It’s a lever point in history. Millions of people want answers. Such is the demand for news on one of the last free platforms, Elon Musk reports that X usage hit another all time high yesterday. In the US, traffic was 23% higher than it had ever been on any single day ever.
Meanwhile all the people who know that Donald Trump is the Single Biggest Threat to Democracy, must be wondering why Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are so pleased that the Threat survived.
If Trump really is a “threat to democracy,” if he really is Hitler redivivus (as the New Republic cover currently has it), if he is going to usher in a Mordor-like totalitarian regime, then what could possibly be wrong with an assassination to save democracy? We lionize Bonhoeffer because of his willingness to be part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Ehud did the Israelites a great service when he took out Eglon (Judg. 3:15).
What kind of sense does it make for Biden to call Trump up to congratulate him on his survival if Trump really is a threat to democracy? The call reveals the hypocrisy and hollowness of the prior rhetoric. This reality puts them on the horns of a dilemma. If their rhetoric is to be believed, then Thomas Crooks is a hero and a martyr. If it is not to be believed, then why were they talking that way?
The Democrats were, of course, doing character assassination with galactic hyperbole
They were winding up the crowd and feeding the hate, then people got killed.
Ad hominem attacks are all very well until the crowd realizes they are on the same side as the bad guys. According to Joe Biden, the extreme MAGA Republicans want to stop you using contraception, you will have no right to marry who you love... MAGA Republicans look at the darkness and see carnage and despair… yet somehow it’s the good guys who are shooting at the families in the crowd. It’s not supposed to be this way.
Every American should watch this video, especially those on the left who are about to start preaching about “lowering the temperature.”
This was the President of the United States dehumanizing and vilifying 35% of the country on primetime TV.
Paul Joseph Watson has spliced together the sequence of events at the attempted assassination, showing just how long the would-be-assassin had to prepare while in full view of a very agitated crowd who could see him on the roof and were trying to warn people. There goes that idea that the Secret Service are dedicated patriots, and experts, and the best on Earth.
Just in: Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance to run for Vice President (skipping the whole DEI theme, and deciding to treat female voters like adults with brains instead of like teenage girls wanting a cheer squad.) On X, MAGA fans seem happy about this, which means the Deep State definitely won’t be. Vance has been endorsed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy already.
But such is the moment we are living through, people are seeing it as divine providence that Trump turned his head at the moment the bullet went past. Such is the mood, that a video of of an eerie prophesy of Pastor Brandon Biggs is going viral. Three months ago he said that the Lord told him a bullet would pass just by President Trumps ear, so close it would break his eardrum… It’s quite spooky.
Gears are shifting. People report seeing MAGA hats in San Francisco, and others tell the story of conversion from a Trump hater to being a silent supporter too afraid to speak up over the years, but now finally coming out, unashamedly.
The narrative has always painted the picture that Trump is just a narcissist seeking power and fame. But how much fun is it to be shot at? Who, exactly, wants to be indicted and face jail and fines of hundreds of millions of dollars? The latest event shows how wrong the narrative is.
Donald Trump is a billionaire, he doesn’t have to do this. He could retire and play golf and fly from resort to resort.
Instead of getting rich being President, like the rest of the political class, it’s costing him a fortune — and possibly everything he has.
Donald Trump barely survived an assassination attempt while on stage in Pennsylvania. The bullet hit his ear. Other bullets killed someone behind him, and critically injured two others. The assassin was on a rooftop just 130 yards away, and was shot dead. (How convenient). He has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, aged just 20. He probably had no idea how expendable he was.
Someone on twitter — “This will be the most iconic photo in the history of this country”.
ZeroHedge reports that the BBC interviewed a witness who says he saw the assassin on the roof before the shots were fired and warned the secret service, but they didn’t prevent this. He wonders why they didn’t have their own guys on every roof.
The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign https://t.co/ihlEC5NP1w
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” Biden said.
The Democrats and the Media hounds have been making Trump out to be Hitler and a threat to Democracy for the last year. They feed the hate, and wind up the crowd.
CNN rush to bury the story:
As Tucker Carlson says “You don’t hate the media enough”.
This can only be a huge boost to Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election
As ZeroHedge points out, searches for “donate to Trump” are surging, and so are his odds of winning in November.
