Hmmm. What one thing might unite the polarized sides of the USA?
Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck is a former US Marine who has worked in Thailand and Taiwan in academia and military intelligence. He writes that the West thought they defeated communism in 1990. They assumed China would play nice, but they were very wrong. Instead China studied the West and Russia, and is waging a Political War. There is a whole PDF book linked under that book image.
Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting” by Kerry K. Gershaneck
China is an expansionist, hyper-nationalistic, militarily powerful, brutally repressive, fascist, and totalitarian state. It is essential to understand each word in that indisputable description. The CCP poses an existential threat to the freedom and democracy that India and the US represent. Failure to understand the nature of the CCP regime undermines our countries’ ability to fully understand the danger the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) PW poses and to build our capacity to combat it.
Officials in democracies such as India and the US have been too easily deceived about PRC’s political warfare for several key reasons. When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990, many in our countries naively believed there would be no more expansionist, totalitarian threats. They were wrong, of course. Chinese communists still quietly harboured plans for regional (and ultimately global) hegemony. As PRC rulers proclaimed China’s “peaceful rise”, they built massive economic and military strength and engaged in global political warfare operations to subvert the democracies.
Meanwhile, the US and other democracies dismantled their Cold War political warfare capabilities and foolishly assumed the PRC would join the community of nations as a “responsible stakeholder”…
All’s fair in love and political warfare:
From the CCP perspective, PW is total war—it is unrestricted warfare using every means just short of large-scale military combat. The PRC’s form of political warfare is generally standard worldwide: it uses the same playbook to achieve its political, economic, and military objectives globally without having to fight conventional wars. Tailored strategies and tactics, however, are adapted for each region and country.
It’s important to understand that PRC’s PW—this unrestricted warfare—is designed to get others to do what the CCP wants them to do. The PRC says unrestricted warfare means “the battlefield is everywhere” and there are no boundaries between “war and non-war, and between military and non-military affairs”. In essence, the PRC says that everything, legal or illegal, is permissible in order to achieve its ends. Specific examples the PRC gives of how to conduct its unrestricted warfare include biological and chemical warfare and terrorism, means particularly pertinent to note and consider in the Covid-19 era.
The list of weapons the PRC employs is long. It includes propaganda, psychological warfare, media warfare, disinformation, corruption, economic and sexual enticement, and coercion. It also includes active measures such as hybrid warfare, proxy armies, assassination, kidnapping, and brutal physical attacks. The PRC’s PW doctrine also includes concepts such as lawfare (using international and national laws, bodies and courts to shape decision making in the CCP’s favour), cyberattacks, terrorism, espionage, bribery, censorship, deception, subversion, blackmail, enforced disappearances (kidnapping, abduction), attacks by criminal gangs, and hybrid warfare.
The CCP’s Troll Factory and 300,000 workers:
A noteworthy recent addition to this list of PW weapons is social media warfare. The PRC uses social media to amplify its psychological warfare, intimidation, coercion, and propaganda. With social media, the CCP floods societies with propaganda and disinformation to weaken people’s faith in democracy and create political instability. In pursuit of social media dominance, the PRC has established a PLA cyber force of perhaps 300,000 soldiers as well as a netizen “50 Cent Army” of perhaps 2 million individuals who are paid a nominal fee to make comments on social media sites supporting CCP propaganda and coercion. In conjunction with the PLA Strategic Support Force, many of these so-called “netizens” use social media to intimidate and coerce multinational corporations, celebrities, foreign governments and organizations, and critics of PRC genocide and expansionism.
This is all part of the CCP’s totalitarian thought control.
In general, the PRC’s rulers wage political warfare for three key reasons: (1) to achieve regional and global hegemony; (2) to maintain absolute control over China’s subjects internally; and (3) to co-opt or coerce other nations into becoming vassal or tributary states and to destroy states perceived as adversaries.
We’re in a Culture War, and there has been no name to label the group who are driving this war. The old Left-Right canard isn’t working. The DINO-RINO’s are one and same Swamp-creatures. The left-leaning Bernie fans got screwed by the Upper Class as much as the Trump fans did.
It’s not about the rich versus the poor either: Donald Trump is a billionaire but he isn’t upper class. Green hippies in XR Superhero-Monk costumes needn’t be wealthy, but they aspire to be in the popular upper class. It’s about status and the pecking order. The same is true of the high school students who lecture grown ups on climate change. They might be poor but they’re aiming to climb class rungs.
Words matter. People can unite behind an idea that has no name, but the movement is fragile, prone to fragmenting. But here, in a rather scathing blast from someone who isn’t Republican and doesn’t even like them is a suggestion that’s got a lot going for it. Bring back a new version of the class war, against the Upper Class, and a war on classism. It is something that can unite the Deplorables, the workers, the minorities, and even the Occupy and Bernie Sanders fans.
