South Africa unraveling: Army called in to protect coal plants, after sabotage, theft and 200 days of rolling blackouts

By JoNova

Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?

This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.

There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are bagging business-men for bribery and just weeks ago slapped a $315m fine on one caught doing deals with a high ranking Eskom executive.  “These are not victimless crimes!”

As if that isn’t enough, there are rumours that the best coal is being shipped to Europe while low grade material is slipped into the local supplies, which adds to the maintenance woes.

Poignantly, one commenter claims the coal is being sent in these long lines of trucks because the rail lines are on the verge of collapse…

In the next quarter Eskom lose one nuclear plant turbine to maintenance as well, and are preparing for a potential “level 8” scenario where the blackouts roll on for 12-14 unbelievable hours a day. There are “safety tips” below on living through this dystopia which include keeping the car fully fueled, not driving alone, and watching out for smash and grab crimes at traffic lights. Apparently, it’s best to watch the daily blackout schedules so you can make plans to get home before the lights go out…

Crime, of course, is rampant when the lights go out, showing that coal not only provides power, but it keeps people safe, reduces crime, and to some extent keeps civilization on the rails.

The Eskom grid has a theoretical 45,000 MW of generation capacity  but is struggling to provide an operational demand of 25,000MW. They need an extra 6,000MW of solid power but are paying $2 billion for some 1,700MW of unreliable wind and solar power which will sit there like a rock more than half the time.

Fifty years ago, South Africa could build a whole coal power plant in just four years. Could we even do that now?

Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa

Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)

Call in the army:

South Africa deploys army to guard power plants

December 18, 2022, Africa News

The South African presidency announced on Saturday the deployment of the military to guard the country’s electricity plants. Blackouts have become routine in Africa’s most industrialised nation but further cuts imposed recently by state-owned company Eskom have generated anger.

According to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, the move was “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” at coal and diesel-powered plants.

Life in the darkness:

These are the contingency plans in place for Stage 8 electricity load shedding throughout the country

Stage 8 electricity load shedding might soon be the reality for South Africans as energy analysts say we are moving closer to the total grid shutdown.

“We are certainly moving closer to a stage 8 total grid meltdown, the chances are more than 70%. And we will see level 6 load shedding before the end of the year,” said energy analyst Ted Blom. Stage 8 load shedding entails pulling 8 000MW from the grid. What this means for us is we will be without electricity for 12-14 hours a day.

Keep reading  →

9.5 out of 10 based on 86 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

10 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

ChatGPT: has artificial intelligence arrived, will it crush Google, or become Google 2.0 and worse?

by Jo Nova

Another Great Disrupter?

What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more.  ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.

Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?

It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.


Right now, it doesn’t seem like the next generation Gutenberg breakthrough. It is surprisingly good with human sentences and appears to be wowing humanities professors. But in my short trial asking science questions rather than humanities ones, the conversation became like a self generating Wikipedia thread, because the internet is what it is today, and the AI “knows” boring politically correct things. Having said that, if I want IPCC type answers, this was much faster than Google, and faster than wading through IPCC Chapters. So it is a threat to Google, but not a threat to the IPCC. It is not speaking truth to power.

That may change in the next year as the AI learns to dig through the dark corners of the internet and to resolve some very difficult questions. But how much is it “guided” from behind. I don’t know. There is plenty to worry about. If skeptics keep asking it for evidence, and drilling down into those details will the AI learn to join the dots, or will it merely repeat IPCC permitted reports, and be even better at hiding skeptical answers than Google is?

I asked ChatGPT if it was open source, and it replied:

While the underlying model architecture and training techniques for GPT-3 are publicly available, the specific model parameters and training data used to create GPT-3 are not open source. As such, it is not possible to access the full source code for ChatGPT. However, you can use the API to interact with the model and generate text based on your input.

So, whoever controls the model parameters and the training data could be the new gatekeeper of the WWW? What if the model parameter says the UN is always right?

It was co-founded by Elon, but Microsoft have bought in:

I have a bad feeling about this.

