrated its remote renewable energy generation chops, after successfully powering the Pilbara town of Onslow entirely on a combination of large and small-scale solar and battery storage for a total of 80 minutes.
Only 520,000 minutes short of a whole year.
“The milestone achievement was announced by WA energy minister Bill Johnston on Friday morning after being demonstrated by state government-owned regional utility Horizon Power, which established the solar and storage microgrid next to an existing gas plant.”
Onslow is a metropolis of 847 people sited in one of the sunniest zones in one of the sunniest countries in the world. With at least 3650 hours of sun a year, Onslow vies for a top ten position globally.
If solar power was going to make it anywhere, this would be it. But we all know what keeps the lights on in Onslow and it isn’t solar power.
The renewable microgrid is made up of 700kW of customer generated solar, a 600kW solar array, and a 1MW (no MWh stated) Battery Energy Storage System.
Plus a gas plant…
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It’s the sort of news that causes a Geopolitical realignment
There are now three Chinese defectors saying Covid19 was deliberately created by the Chinese Military. The third, Dong Jingwei, is possibly the highest ranking yet, and apparently talked to the DIA in mid February after flying into the US to visit his daughter.
The claims are that he has brought with him terabytes of data or “nearly 19 million documents”. It’s potentially dynamite — allegedly containing studies of Covid, forecasts of spread in the West, and names of Chinese spies in the US with details of payments.
If this is confirmed, and the Chinese Military did release a deadly bioweapon on the world, as Paula Bolyard says, “it ranks as one of the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen” — and the media, and some intelligence agencies, helped to cover it up.
The DIA kept the defector a secret from the CIA and FBI because they believed there were Chinese spies within them.
Paula Bolyard, PJ Media
According to RedState, the data includes:
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- Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
- Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the U.S. and the world
- Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
- Names of U.S. citizens who provide intel to China
- Names of Chinese spies working in the U.S. or attending U.S. universities
- Financial records showing U.S. businessmen and public officials who’ve received money from the Chinese government
- Details of meetings U.S. government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies and members of Russia’s SVR
- How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA
One third of Chinese students may be PLA assets?
RedState again:
Again, according to sources, Dong told DIA debriefers that at least a third of Chinese students attending US universities are PLA assets or part of the Thousand Talents Plan and that many of the students are here under pseudonyms. One reason for using pseudonyms is that many of these students are the children of high-ranking military and party leaders.
Dong could be the highest ranking defector yet from Chinese Intelligence
Jennifer Van Laar, on RedState:
Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
The one thing that has always suggested it was an incompetent leak rather than planned dispersal was that it appeared so close to the Wuhan Lab that was working on it. If the Military wanted it to look natural it would have been easier to release far away in Yunnan. Perhaps the truth is a mix — and it was meant to be used, but leaked early, and was then fanned “towards the West” to make the most of a mistake. It’s hard to believe Military intel would assume they could leak it deliberately, then rely on the Democrats and media to help in an election year, and later fall back on an “accident” with plausible deniability. But then it’s hard to believe the Democrats would select Joe Biden.
It may be no accident that the Lab Leak theory is finally getting accepted
Given the timing of Dong’s defection, and the gradual spread of the details from that trove, it makes sense that news has finally grown legs from early May when the Nicholas Wade article appeared. That doesn’t change the fact that there was always enough evidence to treat the lab leak as a possibility all along.
If this is true, it may be just what the West finally needs to pull together against a real threat and to help identify the rot within. It will also put pressure on the Chinese Communist Party’s position in China.
9.7 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
Signs of life in the UK outpost of Civilization
A new TV channel called “GB News” only opened on Sunday, to smashingly good ratings. GB News outdid the BBC and Sky on its first day as 164,000 people tuned in to see if they got real news for a change instead of repetitive inane cliches approved by some middle level bureaucratic arts graduate who was pushing their own political agenda to pump up their grifting salary and impress their friends. The BBC got 133,000 viewers and Sky 57,000.
BBC hit by mass boycott as viewers flock to Andrew Neil’s GB News and cancel TV licences
by Laura O’Callaghan, Express
AVID fans of GB News have hailed Britain’s newest TV channel and vowed to continue their boycott of the Beeb as they seek information from alternative sources.
Naturally, the collectivist bullies have gone after the advertisers, and while many spineless corporate CEOs have folded to cancel culture, at least one team is fighting back. Companies with weak CEOs include Kopparberg, Grolsch, Nivea, Open University, and Ikea.
The Co-op announced that it would not remove its advertising.
”Hi, we have developed a detailed and thoughtful advertising approach, which is driven by 3 principles:
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- “We will not seek to affect the editorial independence of publications or channels.