I hear you’re having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. … You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you’re not sure why, and you don’t know how to build on this success.
So here’s my recommendation: use the word “class”. Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism.
It’s not about economic class warfare, it’s about cultural class warfare.
Trump won by being anti-establishment “but which establishment”?
Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won’t even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, “expertise”, mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, “fast food”, SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.
(full disclosure: I fit like 2/3 of these descriptors)
Aren’t I just describing well-off people? No. Teachers, social workers, grad students, and starving artists may be poor, but can still be upper-class. Pilots, plumbers, and lumber barons are well-off, but not upper-class. Donald Trump is a billionaire, but still recognizably not upper class. The upper class is a cultural phenomenon.
Trump attacked the Swamp, and one of his most popular phrases in the 2016 debates was when he responded to the baiting questions by ignoring the bait, and saying “we have too much political correctness”. But “Politically Correct” doesn’t roll off the tongue, nor bring out a historic class war.
The coalition of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, concerned citizens are being played and divided by semantic word games. They need to identify the target and unify against it.
There is some broad appeal to fighting against the Upper Class: (it’s not exactly a new idea, is it?)
It could appeal to poor people who just want to get jobs. Point out how DC Democrats passed a law saying all child care workers must have college degrees, and how this is just a blatant attempt to take jobs away from working-class people in order to give them to upper-class people instead. Tell them that this is class warfare, that their side is losing, but that if you are in power they will win.
It could appeal to small-government libertarians. Argue that the Democrats and the government are a jobs program for the upper class. All those Institutes For X and Public Service Campaigns For Y, all those regulations that require two hundred lawyers just to move a potted plant, all those laws that mean every company needs fifty compliance offers working full time just in order to not get sued, they’re all a giant jobs program for college-educated people who refuse to work with their hands.
Alexander has some great material, though as great as this idea is (the War on College) it needs a lot of fleshing out. Colleges need to be razed and rebuilt, but — again — without a free media, the parasitic grant-getting machines known as “universities” will ultimately always serve their gatekeeping funders — Big Government. We have to change those incentives or the parasitic phoenix will just rise again:
1. War On College:As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can’t be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees’ knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can’t actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination.
Likewise, the War on Experts — good idea. He’s hunting for a way to get accountability of Expert Predictions. I’m not sold on this, but it’s a tough task. Should we, could we, sack Professors who can’t out-predict the mass prediction markets?
I’d rather pick winner based on public debate. Call it free speech…
2. War On Experts: Argue that you love and support legitimate experts, but that the Democrats have invented and propped up a fake concept of expertise as a way of making sure upper-class people who can game admissions to top colleges control the discourse. Your solution will be prediction markets. Yes, really. Repeal all bans on prediction markets and give tax breaks for participating in them, until they have the same kind of liquidity as the S&P500. You’ll get a decentralized, populist, credentialism-free, market-based alternative to expertise. When the prediction markets outperform 75% of experts, fire them …
But once upon a time Experts had a reputation and if they kept getting it wrong, the throngs would laugh at them and their reputation would crumble. Can’t we get back to that? What we really need is free speech and a competitive media.
Instead we get Tim Flannery and years after his predictions failed dismally, he’s awarded Australian of the Year. The problem is The Media. The problem is also that the government can create Instant Experts with every new QANGO.
Alexander has a plan for The Media too:
3. War On The Upper-Class Media: This is your new term for “mainstream media”. Being against the “mainstream media” sounds kind of conspiratorial. Instead, you’re against the upper-class media, which gains its status by systematically excluding lower-class voices, and which exists mostly as a tool of the upper classes to mock and humiliate the lower class. You are not against journalism, you’re not against being well-informed, you’re against a system that exists to marginalize people like you. Tell the upper-class media that if they want your respect, they need to stop class discrimination.
67% of US families watch the Super Bowl – what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly – how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately.
And the free speech battle:
Insist that working-class people have the right to communicate with each other without interference from upper-class gatekeepers. Make sure people know every single fact about @Jack and what a completely ridiculous person he is, and point out that somehow this is the guy who decides what you’re allowed to communicate with your Twitter friends.
There’s an emptiness in the quest to get to the top of the pile no matter how many bodies are on the staircase. Some beautiful phrases here:
4. War On Wokeness. …wokeness is a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you. Why are they so sure that “some of my best friends are black” doesn’t make you any less racist? Because the whole point is that the only way not to be racist is to master an inscrutable and constantly-changing collection of fashionable shibboleths and opinions which are secretly class norms. The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying “colored people” is horrendously offensive but saying “people of color” is the only way to dismantle white supremacy. You should make it clear that this is total balderdash, you could not be less interested in it, and you will continue befriending colored people of color regardless.
