Tuesday Open Thread

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Pandemonium: Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark

Murano furnace and pipe 2Written by Jo Nova

Spare a thought for glassmakers and tilers in Europe who can’t run on solar and wind powered furnaces.

There are companies that started business in the 1800s and survived two world wars but may not last the coming winter. It’s all changing so fast, they lament. With energy costs rising three to sixfold, the highest energy industries are folding. The first casualties were fertilizer, aluminium and zinc, and now in the second wave, the glass makers and tilers are coming undone, and with them, whole towns that support them will unravel too:

Liz Alderman, The New York Times

Half of Europe’s aluminum and zinc production has been taken offline, according to Eurometaux, Europe’s metals trade association.

Eschenbach Porcelain survived Germany’s transition from communism to capitalism after 1989. But when its energy contracts run out at the end of this year, the company will face annual energy bills of €5.5 million, or roughly six times what it is paying now, said Rolf Frowein, its director.

Eschenbach Porcelain started 130 years ago. The giant glassmaker Arc started in 1825.

The numbers are just astounding:

The whirlwind has unnerved the inhabitants of Arques, a town whose fortunes have been tied to glassmaking for more than a century. The modern-day Arc was founded in 1825 as the Verrerie Cristallerie d’Arques, then a small local maker of fine crystal goblets.

Crystal d'Argues Glass

The site, which consumes as much energy as 200,000 homes, makes “arts de table,” including Luminarc dinner plates and Cristal d’Arques-branded table and barware. All told, Arc produces four million glasses a day…

Doing so requires intense heat to melt sand into glass in furnaces that must stay lit 24 hours a day. In summer, Europe’s power crunch propelled Arc’s energy bill to $75 million, from 19 million euros a year ago.

Even more daunting was the prospect of idling Arcs furnaces. “You can’t just shut down a glass furnace — it would destroy it,” Mr. Hodler said. “If they are powered down gently, they will survive, but then they take more than one month to be reheated.”

Photo: Glass furnace: Wknight94 and Crystal d’Arques glass photo by Agence Sigmund

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In 1969 the FDA commissioner issued a dire warning: The FDA protects the drug companies not the people

Written by Jo Nova

A reminder that the dark influence of corruption started decades ago:

Herbert Ley, FDA Quote: The FDA protects the big drug companies.

It may have seemed like things went off the rails in the last two years, but it couldn’t have been achieved without fifty years of work. The absurdities just felt like they came out of nowhere.

Herbert Ley sounds like a great man. From Wikipedia:

His three years at the FDA came during the time when the FDA grew from an insignificant agency to the key agency protecting consumers; during that time 300 drugs were removed from the market.[4] After he left, Ley stated that he had “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry and that the drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff, to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs.

There’s a sad article in Woroni (Canberra) in 1980 lamenting the reach of drug companies. An antibiotic called Panalba had been sold in the US from 1957 generating $18m in revenue for Upjohn. By 1968 30 experts from the National Academy of Science declared that it was harmful and should be removed from the market. Commissioner Herbert Ley testified that as many as one in five people using it had an allergic reaction and twelve people had died. (Imagine stopping a drug now for 12 deaths?) The FDA finally forced it off the market in the US in 1970. Due to a legal loophole in 1980 the same drug company was still selling the drug in 33 other countries under the name “Albamycin”. Presumably the Big Pharma lobbyists were on good terms with those 33 other drug approval agencies.

Related:

Big Pharma spends twice as much on advertising as it does on developing cancer drugs.

Conflicts of Interest, anyone?

 

h/t Charles

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Monday Open Thread

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Sunday Open Thread

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Facebook will read your personal messages and send them to the FBI if you vote the wrong the way

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, |  Meta

Mark Zuckerberg  | Photo by JD Lasica

Handy things to know: Someone inside the Department of Justice in the US has talked to the New York Post and says that Facebook spied on Americans who doubted Joe Biden or the election, and gave that information to the FBI “outside due process”. A full FBI investigation often followed the “leads” that came from Facebook.

Despite the mountain of data they found no domestic terrorists — not one criminal or violent Trump supporter — only full blooded patriots.  They must have been disappointed.   “It was a waste of our time” said an insider.

