Wednesday Open Thread

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The United States of the FBI

By Jo Nova

As  Scott Adams says “The cover up of the cover up is working”

Live fire training at the FBI.

Picking Presidents?

It’s the story of the century that isn’t selling many papers — how the FBI held onto the Hunter Biden Laptop-from-Hell for months and actively colluded with media outlets to suppress that news, all while US voters were deciding whether to vote for his father for President.

The FBI knew the Lap Top contained evidence of corruption of the highest order, yet chose not to investigate. They also knew the story would probably leak in October and were actively contacting Facebook and Twitter on a weekly basis before then to pre-empt it — so that the bad news could disappear and wouldn’t hurt their chosen candidate. When the FBI wanted news suppressed, the media giants  “handled ” it in a flash. They could make whole newspapers disappear.

The real story of course, is still that the men with guns are deciding which crimes are worth investigating, what news you are allowed to read, and who the voters should vote for. This makes the USA a lot more like Cuba or Russia than anyone wants to think, and it matters to all of us — even outside the US. This dark influence is a black hole in the free world with event horizon out in space.

In the world we thought we lived in, this would be the lead story and day after day.

Who rules America? The Spies?

The DNC (Democrats) could also make the media giants sit up and pant, but when push comes to shove it’s hard to imagine how the Democrats would scare the FBI more than the FBI would scare the Democrats.

 

Transcript

We know now the New York Post reporting on the laptop was correct before the US 2020 election, but Twitter not only blocked their account entirely — they stopped anyone sending direct messages with the link as well.

The Twitter Files and the silence of the hacks

Tom Slater, Spiked

The Hunter Biden story could well have changed the course of the 2020 election.

A political party using a Big Tech platform as its personal censor? A potentially consequential piece of journalism suppressed during an election? What happened to the Hunter Biden laptop story should take its place among the great free-speech and journalistic scandals of the 21st century. And yet much of the American media is still trying to downplay this debacle, and has responded to the Twitter Files with a mix of silence and derision.

On Twitter, elite journalists have gone after Taibbi, often using the same attack line – that he is ‘doing PR’ for Musk, who has been keen to expose the Hunter shenanigans since he took control of the company.

I’m no expert in US constitutional law, but this looks a lot like agents of the security state outsourcing censorship to the private sector.

We always knew the media was corrupt, sensationalist partisan hacks, but the bigger problem seems to be that the FBI are too, and they are vastly better at it.

Photo: Jamal Wilson

h/t Bill in AZ, David Maddison, Another Ian, John Connor II

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Tuesday Open Thread

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In an “Emergency Heatwave”, wait for it, ABC Nanny tells Australians to “use air conditioning”

By Jo Nova

The Nanny State strikes again

Apparently, there just aren’t enough real emergencies anymore, so we need to fake them up.

A couple of weeks ago, our billion dollar ABC, in cohoots with the Bureau of Meteorology, decided to report in prime time news that heatwaves are now so deadly serious we  need New Emergency Warnings —  “like a Bushfire emergency”, even though we get heatwaves every year, they hardly kill anyone and even five year olds know how to press the air conditioner button.

Back in 1896, Australians had to catch emergency trains and head for the hills the heat was so deadly. But apparently adult mammals are now so stupid they don’t know when it’s hot, and need to sit next to ABC Emergency radio all day in case “things change quickly” and someone needs to tell them to rush to the fridge for a glass of water.

I mean, it’s almost like heatwaves sneak up on people around hills at 100 miles an hour?

Either that or two government agencies want to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers:

New heatwave warning system adopted across Australia, using bushfire-style emergency alerts

by Tyne Logan, ABC

Bushfire-style emergency warnings are set to be issued for heatwaves across Australia, as authorities warn their dangers are potentially being overlooked.

No seriously, in an “Emergency” level heatwave the advice is…  drink water, stay indoors, and use air conditioning. The whole news story is a form of subliminal coaching to infantalize the nation. You are all babies and Mummy-Government is here to sing a bushfire emergency song.

Get your dose of Play School for adults on the Australian ABC News:

But the real emergency here is the ABC reporting

One day when the ABC gets the internet they’ll be able to do real research instead of being factually wrong and literally incompetent. The ABC says: “Research has shown heatwaves are the most deadly natural hazard in Australia, with the exception of disease epidemics.” But anyone who reads unfunded science bloggers instead has known for years that the worst weather hazard in Australia is called winter, and it kills around 7,000 extra people each year.

