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By Jo Nova
Let’s not put race politics in our science lessons
Science has no race — it is true, or it isn’t. But once we start deleting one race or judging one scientific hero by the color of their skin, we can still make science lessons racist. It’s just another anti-white virtue-signalling thing. Instead of teaching children how the world works, someone thinks we should teach them topics that make the Minister sound good at UN cocktail parties.
The UK Labour government wants to overhaul school science — if only they knew what science was. They got an “independent” review to tell them what they wanted to hear and invited the grovelling Royal Society’s of Science to sell out science to the latest Woke intellectual fashion. Shame on them.
Real science is about evidence, not the color of your skin, or the continent your last 1,000 ancestors lived on. It can’t be “de-Westernized” because it isn’t “Western” — the laws of physics work just as well in England as they do in Bangladesh. Hypersonic rockets don’t care what language you speak, penicillin kills streptococcus in the East and the West, and gravity sucks us all. Its universality is what makes science so fantastically useful, and ultimately so unifying. We are all just homo sapiens in this together, trying to comprehend the big world.
Naturally the UK Labour government want to screw that all up, as if science was just another kind of Arts degree:
by Greg Heffer at the Daily Mail:
Big Government, payer of almost all the science grants, asked the “science” societies to make up stuff for their PR campaign:
In response to the Department for Education’s call for evidence, top science bodies stressed the importance of teaching ‘non-Western’ contributions to science.
So they can turn science into another social studies unit:
The Royal Society of Biology, Royal Society of Chemistry, and Institute of Physics also said pupils should learn why some cultures were ‘less able to claim credit and ownership for ideas’.
…the Royal Society of Biology’s own submission stated: ‘It is essential that all children feel included in the sciences by valuing their experiences and through the thoughtful use of contexts, imagery and narratives.
All children need to know what science is, they don’t need to be patronized. There’s a devastating condescension, a racist underbelly to the idea that someone with Hispanic, Malaysian, Kenyan or whatever skin can only learn science if we can teach them through neolithic folk songs or just-so-stories about imaginary ancestors. Spare them the soft racism of low expectations. How unforgivably demeaning.
All children should “feel included” in science because the laws of physics and chemistry apply to them; because they use phones, fly in planes and get x-rays.
Then, after all students learn what science is (observation, hypothesis, prediction, and testing with rigorous skepticism) then they can go to social studies classes to find out how scientific heroes changed the lives of millions, and why the discipline of science was crucial to the West, and how the search for truth became embedded in the dominant Western culture.
We don’t want more social studies in our science lessons, we want more science in our social studies…
They can learn the physics of electromagnetism in their science class, and talk about the impact of Michael Faraday in their history lessons and how he had to teach himself, and how his idea of electric fields and electric motors changed the world.
 Professor Faraday lecturing at the Royal Institution, 27th December, 1855 Killing off Western heroes is something communists and enemies want
Deleting the heroes of science (and the heroes of the UK) is a great way to demoralize and divide a generation. Instead of inspiring kids of all colors to grow up to be Alexander Fleming, the Labour Party want to teach children that their culture is not different, not worth fighting for, and not worth passing on to their own kids.
It’s a stupid way to run a country:
The Royal Society of Biology also said it had sought expertise on ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and for a ‘no more heroes’ approach to teaching science in schools.
This would mean ‘avoiding prescriptive lists of historic figures in biology’ and instead ‘exploring opportunities for local, recogniseable, diverse historic and contemporary figures through which discovery and exploration of biological concepts can be explored’.
President Xi would be pleased.
This is a test to see if we will resist. Mock it accordingly so the people that spout this craven nonsense crawl back in their holes.
Top image by Andy from Pixabay
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By Jo Nova
It’s become a flood
It’s a good start to 2025 — just quietly, the money is exiting the Monster Banker Climate Cartel. Since the Trump win, the bankers are running away suddenly from the United Nations “Net-Zero Banking Alliance” (NZBA) which is a sub-part of GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) — the world’s largest and richest climate activists club. GFANZ is the public face of every kind of global financial-bullying-to-save-the-world. Economically, the monster collective could eat whole nations for breakfast. At one point the collective assets-under-management were as valued at the fantastical conglomeration of $130 trillion. It is the hydra-head hissing at superannuation funds and national treasurers that don’t comply with sacred green goals. Who cares what the voters want?