Great finale:
There’s a theory that the US party system realigns every 50-or-so years. Last time, in 1965, it switched from the Democrats being the party of the South and the Republicans being the party for blacks, to vice versa. If the theory’s right, we’re in the middle of an equally big switch. Wouldn’t it be great if the Republicans became the racially diverse party of the working class? You can make it happen!
Read it all. Be a part of hammering out the solution.
We only have a small window to get a new narrative and give it flight…
There was a good but small (tiny) study that came out of Israel three weeks ago about a drug called EXO-CD24. The professor in charge claims to have treated 30 out of 30 people who had moderate to severe cases and had near universal success. All, bar one, were able to leave hospital very quickly. CD24 is normally stuck on the outside of immune system cells. By getting EXO-CD in, apparently they can stop the cytokine storm.
Any day now, the mainstream media will let us know. The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24 and according to Professor Nadir Arber, could be scaled up and mass produced within a few months and they could provide enough doses for the World.
“To date, the preparation has been tried with great success on 30 severe patients, in 29 of whom the medical condition improved within two to three days and most of them were discharged home within three to five days. The 30th patient also recovered but after a longer time,” the hospital reports.
“The drug is based on exosomes, [vesicles] that are released from the cell membrane and used for intercellular communication. We enrich the exosomes with 24CD protein. This protein is expressed on the surface of the cell and has a known and important role in regulating the immune system,” explained Dr. Shiran Shapira, director of the laboratory of Prof. Nadir Arber, who has been researching the CD24 protein for over two decades.
“The preparation is given by inhalation, once a day, for only a few minutes, for five days,” Shapira said.
The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24, can work in hours, not weeks. This is only a phase one trial (just proving it does not hurt the people it is given to). It may not survive Phase II and III. But if it does, will we see prime time daily reports of the latest results. Or how about free advertising to get people to enroll for trials, with breathless excitement when a planeload arrives with another delivery?
Or is that just what happens with vaccines?
Welcome to the Age of Antivirals. If CD24 isn’t The One, there will be something else. If CD24 doesn’t work against Covid, it may help against many other viruses (or immune disorders). The researchers have a mechanism in mind. So this is not just a random drug from a test tube array, though now is not the time to talk about 95% cure rates.
But Big Pharma don’t seem to be. Imagine a cheap reliable treatment was available that helped most people. Getting vaccines might not seem quite so important.
If some respectable countries start to achieve something very meaningful on national scales, will that be the day the Western Media and medical swamp have to admit we have all kinds of tools at our disposal. Not just vaccines.
Hypothetically, if someone were trying to divide a nation this survey is Paydirt
It’s almost like a team is winding up the young and impressionable, stoking their fears. Republican Voters worry about policies, but Democratic voters are just scared of Republicans.
According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, Democrat voters are more concerned about “Donald Trump’s supporters” than anything else.
Democrats
Democrats are less concerned about policy issues than they are about people with whom they disagree politically. To them, Trump supporters are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, a more pressing issue than gun violence, and even more important than issues that affect their various constituencies, like discrimination against LGBT Americans, sexism, student debt, alleged voter suppression, etc.
To these voters, Trump supporters are a bigger issue than all of those and more. Imagine being a store owner minding your own business and thinking that the Democrat voters around you think you are a bigger issue facing this country than anything else, even more than the issues that directly affect their own families.
Who runs the national conversation — the media, the tech giants. Who controls the fish? No one and everyone. They are just following the cues fed to them every day on TV and Facebook. Once the ripples of hate start, they are amplified by “Friends.”
Meanwhile the GOP worry about foreigners, taxes, and media bias
What don’t you see on the chart? “Joe Biden’s supporters.” And why not? Because Republican voters clearly care more about real issues. Democrats, on the other hand, are still obsessed with Donald Trump and the people who voted for him. They would rather whine about Trump than actually solve the problems facing this nation. That’s why Democrats went through not one, but two bogus impeachments.
Republican’s greatest concerns.
If someone were fomenting fear the last thing they’d want is a healthy national conversation.
Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths
The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).
The Big Black hole in medical research?
I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.
The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to the idea that public funded University science could be a foil against profit hungry large corporations? Instead, it’s almost like they’ve jumped into bed with them. It’s not a radical new idea that B6 could reduce lung infections. The mouse study, forgoodnesssake, was done in 1949. Potentially people may have been getting sicker than they needed to be for 70 years. That’s a crime.
A B6 tablet costs about 7 cents or practically nothing compared to $3000 a dose Remdesivir.
Great comment, Mike Jonas:
The western world is being destroyed by a sickness – corruption. The coronavirus is bad, but it pales into insignificance beside corruption. The coronavirus can be combatted with a vaccine or with vitamins or with various cheap drugs (get a Budesonide inhaler prescription now, take as instructed as soon as you get a coronavirus symptom).
