It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.
Two thirds of American’s don’t trust the media. Half even think they are actively lying, and don’t care about their audience. Nine out of ten people think the media is politically biased. As the trust evaporates, people are switching off the national news. A vast majority of people on one side of the political spectrum now view the media unfavorably, and while that number had jumped in Republican and Independent voters in the last three years — it is even rising in Democrat voters too.
The Knight/Gallup — Trust in Media and Democracy poll reveals, bizarrely, that more than half of the nation thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters. I don’t think I’ve even seen pollsters ask that question before. Effectively then, it follows that nearly six out of ten people think that Joe Biden is not the one running the country, and the same goes for Congress. Barely one person in five thinks voters are choosing the decision-makers.
It’s not just trust in the media that’s collapsing, but trust in the government, and even faith in the workings of democracy is gone. This is a nation in turmoil. But the good news is that most people don’t believe the media, or the government.
Never forget: Skeptics are in the majority.
The media are lying to us
Only about one third of American’s still think they can rely on the media to inform them. But half the population not only think the media is unreliable, but is deliberately lying to them. They think the media intends to mislead, misinform or persuade them. Showing that this malicious interpretation is not an accident, half the US also thinks the media don’t care about their audience.
Trust is evaporating
Look at the change since the start of the pandemic and the debacle of the 2020 election. Trust in the media has fallen across voters of every political type. More people than ever view the media unfavourably. The rising red line measures the fall in trust of the US media. Nearly 80% of Republican voters view the media unfavorably, and in the last five years, despite the bias towards the Democrats, even ten percent of Democrats have “lost the faith” too.
In the biggest shift, one-in-five independent voters has realized the media is a bad thing.
More then half of the US thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters
Faith in the workings of democracy is gone. Nearly six out of ten can see that Joe Biden is not the one running the country. Barely one person in five thinks he does. This result applies to Congress too — whoever is running the country is behind the scenes.
The good news is that eight out of ten people either don’t trust government accounts or are not sure, and most people value the opinion of “ordinary people” more than experts or politicians.
There was a split: 71% of those who didn’t trust the media also believe that the people who really “run” the country are unknown to the voters; but even 46% of those who trusted the media also felt this way. Even half the people who believe the propaganda on TV are still skeptical that Joe Biden runs America.
Americans are switching off the national news
In the last two years, and astonishing 22% of people have stopped paying “a great deal of attention” to the national news.
It’s becoming obvious to everyone that the media is a political player
As many as 89% of all voters in 2022 think there is a fair amount, or “a lot” of political bias in the media.
Which way does the media bias run? Ask the voters
79% of Republicans think the media is biased “a great deal” — the highest category they could choose. There are virtually no Republicans left who think the news is not biased. That says everything anyone needs to know about the direction of bias.
It’s unconfirmed, but there’s a possibility that the US Commander in Chief used an Air Force F-22 fighter jet that costs $80,000 an hour to launch a $400,000 sidewinder missile to shoot down a $13 hobby balloon.
President Biden has been industriously shooting down balloons, almost as if he is trying to distract everyone from noticing how slow he was to deal with the Communist Party balloon, or the Pfizergate video, and the Nordstream leak, or something else. But no one is quite certain what they’ve shot down.
Meanwhile a hobby group called The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) have sadly reported their K9YO balloon has stopped sending messages. The K9YO picoballoon had been aloft for 123 days and was on its sixth lap of the world. It was last heard from at around 37,928 feet, south of Alaska and headed towards the Yukon. Whatever the mystery object was that got shot down was described as “foil” at 40,000 feet, so it’s in the right ballpark, but it’s still a big sky.
After all the attention starting to grow on this the NIBBB has clarified that even though they expected to hear from the balloon last Saturday it has dropped out of communication before and for as long as thirty days. It may well reappear. It uses a small solar panel to send messages and can’t send messages at night, or in the dark.
Naturally, there’s no official confirmation, but there probably never will be if the US Air force just wasted half a million dollars to destroy a party balloon. This opens a new front in warfare. If an adversary releases enough pico-balloons, the US Airforce could run out of money and missiles…
Whatever it was, the rumour that it might have been a party balloon will surely stop the blitzkrieg. It rather takes the fun out of the PR. Big-man Biden just blew up a helium balloon?