If there is any way to suggest that he faked this to boost his popularity and play the victim card, the misinformation industry will find it. But the death of the person behind him might be harder to explain.
Afterwards Trump was not cowed but stood up defiantly and declared “Fight! Fight!” tot he crowd as the Secret Service tried to bundle him away:
Ever been in combat? Ever been shot at? I haven’t. Neither, until today, has President Trump.
But one thing that combat veterans tell me, over and over, is that combat reveals character. The experience of being under fire exposes who you are in fundamental ways. You don’t really… pic.twitter.com/6dBjrqX3Vi
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk wrote on X, which he owns, 30 minutes after Trump was shot at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The system is crooked to the core. They won’t give Robert F Kennedy Jnr secret service protection, even though his father and uncle died by assassination and he is third most popular candidate for the Presidency. Tell that to friends who think the US Intelligence agencies are patriots concerned about democracy.
Trump’s VP pick is crucial. If he chooses anyone compromised, weak, or with any sympathy for the Uniparty he would be a dead man walking. They could solve the Trump problem with one bullet. Neutralize those inconvenient voters!
h/t To Scott of the Pacific, Pierce, Steve of Cornubia
We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact
In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom), the CNEWS TV hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.
During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.
“Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its public spending… It is a form of totalitarianism.”
Apparently, the real crime here is not that he said the unthinkable, but that the TV crew didn’t correct him:
After investigation, Arcom found that CNews’ lack of reaction was a “failure” to meet the obligations of the channel …
Perhaps if they’d laughed at him, called him petty names, and treated him like a leper it would have been OK? (No, seriously, there is a razor point here. There are bound to be past examples where the only response to a skeptic was to call them a climate denier, and Arcom was apparently happy with that, since they’ve never used this fine before.) Does Arcom approve of namecalling or social opprobrium as a “balanced response”? Oh. Yes. They. Do.
The regulators go on to explain that the channel:
“…is required to ensure an honest presentation of controversial issues,in particular by ensuring the expression of different points of view”.
Which must be a new requirement since French TV has relentlessly hammered the establishment line in a one sided way for thirty years without needing any balance at all. And Arcom didn’t fine them for shamelessly promoting government propaganda. Perhaps a French skeptic could ask Arcon if controversial government opinions need to be balanced “in an honest presentation” or whether it’s only critics of the government who need to be held to account?
Arcom found that the views shared “contradicted or minimised” the scientific consensus on climate change “through a treatment lacking rigour and without contradiction”.
Since when was it the job of journalists to promote government approved “science”?
The regulator is going out on a limb and sawing off the branch…
Officially, the regulators are trying to pretend they are not punishing the TV channel for putting on a skeptic, which would be a free speech issue, but it’s clearly what they are doing. So they dress this up as a lack of balance, which accidentally exposes that they’ve never cared a jot about balancing opinions before. Immediately, this opens up all kinds of interesting doors: for one, skeptics can start asking where the balance is on controversial government propositions? In most countries about half the population doesn’t agree that mankind is solely responsible for “climate change”. Where is their voice? The government is suggesting that solar panels can stop storms, and EV’s will control floods, why isn’t this a failure of the obligations of a news channel?
Secondly, skeptics can ask when this rule started and why the regulator missed so many past examples. Why aren’t breaches the other way being fined too?
The overreaction IS the news story
Ponder how afraid the believers must be if the mere opinion of an economist is so dangerous. This man is a not a scientist and every person in France has heard the evidence is overwhelming, climate change is real, and 130% of all scientists who ever lived know that CO2 threatens life on Earth. For three decades children have been trained to say that skeptics are funded by Big Oil, and motivated by money, and yet here is one guy who used the word “totalitarian” and they all go off their rocker.
Why, perhaps because it suggests that believers are motivated by a bigger pot of money and power than skeptics ever could be.
BACKGROUND
Arcon stands for theRegulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication
CNews is controlled by billionaire business magnate Vincent Bolloré and has been compared to FOX in the US.
Edit: Approbration corrected to opprobrium. H/t Robert Swan.
In May this year, on the flat plains of an Icelandic geothermal reserve, a gigantic vacuum cleaner designed to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the sky was switched on.
The machine, called Mammoth, would not be entirely out of place on a Mad Max set….
The big machine in Iceland and will soon start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year and turning it into calcium carbonate rock underground.