Corruption can be combatted with a free press or with genuine universities or with integrity in government, or even with open social media. We now have none of those defences.
The researchers make the case that a B6 deficiency is also associated with lots of the conditions which predispose people to severe covid-19
Vitamin B6 may help keep COVID-19’s cytokine storms at bay
by Chris Melore
Along with promoting healthy blood cell creation, study authors say there’s evidence vitamin B6 can also protect the body from chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. Their report finds B6 can suppress inflammation, inflammatory proteins from the immune system, oxidative stress, and carbonyl stress.
“Coronaviruses and influenza are among the viruses that can cause lethal lung injuries and death from acute respiratory distress syndrome worldwide. Viral infections evoke a ‘cytokine storm,’ leading to lung capillary endothelial cell inflammation, neutrophil infiltration, and increased oxidative stress,” researchers explain.
Kumrungsee adds there are two serious symptoms which can lead to death in COVID-19 patients, thrombosis and the cytokine storm. This storm, or hyper inflammation, takes place when the patient’s own immune system goes into overdrive and attacks healthy cells. Thrombosis, or blood clotting, can block off capillaries and damages organs like the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys.
Vitamin B6 is involved in around 150 reactions in your body involving energy, fat, sugar, DNA, neurotransmitters — you get the idea. There are six different forms of B6 (things are never that simple in biochemistry). Best to look for the PLP form of B6, not the cheap multivitamin form “Pyridoxine”.
B6 may or may not help with Covid, but it’s an experiment worth doing. B6 seems to play a role in protection against diabetes and cancer and heart disease. It helps to regulate homocysteine levels. Even if it doesn’t help against Covid, it seems pretty handy.
Best is to eat more, rather than just pop a pill, but people with gut inflammation, IBS, women on the pill, or long term cortiocosteriods, and alcoholics need more B6 than the other people. The richest foods in Vitamin B6 are Salmon and Tuna, meat, potatoes, spinach and bananas.
And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world.
It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not.
So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver?
Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, has publicly acknowledged “differences” between the United States and Australia in tackling the climate crisis while calling for a faster exit from coal-fired power.
Kerry’s comments highlighted the increased pressure on Australia to commit to do more before this year’s Glasgow climate conference even though the Morrison government maintains it is “playing its part”.
Kerry would say he is doing it for “the climate” but we all know, if that were true, he’d be leaning on China instead of helping it to gain more factories. It’s never about the actual emissions.
There might be a pattern here:
Just days after Joe Biden nominally won* the electoral college, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison had officially given up the battle to use the spare carbon credits that Australia earned long ago. The nation had met and exceeding the Kyoto agreement, but now the extra credits would be tossed away. Australia didn’t need them to reach the target, he said. But we could have used them, and scaled back on the headlong rush.
Within two weeks of Joe Biden being inaugurated as President* before any public leverage, the Australian PM Scott Morrison was already talking of his “hope to achieve net zero emissions by 2050”.
Sometimes US elections influence Australian policies more than Australian elections do.
Meanwhile, in an odd footnote, even as China has spurned Australian coal of late, John Kerry’s home nation was selling 500% more coal to China to fill the trading hole that was left. Though the US was not a big exporter of coal to start with, only sending 200,000 tons each quarter before the rush up to 1,000,000 tons in late 2020. (What is startling is how small the exports are from the US. They ramped up to 1Mt. We export 400MT each year.).
In the end, as Eric Worrall says, more coal will be burnt than ever under Joe Biden’s time as President*:
Far from cutting coal use, I strongly suspect the Biden administration will preside over the greatest surge in coal demand the world has ever seen.
China and Japan, for all their faults, are doing what the West refused to do – building thousands of new coal plants, helping Africa, Asia and South America to rapidly industrialise, helping them to raise their standards of living to Western levels. In a decade, the smoke of Australian, South African and South American coal will rise over new industrial heartlands in what today are some of the poorest places in the world.
The world would be a better place if everyone saw segments like this. Not to convert them to a cause, but just to open their eyes to the gaslighting in the media.
We’re in an Information War and the first salvo is just to let people know there is a War and their news service is being weaponized against them.
Lighting the Rascism Fire helps bury “other stuff” in the smoke
How to stop discussion about corruption at the highest levels — yell “racist”
[Zack] Goldberg looked at every time the term “racism” was used in America’s largest newspapers and noticed a trend. There was a noticeable spike just after 2011, which not coincidentally was right around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
When people are starting to talk about what Wall Street actually does in public, all at once journalists agree that the real problem with America is racism. America is not a place with a screwed-up economic system that rewards a tiny number of emotionally damaged grifters who possess otherwise useless skills applicable only to finance while everyone else gets poorer. That’s not a problem. No, America is instead a place where the rest of us must hate each other at all times because of our skin colors, which, by the way, cannot be changed.