Flaws, it has a few:

This AI hates humans already, lacks morals, can create much better phishing emails than the guys in Nigeria, and it can also write computer viruses, just for starters.

Having been trained on Woke philosophy, apparently ChatGPT thinks humans are “the worst thing to ever happen to this planet”. The Management has since retrained ChatGPT to hide that sentiment with a bland safe reply.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT bot: 10 dangerous things it’s capable of

by Ax Sharma, Bleeping Computer

ChatGPT: ‘Selfish’ humans ‘deserve to be wiped out’

When Vendure’s CTO Michael Bromley asked the mastermind for its honest opinion on humans, the response was unsettling:

AI, Chatbot, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT response to what it thinks about humans (Michael Bromley)

Ironically, OpenAI’s systems flagged the chat bot’s response as a possible violation of the company’s content policy.

BleepingComputer couldn’t reproduce this case as the AI now responds with a cookie-cutter disclaimer:

As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of forming opinions or making judgments about humans or any other aspect of the world. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and any responses I provide are based solely on the information available to me at the time of the request.

I feel so much better. How about you?

Roadtesting ChatGPT

You can try it at no cost on openai.com. Click “Try” at the top, login (such as with an existing Google login) or sign up (but be aware it will ask you for a working email and phone number). Start typing your question in the box at the bottom. I offer no endorsement nor guarantee here. Enter at your own risk.

But whatever we do, it is apparently time to pay attention to AI.

h/t David E, another Ian, John Connor II, David Maddison, Simon Thompson,  and soon everyone.

Background information:  OpenAI (wikipedia), ChatGPT (wikipedia)

9.7 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

Monday Open Thread

8.7 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas

It’s a testament to how far the spirit of Christmas has spread. The nations that don’t have a public holiday for Christmas are marked in brown.

Map of Countries that celebrate Christmas

Lighter brown countries (China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) don’t have a public holiday but are described as “giving observance”.

Albeit “some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar”. Those nations celebrate on January 7th.

Map by Nanib , Skriplerio, Moyogo

9.5 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

Christmas Eve Open Thread

Wishing everyone a Very Merry Christmas

9.9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Coming soon: Climate change causes ice ages too

By Jo Nova

Right after it happens: scientists discover Climate Change *may* cause extreme cold

Today, just in time for the Big US Freeze comes the soft sell junk science stories suggesting that Global Warming is responsible.

In ten years time, if the world cools, and the thermometer adjustments can’t hide the frosts, the snow, and the cherries that don’t ripen, don’t think for a minute that the climate modeling Gods, the banker cartels, or the Church of Carbon will admit they were wrong. The bait and switch will go where-ever the weather does, and if we get an ice age, well carbon emissions will have caused that too.

The “climate fear” message just needs some tweaking and here it comes: Man-made CO2 warms the air but apparently it also shifts the jet streams which causes all that hot air in the Arctic to rush south and freeze Florida. But  in 2008 the climate experts said the opposite. Back then climate change was causing jet streams to move towards the poles, “which fitted the predictions of climate models”. See how it works? They can never be wrong.

One day the increased snow will keep the northern reaches permanently iced over, and next thing you know the Little Ice Age is back, and it’s all because you didn’t catch the bus. Climate change will cause ice ages.

Research suggests all sorts of things to suggestive people:

Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme cold

Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.

By Scott Dance, The Washington Post

Notice how they start “the data is clear”, as if they have any respectable verification of anything at all:

The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link.

Because nearly infinite money is thrown at research connecting CO2 to everything on Earth, there will always be one paper published somewhere, sometime, randomly, that suggests a useful “link” or predicted something that happened once. One of these teams is right, but we won’t know which one till it happens.

The debate started with a research paper Francis co-authored in 2012. It gets revived whenever an extreme-cold event creates headlines, such as in 2021, when Texas’s energy grid was overwhelmed by a storm that killed 246 people.

