Click if you care. All 61 countries (write in the top three yourself.)
I know you’ve all been waiting for the Climate Performance Index of 2017. It’s hitting the headlines today as countries who are falling in the list get officially told off.
A group called CAN have ranked the world (well, 61 countries) according to how much carbon dioxide they emit, and how many degrees they will alter world temperature… sorry, scratch that… and how much they pander to the climate-religion. For a few moments I was proud that Australia ranked 57th out of 61. To reach the top of the malPerformance list (I’m aiming at number 61) Australia only has to outdo Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We’re all in the officially “Very Poor” and most naughty bottom rank, along with the almost-as-naughty-Canada at 55th, and Russia, Iran, and Singapore.
At the other end of the scale, the top ranked country is France at number four.
Why “four” you ask? Because there is no one, two or three. Apparently, the top three countries are imaginary. This is so fitting:
* None of the countries achieved positions one to three. No country is doing enough to prevent dangerous climate change.
Righto. Lets call the winners: Atlantis, Pandora, and Neverland.
It’s hard to imagine the US is only down to 43rd, just “Poor” — even after the Trump effect.
The UK (what were you Brits thinking) ranks an abysmal sixth. Sorry about that.
I’d like to say that Australia scoring 57th was impressive so I could invert the whole list and call it the Climate Sanity Index, or Least Gullible Countries on Earth, but we all know it isn’t true — indeed the list appears pretty random. Despite Germans, Danes and Australians doing more to cripple their economies than anyone else I can think of, they scored 29th, 14th and 57th.
Consider Denmark, which broke the world record for the highest percentage of wind farm generation in 2015, (and the highest electricity charges) but can’t place better than 14th. Germany has 25,000 wind turbines and pays practically the second highest electricity charges but ranks 29th. Australia, the largest coal exporter in the world (or close) is crippling its own coal power stations and has run a whole state into blackness, but gets 57th. We live further from everywhere than anywhere, have the lowest population density, and bigger distances to cover, and virtually the highest population growth rate in the western world, but are still pretending we can cut our emissions by an obscene one quarter. We deserve a Golden Hairshirt Award. Instead, we’re scraping the barrel with Saudi Arabia? How many wind farms do they have, is it zero, or have they finished the first one yet?
*Oops on the Headline. We are not third from the top but fifth. Darn. Corrected. Sorry. I know people will be disappointed. – Jo
The BP Statistical Review 2016 revealed on Wednesday that Indonesia’s coal consumption had doubled since 2010. Last year, coal became the country’s dominant source of fuel, accounting for 41 percent of total energy consumption.
Studies show coal consumption remains popular in Indonesia despite its damaging environmental impacts. The government has committed to an ambitious 35,000 megawatt electricity program, in which coal-fueled power plants will still make up the majority of electricity generation, at around 50 percent.
As coal got cheap, Indonesia exported less and used more of it domestically.
Japan’s major conglomerate Itochu Corporation and one of world’s major electricity company, Electric Power Development Co. Ltd (J. Power), have promised to fully support the construction of the coal-fired Batang power plant in Central Java, which will become not only the most efficient but also cleanest thermal power plant in Southeast Asia.
He said that the Batang coal-fired power plant would be the showcase of the company’s latest power generation technology called the ultra-supercritical (USC) technology, which is not only able to improve efficiency but also significantly reduce emission, including carbon dioxide and mercury.
With the USC technology, the power plants operate their boilers at temperatures and pressure above the critical point of water, which results an efficiency of above 45 percent.
Indonesia’s coal fired electricity will be cleaner and more efficient than Australias. (No one is going to invest in better coal plants in an advanced economy like Australia.)
Who’s a quiet coal giant then? Australia provides about 30% of world coal trade, and it’s our largest export industry, but Indonesia digs up about the same amount of coal as Australia exported a few years ago:
Unhappy democrats have started a Twitter campaign and petition to change the election result on December 19th by convincing Republicans in the electoral college to vote for Hillary instead. I think the plan is to riot, throw a hissy fit, and hope everyone “comes to their senses”. Things are not just crazy in the US, in Australia, the media coverage of the US election has been so politically purified that five and six year old’s at a daycare centre were caught chanting death threats about Donald Trump and the after-school club has decided to do “art therapy” to help them cope.
Hillary Clinton was horrified that Donald Trump might not accept the election result. Now that her fans are rioting in the streets many people look forward to her telling them how much they are “denigrating democracy“. Right now there are really only two people who could stop most of the violence if they made an impassioned public plea for their fans to respect the democratic process, and rule of law. Where are their responses?
….
The popular vote was so popular it seems 3 million people from other countries voted too
The main (only) argument keeping the Clinton-camp’s hopes alive is that she won the popular vote by 600,000 votes. But a study by Greg Phillips of VoteFraud.org suggests as many as 3 million votes were cast by illegal immigrants. Who knows, Trump may have won the popular vote if there had been ID checks, something the Democrats do everything they can to stop. Indeed Obama even explained before the election that non-citizens should get out vote. Snopes has tried to claim this is false, but even their “in context” quote shows Obama was responding to a question about “undocumented citizens” and people at risk of being deported. There are apparently 4 million dead people on U.S. voter rolls, and the Democrats don’t want them to stop voting either.
