11 convoys are converging across Canada. One convoy was claimed to be over 70 kilometers long* last night and growing. US truckers are joining in, and they can’t come over the border they are going to block it.
This is not a union organized thing. It’s grassroots and it’s come out of nowhere. People are coming out and standing in minus 20 degree weather just to cheer the trucks on. The fundraising started last Friday and has reached $5m. It has grown so fast that GoFundMe is holding funds til the organisers present a clear plan. Truckdrivers are even coming from Alaska. There’s an ocean of cars in support in Acheson Alberta.
UPDATE#2: The Empire fights back. Snezhana reports: Facebook shut down the #FreedomConvoy2022 page and Social media is starting to shut down pages supporting #TruckersForFreedom to censor what’s happening in #Canada!
The Facebook Group had grown to 545,000 members before it was shut down.
If news of this convoy spread freely and was supported like the BLM rallies imagine how fast it could grow. Spread the word. We’re in an information war. Share the news any way you can. Never give in. The Establishment is very afraid of what Truckers and the people who support them can do.
Think about this. From a standing start, this ‘army’ was mobilized, organized, financed, and shipped out in 3 days. In another 2 days it’s covered over 1,500 miles heading East, and additional columns have headed West, not sure how far they’ve traveled at this point.
It’d take the Cdn. Forces weeks to accomplish the same thing, with the same size force.
I’m not knocking the Cdn Forces; I’m just pointing out how incredible this enterprise is. The organizers are a folklore in the making.
This is going down in History no matter how it turns out.
Tireroaster below shows lots of small gatherings waiting in the middle of nowhere to see one small part of the convoy. At 7:45 he joins one of the big convoys in Moose Jaw. So many cars lined up beside the roads, Canadian flag waving and finally overpasses loaded with trucks.
Last three minutes here is a compilation that includes a song that must have been made for this event.
Why?
Last night in the -20 something of a January evening, several hundred people gathered on the side of the highway in a small Saskatchewan village, just as 1,000’s of others have done before us, and many more will continue to do. I expected only a fraction of that!
This is not just a trucker thing, it’s not just a vax thing, it’s way bigger than any of that. People can see that there’s something wrong, and are looking for an answer. Our legal, normally accepted political process has been hijacked by those who want an unaccountable system of government that transfers the power of the people into the hands of a few. The ones we elected to speak for us are, for a number of reasons, are unable/ unwilling to exercise their obligations to us as the check and balance against a move towards tyranny.
We are left dangling and frustrated as we don’t have a voice, and we absolutely to almost the last soul out here, know in our hearts that something must change, or we will lose most of what we, and our ancestors have worked our whole lives for. Freedom to live, work, and enjoy the amazing country we live in! Freedom to make choices that affect us and our communities. Freedom to take risks that we determine are right for our circumstances, not what some pencil neck somewhere has determined what is best for us. The evidence has been piling up for decades here, no unaccountable bureaucrat will ever be able to serve you and the best interests of your country better than an honest, community minded, unselfish individual. They almost always spend our capital building their own little empires, giving themselves raises and pensions, making themselves more visible and comfortable while the taxpayer works to support them! They aren’t accountable any more, our country cannot support this, and we all know it!
We need hope! We need a voice, and that’s why we left our warm homes last night, to go and see if this might be a voice that we can trust! We stood there,in the cold, vaccinated beside unvaccinated, farmers beside professors, kids beside seniors, men and women, waiting to see a glimpse of hope. A hope that these people who are spending their own resources, leaving their homes and businesses behind, to drive to Ottawa to try make a difference in our lives. It remains to be seen if they will succeed in convincing the elites in power that they are out of bounds, but I can tell you from simply looking around at what I see happening, they have started something bigger than any of us could have imagined! It’s time!
See it unfold (until Twitter censors it) #TruckersForFreedom and #ConvoyforFreedom and #TruckersConvoy2022. Please save or copy your favourite videos. They will be invaluable to redpill friends who think the news services are reporting honestly.
