What would you do if you discovered three weeks before your national elections that the voting machines your nation was about to use were easily hackable by local or foreign state actors? The Dominion electronic machines were going to be used in 16 states, and it was a “matter of national security”.
Judge Amy Totenberg decided it was all far too hairy, and too late to do anything, so she sealed the entire 25,000 word report by Dr Alex Halderman. But strangely in September the following year the author was still unable to send these “national security” documents to DHS-CISA. They were still legally sealed, and he was unable to give that information to the government.
Dr Patrick Byrne, the Stanford graduate of Philosophy, and also Asian studies, polymath, and self made Overstock billionaire wrote a story last October that in a normal world would have printed its own front page headlines, along the lines of “Scandalous report on Risks of Dominion Voting Machine Suppressed before 2020 election”. Naturally, no one has heard about it. Note that the report and study was done before the elections and contains no evidence that the 2020 elections were hacked, or stolen — it just shows how that might have happened, but even that makes it “fodder for conspiracies” and thus, not apparently something a mature democracy should allow people to read.
What’s worse than going to polls knowing the machines might be hacked? How about living under a government that might have been put there by foreign actors and is hiding that the machines made in China are easy to cheat on…
Yesterday Patrick Byrne posted Alex Haldermans Court Declaration. However the full 25,000 word report remains sealed. Apparently 70% of American votes are recorded on paper and 33 states have a paper trail for every vote. But 5 states, including Georgia, use entirely paperless machines for live voting, with no way to check…
There’s a lot of Dominion Voting Machines out there.
Dr. Alex Halderman is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. He is, in short, a Professor of Dolphin-Speech, with focus on hacking. Halderman is no fan of Donald Trump, and from his public statements I would surmise that his politics are normal academic Lefty, but intellectually honest normal academic Lefty.
At a recent hearing, Totenberg sealed the report, citing a strong reluctance to draw any public scrutiny to the sensitive details in the case. Totenberg would not even allow an election integrity group to openly advocate for disclosure of the report, according to a transcript of a July 26 court hearing obtained by The Daily Beast. Instead, the judge asked that any such argument be filed in secret under seal. “There are so many other ways to educate the public besides trying to use this case,” Totenberg warned on the call. “I’m at the end of my rope about that.”
Totenberg decided to limit circulation of the report, opting to keep it to “attorneys’ eyes only”—and away from engineers at Dominion itself— out of a concern that exposing it to company employees would make it “subject to disclosure in other litigation.” “I’m concerned enough about the information contained in it… I have seen how this can blow up,” Totenberg said, according to the transcript.
Sam Jackson, an assistant professor who teaches about online extremism at the University at Albany, told The Daily Beast that the mere existence of this story could fuel conspiracy theories.
Halderman’s report shows that hacking these machines is easy, so “Georgia voters face an extreme risk that [ballot marking device]-based attacks could manipulate their individual votes and alter election outcomes.” And Georgia will not catch it if it happens. The same is true of 16 other states using these systems. That is highly concerning. Unless a Republican says the same thing, in which case it is a conspiracy theory. So when the judge suppresses the best information our country has about an issue of national self-determination, it is not actually suppression, it is “stopping a conspiracy theory”. Because a Republican said it. And the real problem with letting citizens know that votes can be manipulated and election outcomes altered… is that conservatives might use that knowledge to “undermine the validity of elections in the minds of conservatives” (though why an election in which votes are manipulated and outcomes altered has “validity” is considered something so obvious the Daily Beast need not address it).
In January 2022, the legal battle continued. As the hyperpartisan “Votebeat” site describes it, the report that’s sealed is no big deal. Anyone with unfettered access to the machines could find flaws, and that doesn’t mean anyone else did, or they were used. It doesn’t even mean that other states who are using or thinking of buying Dominion machines should see the report either. And it doesn’t mean the Judge should ban the use of the machines, and encourage states to use paper instead.