The latest round of quiet banker departures started with Moody‘s and Goldman Sachs, a month ago. Only two days ago RealClear Energy took heart that ” U.S. behemoths Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo were still in the NZBA”. But Wells Fargo quit a week ago, and under the cover of New Years Eve parties, the Bank of America, and Citigroup have jumped ship too. No one seems to be saying why they are leaving, probably because there is no good way to admit they were colluding with other bankers in anti-competitive acts, to limit the choices of businesses and voters. Likewise, there is never a good time to say it was a mistake to join a club that put their clients interests second, after the pet obsessions of UN apparatchiks.
Credit for these successes goes to the Republican State Governors and their anti-trust and fiduciary duty legal suits. Their threats are unravelling the giant financial marshmellow man — especially now that the bankers have lost any “protection” the Biden – Harris Presidency may have offered.
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Bloomber g
Citigroup Inc and Bank of America Corp said they are leaving a global climate-banking group, becoming the latest Wall Street lenders to exit the coalition in the past month.
In a statement, Citigroup said while it remains committed to achieving net zero emissions, it is exiting the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). Bank of America said separately on Tuesday that it is also leaving NZBA, adding that it would continue to work with clients on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The bankers just want to save the world — and sell green bonds…
Citigroup has been the world’s No. 4 underwriter of green bonds since the start of the decade, trailing BNP Paribas SA, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Credit Agricole SA, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America ranks eighth.
As I’ve explained — these banker bullies can force first world economies to pick up Net Zero policies, even when their voters don’t want it, but their power hinges on a bluff made with other people’s money which the US Republican’s have called them on. Larry Fink doesn’t hold $10 trillion in personal assets, he manages $10 trillion of other people’s investments:
The climate banker cabal called GFANZ — was set up in 2021 by the UN and Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England). At one point GFANZ grew to an obscenely unbelievable $130 trillion in “funds under management”, giving it the financial power equivalent to a black hole. The largest 20 national economies in the world have a combined GDP of $87 trillion. So when a collective managing $130 trillion says “jump” there are not many Presidents or Prime Ministers inclined to say “No”. In October 2020, the CEO of BlackRock told the Australian government he wanted them to shut coal plants faster and three weeks later, Scott Morrison and the treasurer signed us up for Net Zero, even though the voters had picked them to do less climate action rather than more.
…it was all a big bluff… all the giant funds use other people’s money to bully and cajole boards, ministers, and global leaders into doing things that none of them might want. They were supposed to be investing pension funds to earn money for workers to retire on, instead it looked and smelled a lot like they were squandering the returns in order to prop up socialist ideologies, dodgy companies, and to coerce governments to legislate policies that the voters didn’t vote for.
Larry Fink the CEO of Blackrock, and his pals, turned our pension funds into a leftist activist machine. Thankfully 19 US States fought back by asking the legal bombshell questions about whether these funds were cooperating in a way that breached antitrust laws and neglected their fiduciary duty.
— from ESG comes undone — BlackRock, JP Morgan abandon “Climate Action 100+”
Appropriately the GFANZ logo is an empty hole. You only think you can see the “zero”.
It’s a big set back for the UN and the bankers
GFANZ and the UN banker cartel was an obscene grab for power. It is an unholy alliance of big money and big government — looking acting and smelling like the start of a World Government machine to take power away from the voters and command their energy, investment, pensions, and freedom from Geneva or London.
The psychopaths and colluding bankers won’t stop colluding, but this is, at least, the beginning of the end for the brazen, naked part of the gambit. Now they will have to go back to meeting at Davos for skiing trips to plot their self serving goals. They have to pretend to compete, which will slow them down. They can’t be seen to “set national policy”, and they must not use their clients funds against them, at least not obviously.
