Astronomers are very excited. A new paper suggests Betelgeuse — the red giant in Orion — might be only a decade or two (or maybe a century) away from going supernova. It’s the sort of thing that only happens once in a thousand years. Whenever it does go boom, it will shine brighter than the moon, and dominate the sky for a few months to a year.
It’s 600 light years away, so if it is going to go supernova in the next twenty years, then, of course, it must have already happened and the light is on the way.
Before anyone cracks the champers, the new paper by Saio is based on models trying to figure out what’s happening on a pulsating ball of fire 5,600 trillion kilometers away.
There hasn’t been a supernova in our neighborhood since July 4, 1054, when Chinese astronomers observed a supernova, now labeled SN1054, that remained visible for almost two years. The remnants of that supernova are now called the Crab Nebula.
At the end of it’s life after a star runs out of hydrogen to fuse, it starts to collapse. The extra pressure and heat that generates kicks off fusion with the helium core which produces carbon. When the helium runs out the star shrinks again and pressurizes the carbon core, fusing carbon into bigger elements. But these stages are shorter and faster. Below is a graph of the timelines (with a log scale), and in Saio’s latest estimate Betelgeuse is already burning through the carbon core and has less than 20% of the carbon left, and maybe as low as 0.5%. The red line (the carbon) is theoretically bottoming out in less than 10 to 100 years.
….
The game is over when it fuses its way up to iron:
Charlie Martin:
If the star masses more than the Chandrasekhar limit, gravity causes the stellar material to continue fusing, producing elements farther and farther up to iron and nickel. Eventually, though, the core of the star is largely iron, and the fusion of iron takes more energy than it releases. At that point, the equilibrium of fusion heat and gravitational pressure is broken. The star collapses inward at 20% or more of the speed of light; the shockwave compresses the core until the atoms collapse; and the electrons meet the protons, converting them to neutrons and neutrinos and releasing immense amounts of energy — 100 “foe“, or about 1046 Joules.
We may not see the supernova, but from 6:40 minutes we can at least see Dr. Becky Smethurst get genuinely excited. She explains it well. Though what are the odds, a star 10 million years old reaching the end of days in the 21st century. OK, I’m skeptical…
Sometimes it’s nice to get away from politics.
Just how far is Betelgeuse?
To put in perspective how little we know, I typed in “how far is Betelgeuse” and discovered to my surprise, we don’t have much idea. Three years ago Betelgeuse was “discovered” to be much closer than we thought at 543 light years away. But in January this year it was found to be 724 light years from Earth, or at least between 613 and 881 light years away. Righto…
Betelgeuse is a biggie. See the progression of astronomical bodies up to Betelgeuse in set 5. If it were where our sun is, it would reach past the asteroid belt. Lucky it isn’t our sun.
China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.
The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.
“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”
Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.
Who knows what the real price of an EV is in China?
Not surprisingly, given the waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind, something bad is happening in the Chinese economy — all car sales (petrol and EV’s) are down nearly 20%.
Which is not to say Western economies don’t have their waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind.
Elon may be getting the last laugh if this May 31 headline is correct:
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we call it when it’s so bad it’s not even subsidy-viable? — A blessing.
They’re talking about batteries “degrading in weeks”:
Tecnam was more forthright in their press release. “A few hundred flights” was the optimistic best case scenario. Fast charging and rapid turnarounds would make that worse:
The proliferation of aircraft with “new” batteries would lead to unrealistic mission profiles that would quickly degrade after a few weeks of operation, making the all-electric passenger aircraft a mere “Green Transition flagship” rather than a real player in the decarbonisation of aviation. Taking into account the most optimistic projections of slow charge cycles and the possible limitation of the maximum charge level per cycle, the real storage capacity would fall below 170Wh/kg, and only a few hundred flights would drive operators to replace the entire storage unit, with a dramatic increase in direct operating costs due to the reserves for battery replacement prices.
The power to waiting ratio was doomed
Waiting times are too long, the power is too low, and the battery life is terrible.