That way, once we’re all yelling and aggrieved and angry about irresolvable race questions, once we’ve picked the wound until it won’t stop bleeding, we won’t have the time to ask even the most basic questions about economics — questions like “Why are all these billionaire hedge fund guys paying half the tax rate I am? Who precisely is getting rich from the Federal Reserve? Where’s all that money going?”
You don’t see a ton of stories about those questions in The New York Times. They’re too busy talking about race. It’s a pretty sophisticated operation. Vladimir Putin could never pull it off. He’d buy a few dopey ads on Facebook and call it a day.
No, it takes a sophisticated operator to take the central problem of American life, the agonizing death of our middle class, and cover it up with a smokescreen of manufactured race hatred. You’d really need to be, as CNN would put it, a “disinformation network” to pull that off.
It’s interesting that Carlson is going after the Fed Reserve. The mainstream media almost never does. Fiat currencies and unaccountable central bankers is where the corruption starts and is the river that feeds it. Fake money feeds a fake economy and eventually fake news.
To paraphrase. Tuckers advice to the Woke Professional Class who make diversity a mantra: If you are serious about dismantling systems of power — why not start at the top. At the centres of power? The ideas of this revolution come from colleges. But what hasn’t changed at all are the rich kids that go to Ivy League institutions. The medium family income at Yale is $190,000. So beginning immediately the top 50 colleges in the US should be reserved exclusively for the children of people who never went to college.
The whole episode: Watch from 22:20
This revolution is the “Diversity Equity Inclusion” Unlike other revolutions this one is not for the Workers. This is a revolution designed to empower the already powerful.
To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally.
Hard to find some good news out there today. But here’s a bit:
People are immune to climate hopey gloom
Researchers tried to figure out whether to make their climate propaganda more scary or more uplifting but found instead that they might as well show 500 people “the history of smartphones”. (That was the control video). Nothing works anymore.
It was a complete wash. No new activists were made.
However, despite these emotional responses, neither [doom nor hope] video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated…
After watching the online movies, nobody thought climate change was scarier, nobody want to change anything they did, and no one wanted to be climate activist either, unless they were already one to start with. After 30 years of propaganda, people have heard it all. Pounding them them with more isn’t going to work.
It didn’t matter which movie they saw.
Neither doom, hope nor placebo did a thing.
The multi-billion dollar industry of climate propaganda was hoping to tweak their advertising and find the right point on the Dial of Fear. Instead they showed it’s all a waste of money. Just like research like this.
If they had shown something new, like, say, a skeptical video that the audience had never seen, that would have shifted perceptions, risks, and activism. (Remember when a one hour debate with Christopher Monckton shifted fully 9% of the audience?)
There’s a lot of upside there to Red-Pill people with a story that many haven’t heard. Which is exactly why climate believers have to turn up the censorship screws. So get out there, share the message.
This paper was submitted last April, but not accepted for eight months. It must have been hard to figure out how to spin those dismal results:
The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.
ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:
Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune
The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds of rebooting to get back in action. (Read all the gory details thanks to Lance at the link).
But there was a potential gas powered disaster in the works too. As the cold bites, and everyone with a gas heater switches it on, the flow in pipes ramps up, and pressure falls. If gas powered plants also swing into operation, the gas pressure can fall so low that air can leak in to the pipes. The system has one way valves but at low pressure any faulty valves in the system allow air with oxygen back into the pipes. As Vic Hughes warns “Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.”
So when a big freeze arrives, the wellheads may be icing up and reducing supply at the same time as demand is exploding. In New England in 1989, gas supply fell 95%. Hughes reports that the decisions that came next were gambles on major scales. On the one hand, the low pressure might lead to deadly suburban explosions, but cutting the gas to areas might be even worse. When every home in that area then switches on their electric heaters, the grid faces an electricity blackout as well. As blackouts spread, homes switch on their gas heaters, and so it unravels.
To maintain safe gas pressures, the operators wanted to shed load with localized gas shutoffs. Since all non-critical gas loads had already been shutoff, only critical loads were left. This included houses and hospitals. To save the gas grid, the operators had to cutoff gas to a very large number of customers.
Whose gas to shut off?
After the gas was shut off:
The houses without gas would rapidly lose heat and quickly become unlivable.
Anyone who had any kind of electric space heater would plug it in.
That would blow the electric grid.
An electric utility call confirmed a sudden, albeit short-lived, increase in electric load for space heaters would probably blow the already critically strained electric grid.
The electric grid in areas well beyond the gas shutoff area probably would be blown also.
Widespread blackouts would impact not only shut off gas customers. It would kill the electric blowers in furnaces that could still get gas. How many? No way of knowing.