So Facebook has become a wing of the Government. Facebook needs Big Government to protect their Section 230 legal loophole and Big Government needs Facebook to protect the voters from the ugly truth. Nice racket if you can get it.

The old Sovinformburo must have longed for a searchable database of private conversations. If only the USSR had Facebook.

As the commenter Deplorable at the NY Post says “First thing is Facebook must be told that they can no longer call their private messenger private. “

Thank goodness for the New York Post. Thank goodness for brave whistleblowers.

Facebook spied on private messages of Americans who questioned 2020 election

by Miranda Devine, New York Post

Miranda DevineFacebook has been spying on the private messages and data of American users and reporting them to the FBI if they express anti-government or anti-authority sentiments — or question the 2020 election — according to sources within the Department of Justice.

Under the FBI collaboration operation, somebody at Facebook red-flagged these supposedly subversive private messages over the past 19 months and transmitted them in redacted form to the domestic terrorism operational unit at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, without a subpoena

So Facebook found the right keywords, notified the FBI and gave them “leads” with some parts of the private conversations. The FBI then got the subpoenas to officially get the conversations and investigate them. But even the covert surveillance teams found nothing.

Facebook says the claims are “just wrong”. The FBI neither confirmed nor denied it worked with Facebook.

Of course Facebook would never do anything like that — says Facebook comunication expert who used to work for Obama:

Facebook Logo

These claims are just wrong. The suggestion we seek out peoples’ private messages for anti-government language or questions about the validity of past elections and then proactively supply those to the FBI is plainly inaccurate and there is zero evidence to support it,” said Sackin, a DC-based crisis response expert who previously worked for Planned Parenthood and “Obama for America” and now leads Facebook’s communications on “counterterrorism and dangerous organizations and individuals.”

Notably, the insider says that Facebook and the FBI were only looking at conservative right-wing people, not potential Antifa terrorists. It was a biased fishing trip

One whistleblower seems to have been inspired to come forward after the raid at Mar-a-lago. One breach too far?

Unrest has been building among the rank and file across the FBI and in some parts of the DOJ for months. It came to a head after the raid last month on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

“The most frightening thing is the combined power of Big Tech colluding with the enforcement arm of the FBI,” says one whistleblower. “Google, Facebook and Twitter, these companies are globalist. They don’t have our national interest at heart.”

As I said in 2019, their new algorithms to combat misinformation were going to  bore the world. Facebook announced it would limit the spread of links that were “more prominent on Facebook than across the web as a whole” — thus ensuring Facebook would propagate only Groupthink:

So that pretty much rules out Facebook spreading the word of whistleblowers, rebels, new theories, suppressed ideas, oppressed people and anything controversial, interesting or not completely predictable. Facebook seems to want to transform itself into a mumsie discussion board of old news and approved memes with all the thrill of an in-flight safety lecture.

Thus Facebook will become a mirror of the permitted, official, authorized web. Expect their ratings to adjust accordingly.

Something isn’t working well for Facebook (Meta). Here’s the market capitalization :

Couldn’t happen to a nicer crew. The top three shareholders of Meta are Zuckerberg, then Vanguard and BlackRock.

That would be Meta as in metastaticMeta LogoRead it all at the New York Post.

Tell your friends and children that Facebook Direct Messaging is direct to the FBI.

Big Gov protects the Big Tech monster from market competition  — and in return Big Tech protects Big Government from political competition.  Democrats have outsourced political repression of their enemies to cabals of private companies.

 

h/t Bill nearly in AZ. David E.

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Saturday Open Thread

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NetZero takes a hit in the UK — Fracking is on and “could eclipse North Sea Gas”

UK Flagby Jo Nova

UK Flag, Britain, United Kingdom.

Good News — Fracking will start in the UK after ten years of absurd delays over bizarre seismic excuses where the fracking industry was supposed to stop if tremors were larger than 0.5 on the Richter scale which meant it never started. A 0.5 level tremor is so small you’d need a Richter scale to even know it occurred. People usually can’t feel shakes of 2.0 or less, and it’s a logarithmic scale…

Once fracking starts it will be hard to put this genie back in the bottle. Will Australia, Canada and New Zealand be the last three nations on Earth still serious about Net Zero?