All you “election deniers” just need to crawl back in your holes:
Unlike Trump’s allies, we should resist falling into the logical trap of assuming that potential vulnerabilities in the machines mean they have already been exploited. We should also be clear-eyed about the link between this lawsuit and the raging fire of the Big Lie. David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which helped Georgia research new voting systems, says it is “simply a fact that then-President Trump used these failed claims to justify his failed coup” and his unsigned executive order.
“Whatever their intentions, it’s undeniable that those who have brought recent claims in courts attempting to decertify particular voting machines they didn’t like — all of which have failed — have found their claims and testimony used by election deniers who seek to undermine voter confidence and the legitimacy of the 2020 election and future elections,” Becker said.
Does anyone else wonder if politicians elected with hacked electronic machines may have a vested interest in keeping them hackable “for next time”?
Since direct-recording electronic machines became popular as a response to the disputed 2000 presidential election, there have been folks advocating for paper instead. In 2003, Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) introduced a bill that would have required a paper trail in all federal elections. It went nowhere, and he introduced it again in 2007, when it, again, went nowhere. It received substantial opposition from others in Congress as well as state election officials…
State election officials hoping for golden handshakes or sweet future career offers probably don’t want security holes that they are responsible for, being discussed in public either.
And when will Twitter let Patrick Byrne get his account back?
By Joe McMoncald, AP Business Writer, 25th April 2022
Official plans call for boosting coal production capacity by 300 million tons this year, according to news reports. That is equal to 7% of last year’s output of 4.1 billion tons, which was an increase of 5.7% over 2020.
Chinese officials are blunt about why they need more coal:
Coal is important for “energy security,” Cabinet officials said at an April 20 meeting that approved plans to expand production capacity, according to Caixin, a business news magazine.
“This mentality of ensuring energy security has become dominant, trumping carbon neutrality,” said Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace. “We are moving into a relatively unfavorable time period for climate action in China.”
Clearly these new levels of 4.4 billion* tons are going to set a record high for coal production, with or without Australian imports:
The ABC worked to mislead Australians during an election campaign, right in the headline. It’s if the Australian coal industry has no future and “needs to transition” at a time when the largest user of coal in the world is set to use even more coal.
A new report warns Australian thermal coal exports to China could fall by 20 per cent by 2025 as China invests in domestic mines and a major coking coal mine in Mongolia.
The report also predicts coking coal exports to China could fall by more than 20 per cent.
The modelling by ANU energy economists Jorrit Gosens and Frank Jotzo suggests that if China commits to its current climate policy, coking and thermal coal imports will drop by a quarter within three years, from 210 megatonnes (Mt) in 2019 to 155Mt by 2025.
Like all election advertising ABC fake news stories should be legally required to name the Green or Labor party official that approved them.
The real stories and the trends that matter to Australians lie unnoticed:
December 2021: After falling in 2019 and 2020, global power generation from coal is expected to jump by 9% in 2021 to an all-time high of 10,350 terawatt-hours, according to the IEA’s Coal 2021 report, which was released today.
However, global coal trends will be shaped largely by China and India, who account for two-thirds of global coal consumption, despite their efforts to increase renewables and other low-carbon energy sources.
Australia exports about 400m tons of coal a year and only consumes about 50m tons itself. We’re the first or second largest exporter of coal in the world, but we’re only digging up about a tenth as much coal as China does.
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* ERRATA: “Million” was obviously meant to be billion. Apologies for the typo. Likewise 32 times larger was really 82, and “twice as much coal” is really six times as much as used in Australia. Originally based on Australian coal consumption published in a different unit. Who knew coal was measured in anything other than megatons.?
Denmark has said it is suspending its widespread Covid-19 vaccination campaign. All remaining Covid restrictions were lifted in the country in February. Noting that the epidemic was under control and that vaccination levels were high, the Danish Health Authority said the country was in a “good position”. “Therefore we are winding down the mass vaccination programme against Covid-19,” said Bolette Soborg, director of the authority’s department of infectious diseases.
Around 81% of Denmark’s 5.8 million inhabitants have received two doses of the vaccine and 61.6% have also received a booster. Denmark noted a drop in the number of new infections and stable hospitalisation rates.