The @realDonaldTrump tweeted “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily”
Past presidents that won with lower percentages of the popular vote than Trump (47%) include Abraham Lincoln (39%), Woodrow Wilson (42%), and Bill Clinton (43%).
You may not have realized we have the right to a perfect climate. A bunch of kids age 8 to 19 have won the right to take the US government to trial for not protecting the atmosphere. It’s being called the “biggest case on the planet”.
“Right to a stable climate predates Constitution?” If only the auth ors of the Magna Carta could have prevented the Little Ice Age.
If only. In dismissing the dismissal the plaintiffs haven’t proven anything at all except that they have the right to waste a lot of time and money pursuing the idea that humans not only can control the climate, but they should’ve done so, at any cost, and that these children would be better off in a colder world with lower crop yields. I can see about twenty ways this case can die in a ditch. Bring on discovery.
How about the right to a stable economy?
Can our kids sue the government for flagrantly wasting funds borrowed from their future in a pointless quest to change the weather?
Plaintiffs allege defendants have known for more than fifty years that the carbon dioxide (“CO;’) produced by burning fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate system in a way that would “significantly endanger plaintiffs, with the damage persisting for millenia.”
In a letter to John Kerry on November 3rd, fourteen US senators explained that Obama’s commitment to the Paris deal is the legal equivalent of him giving a speech — the “lowest forms of commitment the United States can make…”. It’s worthless. The Senators explained that everyone knows the Paris deal was done to avoid going through Congress (it’s printed in The Guardian) because Congress would never approve it.
Obama said he had ratified the Paris agreement, but it was a bluff.
What one President can proclaim, the next can just as easily wipe out.
The US senators are warning Turnbull, Trudeau, May, Merkel, Hollande and everyone else, that the US is going to fall far short of its carbon commitment, and that the Paris deal is of “no consequence”:
Paris Agreement Parties relying on fulfillment of promised US climate actions should be fully aware that the administrations “commitment” is opposed by the majority of congress, it’s legal soundness is questioned by the US Supreme Court, and under the best of circumstances, the country will fall short of meeting the 26 – 28 percent reduction by a range of forty-five to sixty percent. Most importantly, any future administration will have numerous options to forego President Obama’s political commitments under the Paris Agreement and the fact that it will soon be in force is of no consequence.“
The US Congress, and Donald Trump, have made their position clear all along. Turnbull and Bishop didn’t have to do this. Who were they negotiating for? The Australian population voted twice against carbon schemes.
BREAKING:Massive magnitude 7.9 earthquake hits New Zealand tonight at midnight local time. 90km North of Christchurch. Thankfully, so far there are no reports of injuries or deaths. UPDATE: One Two deaths now reported. The quake was rated 7.4 initially but upgraded to 7.9 by Geoscience Australia. The small tsunami is expected to reach Australia around now (3 – 4am AEST). Many New Zealanders were evacuated and moved to higher ground for fear of the tsunami estimated at 2.5 – 5m. For more see NZ TV News and Twitter: #Earthquake. Maybe it’s connected to the full moon, maybe it isn’t. Best wishes to all our New Zealand readers.
UPDATE: Clarence River got blocked, a lake formed, and has breached due to the quake. There were possibly two simultaneous quakes at midnight last night. In 2010 the fault rupture was about 30km long. This time it was about four times as long (about 3:30ish on the video). There have been over 400 aftershocks small earthquakes. h/t Tom.
UPDATE: NZ Geo’s say the big quake was 7.5. They are clocking up the aftershocks by the minute here! Two near 6.0 in the last five minutes. The islands are shaking. h/t to Rereke.
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Supermoon Monday
Monday night the moon will rise about 2 hours after it is at the closest point in its loopy orbit (for Australians). Officially it’s called a perigee moon.
ABC – The event, known as the supermoon, occurs when a full or new moon passes closer to Earth in its monthly orbit.
The coincidence will take place three times in 2016 — October 16, November 14 and December 14.
But the November supermoon is special because it will be “the closest full moon to date in the 21st century”, according to NASA.
It will become full just two hours after its closest approach to Earth, arguably making it an “extra-super Moon”.
It is not expected to appear again until November 25, 2034.
Photo: taken tonight from a handheld click-n-shoot camera by me (Canon SX50). It’s not even an SLR. Remarkable technology that lets us see things with a click that the worlds best thinkers could only dream of a few hundred years ago.
Is the quake in NZ connected to (or exacerbated by) the moon?
Ide et al (2016) suggests it might be:
“In particular, a clear causal relationship between small earthquakes and the phase of tidal stress is elusive. However, tectonic tremors deep within subduction zones are highly sensitive to tidal stress levels, with tremor rate increasing at an exponential rate with rising tidal stress.
… This suggests that the probability of a tiny rock failure expanding to a gigantic rupture increases with increasing tidal stress levels. We conclude that large earthquakes are more probable during periods of high tidal stress.”