- “We will not undermine the commercial value of our society for our members.
- “We will ensure our values and principles are clear and undiminished regardless of surrounding content.”
Former Ukip MEP Patrick O’Flynn tweeted that The Co-op had “knocked it out of the park” and he would be proud to shop at his local Co-op store.
As Sacha O’Sullivan says: GB News has been ‘cancelled’ and made a roaring success out of it.
In his opening introduction, Andrew Neil vowed to expose “cancel culture” and focus on the news that matters to people outside of the “Westminster bubble”.
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When only the best will do:
“I thought I knew all there was to know about communist indoctrination, but I was wrong,” said the ruthless dictator to reporters after sitting through a 2-hour lecture on why fidget spinners are a remnant of Western patriarchal oppression. “Your American college professors have this down to an art!” …
The murderous leader of North Korea plans to go back to his home country and start his own Ivy League school: Kim Jong UNiversity.
Thanks to the Babylon Bee. Click the logo to read the rest.
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It’s almost like China’s climate action was just window dressing. It seems to be unraveling…
 China’s National Carbon Trading Scheme was supposed to go into full operation later this month, but now it’s been cut back by two-thirds. Instead of burdening 6,000 companies it will only afflict 2,000. And only a week ago, the Chinese government suddenly axed solar and wind subsidies, with the cuts starting just six weeks from now. Oilprice calls it “a crushing blow for wind and solar”. In a devastating move, there are even demands that solar plants have to sell electricity at the same price as coal power. The cruelty!
China produces three quarters of all the world’s solar panels, having subsidized-the-heck out of the global industry, exploited slave labor and driven the US leaders out of production.
Judging by the Wall St Journal story — in the last two months the paradigm has shifted from Environmental control to Economic priority. Perhaps solar power wasn’t much use for building ballistic missile submarines?
How different things would be if solar was actually cheaper than coal…
No new solar power plant subsidies. Just like that?
BEIJING, June 11 (Reuters) – China will no longer grant subsidies for new solar power stations, distributed solar projects by commercial users or onshore wind projects from the central government budget in 2021, the state planner said in a statement on Friday.
And now solar power can only sell at the same price as coal power? Really?
Electricity generated from the new projects will be sold at local benchmark coal-fired power prices or at market prices, the statement said.
Probably the reason for the solar subsidy cuts is because the bill had heated up to $42 billion by mid last year. And those subsidies are largely paid by electricity consumer serfs who weren’t too happy*.
June 11, 2021, Oilprice
The country’s finance ministry had previously committed to granting 57 percent more subsidies to solar power projects this year, although it did slash subsidies for wind power.
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Entrapment on Capitol Hill: Did the FBI infiltrate and even lead the riot?
 Capitol Hill, January 6 A very strange pattern
Many people are still being held in jail, without bail, five months later, but some of the people who appeared to be the most aggressive activists at Capitol Hill didn’t even get indicted. Were these people legally protected because they were undercover operatives or informants working with the FBI? If so, how much did these actors instigate events and thus entrap genuine protesters?
And if the FBI knew this event was going to happen, on “the most important day ever in Congress”, why didn’t they stop it and let Congress debate the question of whether the election was stolen? Seven US states had sent in dual electors, effectively choosing both Biden and Trump, and a growing number of Senators in five of those states had upped the ante by calling for an official decertification. All that Donald Trump, Rudy Guiliani and 88 State Senators were asking for, was a ten day delay so those key states could consider the new evidence and vote again and choose one set of electors.
Look who benefited from the Capitol Storming?
As reader Chris says:
The last thing genuine Trump supporters, or Republican constitutionalists wanted was to disrupt this critical sitting and the tabling of election fraud evidence.
But, the last thing the SWAMP wanted was the tabling of election fraud evidence.
Revolver takes a close look at the two different types of protestors at Capitol Hill:
Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions of Federal Foreknowledge
Revolver
The first category is the group of mostly harmless tourists who walked through already opened doors and already-removed barricades, and at most were guilty of minor trespassing charges and light property offenses. The second group consists of those who were violent with police officers, broke down barricades, smashed windows, belonged to a “militia” group engaged in military-style planning prior to the event, discussed transporting heavy weaponry, and so forth.
What’s at stake in these investigations:
If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing.
Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol — and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.
Must see TV: Tucker Carlson
Bitchute link
Meanwhile the ABC News said nothing, and SBS News told Australians tonight that “White Supremacy” is the single greatest threat the US faces.