The bigger question is why this bread and circus performance art from Biden and the media was going on in the first place?
Modeling shared by NIBBB shows its balloon was headed in the direction of Yukon before it vanished – and opens up the possibility it was one of the suspicious objects down by the U.S. military.
The object shot down by a a U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter jet over Mayo, Yukon, was variously described by officials in Canada and the U.S. as a ‘cylindrical’, metallic balloon with a payload.
Balloons used by hobby groups like NIBBB often fit the same description. They are usually attached with a small, solar-powered payload that transmits location data back to listening posts on the ground. Typically, these payloads are no larger than a credit card.
NIBBB has not said its balloon was definitely the downed object, but an overview of the circumstantial evidence by Aviation Week leaves the possibility wide open.
For those who want the nerdy technical detail on picoballoon flights:
However there is also the simpler ‘pico’ ballooning hobby, which involves the use of mylar helium party balloons to launch small solar powered payloads that are only a few grams in weight. They typically transmit low power WSPR at HF frequencies and can only transmit whenever there is sufficient solar power available. Amateur radio or SDR hobbyist stations around the world can pick up these transmissions, and report them on amateur.sondehub.org and/or wsprnet.org. Well built balloons can totally circumnavigate the globe several times over several months before degrading.
The insidious vaccine debacle may seem to have come out of nowhere, but pharmaceutical and regulatory rot has been growing for decades.
The story of Zantac, the common heartburn medicine, is both awful and good – it’s awful because one of the most common drugs on the market may have been causing cancers for forty years. It’s good only because the story is finally being told and 70,000 people are suing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The “good” here is the hope that some justice might finally be done, and because the public might find out just how ghastly the industrial pharma octopus really is, and how welded it is in the system.
It’s time to burn down the unholy empire of Big Pharma and Big Government and start again.
This is not a case of one bad egg in the system, it’s the story of a system that virtually creates bad eggs
Glaxo was a little company in the 70s that took one of the most popular drugs on the market, Tagamet, tweaked it enough to patent a “better version”, then aggressively out-marketed it, and eventually bought out the companies that made Tagamet to become the $70 billion GlaxoSmithKline giant.
“By 1989, Zantac was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies.”
But the common heartburn drug Zantac, or ranitidine, which drove their profits — also broke down into NDMA which is a known carcinogen, and there were warnings of this in 1981 and 1982, but it wasn’t until September 2019 that an independent lab tested for NDMA and found it in every sample and at alarming levels. By April 2020 the FDA forced every manufacturer to stop producing and selling the drug altogether. Now, the court cases have started.
Most of the Bloomberg story — which is worth reading in full — focuses on just how badly behaved GlaxoSmithKline have been by hiding the early data for forty long years. But GSK also chose not to do more tests when it should have; it did not try to transport and store the drug in ways the reduced the contamination, and it did not advise the public to take the tablets outside meals. There is no sense that customer health mattered.
To me the bigger question that is never asked, is why drugs like this are not tested by publicly funded groups before they get approval to be rolled out en masse? The tests that were finally done in 2019 are not two-year studies involving thousands of people, they are just lab tests for contamination. What is the point of all the public health funding, the regulatory agencies, and public universities if they aren’t used to defend the public?
If the FDA has the legal power to approve drugs or ban them, shouldn’t it also bear the responsibility when it gets that wrong?
Under legal cross examination the director of research and development admitted they had known for almost 40 years that ranitidine could degrade under conditions of high temperature and moisture … .
Glaxo says the heartburn drug doesn’t cause tumors. But the company was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger.
In 2019 the drug was found to be tainted with high levels of a probable carcinogen. Not by chance or mistake in a few batches. The poison is created by ranitidine itself. Zantac’s makers and health regulators around the world recalled the drug, and in the spring of 2020 the FDA forced it off the market altogether. No company could manufacture it; nobody should ingest it. The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats. The FDA says consuming minuscule amounts isn’t harmful. But tests were revealing excessive amounts of NDMA in ranitidine—and a capacity to create even more over time. No version seemed safe.