As Gaia Fawkes says: Truss Gets Cracking With Fracking

The news comes as The Guardian reports Liz is planning to follow through on her leadership election pledge and lift the ban on fracking as soon as possible, with first licences set to be issued as early as next week. This will no doubt come as welcome relief as energy bills continue to rise during winter. The decision comes despite the paper’s ominous quote from a forthcoming report that forecasting fracking-induced earthquakes “remains a significant challenge”. In August 2019 Caudrilla halted work after recording the UK’s “biggest fracking tremor”. The tremor in question was 1.55ML on the Richter scale, “which it likened to ‘a large bag of shopping dropping to the floor’”…

Green tape — keeping the country cold and poor for no good reason at all:

Liz Truss told to relax regulations to kickstart fracking revolution
The Telegraph

Current rules require drilling to stop if it causes tremors of 0.5 or more on the Richter scale.
Experts say tremors at this level occur naturally and often, at a magnitude so low it is imperceptible to people above ground. The current limit blocks any realistic possibility of exploiting shale resources commercially. Fracking companies want parity with other industries, for example geothermal energy, which is allowed to create earthquakes of higher magnitudes than 0.5. In the US, fracking-related tremors of up to 4-magnitude are allowed.

So much for all the pompous talk of Glasgow. Boris and Carries Energy Plan is gone, thank Vladimir.

Liz Truss to ditch Boris Johnson’s energy plans to focus on driving down cost of household bills
iNews, 14 September 2022

The Government’s Energy Bill is set to be paused or ditched completely as Liz Truss focuses on capping customers’ bills and reforming the UK’s electricity market, iNews has been told.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, told officials on Monday that he planned to effectively put on hold the Energy Bill currently going through the House of Lords, multiple sources said.

There’s a lot of energy under Lancashire:

Fracking power could eclipse North Sea gas

Luke Barr, Financial Mail on Sunday

Shale gas extraction – better known as fracking – could eclipse North Sea production within 15 years after Liz Truss lifted a controversial ban. The new Prime Minister has told MPs the fracking moratorium will be removed in areas where local communities support industry plans, paving the way for a boom.

But it said fracking could reduce our future reliance on imports – and by 2040, it could supply 12billion cubic metres of gas, or 15 per cent of current demand. This will coincide with supplies from the North Sea declining to almost nothing by 2050.

But despite the hope here, the blistering bills of the pagan energy policies have barely begun. Millions of people will live colder harder lives because some Weather Fairies badgered people to try to cast spells to stop storms.

A poll of Express.co.uk readers found that 97 percent of Britons are in favour of suspending green levies. If only the United Kingdom was a democracy this would have all been sorted so long ago…

Speaking of energy security, if you thought the Brits left it too late, wait to you hear about the Belgians:

h/t To NetZeroWatch who must be feeling pleased today.

UK Flag photo: Rian (Ree) Saunders

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Eco Green China is sprayed from a bottle

Chinese environmental care means spraying grass, trees, rocks oil paint “green”

Green paint for Chairman MaoWinston Sterzel (Serpentza) describes how in China people are paid to spray dead grass green, not with fertilizer or seed, but with oil paint. They even paint whole trees, rock faces and cliffs too. Sometimes the quickest way to keep the environmental inspectors happy at a mine site is by rolling out plastic “camo-net”. Sometimes they staple fake leaves to a tree. The government mandated that “we are going to care for the environment” and offered cash incentives from the local government.

It’s not just an environmental hazard, polluting the soil and water, but apparently emblematic of the kind of industrial grade absurdity that communist regimes do better than anyone. Sterzel used to live in China. He talks about the culture of “face” and the overriding importance of looking good. Many things about China, he says, are just a shortcut for appearances sake… everything about government propaganda works like “painting the grass green.” Lying becomes a way of life. Not that we in the West will get too high and mighty about this. There are worse lies, and we have them: like “Safe and Effective”.

Where are Greenpeace when we need them…

Dead brown grass becomes even deader green grass:

China, fake greenery, camo-net.

Spray painting the grass

It is oil paint — same color but not so good for photosynthesis:

China, fake greenery, camo-net.

It’s a smelly oil paint tin

No reason those trees can’t look green too…

China, fake greenery, camo-net.

Spraying the trees

Whole rock walls can be painted non-mossy luminous green, just like no Brytophyta on Earth:

China, fake greenery, camo-net.

Spray painting rock walls

Apparently when they realized oil paints might not be so good for the environment they moved on to rolling out carpets of artificial plants.