They say they may bring it back some vaccinations in autumn.
Alan Moran published an account of the carbon taxes that both the Coalition and the ALP support. In The Spectator he spelled out the cost of two forms of carbon taxation that we have at present and on top of that the ALP is determined to impose a great deal more.
The existing taxes arise from the RE mandates that increase the amount of wind and solar power in the mix and associated costs that arise from the additional transmission infrastructure required to service dispersed sources of power. Secondly there are taxes to support grants and soft loans dispensed by agencies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
The ALP spelled out their vision for increased power costs in a document called Powering Australia which represents a triumph of aspiration over reality. To quote, it will close the yawning gap between our current Federal Government and our business community, agricultural sector and state governments when it comes to investing in the renewables that will power our future.
Our plan will create 604,000 jobs, with 5 out of 6 new jobs to be created in the regions.
It will spur $76 billion of investment.
It will cut power bills for families and businesses by $275 a year for homes by 2025, compared to today.
Moran pointed out that the $78 billion to “rewire Autralia” is nearly four times the asset value of the existing NEM system in SE Australia and the cost of that “investment” will be a charge on taxpayers.
As to the reality of plans to increase the RE capacity and replace the poor old clapped out coal burners, have a look at the situation in South Australia just before sunrise this morning.
While the wind across the NEM was running at 20% of capacity (2/3 of the average) and delivering 10% of demand, in the wind leading state there was a wind drought (3% of capacity), with 60% of demand provided from Victoria while 80% of local generation was gas and (unusually) they were burning oil as well!
This picture will change through the day. And the NemWatch widget. Encourage people to look at the widget before after sunset and before dawn to get a vivid sense of the lunacy of turning to wind and solar power.
Wind was low in Victoria as well, running at 15% of capacity (half the average) while the much maligned coal burners kept the lights on, running at 75% of capacity (they can manage 100% when necessary.)
The video will become legendary. An MSMBC host creates great satire accidentally.
There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years
Elon Musk Is Evil! She says, in a video posted to an app controlled by the CCP, on a phone made by slave labor, repeating propaganda from a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos.
But the EU and UK have both already warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with The Digital Services Act:
“Whether on online harassment, the sale of counterfeit products… child pornography, or calls for acts of terrorism… Twitter will have to adapt to our European regulations which do not exist in the United States,” EU commissioner Thierry Breton told AFP.
The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
Jack Dorsey will get paid a cool billion from the deal, but his mention of “Wall Street” suggests he himself was under the thumb of the Monster asset shareholders.
Hillel Neuer reminds us of the cultural task ahead for the new management:
He tweets:
I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.
The deal everyone is talking about, that has just gone through:
Elon Musk taking Twitter private in $44 billion deal
Reuters
…
NEW YORK, April 25 (Reuters) – Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) for $44 billion cash on Monday in a transaction that will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.
It is a seminal moment for the 16-year-old company that emerged as one of the world’s most influential public squares and now faces a string of challenges.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement.
Keep in mind that Twitter is slated to report first-quarter earnings this Thursday, and originally the board was going to wait until after that earnings announcement to respond to the bid. Something changed.
My suspicion is the financials of the Q1 earnings report will not support the $54.20 high end evaluation offer originally proposed by Musk. If the low Q1 earnings rumors are accurate; and if Twitter had declined or fought the offer; the board would have been in the position of declining a deal that was substantially higher than the company market value, a tenuous position legally. Thus, a deal was made.
Which raises the question of how Twitter makes money?
Twitter has struggled to be profitable. Will it become profitable and maintain the high shareprice, and pay off the debts Musk is taking on to buy it? Does Musk expect to make it profitable, or did he just buy it as an act of philanthropy “for free speech” or as a challenge because he damn well could.
Arguably, these monster fund managers could “afford” to lose money on Twitter in order to boost profits in all their other areas. Like, for example that Blackrock owns 7% of a certain pharmaceutical company called Pfizer, and Vanguard owns 8% of the same company. If they were using (or rather abusing) Twitter to suppress any news that hurt their other investments, or elect governments that help them, that rather raises the stakes. They wouldn’t sell Twitter for the profit of selling it unless they thought they had no legal choice, or they thought they could neutralize or sabotage the Free-Speech-Twitter after the sale.