Compare that to the official heatwave tally hidden in the ABC news (20 a year), and winter is 300 times worse.

If we are going to talk about overlooked dangers, lets say the word “cold” and sing about fossil fuels. They can keep you warm or fly you to summer, whereever it is.

Excess winter deaths Australia and New Zealand. Graph. Indur Goklany.

Average daily deaths for each month in Australia (left axis, black numbers) and New Zealand (right axis, grey numbers) over a ten year period. | Indur Goklany

 

Officially we’re talking about 20 deaths a year:

This doesn’t sound very scary though so the ABC bundles 18 years of deaths together:

Analysis of coronial records, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, showed there were 473 heat-related deaths reported in Australia between 2000 and 2018.

It found 354 of these occurring during heatwave conditions.

But in January 1896, when Australia had only one sixth as many people, an astonishing 437 people died of the heat in the space of a few weeks. There were no air conditioners then. So we could add all the deaths that occurred then over an 18 year period and multiply by six and the deaths from actual heatwaves would be vastly bigger than current deaths.

The ABC tosses in a wild outlier study, with bigger numbers:

…other research suggests the number of reported heat-related deaths could vastly underestimate the actual number, with up to 36,000 deaths associated with heat between 2006 and 2017.

It is written by people who believe the effects of climate change will become more common, and who fish through death and temperature data looking for “heat-related” mortality but presumably not “cold related deaths” or deaths due to unaffordable electricity.

And all of them seem to ignore that it’s well known in mortality research that often heatwave deaths are followed by a dip in deaths. It appears that heatwaves tend to kill people who are so close to dying that they probably would have died in the following weeks. This process is known as forward displacement. The same pattern is not found after cold snaps.

Our media is the problem

The real issue here is not the Heatwave Emergency Warnings, but that the ABC acts as a propaganda unit. They should be mocking the BoM instead for treating us like babies and filling our airwaves with meaningless warnings.

When we were kids we’d turn on the garden sprinklers and run through them on hot days, and we didn’t wait for the ABC to suggest it.

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Monday Open Thread

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Climate lockdowns coming? You will be tracked in your suburb and happy about it.

By Jo Nova

The 15 Minute City is a UN and WEF plan, because they care about you want you to drive less.

A cartoon from the WEF just for you good girls and boys:

15 Minute City, WEF, UN.

In the WEF’s own words — this rearrangement of cities is absolutely about climate change:

As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.

And the solution was the pandemic (they really say that):

The obvious, yet incomplete, answer is the pandemic…. with COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a “nice-to-have” to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one’s needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death.

And then the dark hand of the totalitarian managers appears, as James Woudhuysen, warned in Spiked in late October:

The madness of the ‘15-minute city’

The green agenda is taking inspiration from the illiberal days of lockdown.

To this end, Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, wants to divide the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts. In these districts, it is said, most household essentials will be accessible by a quarter-of-an-hour walk or bike ride, and so residents will have no need for a car.

On the surface, these 15-minute neigbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys.

Residents will have to register their cars with the council and they will be tracked to count their journeys through the key gateways. It’s the social credit scheme that starts with your car and works like anti-frequent-flyer points.

Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70.

The concept of the 15-minute city was born with ‘C40’. Chaired today by London mayor Sadiq Khan, C40 calls itself a ‘network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the urgent action needed right now to confront the climate crisis’.

Climate lockdowns? Seriously?

It all sounds a bit ridiculous to suggest a lockdown “for the climate” but listen to the BBC.  They’re working awfully hard to persuade us — they obviously think voters won’t want this. Here they are connecting the “15 Minute City” to the fun of covid lockdowns, and setting this up as though it’s totally normal for the government to decide who your friends are:

How ’15-minute cities’ will change the way we socialise

And furthermore lockdowns in Paris were great social moments where we all made friends. Who knew how much fun it would be to be told you couldn’t drive far?