In a world where humans make 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually the project will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 each year, which is approximately one millionth of human annual emissions.
Cost estimates are said to be “closer to $1,000 a ton” to remove the CO2. Effectively, we’re spending 36 million dollars US to convert one millionth of human annual emissions of a fertilizing gas into limestone rock we don’t need.
Flagrant Big Government wastage doesn’t get much more pointless than this.
File this away for the history books of the future like the quest for perpetual motion machines.
The process is called Direct Air Capture (DAC) and supposedly the Mammoth plant achieves something equivalent to taking “8,000 cars off the road” each year, as if that was a useful thing.
The problem for the Swiss Company (Climaworks) is that the most efficient machines for capturing carbon are plants, and they’re cheap and out of patent.
Climeworks built this project in Iceland, of course, so they can use “clean” geothermal energy. But that raises the question of how much electricity it takes to turn CO2 into limestone. If we ran it off coal fired power would it ever be carbon neutral?
“It’s essentially a SodaStream on steroids,” says Douglas Chan, COO of Climeworks. Absorption water is injected at the top of the tower and trickles down through packing that fills the column. The water dissolves the CO2 coming up through the bottom of the tower producing a pressurised mix that is ready for injection underground through two onsite wells operated by project partner Carbfix. Deep under the earth it reacts with the rock, becoming mineralised, locking up the emissions for long-term storage.
Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks CEO, said: “Within two years, the CO2 has become solid carbonate rock, 800m underground where it will stay for the next couple of millions of years for sure.”
As for the cost of capturing the carbon, Wurzbacher says: “Today we are closer to the US$1,000 per tonne mark than we are to the US$100 per tonne mark.”
If we pretend the costs will fall like they did with slave-made solar panels subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party this process will become wildly cheap I promise:
“If we apply learning rates, which are known from other industries such as solar PV and the wind industry, and if we compare them to our predicted technological learning, we’ll end up at a cost level at the order of US$100 per tonne, going towards 2050.”
Even if this fantasy comes true, it’s still $100 a ton we don’t have to spend.
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip just what a drain EV’s will be on the average household.
“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.
So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?
And as Andrew Bolt points out, you might have been charging your car for a reason…
There’s huge bushfires, say. They knock out electricity lines, like the ones that went down and triggered Victoria’s big blackout. Your EV, which you were charging at home, is suddenly drained to save the electricity system. And then the fires approach. Or the floods.
So after they subsidize your EV purchase, and you think you have a good deal, they’ll raise the price of electricity. Then they’ll offer their hostages discounts if they join the scheme and plug in the car every day. But when your car battery depreciates “to landfill”, or your house burns to the ground, you’ll be the one paying the bill.
UPDATE: To clarify — It will be voluntary but only the wealthy will really have the choice… Like air conditioners that the government switches off in our homes on hot days, the unwashed masses will find the “discounts” offered to keep their car plugged in at peak hour will be hard to refuse.
Expensive electricity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cheap electricity gives power to the people. Expensive electricity gives power to the bureaucrats who control the complicated pricing schemes. The bureaucrats give discounts to encourage certain “patterns of behavior”. The wealthy do what they want.
h/t Bally and MeAgain.
REFERENCE
Bjorn C. P. Sturmberg et al, Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings (2024). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4445838/v1
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters died out in Taipei because of global warming. Instead it turns out the ocean there was much warmer and quite a lot higher.
So they sampled the heck out of this shell. They took so many data points they could figure out the seasonal swings from four years in a row in what was somewhere around 5,500 BC. Somehow even when CO2 levels were perfect, the water temperature swings around quite a lot. Neolithic people probably prayed for better weather, rolled some runes or read some tea leaves. These were early climate models and five thousand years later, seasonal models have not improved much.
Given that these oysters like to live 1 to 3m below the surface, the seas then must have been 1 to 3 meters above where they are now. Which gives us that awkward truth, yet again, that everywhere we look 7,000 years ago the seas were 1 – 2 meters higher than where they are today. Our seas are only rising at 1mm a year, (or 3mm if you believe the adjusted satellites). How could that be unless the natural world was much hotter, frying and expanding the oceans and melting the ice caps to some degree?
And indeed, current winter water temperatures around Taipei on our Catastrophe-Earth are 14–16oC but back 7,500 years ago researchers suggest the water in winter ranged from 15 to a shocking 23oC.
