A new Covid wave is upon us, but the endless vaccine rush is over. The dog isn’t barking. As of last week, almost no one in Australia is eligible for the fifth dose. Even the old and vulnerable are not being told to get another dose. This is the end of two years of non-stop push. “Access to antivirals is more important” say the experts for the first time, and it appears people practically need to be a transplant patient or on chemo to be able to get jab number five.
The Department of Health says fifth doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are not currently being recommended for most people.
Health authorities have warned a new wave of COVID-19 is beginning to make its way through the community and currently, only adults with a severely compromised immune system are eligible for a fifth dose.
So they’re finally catching up with what the deplorable bloggers like I have been saying since March 2020,antivirals were always less risky, easier to test, and cheaper to make. Though, of course, our government health bodies are still profit machines for large pharmaceutical corporations. They’re not promoting the cheapest, safest antivirals — only the Big-Pharma-friendly kind that are still under patents, and which siphon vast funds from our taxpayer pharmaceutical scheme.
They are effectively saying that the boosters are useless, or even worse than useless, without having the honesty to say so.
But Professor Allen Cheng, former co-chair and current member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), told The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday that it was likely the current vaccine schedule would remain as is, given the heightened risk of heart inflammation in young people.
“A 30-year-old with … three doses will be optimally protected.”
He added, “Vaccinations are beneficial and protective even for younger people but the more doses you get, the less benefit you derive from them and then we start to worry about causing side effects.”
It’s a weasel grade Psy-Op
Everything about the PR language is packaged with a dose of literary Valium.
The mantra lines are all the same, they’ve just swapped the word vaccine for antiviral. Now we’re bragging that “Australians have one of the best antiviral uptakes in the world”. (As if the hapless punters in the streets have much say in their prescriptions, were racing to get there, and even knew there was a race?). Are we proud of our druggieness now, or our obedience?
At no point do they say ATAGI have decided the fourth dose is dangerous to young adults, instead someone who used to work there has conveniently leaked out that the “under 30s are unlikely to get approval”. It’s as if the under thirties are champing at the bit to get more doses and ATAGI is just being restrained and sensible, eh?
The mantras of the last two years are still there:
“At the moment ATAGI’s firm statement remains that people should remain up to date with their vaccination.
“And based on the advice we have an older person who has stayed up to date and has had the fourth dose still has great protection against severe disease.
And vaccinees have such great protection, that they apparently need antivirals too…
High uptake in antivirals important, says health secretary
Health Department secretary Professor Brendan Murphy said access to antivirals for the elderly is likely more important than getting a fifth vaccine dose.
“We are seeing a very significant uptake now that this wave’s started in antiviral use,” he said.
“If you’ve had four doses and you’re an old person who is vulnerable, it is probably a more important thing to get access to antivirals than to consider another dose for which the evidence is not very strong.
“We have one of the best antiviral uptakes in the world.
“It’s one of the best markers we have of the pandemic, once cases go up antiviral use goes up.”
And the illusion of our personal control of our health continues. Talk of an “uptake” of antivirals implies the minions have a say over their own healthcare when they still can’t go to their doctor and ask for the treatments they want, and they were never allowed to buy an Australian designed less risky protein vaccine.
If only the US could afford to use paper and pens instead of machines, it would all have been finished. Welcome to Dystopia-World, where the real battle is the struggle to get legal votes counted in the richest nation on Earth. The Arizona slow-roll debacle should have the people in the streets…
Meanwhile, the Democrats don’t want to face Donald Trump again, but they are not the only ones. “The list of people lining up against Trump right now is simply an indicator of how large of a threat he remains to the globalist elite.” says Jenna Ellis.
Steven Mosher makes the case that it’s not Trump but the McLeadership of the Republicans who are to blame for any midterm results. Most of the Senate and House Republican campaigns were not run by Trump, but by the McLeaders — Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Ronna Romney McDaniel
Speaking of McConnell, there are shipping-lanes of connections between Mitch McConnell and China. Just in case anyone has forgotten what a deep swamp the core of US politics is, ponder that there is also one foreign communist government that would be especially happy if Trump doesn’t run in 2024. How much influence does it have over media moguls, tech giants and Mitch McConnell?