From ranitidine’s beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public. Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn’t share a critical study. Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer:At any time when Zantac had been on the market for almost 50 years, did Glaxo cause anyone to test for the presence of NDMA, a probable human carcinogen, in the product it was selling to American consumers known as Zantac?
Glaxo senior medical adviser:Not to my knowledge.
—Deposition, June 2021
NDMA, which is short for N-Nitrosodimethylamine, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn’t have an odor or much of a taste. It was first linked to cancer in 1956 and is most toxic to the liver. It’s one of a group of chemicals called nitrosamines, which by the 1970s were considered the most potent carcinogens yet discovered. They caused cancer in every species of animal tested. A single dose of less than a milligram of NDMA can mutate mice cells and stimulate tumors, and 2 grams can kill a person in days.
Many people would end up taking Zantac for months, sometimes years, even decades.
The 1981 in-house study that Glaxo hid:
Glaxo asked one of its scientists to conduct his own tests: Richard Tanner, who worked in the biochemical pharmacology division. He got the same results. He identified as much as 232,000 nanograms of NDMA in some samples. When the FDA later deemed that a tiny amount of NDMA was acceptable in any drug, that amount was 96ng. Tanner didn’t find NDMA when he used a lower nitrite level, which the company now says is closer to conditions in an actual human stomach. But back in 1982, court documents show, Glaxo kept the study secret. The associate director of clinical research in the US was never told about the Tanner report. The senior medical adviser for gastrointestinal research was unaware of it. So was the FDA.
Their competitors which made Tagamet, even did a study told them in 1982 that their drug would form NDMA.
It’s all about the money, and GSK became the largest drug company in the world at one point:
Zantac’s sales in the US that first year were about $125 million, which made it one of the best launches of a drug ever. “
That year, Tagamet became the first billion-dollar drug. The next year, Zantac overtook Tagamet.
In 1995, Glaxo completed a hostile takeover of another British drug company, Wellcome. Five years later, in 2000, Glaxo Wellcome acquired its longtime rival, known then as SmithKline Beecham. It was the biggest merger in the industry’s history and created the biggest drug company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline.
GSK was hit with a $3b fine “the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history”
This had nothing to do with Zantac, it was for their next two top selling productions. Spot the pattern?
In 2012 the company agreed to plead guilty and pay a $3 billion fine for marketing drugs for inappropriate uses, disregarding safety data and cheating Medicaid. The drugs were among the company’s most popular after Zantac: Paxil, Wellbutrin and the diabetes drug Avandia. The US Department of Justice called it the largest health-care fraud settlement in US history and the largest payment ever by a drug company. Two years later, China fined GSK $500 million and deported a top executive for bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs. The company told the BBC it had “published a statement of apology to the Chinese government and its people.”
As a sign of how few people know how bad Zantac potentially is, the “new” version of it called famotidine is being marketed “building on the Zantac brand’s established history and legacy.”
Blame Exxon for the dead children of Turkey, eh? It’s not the corrupt building codes, the crustal plates, or the solar magnetic field. Climate change sets off earthquakes, you know.
A High Priest Ecologist has read the chicken entrails and prophesies that things will get worse. Your car creates earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis — unless it’s an EV. It’s hard to satirize this, it’s too stupid.
It’s not just earthquakes — it’s tsunamis and volcanoes too:
We do not know for sure what triggered this horrific natural disaster, but we do know there is growing scientific evidence that climate change increases the risk of such tremors, together with tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Here comes Occult Science:
“If a fault is primed or ready to rupture, all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake to set if off […] Environmental changes associated with rapid and accelerating climate breakdown could easily do the job,” professor of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London Bill McGuire pointed out back in 2012.
If a fault is “primed to rupture” and the pressure of shaking hands will set it off, then presumably semi-trailers in Turkey are a no-no. I mean, if the Big One wasn’t set off by climate change at 4.17am, then it would have been by the Ford F-Max at 4:18. Do these professors even read what they write?
And biblical hellfire will reign:
Furthermore, NASA scientists acknowledged that glaciers retreating due to global warming have been triggering earthquakes in Alaska in the last decades.