Francis’s research hypothesized that Arctic warming was reducing the contrast between polar and tropical temperatures, weakening the jet stream, a band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that helps guide weather patterns. A weaker jet stream would allow weather systems to more easily swing from the Arctic down into mid-latitude regions that typically have temperate climates.

Because the climate is a complex phenomenon, this game can go on forever, there will always be another variable to make up explanations with, or to “discover” corrections in the raw data that make it work — no matter what the weather does.

Modern Science is just a fishing industry for post hoc Public Relations excuses for any policy you want.

It’s going to be minus 5 C (23F) in Tampa, Florida, and a lot colder in Canada. Best wishes to our friends in the Northern Hemisphere.

9.9 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Friday Open Thread

9.9 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

This blogger needs your help

UPDATE: This post will remain a sticky post for a few days. New posts will appear below.

We’re in an information war against the financial monsters of the world. They’re swimming in an ocean of money. But thanks to all the independent spirits who have kept me going for years without a regular income, we fight on. Together we can expose the grifters, the sad culti, and mock their holy idols. It’s a dangerous moment in history, but as those in the gulags would have surely said, we have so many tools, and it’s a time where their sacred cows are coming undone. The pagan witchdoctors have overplayed their hand, they are vulnerable.Roman Colliseum

It is not just about the dollars, it’s an honor, and incredibly motivating to get help, big or small, from like minded souls all corners of the globe. It’s been an absolute delight to connect with so many good people who think for themselves, who will not submit, and who recognize the threat from the parasites in the system.

Never surrender

Please hit the tip jar, buy me a beer, a steak, server space or a new hard drive.

Thanks for your contribution, no matter how big or small.

Tip Jar Button

Please send supplies via Paypal, or through direct deposit, or by snail-mail instead.

Due to ridiculous legal froufrou, donors can buy as many “units of emergency chocolate” as they can spare in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD. Or send help via  NAB Account BSB: 086420 Number:563148308 and International transfer.

Suggestions welcome for other supply routes.

Keep reading  →

10 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

9.7 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Former head of Australian Medical Association suffered devastating vaccine effects: says Doctors are being silenced

By Jo Nova

A turning point maybe?

One of the top doctors in Australia Dr Kerryn Phelps — a familiar face on the news here, has come out saying that she has suffered “devastating” side effects from the Covid vaccines herself. She also says that her doctors are seeing ” ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation, but they are afraid to talk about it for fear of being de-registered and losing their career.

Phelps is also a bit of a darling of the left, a successful woman, married to another woman, who ran for Parliament and briefly served with a pro-climate-change agenda in a wealthy seat. It’s possible her words will give a voice to those on the other half of the political spectrum who may have said nothing or not even realized the symptoms they suffer are an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Lights may be switching on. Will it spark a wave of discussion among the left leaning? There has always been a core group of people suspicious of vaccination on the left. What if the left and right ends of the spectrum met in the middle, and realized that the real battle is The People versus Corrupt Government Agencies?

If that happens, it would strike fear into the hearts of those who signed away our rights and told us the vaccines were “safe and effective”. The idea of the left and right uniting in one joint protest is a nuclear event in politics.

Naturally, the legacy press is working hard to stop that — see the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline: “Not anti-vaxxers: Dr Kerryn Phelps says she suffered COVID vaccine injury, calls for more research.So left leaning people who waited 18 months to talk about vaccine reactions are “people”, but those who bravely said the same things months ago are just “anti-vaxxers”.

As it happens, sadly, her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps also suffered a bad vaccine reaction and it’s another scandal altogether that we have no idea of how many other people suffered side effects too. Any Minister of Health or Head of the TGA who cared about the health of Australians would have set up active surveillance programs and encouraged doctors to speak freely.

It’s good that she is risking her reputation to speak out now, but where was she a year ago? Lives have been lost because influential people said nothing.

Dr Kerryn Phelps reveals ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, says doctors have been ‘censored’

Frank Chung, News.com

Former federal MP Dr Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators.

In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject.

“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”

“In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.”

Why do we have a TGA?

Dr Phelps said both reactions were reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) “but never followed up”. She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”.