As the former president himself noted, smiling broadly, “I deserve full credit for every win, and no blame for any loss.” The mainstream media mocked him for saying this, but it is in fact true. Consider all the ways in which President Trump helped over the past 18 months to get Republican candidates over the finish line:
Endorsed over 330 candidates this election cycle.
Hosted 30 rallies across 17 states.
Hosted 50 in-person fundraisers in support of candidates up for re-election.
Raised nearly $350 million this election cycle for Republican candidates and Party Committees.
Spent $16.4 million from his Make America Great Again PAC over the past month in support of Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, and Adam Laxalt in Nevada.
That was what Trump did. This is what the McLeaders did:
Republican senatorial candidates in battleground states were often outspent five- or 10-to-1 by their Democrat opponents this election cycle. The disparities are staggering:
New Hampshire: Republican Don Bolduc $2m versus Democrat Hassan $36m
Arizona: Republican Blake Masters $9m versus Democrat Kelly $73m
Georgia: Republican Herschel Walker $32m versus Democrat Warnock $76m
Nevada: Republican Paul Laxalt 12m versus Democrat Cortes $47m
A bit like sabotage…
But McConnell has not only failed to support Republican candidates in key Senate races, he has actively worked against them. The clearest evidence of betrayal comes from Alaska, where the local Republican Party in 2021 censured Senator Lisa Murkowski and instead endorsed Kelly Tsibaka as their candidate.
But it gets worse. In the closing months of the campaign, McConnell took money previously committed to the campaigns of Masters and Bolduc and sent some to his hand-picked Senate candidate in Colorado, Joe O’Dea. That is to say, he sacrificed two MAGA candidates in close races to a self-declared Anti-Trump Republican Establishment candidate who had no chance of winning.
Democrats prefer to face DeSantis rather than Trump in 2024
Ron was, far and away, the best funded of the Republican candidates. He raised some $200 million, with almost all coming in the form of large donations from the Republican establishment and Wall Street, far more than he needed for the governor’s race. He was further helped by the fact that the Democrats pulled a “McConnell” in the months before the election, pulling out their funding and effectively bankrupting the campaigns of their own candidates for governor and senator.
With its virtual celebration of DeSantis’ victory, the Left has made clear that it would much rather face DeSantis in 2024 than Donald Trump. The left-wing propaganda outfit formerly known as The New York Times, for example, has declared that the Florida governor is now the front-runner in 2024.
All this below about Mitch McConnell’s connection to China is legal, publicly available information, but that in itself, shocked me more than the naked potential conflict of interest did. I wrote this in Jan 5th 2021 — just the day before the armless “insurrection” on Capitol Hill, a credit to Peter Schweizer’s research. If McConnell wasn’t liked by the media, every time he talked about Trump or China they would introduce him as the Senator who married into a Chinese Shipping Magnates family…
Mitch McConnell is a powerbroker of the US Senate, but he’s also a guy whose in-laws own a major shipping company that buys container ships from a Chinese Government company. The in-laws make money from carrying goods back and forward in deals with Chinese State Owned companies.
McConnell’s wife is a Chinese-American and also happens to be The Transportation Secretary of the US Government (or was when this was written!). Since Elaine Chao took up that job four years earlier, her fathers company has expanded rapidly and has added 40 percent more ships. Her father, James Chao, is a shipping magnate that gave his daughter and her husband McConnell a gift of at least $5 million in 2008. That’s the conservative estimate — it might have been worth as much as $25 million dollars. (Nice in-laws if you can get them.) The largess was legally disclosed. The net worth of the political couple went from $3m in 2004 to something between $9 and $36m by 2018.
The Chinese Ship building company is called CSSC Holdings. McConnell’s wife’s family is so close to it that both her father and her sister sit on the Board of the financial arm of this Chinese company they buy boats from. It’s odd, stacked on weird, wrapped up in long explanations. CSSC is not just a boat building company, it’s the Chinese government’s military contractor. Indeed, the letters CSSC stand for the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Get it?
In another odd coincidence, just ten days after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Elaine Chao’s sister Angela was appointed to another board of Directors — the Communist Chinese government’s Bank of China.
McConnells wife Elaine Chao and her father-the-shipping-magnate are lauded in China and do interviews on Chinese TV in Chinese. They are promoted as “lifting the status of Asian-Americans in America” often with little Dept of Transport flags in the background. This probably doesn’t do any harm to James Chao’s business.