The truth is everyone in aviation wants fast-charging planes so the air crew and the capital assets aren’t sitting around for hours paying airport-world prices while they earn nothing. But batteries have a shorter lifespan if they are pumped hard, fast and charged completely full. Sadly slow charging and underchanging are not a solution either. Even if we treat these babies gently with long slow feeds, they would only store less than “170 watt-hours per kilogram”. As the Telegraph authors point out, jet fuel has an energy density of 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram, which is seventy times as much.
The bottom line, Tecnam explains, is that the only alternative to waiting for the development of much lighter, better batteries, is “extremely aggressive speculation on uncertain technology”. It would be a wild and risky bet. Not that we aren’t doing that with our energy grids.
Corporate leaders are not bragging about their environmental wins or diversity hires with the same fervour they had a year ago. Some of this is due to pressure from the 23 US state Governors who are asking CEO’s sharp and pointy questions about anti-trust behaviour and fiduciary duty and campaigning on anti-Woke platforms. And some of this is due to the backlash against disastrous Bud-Light and Target campaigns.
Companies Quiet Diversity and Sustainability Talk Amid Culture War Boycotts
Mark Maurer, Wall Street Journal
Companies’ mentions of green and social initiatives during earnings calls have fallen off sharply in recent quarters, reversing a more boastful approach taken over the past few years amid intensifying pressure from some investors and conservative activists. Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts …
Charting the rise and fall of public “Woke” declarations in the corporate world.
The backlash is coming from several angles — investors, conservative groups, political leaders.
It’s a good sign democracy and free markets are not dead yet. But these companies are probably pursuing quiet “Woke” agendas. After all, as long as the Big Money end of town is demanding progress reports during the ski weekends in Davos, many companies will continue to buy the wind and solar talismans to ward off the fury of the BlackRock and Net Zero Banker cabal.
It’s a win, the trainwreck is slower, but still in progress
In Australia, politicians stopped bragging about emissions trading schemes when Tony Abbott won in a landslide in 2013 with Axe the Carbon Tax. But two years later the party dumped Abbott and snuck in an emissions trading scheme anyway — they called it “The SafeGuard Mechanism” and hid their plans in the details. In that case, popping the public bragging bubble slowed the trainwreck by a decade.
We haven’t won until CEO’s can openly mock people who think eating crickets will change world temperatures.
Ten years of lies, deception, and dangerous experiments
Imagine if our adversaries were splicing together mutant viruses and testing them on humanized mice for years in order to make them more pathogenic, and our top researchers were helping them, our government was funding them, and we had years of warnings that the experiments were dangerous.
The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly, but it’s in print in a long feature article with plenty of ugly details. The headline is very sedate given the gravity. The world would have reacted very differently in January 2020…
Johnathon Calvert and George Abuthnott, The Sunday Times
Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.
For starters — here’s a map of the places where people were reporting on social media that they had covid in January 2020. While everyone was talking about sea-food markets, the big clue was there all the time.
…
These hot spots were published by the academics at Wuhan University. But they somehow didn’t think to label the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The US Senate investigation years later put that dot on the map (after half a billion people had caught the virus). If any of our government health and intelligence agencies had been remotely competent or interested in our health, and if the CCP had been a good global citizen, this would have been known in the first few months.
From a cave in Yunnan
The story starts in 2012 with the WIV team finding SARS like viruses in the Shitou cave 800 kilometers south of Wuhan. They had American funding and training to help them. The same year, six miners nearby in Moijang Mine fell horribly sick with some unknown coronavirus and three died. The WIV team kept this to themselves, but went back to the Moijang mine to collect 1,300 samples from the bats there over the next few years. They discovered not one or two, but 293 coronaviruses. One of those viruses would emerge as the nearest known relative of Covid-19. (Called RaTG13)
Over the next eight years the WIV would experiment on the SARS-like coronaviruses from the Shitou cave and publish some papers, but in parallel, they were apparently also working on the nasty Moijang mine viruses, which they weren’t talking about.
Thanks to American know-how
The Americans meanwhile have taught the chinese researchers how to work with mice that have “humanized” lung cells. The WIV team infects the mice with a mutated version of the SARS-like virus they found in the cave in 2012. Three quarters of the test mice die, but again, the WIV team keeps it to themselves.