.. for Fraioli, the two-month lockdown that began on 17 March – confining her to a 1km radius of her home – gave her a nuanced, enriching view of her neighbourhood. “I discovered it’s possible to feel like you’re in a small village in Paris,” she says. “To get to know your neighbours, to maintain good links with shopkeepers, to favour local craftsmen and shops over large supermarkets. I even joined a citizens’ movement where people prepare food baskets for homeless people. I thought I would have a hard time living the lockdown, but I was perfectly at home, in a quiet place.”

I don’t seem to recall “getting to know neighbours” as being part of any lockdown anywhere?

And lookout —  the 15 minute city is not just Oxford, but turning up in Brisbane, Melbourne, Barcelona, Paris, Portland and Buenos Aires. It’s everywhere.

UN Climate Change logo

Oxford City Council is moving faster than the rest

Apparently, not enough people are catching buses or riding bikes. But instead of making that more appealing, the totalitarians will force it through tracking and fines. Oxfordshire has just approved on November 29th, the “traffic filters” trial which will turn the city into a “fifteen minute city”. The Trial will start in Jan 2024.

It’s a crowded area, Oxfordshire, and no one likes traffic congestion, but in a free world the problem is self-limiting as drivers get fed up with delays and exorbitant parking costs, and they car-pool or choose to catch the bus or ride a bike. But in Big Nanny State the local rulers start making rules about who can and can’t visit and how often, and they want your car registered on their own special list with cameras to track you and fines to punish you. They offer exemptions of course, but then you have to apply for them and get permission.

Oxfordshire County Council Pass Climate Lockdown ‘trial’ to Begin in 2024

Vision News, November 30th

Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.

Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.

Every resident will be required to register their car with the County Council who will then monitor how many times they leave their district via number plate recognition cameras.

In the end, these aggressively overmanaged schemes mean more paperwork, more tracking, more jobs for bureaucrats and more free passes for “friends” of Big Government.

The more rules you have the more corrupt the system gets. For example, some city blocks are included in the favored list with 100 passes, while others get just 25 — so the property values of the inner circle addresses rise. As a bonus, in years to come property developers “in the know” and on the favoured list with certain councilors can arrange for rezoning on the right day (the one after they buy the property) and voila — that’s a nice capital gain for them

“Reconnecting Oxford” wants to end these artificial blockages

Oxford Traffic filters map.

From “Reconnecting Oxford” –– a protest movement to stop filters and road closures.

The councilors held a major consultation process but apparently knew the outcome. It says rather a lot about the attitude of one councilor who said it was going ahead whether people liked it or not.

Traffic filters will divide city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, agrees highways councillor

Oxford Mail, October 24

ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said.

And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.

Businesses in Oxford are not impressed:

Keep reading  →

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Saturday Open Thread

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NetZero impossibility point? Europe’s renewable wonderland now can’t make solar, wind, batteries or EV’s

By Jo Nova

The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero

Wind Turbine Cash cow, by Jo Nova

The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.

The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)

Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.

How fast those balance sheets change…

Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.

‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and China race ahead, Volkswagen warns

Tristan Bove, Yahoo News

Europe’s energy crisis is leaving the continent’s industry at a standstill, and its biggest car manufacturer says competitors are racing ahead as EU governments fail to provide enough support.

“On the international stage, Germany and the European Union are rapidly losing their attractiveness and competitiveness,” Thomas Schäfer, brand chief executive officer at German carmaker Volkswagen, wrote Monday in a LinkedIn post.

Schäfer said that Volkswagen, and other European carmakers, risk falling behind competitors in the electric car manufacturing space due to high energy prices, as the crisis puts the whole of European industry at a disadvantage.

“We are treading water,” he wrote. “I am very concerned about the current development regarding investments in the industry’s transformation. This needs to be urgently prioritized—unbureaucratically, consistently, and quickly.”

He also warned that Volkswagen could not afford to make batteries in the EU either:

Politico

“If we don’t succeed in quickly lowering energy prices in Germany and Europe, then investments in energy-intensive production, or for new battery cell factories, in Germany and across the EU will no longer be feasible,” he said.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Volkswagen are searching for new sites for battery plants in Canada?