What would stop the Octopus-Funds from abusing their social media pet corporations? Corporate Law.
Arguably, the Twitter Board are accountable to the Twitter shareholders, and are supposed to be making profits for them, not for other shareholders. It’s a legal bomb that Ron De Santis, Governor of Florida has pressed the button on. As he sees it, the Pension Fund of the State of Florida owns shares of Twitter, and the way the Twitter board was behaving looks like an injury to the fund.
“We’re going to be looking at ways that the state of Florida can hold the Twitter Board accountable for breaching their fiduciary duties...”
BREAKING: @GovRonDeSantis announces he is looking at ways to hold Twitter’s board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duties.
— Benny “Libs Of Tik Tok” Aficionado (@bennyjohnson) April 19, 2022
….
It’s a very big game of chess. Has Elon Musk just outsmarted the Twitter Board and caught them at their own game, or will the same machine that used Twitter, sell it, and then sabotage it with cancel culture, and leave him holding the debt?
Because, let’s face it, the Haters are not coping well already
It won’t be impossible for Groupthinker cults to poison-the-well. Here’s one projecting his hate already for fear that Elon Musk might let people like Donald Trump back on Twitter.
….
Soon, supporting Twitter or being seen on it, might be a crime people lose their job for.
Not to mention that Musk may face visits from the IRS, spurious legal cases and general harrassment of all kinds for getting in the way of someone’s narrative.
AUSTIN, TX—According to the latest reports, inflation has hit a 40-year high affecting the prices of many consumer goods. However, one consumer staple is actually at an all-time high. Speech, which as recently as earlier this year was free, is now valued at $43 billion.
“The free exchange of ideas has been under attack, causing massive inflation under the Biden presidency,” explained Joe Squawk of CNBC. “It used to be that people could argue about all kinds of things on Twitter, a bastion of free speech. Then liberals started saying a lot of dumb things, and conservatives started making fun of them. So, the liberals started crying a lot, and the people working at Twitter just started kicking the conservatives off so no one would laugh at them for being dumb.”
This morning at sunrise the wind across the NEM was average (29% of capacity) with interesting variations between the states. Most of the states were close to balance with some flow of power from Queensland through NSW and Victoria to Tasmania.
My main purpose to track these numbers is to see how often SA depends on coal power from Victoria which is always when the wind is less than average between sunset and sunrise.
The other purpose is to see how much coal and gas contribute between sunset and sunrise to assess the feasibility of getting through nights on the back of hydro, wind and storage.
Across the NEM wind was delivering 14% of power at 29% capacity, with coal 75% and gas 3%.
NSW, wind 13% at 40% capacity and coal 85%. Queensland, wind 7% at 60% capacity and coal 86%, Victoria, wind 10% at 11% (wind drought) and coal 82%. South Australia, wind 75% at 45% capacity and gas 25% (no imported power).
Tasmania, wind 1% power at 3% capacity, hydro 83% and gas 16%.
So the message is that even with average wind across the SE of Australia and better than average in SA, Victoria and Queensland the overwhelming source of power is coal. Imagine the situation without Liddell and Eraring, not to mention all the other coal power stations that are supposed to close as soon as possible due to the rapid growth of wind and solar capacity.
Who knew? A study came out way back in 2016 showing that most people still had antibodies against tetanus, or “Lockjaw” even 60 years after their last vaccination. It’s a reminder of what successful vaccination can look like. It also shows the extraordinary ability of the human immune system to acquire lifelong protection — that doesn’t happen with all diseases, but it does with things like influenza, polio, measles, and mumps, and possibly tetanus and diphtheria.
The study tested the blood of 546 people. Given the striking results the authors suggest that the need for a ten year booster should be reassessed, but six years after the study came out the CDC and the Australian government are still saying we need “ten year boosters”. Is anyone even looking at this data?