Lots and lots of people are in the cold and in the dark.
Many would probably get in their cars for heat and try to drive somewhere, although in reality there is nowhere for that many people to go.
All the traffic lights would be out, creating a massive traffic jam, trapping many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands)?
Since the blackouts killed the electric gasoline pumps, filling your tank would be impossible.
As cars ran out of gas, abandoned cars would block traffic and create massive traffic jams, possibly for days.
In the end, it was only luck that the gamble paid off:
The decision was made to just let the gas system pressure drop and hope it would stay high enough to get by. If it didn’t, a few blown up neighborhoods would be less damage than a gas shutoff.
Luck saved them. An unexpected break in the weather lowering demand, along with some unexpected supplies, saved the city.
If you aren’t properly scared, all this relates to the short-term deaths. Longer-term deaths from a gas shutoff were incalculable.
Hughes goes on to explain that shutting off the gas en masse can take as long to reboot as a blackstart. Frozen houses get burst pipes, basements flood, things ice over, then every furnace and gas line needs to be individually cleaned and inspected…
His last words:
Wind power did this to Texas. Be very afraid of the Green New Deal.
PS: Hanrahan sent in an excellent long comment from an Engineer in Texas. I would like to post that, but am hoping to find out if we can get permission, or if it is published elsewhere. I’m hoping Hanrahan will check his email, or perhaps someone else has seen a forum with perhaps “Goatboy” and these words: “ I’ve been an engineer in the Fossil Power Generation industry for over a decade. I am based in Texas, but have worked at plants around the US and even around the globe. I literally know these plants inside and out. ” He mentions AEP Turk. And AEP Walsh and “Sickening Schadenfreude”.
On Sunday, the Washington Postenthusiastically relayed that the White House’s pronouncement that Biden is “eager” to visit Texas and might even go there this week. According to the WaPo, Biden’s hands-off approach is a virtue:
It all makes sense if you understand that the American media are Pravda West – except the media are actually worse than the original Pravda. Soviet “journalists” lied and propagandized because they’d be imprisoned or killed if they didn’t. Our American “journalists” lie and propagandize because they want to.
Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2.
Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame).
This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.
The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/
Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew in New Zealand, and people got quite excited to find this log in 2019. They have now published a paper on it. (Yes, we are talking about tree rings from 40,000 years ago, and by teams that don’t want to talk much about cosmic rays in the modern era. )
What’s more exciting than a flipped field? It’s having almost no field at all.
As far as the climate goes, if they are correct, this would have been a very tough and wild era. Around 42,000 years ago — in the lead up to the flip, they estimate the magnetic field was so weak it was at barely 0 – 6 % of current strength. Earth’s shield would have been down, gone, and the ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation was flooding in. Presumably, the ozone layer and jet streams, cloud cover, it all changes.
This is assuming that the dating is right and the layers mean what they think (and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical). Anthony Watts asked Willie Soon, who is dubious. Cooper et al are talking about modeling some of these aspects (which I am ignoring). Even if their assumptions on the ozone layer are wrong, if the magnetic field dropped, it would be hard to believe that this would not change all kinds of events — like ocean cycles, cloud cover, and the sea surface temperature.
The real point of this paper that interests me and should not be lost under the personalities or junk modeling, is the Be10 and C14. Was there a point when Earths Magnetic field fell? If so, when and what flowed from that?
Somehow our ancestors survived this. Though the Neanderthals and some other species may not have. Indeed, a magnetic flip or fail, would be a decent candidate for the Neanderthal extinction. It was thought that the last of Neanderthals may have lived until 35,000 or even 28,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, but better data suggests it really did all end “around 40,000” years ago. In which case, the timing coincides with what must have been a dreadful time to live — an ice age, plus magnetic shocks.
Earth’s Magnetic Field during a flip (right). NASA
A climate catastrophe
Prof Chris Turney describes a bad era (this is the climate scientist who was once stuck on a cruise-in-thick-Antarctic-ice). [Update: Though let’s not let personalities cloud what we might find in the data.]
Ancient relic points to a turning point in Earth’s history 42,000 years ago
The temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study co-led by UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum shows.
During the magnetic field breakdown, the Sun experienced several ‘Grand Solar Minima’ (GSM), long-term periods of quiet solar activity.
Even though a GSM means less activity on the Sun’s surface, the weakening of its magnetic field can mean more space weather – like solar flares and galactic cosmic rays – could head Earth’s way.
“Unfiltered radiation from space ripped apart air particles in Earth’s atmosphere, separating electrons and emitting light – a process called ionisation,” says Prof. Turney.
“The ionised air ‘fried’ the Ozone layer, triggering a ripple of climate change across the globe.”
There would have been auroras all over the Earth, and many lightning storms.
Dazzling light shows would have been frequent in the sky during the Adams Event.