The Camo-net brings instant plastic to a wilderness near you:

China, fake greenery, camo-net.

Camo-nets roll out over the slopes

Never mind about the strangled wildlife.

The comments under the Youtube reinforce the message.

There’s no way to gauge how widespread the practice is, but comments suggest it’s been going on a long time. I doubt this is a major cause of pollution in China, just one of many — but it is a great example of a Government mandated “solution”. As Winston says: What China needs is a little bit of honesty. Don’t we all.

Keep reading  →

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Friday Open Thread

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Political Purges in America, FBI Intimidation, but hope against Woke rises in Florida

There is a major battle in the US that most media are barely mentioning

On the one hand Joe Biden calls political opponents Domestic Terrorists, and delivers speeches flanked with marines. The FBI are raiding the homes of his main political adversary and his supporters too, knocking on doors based on nothing more than anonymous tips, without search warrants. They demand answers to ridiculous questions, the only purpose of which can be intimidation or fishing trips. Lines in the sand are being crossed here that we never thought would be crossed in America. Things that ought to have the whole nation (and allies) standing to attention.  Personal communications with lawyers used to be confidential, “not any more”.   How do we explain the hunt for someone’s daughters’ Instagram posts?

Against that dark background, something great is unfolding in Florida and other states. Ron de Santis delivers a great speech below, laying out how he’s fighting back against the Tech Giant Oligarchs, the WEF, the UN, Woke ideology, school indoctrination, gender change surgery on children, forced injections, and election fraud. We’ve discussed the State fightback against the influence of BlackRock and ilk which abuse their fiduciary duty with retirement funds to force ESG on hapless corporations.  It’s a Christmas wish list of free men against corruption and tyranny. And he’s not just talking about it, but winning battles, and many Americans are loving it. They’re leaving crime ridden, high taxing Democrat states to come to Florida in record numbers.

The Tucker Carlson reporting from two days ago should give anyone chills, but the Ron de Santis speech below that would give citizens of democracy hope (and a handbook for how to win). The US may yet be saved by the strength of the States.

Purges in America: Are you now, or have you ever been a Trump supporter?

The morning after Joe Biden’s Red Sermon demonized 74 million Americans,  armed agents from the FBI started turning up at Trump supporter’s homes. It starts with Biden equating domestic protests with 9/11 mass terrorist deaths:

So, you’re slack-jawed watching something like this. Did I just see that? And I’m quoting “I began by asking the vice president about how over two decades our focus has had to shift from foreign terror to the threat within.”…

It can’t possibly be about January 6, the fake insurrection, the only insurrection in history with no guns, the insurrection in which the only person shot to death was a Trump supporter.

No, the point of this is to suppress political dissent, to hobble an entire political party and to keep any of these people from ever participating in American politics again. …

From 6:50 especially unfolds the Stasi-like program apparently designed to scare ordinary citizens into silence. If it works in the US, presumably it will not be long before similar programs spread to the rest of the West.

Tucker Carlson:

[The Day after the Red Sermon] …at 8:30 a.m, a woman called Lisa Gallagher was sick in bed at her home in suburban New Jersey.

Her daughter came upstairs and told her that the FBI was waiting outside. Now, Lisa Gallagher is not a criminal, never has been. She is an active Trump supporter, particularly on Facebook. She did Trump (flag on her lawn). She’s a patriotic American. She describes herself as a rule follower. She’s never once been in trouble with the law at any level, and she had nothing whatsoever to do with January 6 and yet, outside her door with three FBI agents with guns. “We got an anonymous tip you were at the Capitol on January 6.” That’s what they said. Gallagher was terrified. “I thought they were going to take me out of here in handcuffs,” she told the show this morning.

Ultimately, her husband came home and the two of them showed the FBI agents her daily calendars from January of 2021 and finally convinced the agents that she was not at the Capitol that day. Imagine armed FBI agents showing up at your house because you supported Trump on Facebook and demanding records of your whereabouts on a date nearly two years ago and of course, the FBI already knew that Lisa Gallagher was not there because they have sophisticated facial recognition software, so they were never planning to arrest her. The point (and this is a theme in every authoritarian regime), the point was to use government agents to intimidate enemies of the regime on the basis of an anonymous tip….