The impact is not limited to the Arctic. As melting glaciers change the distribution of weight across the Earth’s crust, the resulting “glacial isostatic adjustment” drives changes in plate tectonics that could lead to more earthquakes, awaken volcanoes and even affect the movement of the Earth’s axis.
Melting gigatons of ice might well affect crust plate tectonics, but solar activity is much more likely to be melting the ice, not the air-conditioners of Sydney, or the hair-dryers of London — in which case all the carbon credits in the world won’t stop a single seismic event. The effort to shield us with windmills will look like necromancers shouting at the breeze.
And occult science flows straight into tribal hate
Everything fossil fuel companies do is a crime against humanity. They are the “evil spirits” of the climate cult. A google search for “climate activists launch law suits” gets 3 million results. But when fossil fuel companies target 150 environmental activists it’s proof that they run the world:
A series of investigations and legal proceedings over the years have shown how fossil fuel giants call the shots: they use and abuse the rule of law to escape accountability for environmental pollution, resource-grabbing and cronyism. Those objecting are often silenced.
Just over the last decade, fossil fuel companies in the United States have targeted over 150 environmental activists with lawsuits.
Oh woe is us, say the purveyors of nonsense. They can’t persuade the world to follow their soothsayers, so they feel silenced and victimized if they can’t turn off the taps on major gas pipelines instead:
Meanwhile, dozens of US states are in the process of enacting “critical infrastructure” legislation, increasing criminal penalties against activists protesting pipelines that will wreck the planet.
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is shamelessly exploiting the deaths in Turkey to promote his own career
Here is his byline:
Professor İbrahim Özdemir is a UN advisor and an ecologist teaching at Üsküdar University. He has served as Director-General at the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Turkish Ministry of Education and was a leading member in drafting the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change endorsed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.
Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.
Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.
“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.
Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. The stuck bore can’t go forwards, but she can’t go back the way she came in either. The team has installed concrete reinforcing behind Florence as she moved and the concrete reinforcing effectively locks her in. It’s meant to be a one way trip.
So we have the irony of a machine designed to carve through miles of rock trapped inside a pile of sand. But it gets worse.
Last month, the Snowy Hydro Corporation said it was monitoring a “surface depression” above the boring machine. So a local man decided to go looking for the hole. As he says “technically, [Florence] should be 9 kilometers in but I thought I’d start about 3 kilometers out and start walking my way back in,” Mr Anderson said.
He spent four days looking for the hole only to find it, wow, barely 150 meters from the entrance.
His big shock was not the hole, but that the tunnel borer had barely achieved anything at all. These machines are designed to travel 30 to 50 meters a day, so this short tunnel is effectively one week’s work. The Snowy 2.0 scheme is supposed to be finished by December 2026, (just revised a week ago to Dec 2027) but at the current rate of 60 centimeters (2ft) a day it will take about 70 years to finish.
Looks like we will need those old coal plants for a bit longer. This delay could affect the rollout of new renewables.
The hole is only 150m from the entrance.
Future options include jacking it up (described as “a huge task”) or disassembling Florence — all 143 meters and 2,400 tons — and extracting the machine in pieces. But if they do that, they will have to start the whole tunnel again. Still they hadn’t got very far…
You’d never know Australia was a top mining nation, eh?
Pumped Hydro is giant appliance that sucks electricity and gives you back some later. In a system with reliable baseload generators it is superfluous, redundant, and entirely unnecessary. It is an expense we don’t have to have, didn’t need, and don’t want to pay for. It can only make things more expensive than the system we used to have. Not only do we have to pay for the giant infrastructure, every day it operates we also throw away 20 – 30% of the electrons (so to speak) that go through it.
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superseded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Thanks to Steve Hunter
UPDATE: A net-zero grid (without nuclear power) needs 23 Snowy 2.0 schemes for storage:
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that by 2050, without coal power plants, the National Electricity Market will require 45 GW and 620 gigawatt-hours of storage in all its forms to manage variations in fast-growing wind and solar generation, and to keep the grid stable. The figure rises steeply the closer the grid gets to 100 per cent renewables.