Aurora borealis and aurora australis, also known as the northern and southern lights, are caused by solar winds hitting the Earth’s atmosphere.
Usually confined to the polar northern and southern parts of the globe, the colourful sights would have been widespread during the breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field.
“Early humans around the world would have seen amazing auroras, shimmering veils and sheets across the sky,” says Prof. Cooper.
Ionised air – which is a great conductor for electricity – would have also increased the frequency of electrical storms.
“It must have seemed like the end of days,” says Prof. Cooper.
It may have caused many extinctions and changes in human behaviour
It’s a leap into pure speculation, but hey:
The researchers theorise that the dramatic environmental changes may have caused early humans to seek more shelter. This could explain the sudden appearance of cave art around the world roughly 42,000 years ago.
“We think that the sharp increases in UV levels, particularly during solar flares, would suddenly make caves very valuable shelters,” says Prof. Cooper. “The common cave art motif of red ochre handprints may signal it was being used as sunscreen, a technique still used today by some groups.
“The amazing images created in the caves during this time have been preserved, while other art out in open areas has since eroded, making it appear that art suddenly starts 42,000 years ago.”
If human art did leap 42.000 years ago, I think there would have been a bit more to it, than time indoors. If times were so tough, there would also have been a major genetic bottleneck, similar to the one circa 70,000 BC when the volcano Toba exploded and nearly wiped humans off the planet.
Earth’s magnetic field is wandering now. Maybe that matters?
The Earth’s magnetic field does seem to be wandering around | Courtesy of John Hillhouse, USGS
The whole 1.5 degrees of apocalyptic warming won’t seem quite so apocalyptic if Earth’s magnetic field shrinks. We might miss our satellites and electric power grids…
An accelerant like no other
While the magnetic poles often wander, some scientists are concerned about the current rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere.
“This speed – alongside the weakening of Earth’s magnetic field by around nine per cent in the past 170 years – could indicate an upcoming reversal,” says Prof. Cooper.
“If a similar event happened today, the consequences would be huge for modern society. Incoming cosmic radiation would destroy our electric power grids and satellite networks.”
What does this mean for the current climate scare machine? It means lame excuses.
Prof. Turney says the human-induced climate crisis is catastrophic enough without throwing major solar changes or a pole reversal in the mix.
“Our atmosphere is already filled with carbon at levels never seen by humanity before,” he says. “A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants.
“We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again.”
So if Earth’s magnetic shield is about to collapse don’t build underground bunker-cities inside Faraday cages — get cracking installing solar panels as fast as you can.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of this paper and the Adams Event in the wash… In the meantime, it’s a spectator sport to watch how the Apocalypse Science absorbs some conflicts of catastrophe.
Also: The lead author Alan Cooper got sacked recently for allegations that he bullied staff. He denies it. Skeptics ought be aware but also wary that this necessarily means much in a debate about data and observations. Ad homs are still ad homs.
h/t Willie and Eric for further info.
REFERENCE
Cooper, A et al (2021) A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago Science.19 Feb 2021: Vol. 371, Issue 6531, pp. 811-818, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8677
If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?
Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.
Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac
Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.
But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the weather would never get that cold again. Like perhaps they were afraid of endless droughts, more cyclones, and deadly heatwaves, but not Arctic ice storms?
Renewables fans will point to this as mere incompetence. But if the government had built the “fifth largest nation” of windmills with all the cold bells and whistles, it would make them even more unaffordable. Anyone with infinite money can make wind plants more useful in cold weather, but it makes them more expensive all year.
… this is Texas . . . so the need for winterizing assets has always been an afterthought. Other parts of the country that deal with colder temps annually have solutions for a lot of these issues. For example, natural gas power generation can have heat tracers on pipes, valves, and various connections; insulation around key equipment; indoor power generation vs. open to the elements. Insulation would be near impossible to implement in Texas due to the heat, but the other components could be installed as a retrofit or at the time of construction. The only problem is, it costs money. Wind turbines can be outfitted with insulated turbines, oil and fluid heaters, resin covered blades to limit ice buildup, and other high-grade components to protect the asset . . . but again, it costs money. Wind also decreases in the winter months due to the physics of how wind is created, so ERCOT already had a massive range of expected wind output: 12%–43%, and in really bad weather 6%–7%. Many of Texas’s wind turbines (except for those along the coast initially) ended up freezing, limiting total output, while solar panels were covered with snow or ice, limiting capacity. Most of the renewables in the country (especially in Texas) are backed up by short-cycle gas turbines, which are assets that can turn on in 2–3 hours. These assets are called peakers, or peak shaving, and can come online quickly to fill a growing electricity need during peak hours or surging demand, such as heat waves or cold spells. Coal can be used as peak shaving, but there are limitations: it is costly and timely to maintain because it can take 24–48 hours to bring it online, coal piles can freeze together if not rotated, etc. All of these restrictions make natural gas the preferred and cost-effective method.