Amy Kremer, for example, is a former Tea Party member and a candidate for the House of Representatives. She also obtained special permits for the National Park Service, which authorized Donald Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021. To be perfectly clear, Amy Kremer never went to the Capitol on that day. She never encouraged anyone else to go, either. But for the crime of organizing a lawful political event, an election justice rally protected by the Constitution, Amy Kremer is now being terrorized by Merrick Garland’s DOJ.

On Wednesday morning, FBI agents showed up at her home, first at the home of her ex-husband, carrying a subpoena for her daughter Kylie. Kremer received a call from Kylie’s stepmother saying, “The FBI is here for her.” The FBI subpoenaed demands, all communications from Amy Kremer and Kylie, including their social media posts (what) from October 1st, 2020 to the present day.

Now, why would the FBI, Joe Biden’s FBI need Amy Kremer’s daughter’s Instagram posts? Because this isn’t about the events leading up to January 6. Obviously, it’s about mining all of her personal information.

This is harassment on political grounds. It’s illegal. It’s unconstitutional. It shocks the conscience of everyone who sees it, but the number of people who see it is very small because it is not covered by any media and it’s not just happening to Amy Kremer.

Hope against Woke, Tech Giants, BlackRock, propaganda and medical crime rises in Florida

Sometimes all it takes is one man to stand his ground, and the idea catches on.

These are just some snippets below, but I watched it all (at speed) and it was worth it. I almost never watch more than five minutes on Youtube. Conservative parties all around the world could design whole campaigns from this one speech…

16:00 Less Government means a bigger economy: Florida has three million more people than the state of New York …but the New York government budget is twice the size. In Florida for half the money they manage the roads and the services and have higher ranked K – 12 schools, and “we do all of that with no income tax and the second lowest per capita tax burden in the country.” Nice.

26:00 Open borders — In response to mass illegal immigration across the Southern Border, Ron De Santis banned Sanctuary Cities in Florida, and announced  that if anyone buses in illegal aliens he was going to reroute the buses to Delaware and other “sanctuary” states. Apparently he hasn’t had to do that, because they didn’t send any buses and the Governor of Texas started rerouting buses to sanctuary cities himself. De Santis argues that the people who make these rules need to live with the consequences.

29 mins Election Security: To improve election security De Santis made ballot harvesting is a third degree felony. He’s also banned mass mailing of ballots, and insisted that people need voter ID to get an absentee ballot. Somehow, he also banned Zucker-bucks. (Funding from Mark Zuckerberg or presumably any oligarch to help state officials with the infrastructure of elections). If they do that here, he said, they’re going to jail.

33:00 On schools“We’re not going to have CRT (critical race theory), or Woke ideology imposed on our vulnerable children. We’re getting American Civics back in our schools.” Every November 7th students will learn  how communist regimes end up killing millions of people.

He also has a plan to stop it occurring in corporations too to prevent people being de facto forced to declare allegiance to ESG or Woke doctrines.  In Florida you do not have to self flagellate to keep your job.

47:00: On Big Tech Monopolies — de Santis declares that the Tech Giants are dangerous monopolies: To paraphrase —  They are not private entities, they are doing the governments bidding, they are essentially an arm of the state. They have meetings at the Whitehouse to discuss who to censor. The Silicon Valley oligarchs are imposing an orthodoxy on this country. 

The solution is the legal recourse against selective politically biased enforcement. The Tech Giants can “set their own rules” he says, but if they discriminate based on people’s views, they are committing a fraud. They told customers that they are open platform. Florida citizens will have the right to sue when the Oligarchs punish them for their political views.

De Santis is warning everyone in the free world to toughen up because everyone who fights for their rights will feel the pushback.

Nice republicans (and ones with comfy sinecures) are still caving in too easily. De Santis warns:

“They’re playing for keeps. A leader has got to be willing to take the arrows to achieve anything.”

The stakes are high. As David Evans says: “Rig just one election, and you have to rig every election thereafter because you are afraid the other side will investigate what happened and throw the wrongdoers in jail. Before you know it, you have to fix the system permanently.”