Snowy chief commercial officer Gordon Wymer points to an old estimate from ITK Services that some 8000 GWh – 23 times the capacity of Snowy 2.0 – could be needed for a fully renewable NEM, while Snowy’s own estimates signal that three to five times the capacity of 2.0 is needed for a 50-60 per cent renewable grid. (ITK principal David Leitch says his estimate is out of date and refers back to AEMO’s estimates.)
Snowy 2.0 needs huge transmission line construction as well (Humelink and VNI West):
There’s another $6 billion in transmission lines that we didn’t need for a coal fired grid.
“The cost/benefit analyses undertaken by TransGrid and also by AEMO makes quite clear that HumeLink plus Snowy 2.0 – they go together, the one is useless without the other – will destroy the wealth of New South Wales electricity consumers and Australian taxpayers,” says Bruce Mountain, director of longstanding Snowy 2.0 critic, Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University.
He says findings by AEMO and TransGrid that HumeLink provides net benefits only get to that conclusion by ignoring the cost of Snowy 2.0.
Broad argues the new transmission was required as long as 10 years ago, pointing to the bottlenecks in the system that prevent even the existing Snowy hydropower output reaching Melbourne and Sydney during demand spikes on hot summer days. Lack of grid capacity is also crimping new wind and solar generation, he notes, saying the critics are “missing the point” and getting caught up in “the politics of who’s doing what”.
Broad fears the $3.3 billion HumeLink will slide into 2027, while the $3 billion VNI West, which three years ago was expected by 2028, is now pencilled in for July 2031 in AEMO’s latest draft grid blueprint but may slip into 2032.
In the next great environmental cult moment, “The Science” has a plan to explode a 10-billion-kilogram dust cloud off the moon between the Earth and the Sun. Shimmery white moon dust will dim the evil solar rays and “save us from our addiction to fossil fuels” (at least until we run out of Moon). The dust will disperse every couple of weeks, so we just need to keep topping up our global sunscreen by setting the explosives off. At least it probably won’t kill many whales.
The plan involves getting man back on the moon for the first time in fifty years, setting up a moon base, and a permanent mining colony, but (guard your coffee) — it might be cost effective:
Squirting a carefully calculated stream of Moondust from a future lunar station at the right point between the Sun and Earth might bethe most cost-effective, risk-free means of keeping our cool until we come to our senses and cut emissions.
Bromley notes the proposal would mimic the scenario that occurred during the Little Ice Age, when Louis XIV reigned over France. You’d need a lot of dust but, provided you could get it into space, it would essentially work to reduce solar radiation, blocking around 1% to 2% of the light.
What luck, God made the moon out of just the right cheese?
“Lunar dust stood out for two reasons,” said Bromley “First, it can be pretty efficient at deflecting sunlight, and second, it turns out that the most efficient grain size is the most plentiful on the moon’s surface.” This, he notes, was a fun surprise and something they didn’t know going into the project. One of the problems, though, is just how much dust is required. It would be cost prohibitive to constantly send rockets full of space dust to a platform out at L1, so the moon provides a second advantage.
Exploding bombs on the moon will either waste a continent worth of money or — if it works — make the Earth less habitable, reduce crops, increase frosts, and shrink coral reefs. But it will apparently “buy us time to mature as a society”. Put yourself in the naughty corner.
People in 100 years are going to find this very funny. Why wait? Laugh now…
Desperate to avoid worst-case scenarios, researchers have proposed various measures that could, at the very least, buy us the time we might need to mature as a society and work to undo the damage.
Blasting a steady stream of dust from the surface of the Moon is the latest suggestion to get a solid scientific appraisal, with University of Utah computational astrophysicist Ben Bromley and computer scientist Sameer Khan and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory astrophysicist Scott Kenyon giving the idea a tentative thumbs up.
UPDATE: Think of what a nice bureaucratic model this is. NASA / ESA / NOAA gets more money to do what they want to do anyhow, and they can tweak the program to suit the weather. If the world cools they claim “success”. If the world doesn’t cool, they can point to how essential this program is to stop extreme heat. Give me your money… Whatever happens to the weather, the climate modelers will tell us how useful the moon dust was and another international bureaucracy is born.
Science communicators have mastered the art of treating adults like 6 year olds. Logic?