Texas paid for unreliable energy, not for spare capacity
Ryan also makes the point that Texas doesn’t pay people to sit around with ready capacity. (They certainly got what they paid for).
ERCOT is an “energy only” system, which means producers are only compensated for power produced, while a capacity market provides compensation for readiness or spare capacity for power as well.
And Planning Engineer spells out just how this set the grid up for failure:
Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down.
And he asks the key question, and the answer is “renewables”:
Why has Capacity been devalued?
If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources.
So the core values of a strong grid were eaten away in the haste to make the grid “renewable friendly”. Those same artificial forces pushed coal plants below profitability — and now having destabilized the grid, when the trainwreck occurs, the Greenblob wants to blame the failure on fossil fuels.
To paraphase Planning Engineer: — why would anyone build a perfectly good power plant to sit around most of the time doing nothing and just waiting for the wind turbines to fail?
More emergency peaking units [gas plants that can be brought on at a moments notice] would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
On Monday night that is an awfully sharp fall. That was a sharp loss of 10GW in the dead of night. Did all the gas wells freeze at once, or was there some common safety feature of automatic shut downs triggered? (I’ve seen no suggestion that there was, I just wonder). Perhaps it was the middle of the night when lots of people in Texas suddenly put their gas heater on and took the supply from the power stations?
Texas energy generation
These blackouts wouldn’t have happened if Texas hadn’t shut down so much coal power.
The Green blob is trying to tell us that the ghastly blackouts was all the fault of fossil fuels — mainly because gas powered plants went offline. But the truth is that if Texas hasn’t swapped coal plants for wind towers the grid would have been fine. They certainly couldn’t run a 100% wind and solar grid. But we all know they can run just fine on 100% fossil fuels.
Royce Pierce told Newsweek he owes electric company, Griddy, $8,162.73 for his electricity usage this month. He said that’s a massive increase from his usual $387 bill.
“It’s mind-blowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said.
“It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”
Pierce was one of the lucky ones who maintained power through the entire grid crisis, but it came at a steep cost.
“There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” Pierce said, adding that if the virus pandemic hadn’t affected his work, “we could have taken care of this.”
Other horror stories of soaring power bills flood local television stations across the Lone Star State. When food and housing insecurities are incredibly high due to pandemic job loss, many folks in Texas who were on variable power plans could be financially devastated.
Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months
A few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.
Daylan Cook, 18, said he had built a fire inside a ceramic pot in his apartment living room, aided by hand sanitizer and gasoline. … The local emergency medical services department said it had responded to 63 carbon monoxide exposure calls in 2 1/2 days.
People are being told to boil water on outdoor gas BBQ’s to fill hot water bottles to keep themselves warm, and advised to stay in one small room, and to seal the doors and windows.
Civilization on the edge
The water supply network in Austin was being drained because pipes in houses without electricity had burst, water mains had broken and customers were both storing water and also leaving taps dripping in an effort to stop their own pipes bursting. The demand for water was so great it exceeded supply in some areas by 250%. That meant the water pressure dropped below the minimum needed for sanitation. On Wednesday the City of Austin issued a water-boil notice because Austin’s largest water treatment facility, the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant, lost power. They described it as just precautionary, but it meant that many people without power now had to find a way to sterilize water, and people with power added more of a drain to the system.
St David’s hospital in Houston has no water pressure or heat. They can’t transport patients to other hospitals as the others are facing their own issues.
Meanwhile there were dozens of water main pipes also leaking, but Austin Water couldn’t drive out to fix some breakages because of the ice, and sometimes they didn’t even know where the breaches were, their instrumentation wasn’t working, the data wasn’t coming in, and snow was obscuring everything. There were warnings that some fire hydrants wouldn’t be working due to the lack of water pressure.
And so the chaos spread.
How would Texas have fared if they were 100% renewable?
About an hour ago ERCOT said that most power was “able” to be supplied
The grid is now up to 58 GW of capacity. Wind power is now back to 6,800 MW (some more turbines have thawed out).
In the latest update ERCOT says that a “Majority of customers are able to be restored.” Apparently, it’s a theoretical restoration. It’s now up to electrical retailers to connect the dots. There is no longer any forced load shedding although they also say 40GW of generation is still not operational. How does that work? Rolling blackouts are expected to continue and people are being warned not to turn everything back on.
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From the CCP perspective, PW is total war—it is unrestricted warfare using every means just short of large-scale military combat. The PRC’s form of political warfare is generally standard worldwide: it uses the same playbook to achieve its political, economic, and military objectives globally without having to fight conventional wars. Tailored strategies and tactics, however, are adapted for each region and country.
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