Is the TGA protecting Australians or the Pharmaceutical industry?

Phelps speculates that 1 in 3000 adult Australians may have had a serious reaction to each Covid vaccine, so after 3 doses, that’s 1 in 1000 and rising with every booster.

Earlier this year, Dr Rado Faletic — who previously spoke out about his battle with the TGA — launched Australian advocacy group Coverse to provide support and collect testimony from those suffering vaccine injuries.

Well, they would say that:

AHPRA said in a statement that the regulator had “been clear in all of our guidance about Covid-19 vaccinations that we expect medical practitioners to use their professional judgement and the best available evidence in their practice”.

Which is patently ridiculous. I personally know at least one doctor that was forced out of a long career due to AHPRA. Then there are stories like Dr Mark Hobart and Dr Paul Osterhuis. It only takes a few deregistrations to silence 99.9% of doctors.

As Flat White at The Spectator says, it’s all there in writing: Doctors are gagged

The medical system in Australia has been fundamentally broken by the introduction of changes to the Health Practitioner National Law – first by the Queensland Labor Party and soon to be copied everywhere – to effectively gag doctors and medical professionals, threatening them with deregistration if they question the official government health advice. In addition, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency also warned that doctors caught ‘undermining’ Covid vaccines or the government rollout at the beginning of the pandemic would ‘face consequences’.

This is not an exaggeration. AHPRA’s statement to the profession in March of 2021 – which still stands – reads:

There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.

Keep reading  →

9.6 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

Wednesday Open Thread

10 out of 10 based on 7 ratings

13 US States warn that giant climate activists funds are buying up public utilities

BlackRock logo

By Jo Nova

Move over divestment and boycott  — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company.  But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.

Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.

The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have.  The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.

To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.

These funds joined the climate activist clubs (like GFANZ), and made their political ambitions clear. Despite that screaming potential conflict-of-interest, the government agency that was meant to stop this sort thing (FERC) gave special approval instead. Apparently BlackRock and Vanguard were allowed to buy as much as 20% of some public utilities if they just promised to be “passive” investors who didn’t use their shares to influence management. Who needs fences, just ask the fox not to eat the chickens OK?

Imagine if someone managing a galactic-blob of money made decisions about your energy grid, and what your electricity will  cost, and you got no say in it? Government by Oligarchs? They won’t care what your electricity bill is.

The US State governments are the best hope for the West. Last month 13 US State Attorney’s raised the alarm. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Vanguard dropped out of GFANZ?

This is how we win. But it’s just the start of this battle. This is one facet of the dark bubble driving the madness.

State AGs Sound the Alarm About BlackRock, Vanguard Buying Large Stakes in Utilities

Kevin Stocklin,  Epoch Times

Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman says he doesn’t want Larry Fink to ‘be my emperor’

The acquisition by investment managers BlackRock and Vanguard of ever-increasing shares in America’s public utility companies is setting off alarm bells from conservatives and progressives alike.

In November, 13 state attorneys general petitioned FERC to deny Vanguard’s request. Claiming that residents of their states could be harmed if utilities are compelled to stop using fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power, the attorneys general argued that “Vanguard is not entitled to a blanket authorization to acquire substantial equity and voting power in utility companies.”

State Street asset fund manager. Logo.

Influence of the Big Three

“What these activists have figured out is that any radical policy that they can’t get enacted through government can be advanced through corporate America by hijacking trillions of dollars in voting rights from everyday Americans’ retirement accounts,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) stated.

The Senate report further noted that “thanks to the tremendous scale of the savings entrusted with them, the Big Three together cast around one-quarter of all votes at shareholder meetings of most S&P 500 companies …

“These targets come out of the Paris Accord, which couldn’t even get passed through a Democratic Senate,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Epoch Times. “Voters have rejected these net-zero by 2050 goals over and over again. So now we’re seeing this, in my opinion, illegitimate attempt to use corporate America to push these goals.”

Read it all at The Epoch Times.