It’s a bloodbath in Europe for the wind industry

Europe’s Wind Energy Industry Has Hit A Rough Patch

Haley Zaremba, Oilpatch

…across Europe, major wind turbine makers are reporting massive losses and laying off swaths of employees. Just this month, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the largest maker of wind turbines in the world, reported a third-quarter loss of 147 million euros (about $151 million). General Electric, another major wind turbine producer in the United States and Europe, reports that its renewable energy unit is likely to report a $2 billion loss at the end of the year. Spanish company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a Madrid-based company that is a leading producer of offshore wind turbines, reported an annual loss of 940 million euros ($965 million) and has announced spending cuts which will incur 2,900 job losses – approximately 11% of the company’s workforce.

Here’s a clue about why wind power can’t compete:

According to the CEO of Siemens Energy, the issue is supply chains. “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material [compared to] … what conventional technologies need,” said Christian Bruch in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe. “So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.”

With slower production due to supply chain problems, the wind industry is stuck — still trying to deliver orders from the pre-covid era at prices that are impossible, to an audience that is strapped for cash and selling a product that no one really needs.

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Friday Open Thread

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The ESG divestment grows: Florida takes $2 billion back from Blackrock

BlackRock

Good News: The best hope of unwinding the unholy alliance between Big-Money and Big-Government comes from the US States and they are starting to sink their teeth in.

BlackRock is the defacto Global Climate Police — but disguised as a monster investment fund. The way to break it is to expose that its primary interest is not in making money for its clients but as a Woke political tool.

BlackRock are able to intimidate most of the world with $10 trillion dollars in assets. They are effectively the third biggest “country” in the world by GDP. But it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients. And once those clients figure it out and pull their funds, BlackRock will become an empty shell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company…

It’s a scam where BlackRock target legal corporations in states that voted to use fossil fuels to effectively undo what the voters wanted. A few months ago, 19 States in the USA started asking BlackRock and the US SEC some hot and hard legal questions. West Virginia announced they would boycott firms that boycott fossil fuels, and now Florida joins them in boycotting BlackRock.

Florida pulls $2 billion from BlackRock in largest anti-ESG divestment

By Ross Kerber, Reuters

Dec 1 (Reuters) – Florida’s Chief Financial Officer said on Thursday his department would pull $2 billion worth of its assets managed by BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), the biggest such divestment by a state opposed to the asset manager’s environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) policies.

We note BlackRock used to have $10 Trillion in assets to manage, now it has eight?

The move will hardly dent BlackRock’s $8 trillion in assets and drew a strong response from the company, which said the action put politics over investor interests.

Pots and kettles indeed. The company which specializes in putting politics over investor interests, accuses the Government of Florida of putting politics over investor interests? Governments are supposed to do politics…

Nonetheless it underscores how a backlash among many Republican leaders, such as those in Florida, against ESG investing, which they see as promoting a “woke agenda” is gathering steam.

The key terms here are “Fiduciary Duty” and “Duty of Care”. If BlackRock are not maximizing the income of their clients by putting their money in the best investments then it would be negligent of any pension fund manager to leave their client’s assets in BlackRock.

Republican State governments are also starting to raise concerns about Vanguard — another supergiant asset manager pushing ESG policies. These motherlodes of unguarded conglomerate money are driving some of the stupidest and most absurd policies in the world. They are often the largest single shareholders in both media and mining assets, and can lean on them to elicit the policies they want. “Nice business you have there, shame if something happened to it…”

UPDATE: To clarify — Obviously $2 billion drawn out of $10 trillion is nothing much, and I searched but could not find any specific listing or reason why BlackRock’s total assets are described as being only worth $8 trillion by Reuters now. Perhaps others are pulling out quietly? Perhaps it’s a typo?

But word will spread, and if pension fund managers start to get questions from clients, and lawyers put the fear of negligence into them, the entire modus operandi of the Bullies at BlackRock will come undone.

Where are your retirement funds?

Photo: Jim.Henderson

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Thursday Open Thread

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UN shakedown: Threats to list healthy reef as in danger just a way to extort “climate” money

Corals, Fish, at Flynn Reef, Great Barrier Reef, Photo.

By Jo Nova

It’s a miracle. It’s only six months since they were elected but the Labor says Great Barrier Reef is OK now.

However UNESCO is still threatening to list it as “in danger”, despite record coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef for the last two years running. The “danger” label would scare off some tourists, so the Minister is lobbying the UN to stop it.