There was a practice run three months earlier in Michigan led by the FBI
Remember the strange “Governor Whitmer Kidnapping Plot?” One third of those that Stormed Michigans Capitol turned out to be FBI agents or informants, and many of the people at that storming also came to Capitol Hill on Jan 6th.
…what if we told you that scarcely three months before the 1/6 Capitol Siege, the FBI arrested 14 people for planning to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the State Government — and that the alleged conspiracy to overthrow the State government involved storming of the State Capitol?
And what if we told you that of the 14 individuals who allegedly plotted the “kidnapping” and overthrow of the state government, at least five were undercover agents and federal informants? And as if that’s not enough, many of the individuals allegedly involved in this plot appear to belong to the “Three Percenters,” one of the very same militia groups now blamed for storming January 6.
And, as the cherry on top, what if we told you that the director of the Detroit FBI Field Office, who oversaw the infiltration operation of the Michigan Plot, was subsequently granted a highly coincidental promotion to the D.C. office, where he is now the lead FBI agent for all 1/6 cases?
As crazy as it sounds, all of this is true…
What did the FBI know, when did they know it, and were they involved?
- Did the FBI infiltrate the militia groups and protesters at Capitol Hill and how many agents were there?
- Why are some people who were there being kept in solitary confinement five months later, while others, who appeared to be leaders on the day, are able to go free? Is it because these people were FBI agents?
- Why are federal agencies hiding 10,000 or more hours of security camera footage of what happened on January 6th at Capitol Hill? Including, probably detailed footage of the pipe bomber the FBI supposedly want to catch.
- Who killed Ashli Babbit?
January 6 became the reason the Biden government claim they need to use law enforcement to crush anyone who opposes the Biden government.
Read the whole Revolver account, and watch Tucker Carlson.
h/t David, Bill in AZ, and Chris D
9.6 out of 10 based on 67 ratings
 Would you like bunions with that? | Photo: Mshirk Believe it or not, Medieval shoes tell us something important about modern civilization. The hyper-gregarious Homo Sapiens might be able to walk on the moon, but ultimately a large proportion of the species just want to climb the social ladder. And the smarter, higher order sapiens might paradoxically be willing to pay the most stupid price.
In this case, being “progressive” in the 14th Century meant wearing pointy shoes that left 4 out of 10 people buried at the friary with bent and sometimes broken bones. Bunions make it harder to balance so they increase the risk of falls. The undeniable benefits of scoring social fashion points were apparently worth spending decades distorting foot bones. Before you dismiss this as a teenage girly thing, ponder that two thirds of the victims were men.
The social competition to have the pointiest shoes became so dangerous that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law declaring toe-points had to be 2 inches or less within London.
 Pointy shoes in a statue from 3,000 BC. | Camocon The pointy shoe fashion bubble has struck all over the world: Japan, China, Sweden, Turkey and even in the 20th Century. The horned statue to the left is from the near East circa 3000 BC.
In the battle of stupid fashion trends the best weapon is free speech. If the King makes pointy shoes an employment criterion, even smart men who know the price will still pay it to get the girls and the goodies for their offspring. It’s a cold cost-benefit calculation, not a religion.
It’s quickly cured if the court jester can mock the King. Once the price is named out loud the race is over, and all the contestants lose.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:
Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.
Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.
One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:
May 14, 2021, , Reuters
Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.
…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.
The costs of renewables are expected to continue falling, while gas plant owners are exposed to EU carbon prices, which have hit record levels above 50 euros a tonne, and volatile wholesale energy prices.
But in Europe, where coal is already hard to finance, lending institutions and governments have moved on to tightening requirements for funding gas projects.
The European Investment Bank, Europe’s largest public lender, has revamped its lending policy to largely exclude new gas infrastructure from the end of this year.
“To put it mildly, gas is over…Without the end to the use of unabated fossil fuels, we will not be able to reach the climate targets,” EIB president Werner Hoyer said in January.
And so the shortage came to pass:
Not only was there a shortage of gas plants, but also a shortage of gas too. Winter was freezing, and Russia was sending more gas to China, and less through the old pipe to Europe through Ukraine. Plus the pipes from Norway were under heavy maintenance.
Gas Is So Scarce in Europe That Coal Is Making a Comeback
Bloomberg
Europe is so short of natural gas that the continent — usually seen as the poster child for the global fight against emissions — is turning to coal to meet electricity demand that is now back to pre-pandemic levels. Coal usage in the continent jumped 10% to 15% this year after a colder- and longer-than-usual winter left gas storage sites depleted, said Andy Sommer, team leader of fundamental analysis and modeling at Swiss trader Axpo Solutions AG.
 GIE European gas storage: percentage of full
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9.8 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
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