Perhaps the oddest thing of all is that all this information came out in 2018. That’s when Peter Schweizer’s best selling book was published and the news was shared in Politico the Wall St Journal, and Breitbart among other places. Yet, Mitch McConnell is still the man elected …
Worth watching: Raheem Kassam talks to Jenna Ellis
Kassam is editor of the National Pulse, worked within UKIP, and was adviser to Nigel Farage. Jenna Ellis was on Trump’s legal team. They talk about the Trump versus DeSantis stoush and the dark role of the media.
Ezra Levant –@ezralevant
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The election was two days ago. But Arizona has only counted 70% of its votes. I’m sure everything’s above board. I also believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, carbon taxes can change the weather and the fifth Pfizer shot is the best Pfizer shot.
Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.
The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.
By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express
Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).
In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.
Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)
To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that are paid to do nothing are allowed to turn around and sell their electricity to a third party down a private line if they have a buyer, thus earning payments twice for the same electricity. And by golly, if someone happened to put a big battery on a private line to soak up that electricity, the public will pay for the wind farm to charge the battery, and then they’ll pay for the electricity from the battery back to the grid later. And these are batteries that the grid wouldn’t need at all, if it weren’t for the unreliable generators. So the first payment is for electricity they can’t use, and the second is for electricity they didn’t need.
Even as energy bills soar to unaffordable levels, and the UK faces the threat of blackouts this winter, the country has been effectively wasting millions of pounds worth of electricity every day, Express.co.uk was told. Over the past year, Britain has been gripped by a major fossil fuel energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent wholesale gas prices to record levels. While the Government is looking to tackle this crisis with a major investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, experts warned of a critical lack of battery storage facilities, which means that much of the cheap, green electricity that can be used to power British homes, is being wasted.
Speaking to Express.co.uk, Andy Willis, the CEO of Kona Energy, warned that the UK has been spending millions of pounds a day to ask wind farms to stop generating electricity.
He said: “Over the last couple of years, [the amount spent] has been about £1billion pounds a year, and that is worth caveating by saying quite a complicated calculation. It’s not just the cost of paying wind farms to turn off, but it’s also the cost of paying the gas-fired power station to turn on somewhere.”
It’s just subsidies piled on legal loopholes all the way down
Andrew Montford couldn’t figure out how Moray East wind farm was earning money, and why investors had built it in the first place. Their costs appear to be somewhere north of £125 per megawatt hour and a constraint payment is only worth £60. Then he realized that they could receive “constraint payments” (for switching off during an oversupply) but turn around and legally sell the same power off grid.
How were Moray East’s developers hoping to make up the difference? The income had to come from somewhere. The revenue stream from selling power to customers appeared not to be the answer. Customers look after themselves. But the amount of time Moray East is spending switched off got me thinking. The windfarm developers must have known that they would be constrained off a lot – they exhaustively analyse wind speeds, turbine design and the capacity of the grid to take their power. They must also know that the rate of payment for being constrained off was not that high. I started to suspect that they had found a way to get game the system to their advantage.
Montford tracks through planning documents and maps and figures out that there are plans for batteries nearby, and there is already a giant flywheel which mysteriously declares that it gets “some” electricity from the grid — meaning it must get the rest of its electricity from an alternate unknown source.
So we know that electricity is finding its way direct from the windfarm to industrial users without touching the transmission grid. However, this observation comes with a caveat. We don’t know for sure that these are megawatt hours of electricity for which the windfarms have received constraint payments. But we do know that it would be completely within the rules for them to do so (there is no suggestion of lawbreaking), and that it would be highly profitable too.
And if wind farm investors could legally do this, we have to ask, why wouldn’t they?
Thus the renewables grid is Communist-electricity by stealth — by definition the unreliable generators can’t afford to run in a free market, so the government subsidizes them. Then they rattle the rest of the system, and impose all kinds of costs and burdens, and the government has to subsidize the rest of the sector to make it worth their while to stick around — so they can earn the same amount for producing less, and pretty soon you’ve got the Soviet Union of Electricity.
The core baseload of the European grid is in trouble, and there is no back up. If the rest of Europe had enough coal or nuclear power, this wouldn’t be so bad, but they were all too worried about heatwaves in 2100 they forgot…
Half the French Nuclear Fleet will not be back in time for winter and there is no other nation that fill the gap. | Photo by Spiritrespect.