The Biden family scored $31 million from five deals in China, all with individuals who had ties to the Chinese spy apparatus. All the details are written up by Peter Schweizer in Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.
The US media spent years obsessing with Russiagate which amounted to nothing while ignoring the bulk carrier load of suspicious deals that connected the son of the then Vice President of the USA to the highest level of Chinese Intel. These businessmen were people like the former head of the Ministry of State Security and the head of foreign intelligence recruitment. Millions of dollars changed hands but no one can easily point to particular goods or services that were received.
The burial of the Hunter Biden Laptop-from-hell in the three weeks before the US 2020 Election was the first seismographic warning that major cracks were spreading through the bedrock of Western Civilization. We expected the media to lie and cheat and be shamelessly, insufferably biased, but it was so much worse.
Schweizer then, has done the job the Western media won’t. He calls this the “scariest investigation I’ve ever done”.
How could Big-Science be 100% dependent on Big-Crooked-Government and not become the same corrupt machine that steers it?
“The hazard of a Chinese businessman with close ties to the top ranks of Beijing’s spy agency conducting financial transactions with the son of the U.S. vice president cannot be overstated. How this did not set off national security or ethics alarm bells in Washington is a wonder in itself,” Schweizer writes in Red-Handed.
Indeed:
Another partner the Bidens were introduced to via “The Super Chairman” is Zhao Xuejun (aka Henry Zhao), who formed Harvest Fund Management. Zhao was the chairman and Chinese Communist Party general secretary at the firm.
Zhao had another company called “Harvest Global Investments,” which he co-founded with Jia Liqing, the daughter-in-law of a member of the Politburo Standing Committee at the time… “There is no one more powerful in the world of Chinese intelligence,” Schweizer writes. “The seductive and lucrative deal that Hunter was now putting into place, creating BHR, involved two financiers with ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence,
In the infamous “Laptop From Hell,” a 2019 text was recovered from Hunter Biden to his daughter Naomi, where he writes, “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years … It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
And where were the FBI?
They were too busy hiding Hunters Lap top from American voters.
“Imagine if we were talking about relationships to Big Oil or Big Tech, the media would be all over this. ” The reason they don’t want to deal with China is a strategy called Elite Capture.
What Beijing want to do is decapitate the leadership in the United States by striking these lucrative deals.
Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s finances are intertwined. They are not separate entities. There are hundreds of examples where Hunter Biden is paying bills for Joe Biden, which is not legal. He is subsidizing Joe Biden’s lifestyle…
Peter Schweizer is a Breitbart News senior contributor. He also exposed Mitch McConnell’s ties with China — This time last year it was chilling to see how deeply corrupt those connections were, hidden in plain view, officially declared, yet never mentioned in the news.
Mitch McConnell is the powerbroker of the US Senate, but he’s also a guy whose in-laws own a major shipping company that buys container ships from a Chinese Government company. The in-laws make money from carrying goods back and forward in deals with Chinese State Owned companies.
His wife, by the way, was also The Transportation Secretary of the US Government (!). Her sister sits on the Board of Directors of the Communist Chinese government’s Bank of China.
A German car reporter bought a new VW e-Up car in Wolfsburg and drove the 650 km to Munich. But the weather was freezing and to get further on each charge Lisa Brack kept the heating off most of the time. She still needed three charging stops and took 13 hours to get home.
Gosselin said that a diesel car would usually finish that trip in seven hours without a fuel stop (and with a heater running).
13 hours of driving and charging
The subfreezing weather was a major drawback for the VW e-car. According to the kreiszeitung.de, “the heating stayed off for almost the entire journey in freezing temperature” in order not to draw down the battery so quickly. This meant that to survive the trip, Brack had to take along a generous supply of “hats, scarves, gloves and generally warm clothing”…
According to the kreiszeitung.de, she made the crucial mistake of charging up too seldom and wasted much time charging the batteries to 100% instead of 80% (the last 20% take the longest). “Charge faster, accept a little less range and charge again earlier – but again faster.”