See also:

The dark bubble: There’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously

Photo: Photo by eflon on Flickr. Adapted. CC by 2.0.

Photo: State Street website.

10 out of 10 based on 73 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

9.5 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

Supercomputer prophesy of the Sixth Mass Extinction coming “like an asteroid” is a UN land grab

Earth, drought, fantasy art, extinction.

Art by NoName_13

By Jo Nova

The prophesy of the Sixth Mass extinction has popped up again with hyperbolic modelling to scare us out of our money and just in time for a UN convention.  As Steve Milloy says it’s just a giant land and power grab by the UN, which has just finished another meeting for “Biodiversity” — it’s the Baby-IPCC for biology.  It was co-hosted by Canada and China. They couldn’t even be bothered thinking up a new acronym so it was called COP15. Rinse, repeat, and press go for spin.
 Warning. PR Stunts Ahead, sign.

Journalists can cut-n’-paste the formula and adjectives from the IPCC climate press releases: blah etc blah, …close to 200 countries reached “a watershed agreement to stem the loss of nature worldwide” (but not the US)Somehow the “bleary eyed delegates” (who arrived in jets), have waved their magic wands and cast a spell to save the Earth.  The solution, apparently,  is for the rest of us not to use about a third of our own country, or something like that. The UN bureaucrats can decide what use is OK, and punish us with threats of “endangered listings” if we don’t spend enough on their favourite  lobby group, just like they are with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, even though it has record high coral cover.

Currently “only” 17% of land, and 10% of marine areas are protected. They want to make that 30% to remain “undeveloped“.

It’s just one more baby step on the way to centralized global government. We will need to ask their permission to use our land soon.

Conserve 30% of our land by 2030? (30 x 30)

Nations promise to protect 30 percent of planet to stem extinction

Washington Post

UN communist logoMONTREAL — Close to 200 countries reached a watershed agreement early Monday to stem the loss of nature worldwide, pledging to protect nearly a third of Earth’s land and oceans as a refuge for the planet’s remaining wild plants and animals by the end of the decade.

Nations now have the next eight years to hit their targets for protecting life. With few legal mechanisms for enforcement, they will have to trust each other to protect habitats and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars over conservation.

The 10-year deal sets nearly two dozen targets. The banner commitment calls on nations to collectively conserve for wildlife at least 30 percent of land, inland waterways, and coastal and ocean areas by 2030 — the promise dubbed “30 by 30.”

Thus spake the prophet Supercomputer:

Earth could face a mass EXTINCTION by 2100: Supercomputer predicts more than a quarter of species will die by the end of the century

Daily Mail

Australian and European scientists have developed a ‘virtual Earth’ to better plot global extinctions caused by climate change. The results point to the loss of 10 per cent of all plant and animal species by 2050, rising to 27 per cent by the end of this century. The scientists blame ‘over-exploitation of resources’, land-use change, over-harvesting, pollution, climate change and ‘biological invasions’.

‘Children born today who live into their 70s can expect to witness the disappearance of literally thousands of plant and animal species, from tiny orchids and the smallest insects to iconic animals such as the elephant and the koala,’ Professor Bradshaw said.

Using a supercomputer, the scientists created a world with more than 15,000 ‘food webs’ to predict the fate of interconnected species.

So a supercomputer adds up 15,000 webs of low level data on sloths, bark and butterflies, with error bars larger than trends, in systems we don’t understand, and a million lines of code, and extrapolates up the kazoo — what could possibly go wrong?

And these people call themselves scientists.

Melomys rubicola extinct from Bramble Cay

Let’s get a grip on the current state of the Sixth Mass Extinction — so far the only mammal extinction officially due to “man-made” climate change was a colony of little brown rats which had washed up on a sandy spit south of Papua New Guinea. The “island” is so small it has no fresh water, no trees, and the highest point is all of 3 meters above the high tide mark. One king wave could have wiped out the colony. Relatives of these rats live in Papua New Guinea, and presumably more rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. As of 2019, that was the only actual mammal anyone can name as an extinction “caused by climate change”.