And if you’re wondering, the big oyster shell was not just carried there by some fisherman long ago — it was found in a muddy black silt clay layer that was more than 5-m thick and filled with other marine remnants above and below that. The researchers dated other things in that stack going back to about 10,000 years ago.
The researchers concluded as drily as possible “The disappearance of this type of oyster in Taiwan during the late Holocene should not be due to a warming trend.”
Indeed.
So yet again, we find something made the Earth a lot hotter 7,000 years ago, and yet the corals survived, the koalas managed and the extinction apocalypse never came. Sensible people would stop throwing money at the wind to control these natural swings that we can’t predict.
REFERENCE
Li H-C, Mii H-S, Liu T-K, et al. (2024) AMS 14C Dating and Stable Isotope Analysis on an 8 kyr Oyster Shell from Tapei Basin: Sea level and SST changes. Radiocarbon. Published online 2024:1-15. doi:10.1017/RDC.2023.117
Remember you are a planet-wrecker, but China just has growing pains
China burns four times as much coal as the second largest coal burner in the world. Everyone else is an also-ran in the coal stakes. For every ton the US consumes, China fries 12 times as much. And poor patsy Australia, for every ton we apologetically ignite, China burns 50. More coal was burned on Earth in 2023 than ever before in human history, and more than half of it was burned in China. Moreover, despite all the Sino nodding to sacred targets, China shows no intention of putting the brakes on the coal train. Around the world, 95% of all new coal power plants built in 2023 were built in China.
Where is the apoplexy?
The UN has met every year for twenty-eight years to badger everyone to stop using coal to appease the Goddess of Trace Gases and Weird Weather — all while China became the coal furnace of the world.
Or perhaps The UN met every year, so China could do exactly that? Lord above, imagine if the bureaucratic starlets of the West could be bought off so easily by trophies, trinkets and photo-opportunities — as a trade strategy, it would be a bargain. And it surely was.
Somehow life on Earth depends on Just-Stop-Oil protestors, but they can’t seem to find the Chinese Embassy. Banker cartels threaten higher interest rates for naughty nations, but no one suggests so much as a boycott of solar panels made with coal.
We’re all in this together, eh?
Supposedly, the developed world caused all the bad weather we have today — leaving the developing world to wallow in the suffering of the coal plants and cars the West invented. But, the developing world just landed a rocket on the moon and bought back some moon-rocks.
The last time NASA did that it was 1972.
A fork in the road for civilization
In a sense, the diverging lines of coal consumption mark the rise and fall of civilizations. They don’t have to — not if the West had upscaled to some better industrial power. But the West upscaled to witchcraft and corruption instead, arrogantly trying to control the weather itself with our power plants in a teenage fashion contest. China took our mistake and smiled and egged us on. They would be crazy if they didn’t support the Greens, and pay off our politicians to cripple our grid.
As CO2 Lover says in comments, it is the Sun Tzu Art of War. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — “Yes they are “very worried”. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have “no intention” of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets. And for people who only fly once a year, the idea of flying less was very unappealing. Worse, the under 35s like taking a series of flights each year is so normal now it’s “part of their identity”.
After years of this tedious preachy non-debate the report authors even had to acknowledge that “virtue signaling” was a thing, and it was turning off middle and lower class people. Rather than being seen as heroes, those who did a lot to prevent climate change were seen as boring and earnest, and either miserable martyrs or people who are “intentionally vocal” about their actions, partly as a way to show off. The working poor didn’t like being talked down to, and it reinforced the idea that “climate action” was something for people who could afford it. It’s a rich girls game…
POST NOTE: This survey is not as stupid as most of their surveys. Usually they just ask how worried people are. This survey gives us (and them) an idea of just how superficial that “worry” is. Apparently the world is going to end, but 6 out of 10 people are not going to give up their cars, their favorite food or their pets. That means they are not that worried. More than half don’t believe it’s harming them. It doesn’t get more basic than this. Four thousand experts have told the people for 30 years that climate change is their fault and a catastrophe — and more than half the audience doesn’t think the experts are right.
Their team is swimming in so much grant money they accidentally did a survey showing 60% of the population don’t believe them.
A study on Irish attitudes toward climate change has found more than half of respondents did not believe it is harming people in Ireland, and that a significant gap exists between people’s climate-related intentions and actions.