The American who led the way and taught the Chinese was Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He was the one who made the humanized mice — he put human genes into the mice so they grew “human-like” lungs which made them ideal for studying human pathogens.
He knew he was playing with fire:
“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”
By 2012 as many as 30 labs around the world were working with live SARS viruses and a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation called for these experiments to be stopped, pointing out that it was just a matter of time before a virus escaped. Yet grant money continued to flow to China.
Between 2013 and 2015 the Bat lady of Wuhan, Dr Shi Zhengli collaborated with Ralph Baric in the US. She sent him the genetic sequences from the Shitou Cave SARS like viruses. In 2014 Barak Obama called for a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments, except for the “urgent and safe ones”, of course, and so Ralph Baric got an exemption. He melded the spike from one SARS virus onto another:
The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.
It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
The Wuhan team were apparently very happy to learn these techniques and kept right on going.
Meanwhile a British bat expert called Peter Daszak was involved in a Wildlife Trust which somehow became the EcoHealth Alliance. He arranged some NIH grants, and provided cover by writing reports that missed a few important details. When 75% of the mice died in one experiment he wrote that they had mild SARS-like symptoms. He later said that this was based on “preliminary results”, but the mice were long dead by a few months before he said that.
At one point in 2018 Daszak applied for $14 million in funding from Darpa (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He and Shi and Baric wanted to find lots of SARS like viruses and fuse them with their favourite deadly Shitou cave varieties. So Darpa said “no thanks” to that. But in the application they said they’d like to insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS virus. When the funding bombed, they claim they didn’t do the experiment, but somehow, by strange coincidence, when SARS-2 appeared it had a furin cleavage site. It was the first SARS-like coronavirus which had a the target site for our furin enzymes to cleave.
[Dr Steven] Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”
The Chinese Military thought they would like to help too?
Around 2016 or so the WIV team became fairly secretive. The Chinese Military allegedly got interested and funded WIV work as well. What a cauldron.
The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
As I’ve said — we’re in a biotech Cold War, or maybe even a hot one:
A vaccine to shift power
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
Electric cars are not enough, they want no cars (for you)
Will taking a billion cars off the road change the climate or just make parking easier for WEF billionaires?
The conference-and-ski club for the uber rich has issued another white paper no one asked for. In it, the World Economic Forum that no one elected, says the world should redesign cities and reduce the number of cars to 500 million by 2050. Given that there are 1.5 billion cars around today and we’re headed for 2 billion cars by then, this means thwarting the desires of 1.5 billion people. It won’t be rich people who miss out.
It’s not clear why anyone should anyone care about the pronouncements of the Ski Club for the Stars of Money — but their strange catch-phrases have a spooky way of being parroted by our elected politician-minions. The galaxy of money that orbits the Planet WEF presumably waves their $100 Trillion dollar weight around and tells politicians “nice career you have there”. Who could argue with that?
The WEF world always looks disturbingly like a preschool cartoon.
The benefits of adopting their plan are, seriously, that there will be a lot less cars. They say this like that is a good thing in and of itself, rather than a deprivation. Imagine saying it would be a benefit to have 75% less houses? The assumed car-vilification is part of the packaging.
The second reason is, naturally, that it will reduce plant fertilizer (CO2), presumably stopping storms, saving whales, and calming anxious jellyfish. It will also “free up” 75% of urban public space and “save” $5 trillion a year. Sure.
WEF billionaires can give up their cars and private jets any day and show us the way, but they don’t.
The Scorecard tool is not a tool to create a future the voters voted for or voluntarily want, but it will help to bully bureaucrats into doing what the WEF want. This is the protoplasmic One World Government coalescing — issuing their policy prescription.
Look out for the keywords “SEAM Strategy” — it stands for Shared Electric Connected and Automated Transport Modes which means buses and trains and automated tracking. Any politician that starts to mouth the WEF lines should be reported to your local talk-back radio show.
Did I mention “cartoon-like”?