“One more charge alone would have saved 1.5 hours,” she commented.
So with better planning she only needed an extra 4.5 hours. Imagine if she’d had passengers and suitcases and her EV was 10 years old?
Truckers for Freedom — thousands of trucks are headed for Ottawa
The TruckersforFreedom are starting in Vancouver today and tens of thousands of trucks will converge on Ottawa on Jan 29th in a bid to stop the mandates. A GoFundMehas already raised more than two million dollars to help cover the costs to drive the big rigs across the country. Some US truckers are driving up to join in. And they are jubilant!
Crowds are waiting for the Convoy on overpasses and beside the roads.
….
Truck Protests Can Stop A Nation
Our experience with the Convoy of No Confidence of in Australia in 2011, against the carbon tax, was that the establishment is very afraid of this sort of protest. Truckers really can shut down a nation, and the images of thousands of trucks storming across the countryside will pull in people as they see it pass. It’s a powerful image. In 2011 whole towns turned out to wave and cheer and offer free food. Vehicles would join on for hundreds of kilometers.
But these protests strike fear in the heart of the Establishment. A giant political PR machine is almost certainly swinging into gear to minimize everything about it. The media will downplay it, and hide it, as if people spending thousands of dollars and two weeks of their time is no big deal. They will say it was “smaller than expected” or is “shrinking” (no matter how big it is). I hope the Truckers for Freedom have a team to count all the trucks, and film everything. They need to use every kind of social media they are “permitted” to.
Flymaster comments that “CBC is reporting on the Truck Convoys but the storyline is “Truckers protesting bad highway conditions in BC”“
The Toronto departure date has been moved forward a day because there are so many trucks.
Make no mistake, we have to share the message with the world. Someone has to make sure the organisers know what is coming and how dirty underhanded tricks will be used at the last minute to separate the convoy or slow it down, or prevent it reaching the most important, symbolic or ideal photoshoots.
In Australia, the Truckers went to great lengths to coordinate with the Federal police, to get permits, and make sure they didn’t put people out, and it was used against them. At the last minute on the day the trucks were supposed to drive in laps around Parliament House they turned up to find the inner road blocked by police, and were diverted to an outer one.
The Convoy organizers staged their entry so carefully, coordinating it with the Federal Police. They meticulously planned everything so as not to put out the average Canberran, even starting at 5.30am so as to avoid the peak hour traffic. They were scrupulously considerate. (Perhaps too much so.)
In the end, the fact that they were so well organized and polite was used against them. The pro-government forces hyped up the anger against the out-of-towners with threats that “it would cause major traffic delays” and “bring Canberra to a standstill”. But when the protest didn’t cause any of the promised disruption, instead of admitting they were wrong, and apologizing, they pretended that the lack of traffic problems shows the Convoy was a fizzer. Spin spin spin. It’s too easy, isn’t it? If the Convoy had slowed up the traffic, it would be called a nuisance.
How do you portray the grassroots movement of cattlemen, miners, truck-drivers, business-people and farmers as being unrepresentative? Just call them all “truckies”.
Meanwhile, the health workers in London are kicking up a storm
The UK is ending all mandates except for the requirement for health workers to get vaccinated, and that’s being stridently opposed. As many as 70,0000 health workers are not vaccinated and may face being sacked on April 1:
PROTESTORS in central London have sparked chaos as hundreds gathered to call for an end to the Government’s vaccine mandate as NHS 70,000 workers may lose their job if they keep refusing the jab.
Thousands of protesters flocked to central London to remonstrate against mandatory coronavirus vaccination for NHS staff. Dramatic footage shows protesters dancing to Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, suggesting the Government’s measures go too far and encroach on civil liberties. With the new rules coming into effect on April 1, there are serious question marks over what the future holds for up to 70,000 health care workers unless they get jabbed in the next 67 days.
It’s hard to believe, but when the government says “take this Pfizer drug OR lose your job, your rights and your house” — they are quietly also saying “trust Pfizer” — because Pfizer hold all the trial data and you are not allowed to see it.