We don’t need all the bankers to shift, we just need a few so we have some competition.
Which banks serve the UN?
Conveniently the bragging UN has made the list of member-bankers searchable by country.
The only big US bankers left in the NZBA are JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. The US member list is looking decidedly empty… On the other hand, practically every Australian bank has signed on to obey the United Nations “NZBA” club — the ANZ, Comm bank, NAB, Westpac, Macquarie and BoQ. Which banks did not? Bendigo Bank? Please search among the wiki list of Australian banks. Let us all know if you know of one that serves Australians rather than the UN.
The Bank of NZ is also a fully fledged member. For Canadians, like Australians, seemingly every bank is a Bank of the UN — the CIBC, the BMO, Coast Capital, NBC, RBC, Scotiabank, TD Bank and Vancity too. (Forgive me if I screwed up the acronyms.)
The UK bankers include too many to name, but Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, PBS, TSB, Standard Chartered, and Virgin Money for starters.
While the US has the well known “anti-trust” laws which the Republicans are using to frighten the bankers, the rest of the West has fiduciary duty rules, and regulations that prohibit anti-competitive collusion. Hopefully this is just the start of the great climate unravelling.
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Related posts:
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By Jo Nova
The whole guilt trip about how the rich nations have ruined the world and need to pay reparations to the poor is rapidly losing currency.
The British may have started mining coal in third century, invented coal fired steam engines and made the first coal fired power plants, but by 1998 China had already burned more coal than Great Britain. In terms of cumulative coal burning, by 2018 China overtook the EU, and by 2020 it surpassed the US. China has now burnt more coal than any nation on Earth.
China has become the world’s coal furnace and no one gives a toss. Everyone in the West pretends to save carbon dioxide while they ship their factories to China, and buy the same things back from them. When will China have to pay reparations? Answer — Never. Because it was never really about CO2.
Coal is the largest single source of human CO2 emissions. In terms of the cumulative human emissions of CO2 from all sources, the USA is still the world leader. China almost certainly overtook Europe in the last twelve months, and it’s just a matter of time before China could theoretically take the blame for “man made global warming”. (If that title meant anything).
 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
The point of this post, is to highlight how absurd the situation is. The white guilt for “climate change” is the point — not the gigatons of CO2. No one really gives a damn about carbon dioxide or they would be trying to solve “the China problem” as if life on Earth depended on solving it.
The whole planet and every koala will die, but no one has the time to add up a few sums and start talking about trade embargos, or boycotts, or even writing a strong letter to President Xi…
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By Jo Nova
Things were dire in October, and they aren’t getting better:
Spare a thought for the people of Cuba. In October, Cuba suffered through a week of extended blackouts when 7 out of 8 power plants were out of action. After power was restored it meant people in Havana, the capital city, got 4 or 5 hours of electricity a day. (So they only had 20 hour blackouts each day, instead of 24 hour ones). According to The National, people often travel by horse-drawn carts rather than motor cars, and in the countryside, it’s a common sight to see ploughs being pulled by oxen. “Motorways connecting major cities are eerily quiet. ”
Not surprisingly, in the last few years, ten percent of the entire population has left (mostly for Florida). Unfortunately for Cuba, these were the working age adults. Predictably, the loss of productive workers and productive electricity means the loss of product, and so it has come to pass:
John Hindraker, Powerline
This is like Libya running out of sand: Cuba is now an importer of sugar:
The Cuban government acknowledged that it is “shameful” for the island, traditionally one of the leading sugar producers in Latin America, to be forced to import this product.
Cuba was once known as the Sugar Bowl of the world.
John Hindraker calculates that the current cost of a pound of sugar in Cuba is about $25 US.
Blackouts on top of Blackouts
Apparently, the Cuban grid managers were expecting to be 1,311MW short today on a grid that was theoretically 3,150 MW. The reasons being just about everything:
The power outages are primarily due to a deficit in power generation, compounded by issues such as equipment failures and maintenance at key thermal power plants, as well as fuel shortages affecting distributed generation stations.