But follow the reasoning.  The Minister is admitting that the UN listing is not about the reef itself, it’s about whether they have paid enough money for UN causes or adopted the right “NetZero” liturgy.

Barrier Reef in danger? The fight’s on again

Lydia Lynch and Jess Malcolm, The Australian

Ms Plibersek [Environment Minister] and her Queensland counterpart, Meaghan Scanlon, sought to distance themselves from the report’s findings, arguing they were the result of the former Coalition government’s failure to act on climate change.

“The reason that UNESCO in the past has singled out a place as ‘at risk’ is because they wanted to see greater government investment or greater government action – and since the change of government, both of those things have happened,” she said.

Apparently the UN uses the “in danger” listing  a form of coercion to squeeze more money for their favourite causes. It’s nothing about the actual reef. Nothing about what Australians want. And it was never about “The Science”:

Steve Edmondson, a reef tour operator in Port Douglas, said the UN-backed report relied on old ­information gathered during a monitoring mission in March while the reef was going through a mass coral bleaching event.

UN labels are just a form of foreign interference to drum up money for friends which benefit from “climate money”– like the Bankers who invest in renewables, or the Chinese Communist Party that sells us the windmills and solar panels.

Keep reading  →

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NZ Court battle: Parents want unvaccinated donor blood for baby, but Health dept wants custody

By Jo Nova

Whose baby is it anyway?

Bizzare: A a four month old baby called Will needs open heart surgery,  but the parents don’t want the doctors to use the “pooled” vaccinated blood on offer. They’d prefer to use donor blood from unvaccinated people and already have 20 potential donors lined up. All Health New Zealand has to do is say “OK — but you pay any extra costs” and this problem would be solved. Instead the health police are taking the parents (and baby) to court to try to take control of the boy off them, so they can do the surgery their way.

Health New Zealand says the vaccinated blood is fine and dandy because it has extra antibodies in it (and being clairvoyant they already know the results of the ten year studies too.) What they don’t say is whether they can guarantee donor blood has no SARS-2 Spike proteins, or mRNA coding for remnants of lab experiments in it.

Why are Health New Zealand risking the baby’s health, delaying surgery, putting the parents through an ordeal, and wasting money when this could be solved so easily?

What, exactly, are the bureaucrats so worried about — that every parent might start to ask for unvaccinated blood?

Parents refuse vaccinated blood for baby’s lifesaving heart surgery

News.com.au

The parents of a four-month-old are in court after refusing to allow vaccinated blood to be used in their baby’s lifesaving surgery.

The parents’ lawyer, Sue Grey, said the case was unusual and different from other medical guardianship cases where parents are refusing medical care. For this one, she said, the parents want better care than what the state is offering.

There was no legal or other reason why Te Whatu Ora [Health New Zealand] is refusing to consider the parents’ proposal as a solution, Ms Grey said.

The New Zealand Heart Foundation described stenosis as when one of the heart’s valves didn’t open properly, meaning pressure and blood could back up and cause strain on the heart.

It’s about as totalitarian as it gets — give us your children:

The New Zealand Herald understands Te Whatu Ora is seeking the guardianship of the four-month-old be shifted from his parents to the courts so consent to use donated blood in the required open-heart surgery can be given.

Protestors are gathering in support

About 100 people gathered in support of the baby’s parents outside the front of the court’s entrance, holding placards and loudhailers. Some recorded the ongoing scenes on their devices.

NZ Blood Service says there’s no problem:

The website confirmed any Covid-19 vaccine was “broken down” in the blood soon after injection and would not be transferred to recipients of donations.

“All donated blood also gets filtered during processing, so any trace amounts that may still be present poses no risk to recipients,” it said.

But a paper from 11 months ago shows that the mRNA vaccines produce large amounts of Spike protein and for at least two months. It would be extremely costly to remove this from donated blood, but fairly cheap to get blood from an unvaccinated person.

More info: Freedom to choose clean blood

h/t to Dr Paul Oosterhuis who says: “Informed consent … doctors and blood banks have forgotten their duty.”