It’s like the wolf turned up wearing a teenage girlie magazine cover:
Presumably with all the bad press EV’s have been getting lately someone at the WEF realized they need to revive the old “public transport” canard. It’s not enough to force us out of our fossil fuel cars and into EVs, they need us to catch the bus.
The Green dream is unravelling in the fourth largest economy in the world. The Vice Chancellor is bluntly saying that Germany industry may have to shut down in 18 months if the current gas flow deal from Russia through Ukraine isn’t extended and he doesn’t seem to believe it could be. Meanwhile 13,000 people protested in Bavaria against the “heating ideology” — whereby evil gas is theoretically going to be forcibly replaced with wildly expensive heat pumps powered by erratic green electrons. The people just don’t want them: last year Germans installed 600,000 gas systems and only 236,000 heat pumps. Politicians are starting to back away slowly from the plan to make all new heaters “65% renewable” by next year. It’s starting to look like the backdown on banning fossil fuel powered cars.
The German economy is possibly in a recession already and Greens are finally getting the blame. It’s so bad that journalists worry that the “Far Right Surge” could endanger some businesses. The right wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party is now polling second across Germany. The AfD is particularly popular in East Germany, (where voters are experts on the failings of socialist experiments).
Today the Greens are being mocked for failing to install a heat pump in their own headquarters after a three and half year quest. The cost is set to reach €5 million because they opted for the geothermal plan and have to drill down “almost 100ft” (that far eh?). The project has been beset with delays.
Germany may be forced to wind down or even switch off industrial capacity if Ukraine’s gas transit agreement with Russia isn’t extended after it expires at the end of next year, according to Economy Minister Robert Habeck.
Habeck, who is also the vice chancellor, issued the stark warning Monday at an economic conference in eastern Germany, saying that policymakers should avoid “making the same mistake again” of assuming that the economy will be unaffected without precautions to secure energy supplies.
His message is aimed at Green and environmental groups
“There is no secure scenario for how things will turn out,” Habeck said at the forum in Bad Saarow. Additional capacity — including a planned LNG terminal on Germany’s north coast that has provoked opposition from locals and environmental groups — will therefore be essential to maintain supply to both Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe, he said.
Companies are moving to the US as they face administrative burdens and high energy costs in Europe, Stefano Mallia, the head of the Employers Group of the European Economic and Social Committee, told EURACTIV.cz in an interview.
The relocation of companies mainly concerns those sectors dependent on high energy use, according to Mallia. “I can call it a real and present danger,” he said, adding that the EU has to put the competitiveness agenda to the forefront of its policymaking.
The Malhotra-Dowd-Wolf-Shipman event about the Corruption of Medicine in Perth was a smashing success. The crowd of nearly 2,500 was on fire, the speakers were excellent and you can still watch it (and help cover some of the costs) by buying tickets to watch it online. Four hours of some of the best and brightest of humanity.
Fact-of-the-day (for me) was that the Australian TGA (drug approval agency) gets 96% of its budget from the industry it supposedly is a watchdog for. Hello? So when the TGA inexplicably banned the safe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine options they were, it seems, just doing what any bought-and-paid corporate crony agency would, even if people died. Apparently the government agencies are not just a rubber stamp for profitable drugs, they are the iron mallet to crush the competition too.
While Australia won the prize for the agency with the Biggest Conflict of Interest, there’s little material difference in the EU, the US or the UK (or Canada). The drug industry funds 89% of the EMA budget in Europe and 86% of the UK-MHRA’s. The giant US FDA is “only” 65% industry funded. Glory be — is $800 million enough of a conflict of interest?
From the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and Australian investigator — Maryanne Demasi:
Over the past decades, regulatory agencies have seen large proportions of their budgets funded by the industry they are sworn to regulate, explains investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi.
Industry fees to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have increased 30 fold – from around $29m in 1993 to $884m in 2016, while in Europe, industry fees now fund 89% of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), up from 20% in 1995.
In 2005, the UK House of Commons’ health committee evaluated the influence of the drug industry on health policy. But nearly two decades on, little has changed, and industry funding of drug regulators has become the international norm.