This is bad news for Europe. Half of France’s nuclear power fleet were already out of action and EDF was hoping to bring “all of them” back online for winter. But they’ve just announced that at least four plants they planned to restart will suffer a major delay. France’s electricity prices have hit €1,000 per MWh for January delivery. (Which is a blockbuster $1,500 AUD).
To make matters worse, a week ago, a pipe ruptured during a safety test at the Civaux plant. This is the same plant where corroded welds were discovered in August last year, but this is “absolutely not a weld that gave way” this time, which sounds ominous. When they shut Civaux down last year, they also shut down another 12 reactors built to the same design — which paradoxically are the newest reactors in the nuclear fleet and only about 20 years old. Such is the urgency, that currently 500 specialist welders are working on these plants, about 100 of those have come from the US and Canada.
On Thursday night, EDF announced what many had anticipated and feared: lower-than-expected nuclear output in 2022. It told the power market that four reactors expected to come back into service between the middle of this month and early December will be out of commission until the end of January — at least. Several of them won’t restart until the end of February. The electricity shortfall is huge. Currently, French nuclear plants produce less than 30 gigawatts, compared with a 10-year average of nearly 45 GW.
In mid-winter, usually EDF can produce 55-60GW of power, but this winter it may be only 40GW.
Dr Paul Dorfman, an associate fellow from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex told Express.co.uk: “Despite the friendly rhetoric between Sunak and Macron, trying to keep the lights on in Paris, while coping with the broken French nuclear fleet, will take precedence over power supply to the UK – and will mean UK blackouts are much more likely.”
“The implications are enormous,” [Energy analyst Gerard Reid] noted. “For every 1 degree drop in temperature France needs one extra nuclear power station to provide the power needed to provide heat across the country.
What this means is that on a cold January day France needs circa 45GW of nuclear energy. Yesterday there was only 25GW online.”
Nothing says “believe us” like doing all the things they say we must give up. They fly in private jets, eat steak and drink from plastic water bottles. Obviously, if they really thought CO2 was planetary poison, they wouldn’t be acting this way. Unless, of course, they are narcissistic overlords who believe CO2 is bad, but that the rules don’t apply the them. There is that…
If you are saving the world it’s fine to ship that salmon in from the Atlantic:
Beef medallion with mushrooms sauce, chicken breast with orange gravy, and salmon with creamy sauce and chives are some of the menu options that world leaders, diplomats, bureaucrats, and industry bigwigs will be chomping down on at the COP27 meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt this week.
Scottish author and political commentator Neil Oliver said: “They’ve come to lecture us about eating less meat while they sit down to menus featuring beef, chicken, salmon, and sea bass and cream sauces. This is not leadership that we are seeing now, it’s desperation, it’s trolling us proles on a galactic scale.
“The policies that they are preaching are condemning hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest to poverty, starvation, death on a global scale and at the same time, in their cynicism, they are ensuring that the populations of their own countries are plunged into fuel and food poverty for the first time in generations.”
Apparently, there were a few genuine vegan and animal activists who spoke out about how bad this was. Good for them. But the UN fan-club was probably too busy enjoying an hour and a half of bottomless cocktails for £110 each.
PS: But Angus Beef and mushrooms at $100? We Australians live like kings.
Even in 1983, the media was just an unwitting wing of Government Agencies
Edward Snowden went looking for videos of former CIA employees that the CIA “sued into silence“. He foundwhat the CIA wanted to hide. Here, CIA officer Frank Snepp describing just how easy it was to get journalists to write exactly the stories they hoped they would write.
All those problems we see in the media today were already well developed 40 years ago. Real journalism is really rare.
On a website for people with a four-second attention span, that’s a lot of folks who stopped to watch a four-minute video from forty year years ago. Real numbers. https://t.co/shyAKE8SJt
The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets.
Once an agency becomes good at lying “for the sake of the nation” or to “win the war” it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to lying to the nation to save the nation from itself.
Full 16 minute version below: Frank Snepp discusses his dilemma with the morality of what he did — “propagandizing the American public” — from 8 mins.
Snepp wrote a book, which is when the CIA sued him. In the court case The Supreme Court set an extraordinary precedent curtailing the free speech of public servants — deciding that every public worker in any public office has an obligation to report to the government what they are planning to write and must get approval before publishing it, even if they are not revealing secrets. It’s a life long gag order, even if they signed no secrecy order.