Drew Creighton at the Sydney Morning Herald gets excited: Climate Change affects all levels of life. (By crikey, the banality! It would be legendary if a scientist found one form of life on Earth that wasn’t “affected” by temperature, clouds, frost, ice, storms or rain. How low is this bar?)
First a Prof somewhere notices fish are getting smaller:
Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies said while the study encompassed all ecosystems, his particular interest was the sea.
But which fish are shrinking exactly — “commercial fish” — could be a clue?
“We’re seeing decreased yields in fisheries, for example in the North Sea commercial fish have undergone reductions in body size, all of them, simultaneously.”
So how do we know this shrinkage is not due to bigger boats and the increased fish-and-chips factor?
He said the study factored in over-fishing and fisheries induced evolution and separated the two results. “This in in response to ocean warming over the last forty years.”
Well that’s alright then. It must be a pretty hot fisheries model to separate the the multifactorial uncontrolled nightmare of predator-prey changes and temperature shifts too-small-to-measure, spread over decades in an ocean where hot and cold water swirls in eddies right next to each other.
How much warming does it take to shrink fish?
The story mentions “one degree of warming since the industrial revolution.” But that’s air temperature, and fish don’t fly much. Creighton doesn’t tell poor SMH readers how much the water itself warmed. Globally we’re talking about a fifth of a degree C over 40 years (plus or minus 0.5C). We can’t even measure something that small with the equipment we use now, let alone the buckets of 40 years ago.
As far as the North Sea itself goes, see the image above, right. There is a six degree normal variation across the surface of the North Sea but panic now, because fish are shrinking due to water warming at two to five hundredths of a degree per year. (A trend estimated by the European Environmental agency).
The miracle is that life on Earth survived meteor strikes, super volcanoes, continental shifts and lived for hundreds of millions of years, but if the oceans warm 0.2 degrees Celsius “commercial” fish can’t adapt.
Apparently 100% confidence in unverified models is a broad view:
Is there anyone online that hasn’t seen angry Democrats rioting, and beating up voters who made the “wrong” choice? In the land of meaningless slogans, this must be what happens when Love Trumps Hate. Presumably they are teaching Hitler’s disciples a lesson. As Mark Steyn says, every Republican candidate is called Hitler, and when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.
Around the world many people remain baffled as to how 60 million US citizens could vote for the sexist, racist, trash talking Trump. In one survey only 4% of Germans said they would vote for him. Here in Australia I don’t know the numbers, but The Flummoxed are everywhere. Thank the media for the one-dimensional caricature they sell.
Things are so bad here that The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) put out a story saying there were “reports from Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday evening” with crowds of thousands chanting: “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back”. Michael Smith found a tweet pointing out that their entire source for this was a guy who runs a known parody account on Twitter @sRowntreeNews. Smith clocked up the screenshot, sure that the newspaper would correct their inflammatory uber embarassing mistake in minutes. But hours ticked by with nothing. Tonight, long after Smith did the last update on his site, apparently the SMH page has gone 404. Is that it? Will the SMH let their readers know, or leave the entirely false impression out there to fester in the minds of people looking for an excuse to get violent?
Here’s a view of Trump and blacks you won’t see on the ABC / BBC / CNN
These video shorts, give us some idea of how different the story could look if 96% of media donations were going to the Trump campaign. Granted, all these videos star people employed by Trump, so run that through your mental filter as you watch. Bias, bias, bias. But the narrative they create is a parallel universe to the one running in the mainstream press. These adverts (I assume they are ads) are great examples of the power of editing…
It follows that if the media had higher standards, we’d get better politicians. The media IS the problem.
We can’t force the media to do the right thing, but we can make sure people are aware of the bias. We can teach our children to seek out both sides of every story.
William Campudoni’s story about how Trump hired him off the street, gave him suits and said “welcome to the family”.
“The film was made by political filmmaker Lucas Baiano without the backing of any political action committee or major donors because he felt like the story needed to be told.”
The divisive people are the ones dividing by race.
Brunell Donald-Kyei, is vice-chair of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump. Probably Australians would have never seen anything like her on any of our “national talk programs”.
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Trump the sexist-racist hires non-white woman as executive.
She seems pretty happy about it.
How to dehypnotise a nation?
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, writes about De-Hitlerization and also has suggestions on on ways to dehypnotize. Sounds like some fun party tricks, though Adams is not suggesting you wear Trump T-shirts and try these out in dangerous neighborhoods.
Finally, a leader says No to refueling the Global Green Gravy Train. It will still take years to slow and unpack, because it is a pagan religion and a 1.5 Trillion Dollar industrial freight machine. But yesterday the gargantuan train split at a junction and the people stuck on Big-Green roller will be able to watch the other train take off as it dumps the dead-weight carbon truck with square wheels.
As Marc Morano says: “Trump is right on climate science and Trump rightly scares the hell out of the warmists.”
No wonder they are in tears. The two main weapons of carbon-believers are the free money from government treasure chests, and coercion through namecalling. Trump has control of the biggest treasure chest in the world and isn’t afraid of being called names.
“Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate-change skeptic, was chosen at the end of September to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team…” — Newsweek
Ebell is a complete skeptic. I’ve met him at Heartland Climate Change conferences and he’s a good man. A great choice.
In May Trump offered up the Skeptics Christmas Wish List:
1) Trump pledged to rip up Paris climate agreement in energy speech –
2) Trump railed against “draconian climate rules” –
3) and withdraw any funding for United Nations programs related to global warming.
Has anyone in politics ever laid it out so bare? Read the last three promises written under “Seven actions to protect American Workers”:
★ FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.
★ SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.
★ SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.
In the long run, the movement will never completely go away, the religion will transmogrify. The freeloaders will find other ways to enrich themselves off the public purse and people who are not-too-good-with-numbers will seek alternatives to feel useful, and assuage their guilt for living in the best countries on Earth.
But yesterday honest hardworking people had a win. Rejoice, they are rare. Democracy is not dead.
POST NOTE: to clarify a point discussed in comments with RAH and Peter:
Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
IMHO Peak frenzy was circa 2007, and the end of the beginning was Dec 2009 with Climategate and Copenhagen. Seven years later, this is the largest hurdle the climate movement has faced.
PS: Climate-frenzy (definition): money x “worry”. See opinion polls
Bigger than Brexit: This is a win for workers and the middle class.
It’s a major loss for the old media and political correctness. Corruption finally gets pegged back.
Trump beat both political parties, almost every government organisation, Wall Street, and media outlets. — Jo
UPDATE: Listening to the ABC, commentators are talking about the fear of a Trump victory. But the only people who ought to be afraid are the corrupt, the freeloaders and the illegal immigrants. People phoning in were talking about the grassroots movement of those who are fed up with the establishment. The ABC academic, given the last word, replied that this wasn’t a real grassroots movement –“that narrative is false” — because “political parties have been trying to seed doubts about institutions for years”. Sure thing. Which political party supported Trump?
The Trump victory is a win for democracy. This is as grassroots as it gets. Without the internet and a passionate crowd of people on the street how could Trump have defeated the non-stop demonization from the media?
Podesta just spoke to Hillary Campaign “Victory” Party – “Hillary will be back, let’s get these votes counted and bring this home!”
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3pm AEST: Things are shifting fast. In the last hour it appears the markets and now news commentators are suddenly realizing a Trump presidency is likely. NY Times commentators are starting to discuss how the modeling by the Clinton team must have been “way off” and there seem to be signs of the “hidden vote” that Trumps team were mocked for discussing.
NYTimes predicts Trump likely to take the Presidency AND the Senate and House
Note that the Florida margin is only +1% to Trump. Things could still change. (UPDATE: But 98% of the vote is counted. )
The Wall Street Journal reports that stock markets are falling and currencies shifting as a Trump win becomes more likely. With about a quarter of the US GDP tied up in the government, many businesses are aligned with government agencies, grants, and policies. Trump represents a threat to that gravy train.
Big bankers are helping to save the poor from nasty storms. Sure…
In the climate debate, not much is bigger than this US election. If Clinton wins, it’s more of the same tax-funded gravy train supporting a trillion dollar industry that aims to change the weather and hold back the tide in a hundred years with special electrons from windmills and solar panels. Historians will giggle and mock us for falling into the grip of the pagan religion that sapped so much of our productive blood, sweat and tears.
Trump is promising to turn off that tap, though this “nuclear-wipe-out-option” (which is common sense) is barely even noticed about the furious noise of this election. Clinton wont mention it because she knows most voters would like the climate swamp drained too. But the effect could mark the beginning of the end for this particular shade of taxpayer-parasite. The effect on the EU voters of watching Trump pull back and demolish the industry would be electric and infectious as industry, money and jobs fled the EU to the US. Even if Trump doesn’t win, he’s changed politics and made it so much easier for other candidates to stand up and say the bleeding obvious. The emperor is naked.
Spot the virtue signalling conflict
Curiously Trump wants to use the climate funds to help black Americans instead. Strangely the social-justice-eco-worriers are not leaping at this opportunity to show how culturally concerned they are. I mean, renewables is pretty much an old white guy industry, pushed and pumped by large financial houses and corporates like Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, and large multinational groups. Most renewables are completely dependent on taxpayers, or the investors run away. Money is sucked from people of all colors through tax and electricity bills to feed non-profitable, uncompetitive corporates and a massive bureaucracy. Where are the protests as the money is drained from the poor and fed to largely rich whites?
Poor Joe Romm, it’s doing his head in. Unfunding the climate apostles is unthinkable:
He’d end all research on solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.
Romm clearly doesn’t think this is really going to happen or he would be apoplectic. Instead he analyzes the claims as if it’s just another unfunded, badly thought out bubble. After machinations over many paragraphs, he discovers that there really is spending close to $100 billion over 8 years that Trump could axe.