The logical thing to do would be to work together to kick our nasty habit of smoking fossil fuels. Shocking as it seems, it could be faster and easier to engage in mammoth-scaled engineering projects that literally reflect a proportion of sunlight before it hits Earth and is converted into a form that’s likely to stick around as heat.
It was an act of terrorism that revolved around energy, but it’s also about free speech and the media. It’s a red-pill moment, and it was released on a blog, not in “the news”. Journalism lives — but it has moved.
Seymour Hersh is the same writer that broke the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib scandal. The veteran reporter won a Pulitzer prize and has an insider source and many details on his new substack blog. He claims The United States deliberately blew up the Nordstream pipes with help from Norway. The explosives were planted by divers in June under the cover of tine BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise. They were triggered by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane on Sept 26th, last year.
The WhiteHouse has flatly denied it, calling it “utterly false”, but the US always had the means, the motive and the opportunity, and we all remember the day when Joe Biden made the open threat “: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. … We will bring an end to it.” It turns out behind the scenes the people keeping secrets were “dismayed.”
So here we are, Energy is a national security thing, not a fairy wand to get nice weather. Gazprom’s gas and oil revenues “were estimated some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.” Wow.
By stopping Germany and Europe from getting access to cheap Russian gas, the US would be neutralizing Putin’s “weaponisation” of energy, though by weaponising it themselves. The US was afraid the Germans might be reluctant to send weapons to Ukraine if they also depended on Russia for gas. By helping the US, Norway would be happy to sell more gas itself. But how will cold Germans feel knowing that their electricity bills have skyrocketed? Likewise the rest of Europe. Will people in Britain connect those dots? For Europeans, their ally took away their sovereign choices.
Right now the German government could be using this news story for leverage behind the scenes. They could promise not to make a fuss if only the US does x, y and z? What’s the going price for terrorist strikes?
Will the US have to pay the carbon credits on half million tons of methane — the largest single methane leak ever? Does anybody even care enough to ask?
Will this be leading story in every news bulletin around the world, or will the headlines just read “White House forced to issue statement that the claims are utterly wrong”.
The original source is Seymour Hersch’s new blogging platform: Read it all, it’s quite the tale!
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
The motive:
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
Norway were the obvious collaborators:
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
With a last minute change Joe Biden called for the charges not to go off with just a two-day timer, but to sit there ready underwater on the pipe and be triggered at some later date. This caused quite a stir and much frustration. It was a much more difficult requirement:
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
How useless were the media?
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.
See the videos below of all the US officials calling for action against the pipeline — looking for sanctions. Many interests in the US wanted to stop this pipeline.
In light of the Seymour Hersh bombshell on the U.S. and Norway blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, let’s recall how U.S. officials openly incited against it for months, then blamed… Russia.https://t.co/qp1d7Jx9rypic.twitter.com/V0Cy2JPSXI
UPDATED: Ian Rons disagrees, and is very unimpressed with the Hersch uncorroborated story. Worth reading it. Though it smelled like a weak effort with “legal” and political points at the top. (As if any government seems bound by law these days). But one point struck — he queries whether it was necessary to hide under the BALTOPS war games, as submarines could get in there anytime. And the delayed triggering by sonar drop does sound complicated.
I also have deep reservations about the remotely-triggered detonators that were apparently designed and manufactured for this one operation on short notice, that survived over three months submerged under battery power in the cold Baltic Sea, vulnerable all the time to discovery, and which were apparently triggered by a single sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian(!) aircraft, despite the fact that the explosions happened about 50 miles and precisely 17 hours apart. Every detail of that story raises a number of questions, but perhaps Sweden (which is carrying out the investigation) can tell us whether evidence of these sophisticated trigger devices has been found.
Nonetheless, the debunking is not a heavyweight performance. Just points worth discussing.
h/t Another Ian, Krishna Gans, Scott of the Pacific, Tony Thomas, Bill in AZ.
Statistics on corals barely existed before 1980, and didn’t get semi reasonable until 1998 or so. But with twenty years of data there is no evidence suggesting we need to send in the SWAT teams with floating shade sails, giant fans, breeding teams, or sunscreen for staghorn coral.