Not surprisingly, the buzz of diesel generators, and $25-per-pound sugar means the islands other big industry — tourism — is dying as well:
The National
One hostel owner in Old Havana, the capital’s partly-restored tourist hotspot, said that there used to be “a lot of tourists” but the situation now was “very, very difficult”.
As usual the Media is covering up for Communist dictators. Francis Menton looks at China and Venezuela as well: End Of Year World Socialism Round-Up: Cuba, China, Venezuela
Though The NY Times has a story on Cuba — but only because they think they can blame it on Domald Trump.
Ten years ago, President Barack Obama stunned the world by restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending more than 50 years of Cold War estrangement between the United States and a country with which it had once been on the brink of nuclear war.
For two and a half years, Cuba brimmed with enthusiasm amid a remarkable wave of investment and tourism,…
But a financial implosion caused by a cascade of factors — the tightening of U.S. policy by the Trump administration, Cuba’s mismanagement of its economy, the crushing effect of the Covid-19 pandemic — has kept visitors away and launched an immigration exodus of epic proportions.
Teach the children. Big Governments can wreck anything.
h/ t Bally, and Manhattan Contrarian…
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 … By Jo Nova
In the ecosystem of civilization, the OECD is just another batch of multinational barnacles slowing the ship down. These invertebrate filter feeders use taxpayer money to bore the taxpayers kids into submission to The Blob. They presumably hope the kids will grow up to vote for the Big Government Blob, thus boosting the river of money that flows past the barnacles.
In the end, improbably, a foreign committee is pretending it can save children in some of the wealthiest nations in the world from “misinformation”. As if the first world needs some remedial assistance teaching chemistry to their teenagers. The gargantuan arrogance of this is only surpassed by the intergalactic chutzpah. The OECD are, after all, just a bunch of economists, wiggling their finger at nations full of doctors and engineers, and telling them how to teach their kids science.
The gibberish, it grows: What is “action” in response to “climate anxiety”?
The Guardian (of course).
OECD’s Pisa program will measure the ability of students to take action in response to climate anxiety and ‘take their position and role in the global world’
In 2025, for the first time in nearly a decade, science will be the major focus of the OECD’s program for international student assessment (Pisa) – which runs every three years (give or take Covid interruptions), its focus rotating between reading, maths and science. … This year it will measure the knowledge and ability of 15-year-old students from 92 countries and economies to act on climate change, under a new heading: Agency in the Anthropocene.
The point of measuring children’s abilities is to collect statistics for the next batch of press releases the OECD want to browbeat the West with.
They say they want to teach children to “distinguish scientific evidence from misinformation” except that they don’t appear to know what scientific evidence is, or what science is either. If they did, they’d talk about the dangers of consensus and computer models, and the importance of observations.
Let’s have a small revolution in logic and reasoning instead:
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education, describes the refreshed science framework as a “small revolution” addressing students’ capacity to distinguish scientific evidence from misinformation in the context of the “biggest challenge of our times – our environment”.
Look out, a foreign committee influenced by multinational corporate powers wants to provide a “non-political space” for your children.
Amelia Pearson, at the Monash climate change communication research hub, says there have been more “climate change dot points” added to the curriculum, but mainly in subjects such as science and geography.
“Climate change impacts every area of society and our lives,” she says. “So it’s really important that people who might not engage, particularly with [science, technology, engineering, maths], still have the opportunity to learn about these different challenges.”
Education isn’t about persuading children to think a certain way, she says, but providing a non-political space to understand the issues and make up their own minds.
Aren’t our schools supposed to be “non-political spaces”?
I say we survey the OECD instead to see if they know what science is — then cut off their funding when they fail.
The biggest threat to the world today is big-government. We need to teach children that cold weather is terrible, but big government is worse than an ice age.
Thanks to Tony Thomas, and Eric Worrall…
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 What’s on your Santa wish list? Best wishes to everyone wherever you are.