Notably, shifting to a 30 year schedule could save the US government US$280 million each year. But Big-Pharma won’t be too happy about that. It may also prevent “80–160 cases of brachial plexus neuritis” — a rare side effect.
We’ve all grown up knowing that we need to get a tetanus booster at least once a decade in order to be protected from the potentially fatal disease.
That strategy has been incredibly safe and successful, with these days only around 31 cases of the disease being reported annually in the US. But a new study suggests that although there’s nothing wrong with being overly cautious, we could still be protected from the disease by getting just one booster every 30 years – and save a whole lot of money in the process.
… the new research looked into how long 546 adults were actually protected against diphtheria and tetanus, and found that they contained antibodies against the diseases for up to 30 years after receiving their last booster – way longer than previously assumed.
Here’s the astonishing graph of antibody titres in people after vaccination against tetanus (below). Note the scale on the x-axis, that’s a “y”. This is not days after vaccination — it’s years! Scores above −2 log10 IU/mL are considered “protected” against tetanus (marked with a dashed line). That’s nearly everyone who was studied — all 546 people involved.
The fatality rate for real tetanus is a rather nasty 13%. But tetanus itself is so rare, that only 3 people a year die of it in the United States. However anaphylaxis rates with the vaccine are 1.6 per million, so the practice of boosting every ten years “should be reexamined” (see that discussion below).
From the caption: “95% of the population will remain protected against tetanus for 64 years after vaccination.”
Humoral immunity to tetanus as a function of age and time after vaccination. Tetanus-specific serum antibody responses were measured in adult subjects and plotted versus age (A) or time after vaccination (B). Dotted line in each panel represents level of antibody required for protection, equivalent to 0.01 IU/mL. B, Solid blue line is the fitted regression line representing the antibody half-life decay rate, and the shaded blue region represents the upper and lower bound of 95% confidence interval (CI) for the cross-sectional antibody half-life estimation. Dashed blue line represents a 1-sided lower bound 95% CI based on a 14-year half-life and indicates when tetanus-specific antibody titers would decline to 95% seroprotection by crossing the protective threshold of 0.01 IU/mL (ie, −2 log10 IU/mL) at 72 years after vaccination. Dashed green line is based on an estimated 11-year half-life [7] and indicates that 95% of the population will remain protected against tetanus for 64 years after vaccination.
Protection against Diptheria is likewise “not too shabby”:
“…95% of the population will remain protected against diphtheria for 30 years after vaccination.”
Contrary to rhetoric that we’ve “destroyed the planet,” the world has never been a better place for human beings to live. Life expectancy and income have been skyrocketing, with extreme poverty (<$2/day) plummeting from 42% in 1980 to <10% today.
Philosopher and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. A prolific contributor to the climate and energy debate.
Great news! We win. The Pandemic Emergency declaration is officially over and unvaccinated Australians are free to leave the nation.
Since Senator Rennick exposed it, and I mocked the Department of Health about how Unvaccinated Australians can’t leave Australia unless they escape, and how it was due to a WHO treaty so we could “protect the world” — things have changed. The mocking was on April 8th and 9th. Presumably the government recognized how stupid it all looked to restrict unvaccinated Australians when at least 72 nations around the world are happy to let them in, and everyone knows now, that vaccination doesn’t slow transmission. After all, the whole world caught Omicron thanks to vaccinated travellers.
In the last two weeks the plans to write special laws to stop the unvaccinated from leaving the country silently vanished. But most Australians will not be aware the unvaccinated were still banned from leaving the nation until a few days ago, and are now free to go.
The Australian official website still tells Australians they have to have a vaccine. Click to enlarge. | Source: Dept of Health
What do governments do when they realize they’ve been caught with an indefensible rule, easy to ridicule — they quietly drop it. How quietly? The only Australians that might know are the ones reading Senator Rennick’s Facebook page, this site here, or the GreekCityTimes and maybe the Herald Sun.
The Australian government is apparently still hoping to dupe Australian travellers into getting a vaccine. The illusion of mandatory requirements is everywhere.