And it’s largely the same with the other Big-Pharma companies too.
Academic journals are generally part of the problem, so it’s a shock to see one stand up for something.
UPDATE: And it’s fair to say “Where was the BMJ a year ago?” Why now and not before the mass vax campaign? Is this is a sign the Ship is sinking and the first rats are jumping?
“Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come. This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.”
BMJ also accused pharmaceutical companies of “reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims,” pointing to Pfizer, whose COVID vaccine trial was “funded by the company and designed, run, analyzed, and authored by Pfizer employees.”
Right now the whole of civilization is operating on a medical model about one-degree away from drug dealers. The drugs are safe and effective and you have no right to know exactly how safe they are.
It’s almost like democracies are here to serve Pfizer?
The BMJ went on to point out that in the wake of global immunization efforts, “trust” and “transparency” are vital, noting that “Big pharma is the least trusted industry.”
Ooh. Even the “F-word”?
“At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars,” the editors said, adding that one of the companies (Pfizer), has previously “pleaded guilty to fraud.”
Will Pfizer become The Worlds Most Hated company? (A question from David E).
The Swamp has done this all before: Remember Tamiflu?
Billions of dollars were spent on a drug that no one could independently scrutinize. Even the principal authors writing studies on Tamiflu were unable to access the data.
Surprisingly, the World War I era temperatures are still changing. Mornings that seemed nippy at the time are now susceptible to frosts.
Someone should warn the farmers — except they’re all dead.
Thanks to Chris Gillham for independently and laboriously going through the new unannounced changes in another cycle of BOM’s hidden revamp of Australia’s history. ACORN 2.2 is the latest version of the Australian Climate Observation Reference Network of “the best” 112 weather stations across Australia.
“The bureau has now remodelled the national temperature dataset three times in just nine years,” Dr Jennifer Marohasy said.
In the last five years the ACORN re-revisions by the BOM have discovered another quarter of a degree of warming that we didn’t know about from the last hundred years. It’s not clear why the BOM doesn’t want to tell the world how good they are at correcting thermometer records from 1913. It seems like a remarkable skill.
The minima just keep getting cooler
Chris Gillham plots the longest running stations from the ACORN 2.2 set against the old raw readings:
Who knew all those old thermometers were so wrong?
Graham Lloyd:
Independent analysis of the latest changes show they added 0.06C to maximum warming and 0.11C to minimum warming from 1910-19 to 2010-19.
A series of updates to the ACORN data have added 0.228C mean temperature warming if comparing 1910-19 with 2010-17 (2017 being the final year of ACORN 1)
Clearly, the cheapest way to stop global warming would be to sack everyone at the BOM.
The Bureau admitted to Lloyd that they changed 25 sites in the latest round, most of them because of statistical revelations:
The bureau said changes were made to 20 sites on the basis of statistical analysis. According to the bureau, statistical analysis is used to identify an abrupt warming or cooling at a particular site, relative to other sites in the region.
Apparently the future of life on Earth depends on their data, but it would take too long to train someone outside BOM to check it. Tell us again, how much does climate change matter?
Here’s the BOM explanation of the need for adjustments:
“A significant change relative to other sites indicates a non-climatic driver, which sometimes has an easily identifiable cause (e.g. a new building near a site) and sometimes does not (often these will relate to local vegetation or land surface changes)”, the bureau said. “In carrying out this statistical analysis, the bureau uses 10 years’ worth of data from multiple sites to quantify the size of the change. Adjustments are only applied where a significant change has been identified.
So instead of researching the site history as deeply as they can, the BOM use statistical trickery analysis to figure out local site changes using some other thermometers “within a thousand miles”. What they don’t do is full historical research and documentation of the sites first. (Like the ones here, here and here, thanks Bill Johnston). So it’s possible that if, say, 10 sites got similar changes at the same time (like changing to a new small screen) the other better sites in non-changing screens could be slowly “corrected” one-by-one by the junkier sites with the right statistical algorithm. Now, perhaps the BOM have ways to make sure that doesn’t happen — but they won’t tell us what they are, they don’t publish the detailed documentation of either the full site histories or the methods they use to correct them.