Thanks to all the good souls who make this blog possible.
Merry Christmas!
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For a few days new posts will appear below this one. Thank you to everyone!
 If you can help me cover the bills, I can keep exposing the false religion, the crooks, the stupid.
We are running on the wire this year! I should have asked months ago…
By Jo Nova
It’s a dangerous moment in history across the West, but as those in the gulags of 1953 would surely have said, we still have so much to work with. Our Democracies might be unraveling, but the Oligarch are coming undone. Investors are fleeing from wind, solar and exploding EVs. Voters are tossing out bad governments. And more than half the population knows that climate science is a religion. We are the majority, but they don’t want you to know.
 It’s been 16 years here on this blog, somehow, outside the system, living off goodwill and donations, debating the U.N. and trillion dollar cartels. Real freedom is writing with no corporate sponsor, and no major advertiser. There’s no billionaire publisher to toss me off, no editor to boss me around, and no committee to answer to. The government can’t take away a grant it never gave me, and the cowards of Cancel Culture can’t scare away advertisers.
I am not dependent on any institution, but I am of course, dependent on you, the reader, which is exactly how it should be. To serve the people direct, instead of serving Disney, Pfizer or the Minister of Misinformation. When no one holds the strings, everyone does.
I don’t ask for a subscription here, just any help you can spare.
That’s why Western governments across the world are trying so hard to set up rules to censor blogs and forums like this. The Australian government wanted to fine people like me $6 million dollars if I published “misinformation” and they define truth as “everything the leftist government-paid-expert says“. What they really want is to stop critics of the government and force everyone to use ID.
Thank you to everyone who cancelled subscriptions to the propaganda sheets, and sent that money to the new independent media instead.
Never surrender
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Thank you to Troy, Lloyd, Margaret, DavidM, PGC, Spiros, JohnK, CarolineK, FrankF, LawrieA, AndrewH. Thanks to TrevorP, and of course, as always to Bryant.
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9.7 out of 10 based on 59 ratings
By Jo Nova
This will slow down the parasites
The most exciting thing I heard today was that AI was used to find all the nasty surprises secreted away in the 1,500 pages of US legislation that was being pumped through Congress in the days before Christmas. Legal aides must have spent all year stacking the deck with tricks to enrich the political class. No human could unpack the fine print overnight, but AI could. Then, free speech saved the day, the Capitol Pork was exposed when Elon Musk spread the word to his 208 million readers.
As Elon Musk says: I’m suspicious of laws that are longer than The Lord of the Rings.
No matter how corrupt you think Big-government is, it’s worse:
Posters on X exposed some of the hidden surprises which included a payrise for Congress, funding for Bill Gates mosquito games, bioweapons research, vaccine mandates and new rules to define National Emergencies like “climate change”.
How else to describe this other than rampant theft, hidden under a confected “rush” and loaded up with manipulative coercion to get it through?
As Glenn Reynolds points out: The cancer research bill was passed in March and cynically left to fester for months so that it could be used as a hostage against Republicans.
Seen on Twitter:
What is more outrageous, refusing to pass a 1,574 page monstrosity of a spending bill, or using kids with cancer as human shields by writing them into it? “We had to pass all the graft and corruption to help kids with cancer” – that was going to be their defense.
When Republicans reduced the bill to 115 pages, the Democrats who would have presumably passed all of it the day before, would not pass the short form without the grift and the graft.
The mega-long legislation affects all of us in the West. The longer the laws are the more it serves the uber rich who can afford the QCs (or KCs or gun lawyers), and the more it punishes the poor who can’t pay off any lawyer to find the loopholes that weren’t written into the rules for them anyway.
Australia voted against an emissions trading scheme in a landslide in 2013 but got one anyway two years later. The laws were snuck through in deceptive clauses just before Christmas 2015.
Now the talk all over US political circles is this radical idea of voting for one bill at a time…
It’s fantastic, and Trump isn’t even President officially for another 30 days.
UPDATE: The US House just passed the third revision which was 118 pages.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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