Older homeowners, particularly those in rural locations, often believe their way of life is “under threat” as a result of climate initiatives and the report recommends the impact of this change on the “identity of people” be further considered.
The report found many people, males in particular, had no intention of reducing their meat consumption and following a diet seen as more climate friendly.
It’s biology: 54% of people said they have no intention to be vegetarian, and when asked about being vegan, 73% said “No”.
People think they’re already taking enough climate action (like recycling and catching more buses) while the report writers said this was a misunderstanding and people actually needed to “do a lot more”.
Indeed, nearly 60% of the population says they are already walking and cycling more frequently instead of driving and they’re flying less too. Yet there are obviously just as many cars on the road and planes in the sky as ever before, proving researchers need to ask better questions.
If I catch a bus one time this year that’s more frequent than last year, right?
Click to enlarge the graph.
Likewise, are 82% of people really choosing foods with less packaging?
Click to enlarge the graph.
The report authors admit that the unwashed masses are not buying the “fly less” message while celebrities and politicians were flying more:
Across the workshops, individuals didn’t routinely make the connection between the numerous holidays they had booked abroad and the damage to the climate. Numerous arguments were made to justify this travel which point to challenges in communicating the benefits of flying less. Arguments included the fact that the flights were departing whether they were on-board or not and that their impact was minimal when compared with people in the public eye travelling on private jets. These responses point to a sensitivity to people in the public eye (particularly international celebrities) continually flying in private jets frequently whilst the broader population is being asked to not take a holiday and city break abroad.
And finally, there is the realization that “virtue signaling” is its own liability:
They are perceived to be potentially quite boring and earnest as they sacrifice activities such as foreign travel to align with their values. At an extreme, they are viewed as miserable martyrs. They are intentionally vocal about their actions. It was believed that this was intended as an attempt to promote positive actions in others but also to demonstrate their virtuous behaviour. Unfortunately, this active promotion to others less well-placed to act risked being viewed as an attempt to talk down to others, further reinforcing the view of climate action being for those who can afford it.
In Ireland we’re not to burn peat,
For the climate and we’re not to eat meat,
Nor travel too far,
In a petrol run car,
Explains why more greens lose a seat.
Conservatives-in-name-only have suffered the biggest wipe-out in 200 years. Reform UK has won four seats so far, with only about 11 seats not finalized. They’ve done this in a mere matter of weeks, with no funding, no branch structure and in a snap election. From nowhere they won 60% as many votes as the Conservative Party that was the UK government. That is really extraordinary. They are running second in “hundreds of seats” which means that in a first-past-the-post system, they could pick up as many as 6 million votes but only convert that into a small number of seats. But by polling so well across the UK, they represent a large political force. Both older establishment parties will be wary of losing more voters. As the third biggest force in British politics they will change the behaviour of the two major parties in a way that is not reflected in the seat tally.
Ponder that Reform UK won more votes than the Lib-Dems, but at the moment the Lib-Dems look like winning 70 seats, compared to the Reform tally of 4 seats. There is a huge unmet desire in British politics for a party that will represent the people instead of the Establishment — and that includes “establishment science” which has failed the people so appallingly in climate, energy and health. Congratulations to Nigel Farage who finally wins a seat himself.
Looking at the Reuters page — the Labor Party have only picked up an extra 2% of the votes (to 34%) but shifted from 34% of the seats to 63% of the seats in Parliament. The Conservatives have lost 20% of the voting public (from 43% down to 23%), and fall from controlling 56% of the seats to only 18%. The generational shift here is that the “other vote” has reached a record 27% as voters search for anything but the Uniparty corruption. The real story of our times is that politics is not so much right versus left, as The Establishment versus The People. Or Corruption versus honesty.
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POST NOTE: This survey is not as stupid as most of their surveys. Usually they just ask how worried people are. This survey gives us (and them) an idea of just how superficial that “worry” is. Apparently the world is going to end, but 6 out of 10 people are not going to give up their cars, their favorite food or their pets. That means they are not that worried. More than half don’t believe it’s harming them. It doesn’t get more basic than this. Four thousand experts have told the people for 30 years that climate change is their fault and a catastrophe — and more than half the audience doesn’t think the experts are right.
Their team is swimming in so much grant money they accidentally did a survey showing 60% of the population don’t believe them.