A visit to many official Department of Health pages still tells Australians they must be vaccinated to leave. Often there are only hints they might not:
There’s no link there to explain what those changes are. Good luck trying to figure out what the rules are. I went hunting for a straight answer. It took hours. On another page it vaguely says:
“If you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident seeking to leave Australia prior to 18 April 2022, your vaccination status impacts your eligibility to leave. From 18 April 2022, travel restrictions for Australian citizens and permanent residents are being eased.“
From 18 April 2022, unvaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents will be able to leave Australia without an individual travel exemption, but you may still be asked about your vaccination status.
And since non-Australians were always able to leave, the simple answer is that no one needs to be vaccinated to leave and 99.9% of most of the government information pages are now irrelevant to every person on Earth. But you may still be asked by a stranger whether you took an injection. Why?
Scott Morrison and Minister Greg Hunt Lie through Omission
Travellers need to read the fine print, but the government seemingly wants them to mistakenly think they still must be vaccinated.
On the Outbound International Travel, updated conveniently on April 17th, the day before the rules changed, the PDF tells travellers, the government “recommends passengers departing Australia be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and travel with proof of vaccination status documentation. Unvaccinated Australians are strongly discouraged from international travel due to the health risks.”
Officially the site says: “People who want to travel overseas must provide proof of their vaccination status if requested by a relevant official when exiting Australia.” So apparently, any border bureaucrat can still demand to know whether you are vaccinated or not, and your medical details, even though it’s not a requirement to be vaccinated. And you need “proof” of your unvaccinated status? Is there any reason at all to leave that requirement there, apart from fooling travellers that they need a vax passport? What do you do — get a certificate from your doctor to say you haven’t had the vax? How would your doctor know?
Is there any other way to describe this than deceptive, over-bearing, invasive, and misleading? For all the world, it looks like it’s designed to trick Australians.
The failure of European energy policy has become easy to see lately although the usual suspects want to replace imported coal and gas with more green energy. They double down on the green energy policies that have failed. You couldn’t make this up, but here it is!
None of this is surprising in the light of the failure of the German energiewende – the green energy transition that has been driven by the resurgent Greens since the 1990s.
This video from the Five Dock Climate Realists describes the German Trifecta of Failure – failure on the three sides of the energy policy triangle – price, security and emission reduction.
Wow. What does it take to get a democratic government to stop picking winners in socialist electrical generation? It takes a war, a 50% price rise, and the possibility that 4 in 10 households might be reduced to third world conditions within months.
Share the word — no country on Earth has lots of intermittent renewables AND cheap electricity.
Energy bosses have called for more Government support for households facing a ‘truly horrific’ winter, with as many as four in 10 people potentially falling into fuel poverty before the end of the year.
Energy bills for the 22 million British households not on fixed-term deals rose 54 per cent to just under £2,000 a year on average in April, the last time the Ofgem price cap was reviewed.
The clean Green transition was supposed to reduce costs, create jobs, and set people free, instead the experiment failed everywhere it was done. “Free” energy turned out to be a high maintenance, unenvironmental expensive fantasy loaded with hidden costs:
Analysts have warned of a further jump in the price cap from October, which could see the typical household paying £600 more per year.
Chris O’Shea, chief executive of Centrica, said the situation would get ‘much worse’ without intervention, while EDF’s chief executive, Simone Rossi, said its vulnerable customers could be spending £1 in every £6 of their income on their energy bills.
And the UK government is only considering dropping Green Levies.
Net Zero Watch has called for an end to the subsidies and produced The Factsheet: The cost of green levies (pdf).
According to the Daily Telegraph, “government officials are examining whether the controversial levies – used to fund renewable energy subsidy schemes – could be phased out gradually or dropped altogether….”
Green levies cost the UK economy about £11 billion a year in total, putting £150 a year on the average household electricity bill, and a further £250 per household on the annual cost of living, a total of £400 per household per year. The levies also depress wages and rates of employment.