It’s a do or die battle. Small crimes beget bigger crimes, and the quickening is here. The race is on between the forces of censorship and those with the right message.  So when you see a useful message, help it along…

 

Joe Biden’s Red Sermon Transcript

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Thursday Open Thread

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Climate Change makes People Angrier, so give them a solar panel to hug (it’ll help in 100 years)

A new study in the Lancet shows that people don’t get more amiable when temperatures are 42 to 45°C.  Apparently hate tweets were lowest at 12 to 21°C but reached a “prevalence of 22%” at the highest temperatures.  Lo, verily and ka-ching, it follows that climate change will cause nastier tweets. If we pull on this logic-string, your car exhaust is making people mean, your beef steak causes political polarisation, and if everyone owned an EV, there would be no more wars.

Obviously believers will argue that we should solve our social media angst with subsidies for solar panels and cricket-chips. But skeptics will say we just need lots of reverse cycle heat pumps at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour.  Burn oil and calm the world…

Airconditioners save 20,000 lives in USA each year and reduces indoor air pollution as well.

Oh the dilemma — to stop snarky tweets on hot days, we could spend $100 trillion dollars to try to change the climate and wait for next century, or we could just go back to what we had 20 years ago — the miracle of cheap air conditioning?

Climate Change makes people angry.

Bad climate policies breed hate and discontent. In Spain people are banned from setting their air conditioner below 27 degrees, and in the UK and Germany many people can’t afford to turn them on.  That would make anyone angry.

Speaking of Spain, air conditioning has already saved thousands of Spaniards.

Bloomberg News: “Climate change is making us angrier online. A lot angrier. 

Hateful comments spike on social media when temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have found. … “It’s an indicator of how well people can adapt to high temperatures,” said Annika Stechemesser, lead author of the study published in The Lancet Planetary Health earlier this month. “If temperatures go too hot or too cold, we found that there’s an increase in online hate speech, no matter the socioeconomic differences, religion or political beliefs.”

“Our results show that if September is particularly hot, we can expect to see more hate on Twitter,” said Stechemesser.

 

The raw data consisted of more than 4 billion tweets, spanning a timeframe from May 1, 2014 to May 1, 2020. Tweets were sampled from the 1% Twitter stream using a bounding box around the USA to extract geolocated tweets in the country.

The truth was that people weren’t a lot happier at minus 3 – 6C either, and they might have been just as grumpy at minus 15 as they were at 45C, but it wasn’t part of the study. Cheap energy solves all these problems and climate fantasies solve none of them.

h/t to Marc Morano at Climate Depot

Photo: Ildar Sagdejev (Specious)

REFERENCE

Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA, The Lancet, | VOLUME 6, ISSUE 9E714-E725, SEPTEMBER 01, 2022

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Wednesday Open Thread

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Vaccine news is so good that California State bans doctors from saying what they think

Doctor logo. Cadeceus.Always get medical advice, but be aware, if your doctor wanted to say something different from what you hear in adverts on TV, they may lose their job, their business, their marriage and their house. Adjust your filters accordingly. Especially if you live in Australia or California.*

Presumably Californians are still able to phone up doctors in other states. Soon, they may be able to phone their own doctor who moved to another state.

How long before doctors in El Salvador start offering telehealth consultations to Californians? (If only our Covid healthcare was as good as El Salvador‘s).

How bad must the vaccine news have to be if they need to write special legislation so doctors can’t tell you what they really think?

California’s Legislature Votes to Ban All COVID-19 Vaccine Dissent by Doctors

James Breslo, The Epoch Times

…the one-party state’s lawmakers voted to suppress all dissent by doctors when it comes to COVID-19. Assembly Bill 2098 effectively creates a “Ministry of Truth” that assures all information disseminated by doctors in the state conforms with the opinion of the ruling party. It directs the state’s medical board to take action against any doctor who spreads misinformation or disinformation about COVID-19. Under the legislation, it’s “unprofessional conduct” to spread such information regarding “the nature and risks of the virus; COVID-19 prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

The legislation is on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for his signature. The breadth of the proposal is astounding: It bans both misinformation and disinformation. In case you don’t know the difference, the legislation defines each. The ruling party stated that “misinformation” means “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.” “Disinformation” means “misinformation that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead.”

The law would turn the state’s medical board into a Ministry of Truth, designed to prohibit any dissent from the ruling party’s position on COVID-19.

We’re taught to always seek a second opinion on serious medical issues. California is seeking to ban second opinions. If Newsom signs the legislation, there will be only one approved opinion, that of the state.