Voting is open, so presumably, is cheating, which will win?
Betting markets are predicting a Red Wave, but the richest nation in the world can’t afford to use paper ballots, check ID, and can’t count the votes on election night anymore.
Bookies gave Trump roughly 75% odds of a second term, and on PredictIt Trump’s odds of victory peaked at above eighty percent.
In a never-before-seen development in American politics, counting in key states went on for days on end. Over the course of those extra days, Trump’s leads in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shrank and then vanished. Legal efforts to block what was unfolding and contest certain questionable ballots went nowhere, and on January 20, it was Joe Biden who took the oath of office.
Things were so bad, 18 States of the US asked the Supreme Court to investigate blatant corruption in 4 other states and the Supreme Court’s only response was to say, improbably, “they had no standing”, as if cheating in some states that changes the US Government could somehow not affect the other states. Remember, if those four states didn’t cheat, the US Supreme Court could have taken that case and showed the election was free and fair, thus healing the rift, supporting the President and helping the Democrats.
Consider Pennsylvania, with its crucial Senate contest between Mehmet Oz and The Creature Who Answers to the Name John Fetterman. Two years ago, Pennsylvania’s election process probably featured more red flags than any other closely contested state. The state took a whole week to count its votes, with Biden only overtaking Trump’s large election-night lead on Friday morning. Pennsylvania let votes count even if they arrived after Election Day, even if they had no postmark, and even if they didn’t have a matching signature. Twenty Pennsylvania counties used millions of dollars donated by Mark Zuckerberg to finance their election activities, including the famous unsupervised “Zuckerboxes,” which made it virtually impossible to enforce the state’s relatively strict limits on ballot harvesting. When Trump supporters tried to independently monitor drop boxes, state attorney general Josh Shapiro (now running for governor) threatened them with prosecution.
So, what are things like two years later? Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature passed bills to ensure signature verification and photo ID, and to ensure proper poll-watching… but Democratic governor Tom Wolf vetoedthose bills. So in Pennsylvania this cycle, things are substantially like they were two years ago. And, yep, the state is even warning that it’s going to take a long time to count ballots again.
In a throwback to 2020, ABC News reports that a “red mirage” could make it look like Republicans are winning big on the night, but that a full vote count could take “weeks.”
The piece explains how Republicans may “appear to be leading their Democratic opponents, even by large margins” in federal and statewide races, but that their leads “will dwindle, or crumble completely” after “dumps” of mail-in and absentee ballots are counted after election day, which could take “weeks”.
For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.
“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”
There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.
Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.
The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.
Manufacturers such as Vestas Wind Systems A/S are seeing losses pile up as orders collapse at a time when they should be capitalizing on the turmoil in natural-gas markets. To blame — at least in part — is the industry’s insistence that clean electricity can only get cheaper, according to Henrik Andersen, chief executive officer of the Danish wind giant.
“It made some people make the wrong assumption that energy and electricity should become free,” Andersen said in an interview in London. “We created the perception to some extent. So we are to blame for it. That was a mistake.”
How pathetic the truth is — that it takes a war to pump up fossil fuel prices to the point where “wind is competitive”:
To be sure, wind power remains competitive with other energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up prices for fossil fuels. But government auctions for new wind farms put pressure on companies to keep prices low, while costly and lengthy processes to gain planning permission continue to inhibit growth.
Shucks. The industry that lives off Big Government suffers some red tape. Cry me a river. The same corrupt bureaucracy that created the wind industry in the first place will mismanage them right off to China.
By Jo Nova Like a conglomerate witch-doctor cum pagan-preacher the only thing Al Gore recycles is the overproof grade hellfire of centuries past. Chieftain Al will stop the storms if only everyone will do as he says and invest in his climate asset fund. For he cometh armed with windmills that stop rain-bombs and solar panels that hold back the sea.
Like medieval Occult leaders, superstitious rain dancers, and healers with magical cures, the modern witchdoctors have satellites and simulations, but run on the same old formula since time began. Fear, smear, demons, and magic. All prophesies are ambiguous. Nothing he sayth can be falsified.
Coal, apparently, is not just a source of emissions, but a veritable “culture of death.” Despite the era of coal being a time of record crop yields, bountiful food, travel, and exponential world population growth. Despite the working class of today being richer than the kings of centuries past.
One day, he promises, after he is safely dead, all weather will be good weather, and only the perfect amount of rain will fall, and ski seasons will start and end on the same day each year. Trust me, he says.
Damian Carrington, at The Guardian, swallows the whole prospectus:
The former US vice-president Al Gore is on fist-waving, passionate form in front of world leaders at Cop27. “We continue to use the thin blue atmosphere as an open sewer,” he says. “It is getting steadily worse. We have a credibility problem – all of us – we are not doing enough.”
Gore says we can continue the “culture of death” by continuing to dig up fossil fuels, and cites vast floods in Pakistan, heatwaves and “rain bombs” in China, and a million displaced in Nigeria.
And the valley of death will spread, and 1 billion immigrants will move into your home. (And you thought the southern US border crisis was bad?)
“The current areas of the world considered uninhabitable by doctors are small today but due to expand,” he says, with 1 billion migrants potentially crossing international borders this century, with all the colossal difficulties that would bring. If we stop subsidizing the culture of death and back renewable energy instead we can survive, Gore says, and no new fossil fuel projects are acceptable.
Here me O’ Minions — take this essence of arsenic, I mean lithium, and it shall cure your poverty:
Instead, Gore says, “Africa can be a renewable energy superpower”. He says 40% of world potential is in Africa.
Sure, Africa can be a renewable energy superpower, just like nowhere on Earth is. Europe can’t manage it, but Chad will show the way.
Of course, those who question their Occult Leader are racist pigs:
He says the dash for gas in Africa, a contentious issue at COP27, is a new form of colonisation, with the fuel to be sent to rich nations. He quotes the late archbishop Desmond Tutu as saying climate change is the apartheid of our time.
Somehow drilling gas in Africa for Europe is “colonisation” but using African children to mine cobalt for our batteries is the work of saints. Often the same saints want to segregate nations according to skin color. When did Al Gore say “All Lives Matter?” I can’t recall…
Toss in an attempt at being a Concern-Troll:
[Gore] also warns about stranded assets of billions, especially in Africa, if climate action closes oil and gas plants early.
Shucks. The last thing Al Gore wants is Africans to be lifted out of energy poverty.
So much better to keep casting those spells and doing rain dances. Africans are just his stage props.
NEW YORK — Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City.
These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.
In early August, a 27-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, identified as Rafael Elias Lopez-Centeno, died after his lithium ion battery caught fire and ripped through the Bronx apartment where he was staying. Carmen Tiburcio, a neighbor, said Lopez’s aunt told her he had tried to escape through the front door, but the bike was in the way. Instead, he took refuge in the bathroom, where he tried to fill up the bathtub with water to protect himself from the flames. But the smoke got to him, she said.
Isn’t it time we talked about the risks of lithium batteries?
Well that was lucky. Early reports suggest the Chinese space junk from the launch four days ago has crashed in the Pacific 1,000 km short of Mexico. However, if I am reading those maps (below) correctly, on this uncontrolled reentry it only missed Australia and New Zealand by half an hour, and just a few minutes later and it would have “landed” somewhere in Mexico or maybe Florida. (Now that would have been a November surprise).
Despite what China says, this is not what the rest of the world does:
It was China’s latest round of celestial roulette involving a deliberate uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry. The rocket stage, by design, did not include a system to guide it into a specific spot on Earth, far away from people.
“The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that performs research and analysis, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “We haven’t done that for 50 years.”
There’s a callous attitude of disregard here in these excuses:
However, Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, on Friday rejected the notion that China’s handling of the Long March 5B rockets represented anything unusual. “I would like to stress that China has always carried out activities in the peaceful use of outer space in accordance with international law and international practice — re-entry of the last stage of a rocket is an international practice,” he said.
Mr. Zhao added that the Long March 5B had been designed to pose less danger upon re-entry. The rocket “is designed with special technology; most of the components will burn up and be destroyed during the re-entry…
It broke no laws because there are no international laws on reentry. This is not “international practice”, and if it had crashed in a populated area, it would have killed people.
Other rockets are designed with measures in place to ensure their core stages are steered into the ocean after launch, while others like SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, are designed to come down in one piece and be reused. China’s most powerful rocket has no such measures in place.