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch director of energy, points out the renewable firms are making out like bandits:
Is there any better proof that “believing” in climate action is just a fashion statement? For all the talk of the end of fossil fuels, the biggest and most powerful funds in the world sign up for their “Net Zero” clubs but pour money into oil, gas and coal, hither thither, anyway.
The 30 biggest funds in the world manage €42.5 trillion in assets. These funds are so big, they can move markets if they want too…
Soak in that hypocrisy
Larry Fink starred at Davos and other events pontification for years on the importance of “tackling climate change”, how it’s an investment risk, and on how “climate change will upend” the way we do business, and how we need to do “long termism“. But he’s the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management fund in the world and they don’t mind at all they profit from all the fossil fuels. They joined the Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance, but do almost nothing. Indeed, vocalizing about what bad investments fossil fuels are while investing in them, is like a reverse pump and dump. They’re just scaring off the competition.
Poor old journalists and NGO’s are flummoxed, but at least they are paying attention:
This sort of contradiction wreaks havoc with the Occupy crowd.
Climate Crisis? Fund Managers Are Sticking With Fossil Fuel
A new report alleges broken promises on the part of bankers and asset managers who just a year ago pledged to fight global warming.
Tim Quinson, Bloomberg
None of the world’s largest asset managers has definitively called on fossil-fuel companies to stop the development of new oil and gas projects.
Surely, one would think, given all the climate-conscious talk coming from Wall Street bigwigs like BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink, that the investment industry would be using all of its muscle to press the world’s worst polluters to reduce their production of dangerous greenhouse gases.
Instead, the opposite is true.
Together, 30 of the biggest asset managers have at least $550 billion invested in oil, gas and coal companies that have expansion plans, and even more alarmingly, they continue to provide “fresh cash to companies that are ignoring climate science,” said Lara Cuvelier, sustainable investment campaigner at Reclaim Finance, a nonprofit which published a scorecard Wednesday grading investment firms on their environmental commitments.
Big Government is supposed to fear the free press who criticize it — When the press fear the government, it follows the press prints Fake News. It’s just an arm of Big Government.
Justin Trudeau has invented a Social Credit system for journalists. What could possibly go wrong — Apart from death. corruption and wasted money. It explains a lot — like why virtually none of the news media in Canada covered the Truckers Rally, the problems with vaccines, or discontent among the unacceptable working class people. Apart from Rebel News, the other media outlets were afraid of losing their QCJO, or their subsidies, their income tax breaks, and their right to get into government events.
It’s the oldest trick in the Dictators playbook — make the critics get a license. It’s as bad as it sounds. An anonymous panel sits in secret and assesses something called the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organisational Licence or a QCJO. Not surprisingly Rebel News did not get a license. The invisible bureaucrats claimed that only 1% of Rebel News is “news” and therefore it doesn’t qualify. Which means Rebel News are banned from government events, and punished and downranked on social media (even more than they already are), and their subscribers can no longer claim their subscription costs as a tax deduction. In return Rebel News are suing Justin Trudeau.
Ask yourself if the invisible bureaucrats will get bigger or small paypackets if Canadians vote for Bigger-leftier-governments? Which kind of “journalists” will make the bureaucrats richer?
Rebel Commander, Ezra Levant, points out 99% percent of Canadian Media outlets are dependent on Big Canadian government. 1,500 news media companies in Canada took $61 million in funds from the Canadian Government and none of them reported it.
Thanks to Eric Worrall at WUWT who points out that last year the Biden administration introduced tax breaks for “local media” which are worth as much as $25,000 per journalist.
Biden’s tax breaks for local media an effort to turn them into ‘versions of leftist NPR or PBS,’ critic says
Published November 15
The tax break would allow eligible local media organizations, including newspapers, digital news websites and television stations to receive a tax credit of $25,000 per journalist they employ, and $15,000 for the following four years. The tax break can be claimed for up to 1,500 journalists.
He who is owned by Big Government is unlikely to be too critical of it. The fact that the US government wants to pay off the legacy media shows how important the legacy media is to the government. The fact that the public don’t want to pay for the same media show how poorly it serves them.
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