We do however need to send in the SWAT team to rescue our universities.
Hard Coral around the world is not suffering a mass die-off due to climate change, GWPF
Bleached is not killed
Academic shaman have implied (tacitly) that bleached coral is like dead coral, but instead bleaching is more like home redecoration and the corals recover surprisingly fast. But amongst all this noise of loss and recovery, and with such short term data it’s been hard to see the big picture.
The uncertainty bars on early coral studies expand like an emergency flare. But notice that there is no significant, distinctive response from corals despite CO2 being a well mixed gas spread all over the world. Where CO2 looks bad for some reefs one decade, it looks good the next. It’s almost like corals are being affected by something else entirely…
Why fear warming when corals love the hottest large water body on Earth
The area of most coral diversity, the ‘Coral Triangle’, in the seas around Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, is located at the centre of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool – the hottest large water body on earth. This is not a coincidence. For every 1°C reduction in water temperature, there is a roughly 15% reduction in growth rate. Corals are also found in colder water, such as Scotland and Alaska, but their growth rate in these places is so slow that they are unable to form reefs.
Because most of a reef is underwater, determining longterm changes in condition is difficult; historical archives of aerial photographs cannot be used.11 This is in contrast to monitoring the decline of the world’s tropical rainforests, where clearing of rainforests has been documented for about a century. The reduction in rainforest extent in Africa, Asia, and South America can be easily inferred from old maps and modern aerial photographs.
Compared to rainforest loss, reefs are almost untouched
To put this in perspective — we know we’ve lost half of the Australian rainforest yet all 3,000 reefs off Queensland are still there:
For example, Google Earth images can be used to infer a 50% loss of Australian tropical rainforest, and almost total loss of lowland rainforest, since the European settlement, due to clearing for agriculture. Farms are now located where rainforest would once have been. However, for the GBR, all that can be said is that there has been no physical destruction of any reef on the scale of clearing for agriculture. All 3000 of GBR‘s reefs still exist, and all have coral on them.
Data for Australian corals is probably the best in the world, but despite effectively surveying a strip of coral 1,000 kilometers long every year, the Great Barrier Reef is so large we are only sampling 0.003% of the total area.
In order to appreciate the magnitude and difficulty of the task of monitoring reef systems, it is useful to consider the GBR, which has, by far, the most comprehensive monitoring program in the world. Carried out by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), the ‘Long Term Monitoring Program’ (LTMP) only started in the mid-1980s – sporadic data exists for earlier periods, but is too limited for determining long-term trends. The GBR is huge – larger than Germany and as long as California – and has 3000 individual reefs, each a few kilometres across. AIMS surveys roughly 100 of the reefs each year using Manta tows, which means they cover roughly 1000 km each year. Despite this huge distance, the area surveyed represents only roughly 0.003% of the total area of the marine national park. In addition, AIMS covers around 100 small set transects with benthic surveys.
The Caribbean reefs have survived three million years of climate change
The coral cover in the Caribbean is lower than other regions, but hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years. The region has been separated from other coral regions for three million years — so has evolved on its own path. It’s hard to say if the lower coral cover is due to human or other damage that may have started long ago, or is just because these reefs have a different mix of species.
In any case, it doesn’t correlate with CO2 either.
Fast coral recovery is written off as “just the quick growing species”
These are fast growing and delicate ‘plate’ and ‘staghorn’ corals that are extremely susceptible to damage by storms and starfish plagues.
When corals recover fast the academics and media imply that the new growth is somehow not as good or strong as what was lost. But as Peter Ridd points out they can’t have it both ways. These fast growing species are the same ones that got hit in the bleaching episodes in the first place. Slow growing corals are tougher and harder to bleach. So the new fast growing corals are just replacing the injured fast growing corals.
Some corals like to live fast and die young
These corals use bleaching as a strategy to adapt to different conditions.
Some ‘high octane’ zooxanthellae will allow the coral to grow fast, but will make it more susceptible to bleaching from high temperatures. ‘Low octane’ zooxanthellae will make it grow slowly, but leave it less susceptible to bleaching.
An example of a ‘massive’ coral. These are slow growing but can live for centuries. They are relatively unsusceptible to bleaching.