James Breslo is a civil rights attorney and host of the “Hidden Truth Show” podcast on TuneIn.

Pray that the 1st Amendment still means something and this legislation can be overturned.

Otherwise when talking to doctors in semi-communist states, patients learn to look for hints and clues and to read between the lines.

Perhaps bring some tea leaves that docs can interpret for you. They may be trying to send a message.

h/t Strop

*Readers in other nations may have experience and advice they’d like to share.

Image: Caduceus by Rama

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Tuesday Open Thread

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The Worlds Biggest Stealth Propaganda Operation is conditioning your child through their phone

It’s like the West left their children alone in a room with The Chinese Communist Party

Girl using mobile phone

Is there a more perfect propaganda weapon?

The CCP own TikTok and they use it to serve up polarizing addictive trivia to Western teenagers while they serve up scientific achievements to Chinese youth. At the same time the CCP collects locations, contacts, files and aps. Frighteningly it can copy the content of the clipboard, even storing passwords.

It’s not just children but adults too. It is so addictive, there are claims it has a billion users. Many use it daily and for as much as 5% of all their waking hours. With algorithms to control the content delivered and an army of bots to amplify whatever sentiment they want, the CCP can shape public opinion, change norms, and feed dissatisfaction and even violent protest — as Kane points out, the #blacklivesmatter hashtag on TikTok generated a crazy 4.9 billion views.

Near the end of his time in office, Trump must have realized the grave threat it posed. He gave the owners of Tiktok just 45 days to spin it off to a US company or face being banned in the US. But the owners — Bytedance — had already spent millions lobbying Capitol Hill, and immediately after Biden took office he signed an executive order undoing Trump’s directive.

By Carlisle Kane of Equedia Investment Research

China’s Biggest Weapon Against the West: Your Teen’s Phone

This year, TikTok became the most downloaded app on the internet, beating even Instagram and Facebook.

Over a billion people use it every month—that’s one-quarter of all adults outside of China. 

TikTok is so engaging that nine out of 10 users visit the social network daily. And on average, they spend around 5-7% of their all waking time on this app.

If those numbers don’t say anything to you, let’s just say that this Chinese social media beats all addictiveness records that Facebook, Instagram, or any other Western social network has ever achieved. 

The secret sauce? 

It doesn’t let users choose what they want to see, for the most part.

Instead, its secret algorithm serves you an infinite reel of videos tailored to your likings based on all the data they acquire…

TikTok is a data collection machine for the CCP:

…as soon as you download the app, ByteDance—and by extension, the CCP—can see your location (at hourly intervals), contacts, all apps, files, and active subscriptions.  

And here’s the most terrifying part: TikTok has 100% visibility into your clipboard. It can monitor and store your keystrokes, including passwords you type out on the phone. 

So, not only can the CCP feed whatever it pleases to people across the world, it can rally its army of bots to engage with its content to shape public opinion in its favor – very much like Twitter has been used for spreading Chinese propaganda and spreading COVID news.

 

“… what China possesses today is even more dangerous than Cambridge Analytica. Because they don’t just have the data of a billion people, they also control the media they consume.”

 

TikTok serves different content in China than in the U.S.

But it’s not just about the language and cultural customs. The content is of a whole different nature and serves opposite purposes.

In China, TikTok shows educational clips about science and achievements. At the same time, American kids are fed the shallowest, mind-numbing entertainment, such as funny pet videos, comical mishaps—as well as extremist political content.

Before long, they’ll polarize our society to the point that we’ll slit each other’s throats ourselves.

Read it all.

h/t David E

Photo by By Surprising Shots.

9.9 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

Monday Open Thread

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“Nature is Striking Back!” Fake Saint Guterres exploits Pakistan’s pain to sell his climate religion and ask for money

While people in Pakistan struggle with their devastation, the UN chief has burned some fossil fuel to make sure he doesn’t miss an advertising opportunity. The poor of Pakistan need homes, medicine and food, but he wants to sell carbon schemes and solar panels.  You rich sinner, you.  Give us your money! The Almighty, I mean Nature itself (!)  is striking back and if we don’t pay the UN enough and send more tithes to Big-Government supporters like the Renewables Industry then more people will die!