Malcolm Roberts, Tim Ball and Tony Heller held a press conference to release Roberts 42-page reply to the CSIRO. [OR download the PDF here]. Essentially, despite us spending billions of dollars to reduce CO2 in the hope we change the weather, the CSIRO can only provide irrelevant and weak evidence, and nothing that demonstrates consistent cause and effect. CSIRO can provide nothing to show that they are not just exploiting natural climate cycles for political purposes. (See here, models based on solar factors predict temperature changes very well and most turning points. Solar models explains the missing hot spot, solves many other problems, something that none of the major GCM’s can do.)
“The onus is on CSIRO to prove its climate advice and claim.”
A new graph of Law Dome temperatures in the last 2000 years shows there is nothing unusual about current climate changes (just like almost every other long proxy also does which we’ve all seen 20 times before).
No need to panic about the penguins.
Law Dome Antarctica compared to Hadley Met centre (Click to enlarge with sources)
An independent inquiry should be held into the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, which have been unable to provide empirical evidence linking human activity to climate change, One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts says.
Senator Roberts has rejected CSIRO assurances on climate science and called for a due diligence audit of the organisation’s research and methods. — Graham Lloyd
Jo would add that the independent inquiry must be staffed with scientists from other fields of science — ones which have a record of making predictions which are useful. Let’s get some brains who know physics, maths and engineering. Unlike climate models that don’t work, real scientists and engineers research and design bridges that stand up, planes that fly, and mobile phones that let two people talk on opposite sides of the world. If these people aren’t convinced by the CSIRO explanations (and they aren’t) it’s not because they are dumb, but because CSIRO is hasn’t got the goods.
..
Other newspaper journalists struggled to remember what the topic was
Strangely, despite the evidence being “so overwhelming”, not one newspaper even tries to discuss it. The best Sydney Morning Herald science reporting by Amy Remeikis includes the bizarre climate-science terms: “conspiracy”, “Jew”, and “birther”. Do Jew’s change the weather, or is Remekis just trying a pathetic attempt at character assassination?
Roberts knows that “conspiracy theorist” is the wordsmith-weapon used by those without any evidence. Science-by-denigration won’t save the climate.
Malcolm summarizes the flaws:
PROBLEMS WITH CSIRO’S METHODOLOGY page 30
[The CSIRO]:
Relied on varied, arbitrary and inconsistent time periods and scales;
Used periods of varied duration yet ignored earth’s history;
Showed poor understanding of variation, especially cyclical variation and inexplicably it assumed linear trends for part of data sets;
Used assumptions based on a presumption that we will see significant impact within a lifetime;
Grossly misled in not showing the entire temperature data set from 1860;
Excluded reliable data showing Australia was warmer in the 1880’s and 1890’s and excluded periods that were wetter and with more floods and excluded Australia’s most severe drought.
When questioned about using land-based temperatures from before 1910 despite admitting they were from just a few ships. When questioned about using land-based temperatures only from 1910 onwards CSIRO said that it
omits land-based temperatures before 1910 because they are unreliable, yet CSIRO uses sea-surface.
CSIRO’s graph presented mean temperatures. That shows warming. Yet temperature maximums are
generally considered a better measure of regional temperature variability and shows much less
warming. That reduces the trend to 0.4ºC per century. Further, CSIRO did not mention the included
urban heat island effect.
UPDATE: In a feat of public service the FBI conclusively reviewed 650,000 emails in 9 days and clears Clinton, and say they repeat their July determination which found that she was “extremely careless” with “highly classified information” and will not be charged. The Clinton’s made $57 million while Hillary was Secretary of State. Over half the people who met with Clinton paid money to the Clinton Foundation as well which has received over $2 billion in donations in total. Despite these obvious possible conflicts of interest, she used insecure private computers to email foreign leaders and companies that she arranged deals with on behalf of the USA, then destroyed 33,000 emails with Bleachbit after they were subpoenaed. The FBI is not confident there was intent to obstruct justice.
The completely unconfirmed but very interesting scuttlebutt is that the emails are staggeringly incriminating and the FBI re-investigation is being driven by whistleblowers within the US — specifically at the NYPD.
As I said before, books will be written about this week. Great movie plot.
Here’s a man speaking below called Steve Pieczenik, who talks of a coup and a counter coup going on in the US at the moment (“coup” meaning a play for power and control which is peaceful at present). He’s a former deputy assistant secretary of state. None of this is confirmed, and some of the claims coming about about the Weiner cache are the most radioactive hairy stuff, which I won’t repeat here. See the Breitbart article. “NYPD Ready to Make Arrests in Anthony Weiner Case”. There were 15,000 comments under it last time I looked, but no other outlets are picking up the story.
Allegedly the NYPD got Weiner’s laptop first, and it was they who pushed the FBI to go public “or else.” Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince told Breitbart that he has a source in the NYPD, who claims they found “damning information” and if ” Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not seen since, I believe, 1860.” The Dept of Justice is allegedly pushing back fiercely to stop the NYPD going public.
If the Clintons have been very naughty we would expect some of the patriots in the FBI and groups like the NYPD to be outraged and motivated to expose that — they risk their lives for their country and fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean the claims are true… but if the emails are incriminating, and players within both the NYPD and the FBI have copies it will be impossible to put this genie back in the bottle.
And we thought this election could not get any hotter.