The life strategy of many corals, particularly the light and delicate ‘plate’ or ‘staghorn’ corals (Figure 1b), is to live fast and probably die young. They produce a lightweight calcium carbonate skeleton, which means that they will probably be obliterated by a tropical cyclone within 20 years. They are also highly prone to being eaten by crown-of-thorns starfish. As it happens, the return incidence for bleaching events and cyclones is often roughly the same and it is probably no coincidence that these physically delicate and easily damaged corals are the most susceptible to bleaching, and have a life expectancy of just a couple of decades. Taking on high octane zooxanthellae and growing quickly, while risking death by bleaching, is all part of their life strategy. At the opposite extreme are the massive corals that can live for centuries and become a solid block of calcium carbonate, metres across, and weighing tons. These grow more slowly, and will generally pass through a cyclone/hurricane relatively unharmed and are less affected by starfish plagues. They have a long-term strategy, and quick death by bleaching is not part of it.
Bleached is not the same as dead coral
These reefs recovered so fast they could not have been killed in the first place. A coral that has been killed will need ten years to recover, but a bleached one is just redecorating with newer better zooxanthellae.
While they [fast growing corals] can indeed regrow extremely rapidly (within a year) from a small section that is left alive (the so-called ‘phoenix effect’), if they are killed, recruitment of larvae and regrowth takes 5–10 years. They cannot regenerate within a few months. The rapid recovery of the reef cover therefore shows that they were bleached, but not killed. In other words, the past few years’ data has proven that very little coral was killed by the bleaching events – even the fast-growing coral that is most susceptible. Coral reefs can double or even quadruple their coral in a decade. The loss of a few percent from bleaching is a minor disturbance.
Coral comes pre-adapted to climate change
Few other organisms have this type of adaptability to changing temperatures. Whereas many organisms take generations to alter their genetic make-up, corals can adapt to changing temperatures in a few weeks, simply by switching zooxanthellae during bleaching. Corals thus have a remarkable, almost unique, ability to deal with changing climates. Are they the ‘canary in the coal mine’, or one of the toughest organisms on earth, or somewhere in between?
Academic tricks to make an 8% death rate seem like 93%
The legendary 2016 bleaching was essentially word-game hyperbole:
… it was widely reported that the 2016 bleaching event of the GBR affected 93% of reefs, with the implication that there was a 93% coral loss. However, if a reef had only a very small amount of bleaching, it was classified as one of the 93% of reefs that bleached…
The best estimate for total coral loss on the GBR during the 2016 bleaching event is that, at most, about 8% died. Almost all of this was in very shallow water, less than 5 meters deep.
Frade et al. (2018) showed that coral loss in water between 5 and 40 m depth was about 3%. Figure 4 demonstrates without doubt that the coral loss was small compared to the regeneration capacity of the reefs. Although there is no doubt that a significant amount of coral was killed by bleaching in 2016, it was far less than can be destroyed by a major cyclone, and far less than what was effectively reported by the media. This confirms previous work by De’ath et al. (2012) who found that cyclones and starfish plagues are responsible for 90% of coral mortality, and bleaching just 10%.
The bottom line: The Reefs may or may not be fine, but science is in trouble
Although it is extremely encouraging news, the latest statistics about coral reefs around the world, and especially recent ones from the GBR, do not prove that the world’s reefs are all going to be fine. However, they prove without any shadow of a doubt that the coral reef science community, with a few exceptions, is lacking in scientific integrity. They have cried wolf too often.
While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?
If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.
The wind turbine industry today is like the jet engine industry of the 1950s. It will take decades of work to fine tune it and figure out true maintenance costs. The difference between jets and wind turbines is that in 1950 we knew we needed jets, but wind turbines are only useful in the fantasy land of junk climate models.
If ever there was proof that wind power is a national security issue, a rort, and a risk…
Scottish Power — led by a Spaniard, Ignacio Galan, and actually a subsidiary of Spanish firm Iberdrola — conceded that some 71 of its turbines had to be hooked up to diesel generators to keep them warm in December, according to the Sunday Mail, with a whistleblower telling the left-leaning newspaper that problems with the turbines are deep-seated.
It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.
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