The BMJ asked six leading regulators, in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, the UK, and US, a series of questions about their funding, transparency in their decision making (and of data), and the rate at which new drugs are approved.
Of these, Australia had the highest proportion of budget from industry fees (96%) and in 2020-2021 approved more than nine of every 10 drug company applications.
Just how deep and how wide is that river of drug money…
Click to enlarge. (BMJ)
These agencies control what you are allowed to take into your own body. Hours after ivermectin was banned in Australia, a legal script from a qualified doctor was worthless at any pharmacy. Three adults with university training in medical science were suddenly unable to get what they wanted (money, work or medicine). The power of these unelected agencies reigns — where is the accountability? Nice racket you have there…
Sociologist Donald Light of Rowan University in New Jersey, US, who has spent decades studying drug regulation, says, “Like the FDA, the TGA was founded to be an independent institute. However, being largely funded by fees from the companies whose products it is charged to evaluate is a fundamental conflict of interest and a prime example of institutional corruption.”
“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data. Doctors and patients must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”
It’s time to ask our elected members where they stand on corporate-regulatory-capture. For or against? But don’t just stop there, the media are culpable too — why aren’t they grilling the politicians, the TGA, the AMA? Do they get advertising money from BigPharma, or is it more that they lack the courage to speak the truth, or need to believe in a religious savior? Hail Mary for Big Government?
Meanwhile the GP’s, the specialists, the pharmacists didn’t ask for this test, but it is here. And if they want to keep their high status leadership roles, they need to earn it. The brave ones speaking now are the heroes.
Totally blown away after my talk to over 2000 full capacity crowd in Perth tonight. Atmosphere was electric and full of hope. Hope that speaking and fighting for the truth will redeem the world from the hell of corporate tyranny. We can do this 👊👊👊🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/OsR5oDYqE8
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) June 10, 2023
The comedian who opened was savagely good. Someone tell me his name…
Some overpaid academics think the rich nations owe $192,000,000,000,000 to poorer nations because of the “carbon pollution” they emitted.
Jo Nova says that fossil fuels built a civilization that invented cars, trains, planes, penicillin, the Haber-Bosch process, and clean water — making seven billion more lives possible. Fossil Fueled nations added free fertilizer to the atmosphere, increased crops and forests, greened the world and fed more people than ever.
The uncosted benefits owed to the West far outweigh the imaginary losses, so call off the parasites and let’s consider it all a free gift from the West to the world. What are seven billion lives worth?
The global population was resolutely stuck under 1 billion people for a hundred thousand years, then we discovered fossil fuels. | Source: OWID
It’s just another jumped up claim, not to feed the poor, but to enrich the bureaucrat class:
High carbon countries owe at least $192 trillion to low-emitting nations in compensation for their greenhouse gas pollution. That’s the conclusion of a new paper published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability by researchers Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel.
…they divided the carbon budgets into fair shares for every country. Each nation gets a slice of the budget according to its size and population.
And that’s retrospective back to 1960 because the science was settled then.
Next, they examined each country’s cumulative emissions since the year 1960. The world had been emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases for decades beforehand — but by 1960, they said, researchers clearly understood the science of global warming and were beginning to communicate it to the public, as well.
The countries that burn the most fossil fuels are also the ones with the cleanest air. If people are serious about clean air, they need more fossil fuels, not less.
By Jo Nova It’s great to see new media platforms blossoming Australia. I spoke to Topher Field at The Aussie Wire to explain how BlackRock, bankers and the Insurance giants use your insurance, pension and super funds against you and why the 23 states of the USA are pushing back and even winning some battles. UN NetZero cartel wants to make Insurance Firms into “Climate Police”. But the insurance fund cartel is unravelling.
Topher introduces me at 13 minutes and generously lets me talk…
Hopefully we can reach a whole new group of people who might not read blogs.
In this episode of the AussieWire Topher also discusses the Housing Affordability Crisis in Australia, the South Australian Penalties for disruptive protests, and questions about “hate speech” legislation with David Limbrick MP.
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