Who is Pieczenik?
From Wikipedia on Steve R. Pieczenik, MD, PhD. He is an American psychiatrist and former United States Department of State official. He comes with Harvard training and an MIT doctorate in international relations. Apparently his specialty at one time was hostage negotiations. A slice of his Wikipedia entry suggests he really might be very well connected to the insiders at the FBI. He speaks Russian, Spanish and French, apparently knows Assad, and has treated CIA employees.
“Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.“
h/t pickabelief , real universe, Gail Combs, dinn.
McIntyre has looked closely at the legality of deleted emails with regard to Steyn and Mann. So he was already well prepped. He remarks on an interesting case where the law was interpreted very strictly, and the DOJ attorney was none other than James Comey who is now the FBI head. The case was U.S. v Quattrone (which McIntyre discussed in detail here). He notes that in that case Quattrone sent a fairly tame email which the legal department advised against the very next day. No emails were deleted, yet Quattrone was charged with obstruction of justice, and after some years “an appeal court ruled that a trier of fact could have concluded that Quattrone acted with a “corrupt intent”. McIntyre notes that “the DOJ attorney who had found corrupt intent in Quattrone’s actions was James Comey, the present director of the FBI.”
McIntyre also comments on the way these emails may have ended up on Weiner’s laptop:
Information on the provenance of these emails is thus far sketchy, but the following seems plausible:
A source close to Anthony Weiner’s legal team tells Bret Baier that it seems the laptop containing those emails was used to backup his estranged wife’s Smartphone contacts. In the process, the computer apparently backed up all of the emails as well.
There has been speculation that they might include 32K Hillary emails that had been deleted. However, it seems to me that it is far more plausible that they will turn out to include (or even be) the Huma emails from clintonemail.com, accidentally backed up prior to their deletion from the Clinton server in March 2015…
I note JeffID at the AirVent is also writing on the US election dramas too. Skeptics don’t like corruption…
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BREAKING: UNEXPLAINED: CNN even seem impressed with Trump: Trump rushed off stage by body guards due to possible gun threat in the audience. Returned soon after to continue the speech. Man in custody. CNN approve? h/t AndyG
1. Trump delivers his lines perfectly, like an experienced actor. We haven’t heard him like this before. You probably didn’t think he had this in him. He stays calm and assured, but not cocky. That is an effective counter-framing to Clinton’s framing of Trump as an unpredictable madman. Here Trump comes off as perfectly reasonable and deeply empathetic.
2. The timing is perfect. This race went so low that even the trolls were starting to gasp for oxygen. Trump made us wait for relief – Hollywood style. He made us crave civility and sanity. And just when we thought it was out of reach, he goes ultra-positive.
But here’s the best part. Clinton has no good options to counter this message.
My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.
The establishment players have trillions of dollars staked on the election, and 3 decades of schmoozing. Trump threatens all that. Can the people beat the corruption?
Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party, inventing false stories about the candidates nominated by the other party, managing the news, manipulating the public, promoting in the party not favored the nomination of a clown, protecting the utterly corrupt nominee of the other party from scrutiny.
One: Canberra, Tuesday evening at Parliament House with Senator Roberts, Tim Ball, Tony Heller.
Two: Melbourne,Wednesday, 9 November 2016, Tim Ball to give the Bob Carter Memorial Lecture
Three: Sydney, Thursday, 10th November, 2016, Five Dock.
Details below for anyone interested. You must RSVP for Canberra, and book for Sydney.
Tim Ball — former Prof of Climate Science, has been in this for years, involved in three lawsuits, even one from Michael Mann for joking that he “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State”. Tony Heller regularly stirs up trouble against NOAA and NASA in the most irreverent, no-holds-barred, way.
— I would love to spend time myself with these remarkable men (tho’ the 4,000km distance will stop me this time). Don’t miss it. — Jo
____________________________________________
Canberra, Tuesday Nov 8th
Release from the office of Senator Malcolm Roberts.
Be a part of an Historic event
Hello Friends,
Next week Senator Malcolm Roberts will be announcing his report on the Climate Science evidence of CSIRO.
This is the first time anyone has been able to pin down and report on the exact evidence that Australia`s Government Climate Policy is based upon. On Tuesday, November 8th at 8 pm Senator Roberts, Tim Ball, and Steve Goddard will present the evidence in detail that Senator Roberts report is based upon.
It will be in the main House of Representatives committee room (Level 1) in Parliament House, Canberra:
The report will be precise and conclusive.
We believe this will be a turning point in the Politics of climate policy.
A video will be made of the event and released on youtube.
A question time will conclude the meeting.
You are invited to be a part of the audience of this historic occasion.
Free supper provided.
Please ph 0435423636 to book a seat for this free event and
Arrive at 7 pm so we can escort you in.
If you cannot attend , please try to view the event on social media and email or tweet in questions to Tim Ball, Steve Goddard.
Senator Roberts looks forward to you celebrating this important occasion with him.
As I said, “It’s the Corruption, Stupid“. The US election is far beyond policy disputes. Do the people care if their leaders make personal profits by selling out the nation? As Linda Tripp says: “That this is not chilling to much of the nation is the most chilling of all.”