REFERENCES

Röltgen et al (2022) Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination Cell. Published:January 24, 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.01.018

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Wednesday Open Thread

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It’s War: Apple moves against Twitter, helps CCP, so Musk vows to air skeletons and maybe move into smartphones

By Jo Nova

The cannons are all swinging around to point at Elon Musk. The former darling of the left is holding Kryptonite — today he recklessly encouraged people of different political views to engage in civil debate. He also promised to drop “The Twitter Files” soon, showing exactly how Twitter suppressed free speech, saying “The public deserves to know what happened”.

Twitter, after all, may have affected the 2020 US election by protecting Hunter Biden and the FBI. It also may have protected Big Pharma by suppressing bad news on vaccines and good news on cheap antivirals. There is a body count in this free speech debate… and Elon Musk recognises the gravity of the situation.

This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.

In reply to this dangerous free speech concept new signups at Twitter are at an all time high, but Apple  has withdrawn advertising on Twitter. To which Elon Musk asks “Do they hate free speech in America?” And apparently they do, because they are also now threatened to withhold Twitter from their App Store and they’re not even trying to explain why.

Apple similarly deplatformed Parler from its App store in Jan 2021. Twitter had banned the President of the US and Parler was taking off as the alternative. It threatened to take 80 million Trump fans off Twitter. This was so unthinkable, the thought of Trump and the deplorables having a venue to speak at, that Google deplatformed Parler too. It’s like a information cartel isn’t it?

Indeed 50 other companies  also apparently hate free speech and have withdrawn advertising from Twitter now that Elon Musk owns it. This includes Chevrolet, Ford, Jeep, Kraft, Coke, Nestle and Kelloggs. What is it these companies want to achieve that is more important than reaching new customers?

In return Musk said he could always make a new smartphone to sell…

Elon Musk To Build “Alternative Phone” If Apple And Google Boot Twitter From App Stores

Musk responded to conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, who tweeted: “If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone. Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?”

“I certainly hope it does not come to that,” Musk told Wheeler, “but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone.”

Ron de Santis weighed in, warning that Apple looks like a vassal of the CCP

Apparently there are reports that Apple is stopping Chinese protestors from communicating with the iPhone air drop.  De Santis argues that Apple is providing aid and comfort to the CCP. And he thinks it is serious enough that if Apple bans Twitter, congress should respond.

The all-in war on Elon Musk shows us what the Tech Giants fear the most. Not only will free speech on Twitter expose their own skeletons and destroy their sacred cows, but worse, he threatens to steal their power base and end their political protection racket.

 

h/t David Maddison and OldOzzie.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Climate change apparently makes floods less severe

The Murray River was far higher in the 1970 floods and worse still in 1956 when CO2 was just 314ppm. Obviously, if all current floods are “caused by CO2”, we need more of it.*

A photo of flood markers on a tree in South Australia has sparked a debate on Facebook. The only things we know for sure — floods were worse when CO2 was perfect, and censorship of banal truths is the only way to stop the climate change rort unravelling.

Picture of tree at centre of furious flood debate

News.com.au

A picture of a tree in regional South Australia has sparked a wild climate change debate.As floodwaters from the River Murray crept up the Loxton’s Tree of Knowledge, one local thought it was a good time to take a picture to put things into perspective.

Tree of Knowledge, Loxton, SA, Australian floods. 2022

The updated flood markings of The Tree of Knowledge, SA, Nov 30th, 2022. Click to enlarge

UPDATED: Dec 2, 2022. Previous photo Nov 28th. See future updates on flood levels (weekly) here. Thanks to Craig Thomas.

The depth of the scientific response:

“Using one tree as evidence to suit your agenda shows what level of intelligence we are dealing with,” one said.

“There are many factors why areas have worse flooding. There is no denying though, with mass land clearing as one factor, flooding will only get worse under extreme climate events such as La Nina,” he continued.

History speaks on the Land of Droughts and Flooding Rains:

Flooding, Australia, 1956, photo. Murray River.

Main street of Mannum under 2.4m to 3m of water in 1956.

As many as 4,000 homes may be inundated as flood waters rise, and our thoughts are with them.  Because the Murray River drains a basin that covers one million square kilometers, the waters are flowing from up to two thousand kilometers away. The peak may not happen til later near Christmas.

*Using Tim Flannery reasoning.

h/t Richard C NZ and David

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Monday Open Thread

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Sunday Open Thread

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Saturday Open Thread

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