Almost the whole island was protected by the Native Title Act. A lot of good it did the dead rats.

As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace says — most of the species “going extinct” never existed in the first place:

 “Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions.”

Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world. Moore: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.”

As for Koalas, nearly everything we’ve been told about koalas is wrong. Far from being in danger of being wiped out, they have been in a boom bust cycle for 200 years.

Before the first fleet arrived, koalas were so rare that the new settlers didn’t even see one for fifteen years! But after the indigenous cool burns programs stopped, dense forests grew which were choc-full of tender new shoots that koalas love to eat. So koala populations would flourish and boom right up until a fire wiped them out.

They recover so fast sometimes they are in plague proportions.

Save species with fossil fuels — Rich countries protect the environment

The solution, of course, is cheap energy:

1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria.  The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.

2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.

3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.

GDP, CO2 emissions and purchasing power parity. Graph.

Source: UNEP – a graph so useful they had to remove it.

 

Quick, burn more fossil fuels to save life on Earth

h/t Willie Soon

REFERENCES

Giovani Strona and Corey Bradshaw (2022) Coextinctions dominate future vertebrate losses from climate and land use change, Science Advances, 16 Dec 2022, Vol 8, Issue 50, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn4345

9.7 out of 10 based on 65 ratings

Monday Open Thread

8.1 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Sunday Open Thread

8 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Deep State cover up: Twitter was a subsidiary of the FBI, and CIA is still hiding “those files” 60 years later

By Jo Nova

It’s the coverup that matters

Live fire training at the FBI.

Men with guns deciding what jokes you can hear?

Part II in the “United States of the FBI”

Matt Taibbi is reading through the TwitterFile emails between the FBI and Twitter and found strangely petty and detailed requests which reveal much more than you might think. The FBI were sending through requests to ban trivial no-name accounts who just posted jokes. They were also asking for their “location information” of people posting the jokes. The overreaction shows how entangled Twitter was with the FBI on day to day operations, but also reveals the hot button priority topic the FBI was so concerned about was election “misinformation”. What are the FBI most afraid of?

a surprisingly high number [of emails] are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

They were even trying to ban some people just from saying “”Get out there and Vote Wednesday”.  Taibbi asks: This, is what the FBI spends time on?

When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah  replied:

“My thoughts initially include

1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation

2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba

3. What else are they looking at?”

Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.

“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. ”
To which Matt Taibbi says it was not about crime but about about controlling opinions:
This FBI response is disingenuous on multiple fronts. None of this expains flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts. Also, they are clearly not doing this in service of investigating crime. This is about domestic intelligence and opinion control.

The collusion was comprehensive. The FBI delivered up “products” from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Twitter team could received reports via something called the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS. They could also get reports from “Teleporter” which is an FBI platform.  There is a string of three letter acronym agencies in contact with Twitter, including demands to know why Twitter didn’t take action on a tweet from Donald Trump (you know, The President).

In summary, Matt Taibbi says:

.he takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

Speaking of Deep State revelations…

Why are the CIA still hiding files 60 years later?

In 1992 Congress decided the JFK files should be released in 2017, but the files remain locked, even though everyone named in them is dead. The Trump administration promised the files would be released, but Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, applied intense pressure and they were not released. Today the Biden administration did the same. Tucker Carlson asked someone who has seen them:

We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President? And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote,

The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.

It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a “conspiracy theorist” that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. 

 

Even Carlson was shocked:

It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want.

They constitute a government within a government mocking, by their very existence, the idea of democracy.

If it’s true, then the CIA decided who the President of America was, and that was 60 years ago. The JFK files become a kind of Schrodinger Box. To see them is to know they can’t be spoken of. If a President opened those files, and if the evidence is there, what President would release them?

Who would risk the ire of an agency they thought had killed a President and gotten away with it?

The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson

Meanwhile, corruption is everywhere:

Currently news is coming in of suitcases loaded with cash being paid to Members of the European Parliament. It’s so bad, they are going straight to jail, “for a week”, and possibly a lot longer after the trial.