Unfortunately, there are no international agreements in place to prevent these incidents from occurring again in the future, said Marlon Sorge, Executive Director for The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies during a media briefing on Wednesday (Nov. 2). “And the reality is there aren’t any real laws, treaties, internationally that govern what you’re allowed to do in terms of reentry,” Sorge said
China, like always refuses to take responsibility for its falling rocket, instead claiming that it will burn up on re-entry. However, on three separate occasions, metal from their rockets has made impact on the Earth. Once, they managed to damage an entire village.
On the three previous launches by the Chinese space agency where they have used a similarrocket, back in 2020, 2021, and 2022, large chunks of debris damaged villages in the Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, fell into the Indian Ocean, and landed near villages in Borneo, respectively. Fortunately, no one has yet been injured by this falling debris.
According to Alex on twitter, “The Chinese #CZ5B rocket flew over Catalonia a while ago at a height of 148 km and a speed of more than 28,000 km/h.” Which makes it 140 km above most planes. Still, at some point, 23 ton objects moving at Mach 22 through your airspace will surely be breaking some laws.
Judging by reports, it went over northern Spain, past the UAE, over Western Australia and New Zealand and then crashed 1000 km short of Mexico.
Note the tick marks on the path show how far this travels in five minutes. It was a 35 minute flight from Spain to Australia. (I wish I’d known to look out the window as it went past Perth).
China does not know how to play diplomat, and is not even trying. It is treating the world like a trash can. Careless with rockets. Careless with viruses.
How much more would it have cost to add in the last stage small burner to control that reentry?
Apparently China will try this again next year.
UPDATE: For those who believe CCP promises that the craft will burn up, here is past debris.
Shoo 👀 A cropland in Gansu got struck by a large chunk of Long March 2D Y72 debris Twitter
Rocket debris believed to be from China’s Long March 5B (CZ-5B) booster rocket were found by fishermen near the Mindoro Strait, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) confirmed. (Photo courtesy of PCG Station Mamburao)
UPDATE #2:
MV wisely points out these are not blackened. Apparently they are likely space trash from “suborbital” parts early after the launch. They don’t show whether a 23 ton stage would burn up but they do show that the CCP treats the world like its trash can.
But other parts appear to have crashed on land in 2020, showing that the CCP are not being honest when they claim their reentries burn up:
“For a large object like this, dense pieces like parts of the rocket engines could survive reentry and crash to Earth,” McDowell told CNN. “Once they reach the lower atmosphere they are traveling relatively slowly, so worst case is they could take out a house.” ““I conclude that the objects seen in Mahounou, and at least some of the other objects from the Cote d’Ivore region whose photos are being circulated in African media, are very likely parts of the Chinese rocket stage,” McDowell wrote on Twitter.”
It was an 18 ton stage, and there was seismic evidence supporting debris hitting the ground too.
Lo behold, I give you the sign of doom. Bioluminescent jellyfish have traveled from the Pacific to the UK to warn of climate change.
We know this because citizen scientists have been tracking jellyfish for at least 20 years of the Holocene, if not the other 12,000 years, and they noticed things have not stayed exactly the same.
We don’t understand the underlying ocean gyrations, currents, jellyfish biology, or long term cycles of anything, but the team collected 1,315 sightings in the last year, which is a big number. Lordy, in waters surrounding 66 million people, it amounts to them counting three or four jellyfish a day.
Based on this we’d like your wallet, your pension fund, and the deeds to the houses your children haven’t bought yet.
Britain’s seas are becoming populated with large groups of unusual jellyfish owing to climate breakdown…
Between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022, there were a total of 1,315 jellyfish sightings reported to the MCS.
Eight jellyfish species are normally seen around the UK and Ireland but this year 11 were spotted, with more uncommon visitors now visiting these waters
Bioluminescent crystal jellyfish made up 3% of total sightings: these animals are nearly completely transparent, but give off an amazing green-blue light under certain circumstances because of the fluorescent protein produced by their bodies. They are usually found in the Pacific Ocean and rarely visit UK waters.
The doom in this story is the state of science journalism. The Guardian churns out pagan whimsy and astrological prophesy on a daily basis, and calls it science — yet no publicly funded academic scientist has the guts to call this out. We are regressing to an era of tea-leaf reading, and scientists are preying upon the vulnerable and untrained.
No wonder the public thinks that “climate change is already here”.
Did you notice the segue?
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