In a new scientific discovery Professor-cum-Saint-Guterres also declared 100% flood attribution to man-made CO2. This is not something the glorious Experts of the UN have ever announced, and nor will they, because it’s scientifically preposterous — but they will not correct him, because their role was never about getting the science right, just about being the window-dressing for the money grab.

Pagan witchdoctors never had it so good:

In flood-hit Pakistan, Guterres appeals for ‘massive’ global support, tougher action on climate change

“[We] have all seen media images of the extraordinary destruction. I can only imagine the power and ferocity of the water as it bore down on villages, roads, bridges and everything else in its path. It was clearly terrifying – a wall of water.” Mr. Guterres said, adding: “No country deserves this fate, but particularly not countries like Pakistan that have done almost nothing to contribute to global warming.”

If you disagree with my estimate of climate sensitivity you are not even human:

Indeed, the UN chief stressed that Pakistan and other developing countries – from the Horn of Africa to the Sahel – are paying a horrific price for the intransigence of big emitters that continue to bet on fossil fuels, in the face of science, common sense and basic human decency.

Fire and brimstone will raineth down on your suicidal cult, says man holding a windmill up to stop the storms, and telling his followers they can survive winter under snow covered solar panels:

Even today, emissions are rising as people die in floods and famines. “This is insanity,” stated the Secretary-General. “This is collective suicide,” he added, calling for an end to the “war with nature” and urging more investment in renewable energy.

Doom is all around us, and this is caused by your car. I will stop the floods!

‘Nature is striking back’

Speaking next directly to the international community, Mr. Guterres said: “Pakistan needs massive financial support to respond to this crisis that have costed, according to some estimates that I’ve heard today, about $30 billion and counting.”

The Secretary General warned that loss and damage from the climate crisis is not a future event, “it is happening now, all around us,” and he urged governments to address this issue at COP 27 with the seriousness it deserves.

He warned that “we are heading into a disaster…we have waged war on nature, and nature is striking back, and striking back in a devastating way.”

Guterres is utterly shameless. The people of Pakistan need real help not solar panels and windmills.

9.7 out of 10 based on 86 ratings

Corals covered the Australian desert once – maybe they’ll grow back if we screw in the right light globes?

by Jo Nova

The remnants of a long gone coral reef are not in the water here, but on top of the cliff. This is what real climate change looks like:*

Bunda Cliffs, Nullarbor, Great Australian Bight. Photo.

The whole coral reef is now 100 m out of the water | Bahnfrend |

Nullabor plain map. Australia

The Nullabor Plain.

It turns out the high plateau desert called the Nullarbor was once a coral reef. It’s a thousand kilometer stretch without a tree that’s now about 100m above sea level. Obviously it’s a wilderness that’s begging to be restored to its true Miocene glory. The question is whether we can put on enough solar panels to save this reef, or if we can melt the Antarctic and raise the oceans…

Researchers looking at satellite images spotted a suspicious looking dome and ring (below) . They figured out it was not a meteor crater but probably made of coral atoll. It’s about one kilometer across and corals built this (probably) 14 million years ago. Tectonic shifts lifted the land out of the ocean. If only the polyps had put in a carbon tax?

The Nullarbor is a bit special because the surface is well preserved. There is not a lot of rain, no rivers to speak of, humidity is low, storm surges don’t wash over it and sediments don’t settle on it. Plus the nearest glaciers are in New Zealand.

““So even though it’s exposed, it’s kind of like a land that time forgot … the erosion is so slow, [these features] get preserved for millions and millions of years, kind of capturing a snapshot of how environments were at different times.” —WA Today

Coral Dome, remnant, Nullabor Australia

Coral Dome, remnant, Nullabor Australia

Once fish frolicked in the afternoon sun among the anenome here. Now there is saltbush.

This is the kind of climate change we need to teach children at schools. Geological, not Gretalogical.

Imagine the effect if students knew almost nothing was permanent, life was adaptable, and the climate changed all the time.

Coral reef nullabor

The remnants of a 14 million year old reef

ScienceAlert:

Mysterious Reef From Millions of Years Ago Discovered in Vast Australian Desert

Most of Australia is now arid and dry, with vast inland deserts. Millions of years ago, though, during the Miocene, the continent was teeming with life; not just dense, thriving forest ecosystems, but huge inland seas.

Keep reading  →

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