We are in danger of being swamped in the details and emails: too much to process, when so many sub-parts would be election-changing on their own.
“FBI Clinton Foundation probe finds ‘avalanche’ of corruption evidence against her – but agents fear Justice Department will stop her going on trial”
Clintons are accused of running a pay-for-play operation out of State that favored donors to their charity – a charge they have denied
Feds are ‘actively and aggressively pursuing’ a case, Fox’s Brit Hume said Wednesday, and they have an ‘avalanche’ of evidence
FBI’s pursuit of the case is rooted in recordings of a suspect in a different corruption case who spoke about foundation’s alleged dirty dealings
The FBI, under the leadership of director James Comey, believed those conversations were enough to move forward with the probe
Justice Department prosecutors disagreed because the source was not an employee of the Clinton Foundation
The law enforcement agency has at least four other investigations open that involve the Clintons and their close friends, as well
The latest Wikileaks shows again the gap between the Clinton public persona and the real one. Clinton has been caught telling one Democrat Representative that she was “‘only pretending to oppose the TPP in order to get union support but would sign it when she was president,’ write Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Curtis Ellis.” — Breitbart
With a federal criminal investigation of the possible president-elect underway, President Obama might well issue a preemptive presidential pardon on his way out the door. Imagine that. Pardoned before inaugurated. Or she will find a way to pardon herself for “the good of the country.” It will simply never end.
Hillary’s incessant scandals over decades have morphed into an odd sort of national vaccination, immunizing her from accountability while hypnotizing much of the nation. In the face of pervasive corruption, it has been reduced to so much white noise. With much of the country asleep at the wheel, she is days away from likely becoming our 45th President. The colossal Clinton con will have achieved riches, greatness and immortality and that is unthinkable to those of us who knew them both.
Not so much Pay-to-Play as Pay-to-Pardon?
By now we’ve forgotten the most infamous pardon of them all. That was bestowed on Marc Rich, the notorious perpetrator of the greatest tax fraud against the United States in history. Among other things. As a permanent resident on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, fugitive from justice Rich was probably the least likely person on the planet one might expect to receive a presidential pardon. Unless you knew the Clintons. So, let’s review. Denise Rich paid close to half a million dollars to the Clinton Library. She paid at least $70,000 to Hillary’s senate campaign and even donated $10,000 to Bill Clinton’s Legal Defense Fund as he futilely fought the Paula Jones lawsuit. And that is all we know about. All in a day’s work for the Clintons. Few paid attention. Sure, short lived outrage ensued, but our Pravda-esque media ensured the pardon coverage was brief. Most importantly, the Clintons’ paydays were never in any jeopardy.
Worth reading…
Finally when there is so much about greedy selfishness, here’s a nice bit of old news:
Feb 2016: The daughter of a woman whose family farm was saved nearly 30 years ago by a last-minute intervention from Donald Trump praised him during a campaign stop on Tuesday. Betsy Sharp told a Trump-friendly crowd in North Augusta, South Carolina, about her father’s suicide in the face of a bank foreclosure and the billionaire who paid off the mortgage so her mother, Annabelle Hill, could continue to live there.
Lenard Dozier Hill took his own life in 1986 on the morning his farm was to go to a courthouse auction, believing that his life insurance would pay enough to save the cotton and soybean plantation that had been in his family for more than 100 years. He never knew his insurance policy had an exemption for suicides.
At least one former endorser of Hillary Clinton has had enough on Huffington Post: Fed up with the indifference of the people around the corruption.
Why I Can No Longer Support Hillary Clinton
I’m aware of how vindictive Clintonians can be. I’m not speaking about the Clintons themselves, but of those surrounding them. Perhaps the saying is true: dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. Your staff, your donors, your surrogates, and those you surround yourself with are a reflection of who you truly are, no? If not, why not curb any unacceptable behavior? Silence, indifference, or inaction is as incriminatory-at least to me. There has been no repudiation, let alone denunciation, of what was said in those emails-just denial, finger pointing, and doublespeak. To appoint the very same folks who carried out many malicious behaviors to tip the scales for Hillary is just as unpardonable. Why reward unethical behavior? It’s mind-boggling.
“The most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that Parliament is sovereign,” the court writes in a summary document explaining the ruling.
Naive me. I thought the people were sovereign?
Isn’t the Parliament meant to serve the people…
Those who serve themselves can serve up mindless platitudes:
Investment manager Gina Miller, who brought the case, said outside the High Court:… “The result today is about all of us. It’s not about me or my team. It’s about our United Kingdom and all our futures.”
I suspect the British people thought they were voting on “their future”.
America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage…
Dear BBC et al, half the electorate is mocked, reviled, and otherwise ignored. No wonder the other half are clueless… The divided electorates throughout the West don’t understand each other because there is no national conversation to understand. When was the last time the BBC (or ABC) employed a show host that was a skeptic, Brexit-fan, or UKIP voter? Count the years. How about a whole panel? A series? A doco? When was the last government grant awarded to someone to explain the dangers of big-creeping-government?