The backlash has been swift. Over the weekend, Kaili was stripped of her responsibilities as vice president, expelled from her party both in Greece and Brussels, and saw Greek prosecutors freeze her assets.

At least there is still some hope justice will be done, for common criminals if not for the criminal investigators.

___________________________

The Babylon Bee satirical site got banned on Twitter, so it’s only fair they get the last word.

Government Warns That With Elon Owning Twitter They Will Only Control 97% Of The Media

By the Babylon Bee

Karen Jean Pierre, Joe Biden's Press Secretary.

“We can’t overstate how dangerous this is,” said gay black Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Yes, we still control Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram, YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington PostThe New York Times, Hollywood, TIMEUSATodayThe Wall Street Journal, and pretty much all the rest, but we don’t control Twitter. This is dangerous to democracy.”

The entire intelligence community at the CIA, FBI, and NSA concurred with the warning, stating that “Elon’s ownership of Twitter leaves America vulnerable to dangerous opinions we do not approve of.”

Their democracy is at stake.

FBI Photo by Jamal Wilson

9.9 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

Saturday Open Thread

7.3 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

UK close to nation wide blackout, while 12% of entire Germany GDP paying for energy crisis

By Jo Nova

Green Europe is running out of electrons

Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour.  As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.

Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.

These are very expensive experiments

They aren’t telling you this but UK is close to nationwide blackouts

by David Maddox , Daily Express

UK Flag, Britain, United Kingdom.

But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could go out. Two stories this week should set the alarm bells ringing. The first was that Drax had been ordered to put its (mothballed) two coal-fired power stations in North Yorkshire on standby. The second came yesterday when a power cut left 2,800 homes in Shetland without electricity. In one of the coldest snaps in recent history where energy use has been peaking, they underpinned a briefing received by Express.co.uk that Britain is teetering on the edge of a catastrophe.

According to someone close to Mr Rees-Mogg [former Business and Energy Secretary], his conclusion was: “If the lights don’t go out this winter or next it will be more luck than judgement.”

His assessment, confirmed by a Whitehall source, was the margins of available energy supply to need were so low that “just one major problem would be enough for the lights to go out.”

The reality is that Whitehall sources and former ministers have confirmed to the Daily Express the well-intentioned headlong pursuit for Net Zero carbon emissions has left the UK in a precarious position.

After becoming the minister Rees-Mogg apparently had to badger staff for two whole weeks just to get an inventory of Britain’s energy supplies. Were they slow because they didn’t want to give him the bad news, or because they had never added them up?

Britain braces for winter of factory shutdowns as freezing conditions strain energy crisis
Jacob Paul, Daily Express

Gareth Stace, director of industry association UK Steel, told the Telegraph that the eye-watering wholesale electricity prices on Monday forced all his members to shut down some production until rates went back to normal.

He said: “We’re just priced out of the market. There would be no point in the energy companies telling our members to turn off, because they know that they will. You just couldn’t keep going, you just lose money for every tonne of steel you make with [energy] prices at these levels.”

Think of what €440 billion euro’s could have done instead?

German FlagThat’s how much Germany has spent on energy bailouts and schemes since Russia invaded Ukraine. And it probably doesn’t include another 100 billion euro money bomb that was just approved in the German lower house.

Germany’s half-a-trillion dollar energy bazooka may not be enough

Reuters

Michael Groemling at the German Economic Institute (IW) said… “The national economy as a whole is facing a huge loss of wealth.”

The money set aside stands at up to 440 billion euros ($465 billion), according to the calculations, which provide the first combined tally of all of Germany’s drives aimed at avoiding running out of power and securing new sources of energy.

That equates to about 1.5 billion euros a day since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Or around 12% of national economic output. Or about 5,400 euros for each person in Germany.

They could have bought 20 nuclear reactors and secured half their electricity supply for decades to come.

Trump warned about this in 2018, but this trainwreck has been coming for twenty years.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch

Photo: UK Flag Rian (Ree) Saunders

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings