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?
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:
Extraordinary: after two decades of nuclear phaseout policy, a full year of gathering energy crisis, and now half a year of Russian gas warfare, Belgian government officials are asking about delaying the shutdown of a large reactor…due to close in TEN DAYS. https://t.co/Asm0bZ7USq
Chinese environmental care means spraying grass, trees, rocks oil paint “green”
Winston 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:
Spray painting the grass
It is oil paint — same color but not so good for photosynthesis:
It’s a smelly oil paint tin
No reason those trees can’t look green too…
Spraying the trees
Whole rock walls can be painted non-mossy luminous green, just like no Brytophyta on Earth:
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:
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.
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.
[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…
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…
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?
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.
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.
Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA, The Lancet, | VOLUME 6, ISSUE 9, E714-E725, SEPTEMBER 01, 2022
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.
…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.
It’s like the West left their children alone in a room with The Chinese Communist Party
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.
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.
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.
“[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.
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:*
The whole coral reef is now 100 m out of the water | Bahnfrend |
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
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.
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.
It was particularly deadly last summer in the US especially for 35-45 year olds
The Society of Actuaries (SOA) Report released a few weeks ago shows that people in that age group were twice as likely to die as normal in the third quarter last year. The odds were bad across the whole 25 to 54 age range. Deaths were 80% higher than normal.
If there is any good news in a chart of unexpected young deaths — its that whatever it was, the effect is waning. The bad news is that people in the prime of their life were still 30% more likely to die in Quarter 1 this year.
It’s a very big deal. Mortality rates in adults have been constant for decades (see figure 1 in this report). A 200% increase is a red flag flapping there. Something was going very wrong for some young working age adults. The Delta wave was hitting the US in Q3 but why would it hit the younger age groups so much more than the older ones? The data here are not specific enough to draw conclusions, but we have the more detailed resolution from the UK and Germany already. We know another piece of genetic code was also circulating then, not self-replicating but factory-made.
As Mark Steyn said, there’s Nothing to See Here because that’s all he’s allowed to say. As Jo Nova says, where were the US Ministries of Health, the CDC and the NIH? They have all this data already. They didn’t need to wait 10 months to read it in an actuarial report. Lives are at stake. Children are losing their mothers and fathers. Where were the press releases, the studies, and the informed consent? If the 30-somethings were dying because they were unvaccinated and out partying while the older folk were protected with injections — we surely would never have heard the end of it. Yet here we are a year after this 200% spike hit and New Scientist still doesn’t know, and can’t seem to find any expert that does.
The arrows mark the week that the vaccination schedule started for each age group. The change in the curve is evident.
The arrows mark the week that the vaccination schedule started for each age group. The 1-14 age includes babies and children who were not eligible or unlikely to get vaccinated. | Click to enlarge and read the long caption.
Excess deaths are still climbing in 2022 and notably in all ages
Note the scale below is different to the graph above. Despite the way it appears, excess deaths are not rising in 2022 as fast as they were in 2021 in the first quarter, except — Lord no — for the children…
Tonyb: With the death of the queen I feel as if I have lost a family member. A huge part of the west’s structure that has existed for 70 years, has been demolished
David Maddison: She led as Queen way after typical retirement age because she knew Charles and her grandsons were not up to the job. Even though the Queen had little political power, she was an anchor figure of our Civilisation and offered a sense of stability and constancy.
Serge Wright: Yep, she didn’t want Charles to be king for a day longer than humanly possible and she didn’t want to see Charles as king with her own eyes – or Camilla as queen. I think the reason for this is obvious when you look at how Charles influences the government and public opinion on important issues and views himself as a pseudo ruling head of state. To her credit, the queen was always focused on allowing the government to rule without influence or intrusion as this would erode democracy. Now that Charles has become king we can expect a vastly different approach and it won’t be helpful. There is also a risk of countries exiting the commonwealth.
Ronin: The other thing I liked about her, regardless of her own personal beliefs, she never paraded her politics in public, unlike her male heirs.
I think part of what we are all sad for is the end of a wonderful era.
UPDATE: #2 Tucker Carlson “This is why they are attacking Queen Elizabeth II”
Nigel Farage: “I am profoundly sad” — “Her reign was 30% of the time the US has existed — it gives you some idea of sheer historical span of what she’s done, never a single scandal…”
The British Empire was not perfect, but it was far more humane than any other ever. It’s gone now, barely even remembered. Queen Elizabeth II was the last living link to a truly Great Britain.
When the U.S. government withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years, we left behind airstrips, shipping containers and guns. When the British pulled out of India, they left behind an entire civilization, a language, a legal system, schools, churches and public buildings, all of which are still in use today.
The British did give the world the Magna Carta and habeas corpus and free speech. They helped end the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the ritual murder of widows in India. The British Empire spread Protestant Christianity to the entire world. It published some of the greatest literature ever written and produced the finest manufactured goods ever made anywhere at any time, including now. — Tucker Carlson
*UPDATE: Strop and Tonyb point out that technically the Commonwealth has grown in member states from 7 to 52, and now nearly a third of the world’s people live in a Commonwealth nation. Jo replies: I would hope that the influence of the Commonwealth would grow rather than recede, and with Brexit, it seemed so obvious to renew the Commonwealth as a trading and cultural union. Now with the abject decline and failure of the EU on display, the time is perfect, but alas, Charles is unlikely to be that guiding light and the opportunity may be squandered…
I suspect in hindsight we will feel grateful she reigned as long as she did.
*Edited. Today is not the day to analyze the pluses and minuses of the Queen’s legacy and the comment by Daffy about the long term trends of the British Empire can wait. There will be time later…
Gone are the days when governments figured out how laws could be enforced before they made them. In their own words this is only “a massive transformation of the economy”, so who cares about the details like, is it possible, and what will it cost?
And of course that all important detail “why bother in the first place?”
The Australian government has just legislated a 43% cut to emissions of a beneficial trace gas, of which Australia makes 1.1% of human output and about 0.05% of the emissions of all the plants, algae and oceans on Earth. We’ve only got 8 years to do it in and even the head of the our largest national scientific institute admits nearly half of the technologies we need are not even invented yet.
Even the minister calls it “insanely late”.
What could possibly go wrong, apart from bankrupting the nation in an effort to change the weather?
Anthony Albanese’s climate change agenda will shift to creating two road maps to slash emissions in the transport and industrial sectors after his 43 per cent 2030 target became law in a momentous parliamentary vote.
Ahead of the passage of the bill, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen warned there was a lot of work to be done to ensure Australia lowered emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
“We have a lot of work to do and we have to do it urgently. We are starting on the journey for a 2030 emissions reduction target in 2022, which is leaving it insanely late,” Mr Bowen told a CEDA forum in Parliament House. “Eighty-seven months is not long for a massive transformation in our economy.”
The Minister is actually bragging about doing something insane as if it’s a good thing to be mentally deranged. Governing the country is a game of fashion now, and may the biggest poseur win.
Can’t we just legislate inventions?
It would be so much simpler:
Highlighting the task ahead of the Albanese government in meeting its targets, CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall said 40 per cent of the technologies needed to reach to net zero were yet to be invented.
The Labor government apparently relies on the CSIRO plan which assumes these inventions can be invented (and in time):
“It’s largely the plan that the government has adopted moving forward, which is great because it’s based in science, but it requires us to invent some things to get there,” he told the CEDA conference. “About 40 per cent of the things we need to get to net zero, have to be invented. But this country has the power to invent those things. If you think it’s hard, you’re right.”
Attacks on cars coming soon:
A consultation paper on low-emission vehicles will be out in the “next few weeks”, while submissions for reforming the safeguard mechanism close on September 20.
The Safeguard Mechanism is the cheating name for the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme that Australians didn’t want and for the most part — don’t know we had. Documents related to it are here. Submissions can be made here. Please share your most entertaining suggestions below!
What kind of medicine do you offer to all children aged 5 – 11 as a “one off program” with a near-secret end date?
Apparently the end was a preplanned thing, a mere footnote in February that no one noticed. Was this a premade PR “out-clause” that was there from the beginning and which could be turned off or on as it suited? If so, we have to admire the politico-marketing. If things went badly, it’s a clever way of being able to cancel the program without appearing to cancel it. “Nothing to see here Ladies and Gentlemen“. It’s just a footnote clause that doctors didn’t know about.
Presumably, if there were no issues of concern they would have quietly extended the program.
“In a document published on its official website in February, the Government said that the current vaccine project for five to 11-year-olds would be a “one-off pandemic response programme”.
The Government insists its advice has not changed, but scientists said that mentions of a time limit would come as a shock and a disappointment to many parents of children coming up to five as very little appeared to have been done to communicate the cut-off with them.
But now at least one professor is very concerned that children turning 5 will have to wait seven years now to be eligible for their first shot.
“The advice hasn’t changed but they stuck the time limit in a footnote. And clearly it has come as a surprise to parents,” said Professor Christina Pagel, of University College London.
“It may only be a small number of people who are affected right now. But it’s quite a shock to the parents who were trying to get their kids vaccinated to find out they can’t now get it for seven years. That’s quite a big deal,” said Professor Pagel.
It must have been a surprise to doctors too, if they were accepting bookings that they had to suddenly cancel.
As one doctor points out the government has made much of it being a personal choice to get vaccinated, but this effectively removes parental choice.
Resistance is growing — even on Twitter:
That twitter thread has many readers (or apparent readers) saying they were shocked by the decision: “is vaccine tourism a thing” — asks one, worried about her four year old that has missed out. Another says without any irony “Thx for posting this! My 8 year old has had one jab and covid last month and was very unwell despite the reports of it being mild in kids — gutted he won’t get No 2!” — But ultimately most of the responses are sarcastic, apart from the Prof herself who thinks they should still get number 2…. to which in turn, another tells the Prof she is replying to a bot. Another says“do bots have children?”
I am guessing that the British authorities are becoming more aware of the public disappointment and the looming specter of criminal liability, and are backpedaling on the vaccines quietly.
h/t David Archibald, Scott of the Pacific, John Connor II
by Jo Nova
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