A better question would be why the old media are wall-to-wall fans of Big-Gov?
In the US a smashing 96 percent of campaign donations by the media industry went to Clinton. Only 7% of journalists identify as Republicans. How many journalists have ever run a business or lived off investments (as in a real business that sells to consumers, not to the government?) Their wet-left academic training didn’t teach them how to investigate, or the discipline to study the ideas of their opponents. Nor is there training on the ethics of shamelessly pushing their own personal political preference. Only 20% of US people think the media even try to be unbiased. The public know there is a problem — but that doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t generate a national conversation — not one with manners and genuine curiosity instead of namecalling bun-fests.
The BBC crew realize something is missing. Someone wondered on Oct 12th why hatred for Hillary Clinton runs so deep. By Oct 31, they were still asking Why are the candidates so unpopular. Flummoxed, I tell you! By golly, however did the US end up with a choice of two such unpopular candidates? Could it be because one appears to be running a crime syndicate (which nobody likes), but the old media ignores that and mocks the other candidate relentlessly.
Half the US reads the alt-media, and knows about the corruption, which makes them feel betrayed, sold out, and madder than hell. But the other half think the peak issue of the campaign is one guy’s crass bragging to another guy on a bus eleven years ago, not the $50 million dubious dollars the Secretary of State’s family made on-the-side, or the 30,000 emails she bleached after they were subpoenaed.
They’ve spent a year demonising one candidate, and twenty years lauding the other. They sold a message that dumb, old, selfish people vote for a smaller government, while smart young clever things know that the answer to everything is to ask Big-Santa to solve it with the magic money made by the elves at the Treasury. They bought their own advertising.
Look at the “Loyal Army” story. To set the scene the BBC recite the litany of Donald Trump’s flaws for the 4000th time then wonder why some people aren’t convinced:
What has puzzled people who won’t be voting for him, is how tens of millions of their fellow citizens could still be willing to support him. Who are they?
Wait til you hear the genius flash:
The answer is to be found in understanding what I call “The Bloc”.
(Otherwise known as the Middle Class Worker.)
“The Bloc, roughly 40% of the electorate, doesn’t represent a majority in the US but it is the country’s largest unified group of voters. It has lost four of the last six presidential elections but has mostly remained in control of one or both houses of Congress, and many state legislatures, making it almost impossible for Democratic administrations to govern the country.”
Hmm. How to understand the right-wing – Use standard left-voting-journalistic trick — ask another left-voter:
“One Clinton supporter I met … did understand. Bonnie Cordova, a retired schoolteacher, and I were both watching the second presidential debate at the Bohemian Beer Garden in the New York borough of Queens. I asked her afterwards if she understood why people might vote for Trump.
She did. “I taught in inner city schools for 30 years,” Cordova explained. “I was passed over a few times for promotion for a really good job because I wasn’t a minority and I was working at a school where the kids got free dental and optical treatment because they were immigrant children and I was having trouble affording it for my kids.” She acknowledged that made her resentful. “That’s a flame that can be fanned into hatred. You have to rise above it.”
The innumerate argument is that everyone should feel good about paying money to strangers to support their kids
So “The bloc” (sounds so attractive) are morally inferior people who can’t “rise above” petty jealousy. If Michael Goldfarb actually went so far as to interview a Trump supporter in depth, and tried to understand their struggles and concerns, instead of the superficial platitudes, he might find that there were numbers that don’t add up. Like bills and taxes. Mortgages. (Michael Moore gets it).
The innumerate argument is that everyone should feel good about paying money to strangers to support their kids. But how much money? The BBC never asks. Santa will provide. That’s the more advanced conversation the country (all of the Western ones) needs to have.
Why is the campaign full of hate? Blame the media. They demonize Trump, and if they’d done a tenth of a percent of real job of investigating Clinton, the Democrats would never have selected her. The media are destroying the Democrats by not asking hard questions.
Some of the media are, err, waking up “just in time”?
What a week — even the Washington Post (Clinton cheer squad) suddenly finds that Trump can give a good speech. Journo Chris Cillizza says Trump has a great message, “perfect” and marvels that Trump could have used this message for the whole campaign (as if he hasn’t been doing that all along). Could this be the first time Cillizza has watched a Trump speech direct rather than through the CNN filter?
“I am not a politician,” Trump said. “My only special interest is you, the American people. The guiding rule of the political class in Washington, D.C., is that they are looking out only for themselves. They will say anything, and do anything, to cling to their power and prestige at your expense. I’m running to change and reverse decades of failure, and to work with the American people to create generations of success.”
That is an absolutely perfect message for this I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore electorate. People want change desperately. And almost no one believes Clinton represents that radical change — or anything close to it. Trump, in that passage above, puts his life outside of politics forward as incontrovertible evidence that he will walk the walk when it comes to bringing real change to the nation’s capitol.
What struck me most about the speech — aside from how well written and delivered it was — was that it laid bare how simply Trump could have constructed a winning message in this campaign. Cast Clinton as the status quo. Make her own every policy and every controversy of the previous Clinton and Obama administrations.
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