As Chris Gillham notes, the BOM say the new adjustments didn’t change the long term trend. But a lot of little changes in the same direction would. The new adjustments might have also made a few local hottest ever headlines much easier to get. Suddenly the modern contenders for the longest heatwave, warmest night, and hottest summer all got a head-start.
The mysterious process of homogenization
The Bureau “homogenizes” a site according to a mystical method that uses an inexplicable group of sites that are in the same region, or at least in Australia somewhere. For example, lighthouse readings off the Bass Strait have been corrected with help from Hay, 600 kilometers away, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range. A thermometer in Ballarat has been used to correct one at Bruny Island off the South coast of Tasmania. The BOM has also corrected Alice Springs using measurements in Collarenabri nearly 1,600 kilometers away. (Thanks to Ken Stewart for that tip). When I said “a thousand miles” I wasn’t joking.
All the sites marked in black, for example, have been used to homogenize Alice Springs
Congratulations to Chris Gillham, Jennifer Marohasy and thanks to Graham Lloyd.
Major protests against mandatory vaccination are being planned in 40 countries and at least 150 cities around the world this weekend.
Mandates, masks and VaccinePassports are being wound down in the UK. “Prime Minister pledges to scrap all controls by March”. Omicron has derailed the program. We have a short window to push back hard as current vaccines stumble. In only 6 – 10 weeks Big-Pharma are promising new Omicron specific vaccines (which will probably be mRNA because they are faster to develop). At that point, the old vaccines and all the problems with them may disappear down the memory hole as the radiant glow of *All New Vaccines* appears over the horizon. Now is the time.
Even Austria which announced incredible 1,000 Euro fines for the unvaxxed per month has pushed the date back to April. But other states are ramping mandates up.
“On 22 January, new vaccine mandates for truck drivers will come into effect in the US, which will also bar unvaccinated truck drivers from crossing the border.” — Independent
CANADA, Truckers For Freedom are blocking all lanes of traffic to and from USA in Emerson, Manitoba. What do you think about that @JustinTrudeau , next they are heading to Ottawa to pay you a visit.
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Europe
Helsinki, Finland: 14:00, march from Senate Square to Rautatientori
Dublin, Ireland: 14:00, Garden of Remembrance
Lisbon, Portugal: 15:00, Praca do Marques de Pombal
Gothenburg, Sweden: 15:00, Gustav Adolfs Torg
Stockholm, Sweden: 14:00, Norrmalmstorg
Kyiv, Ukraine: 12:00, Sofia Square
London, UK: 13:00, Portland Place; protesters will likely march to Westminster
Birmingham, UK: 13:00, Chamberlain Square
Bristol, UK: 13:00, College Green
Cardiff, UK: 13:00, City Hall
Glasgow, UK: 13:00, Commonwealth Monument, Glasgow Green
Leeds, UK: 13:00, Town Hall
Manchester, UK: 13:00, Piccadilly Gardens
Liverpool UK — St Georges Hall, 1pm
Jan. 23
Brussels, Belgium: 12:00, Brussels North railway station
Sofia, Bulgaria: 14:00, Palace of Culture
…
The only protest list Google seems to find is one by a European security firm warning of disruption.
We finally reached a turning point with Omicron that suggests we have it’s measure.
We couldn’t know if the South African experience would translate to the overweight, indoor and diabetic parts of the world given 60% in South Africa had already had Covid — plus it was summer, and that part of the world is more familiar with certain anti-virals which must not be named.
But the news from the UK is about as good as we could have hoped. And Hallalujah, restrictions are being wound back in the UK.
The hospitalization curve in the UK has just (maybe) started to decline, and if there are no surprises, then Omicron is roughly kinda 10% as severe as Delta was.
Modelling Hospitalizations in the UK. Omicron
I know some will feel that this is no news at all and we could see this coming for weeks. But bear in mind that in South Africa, the country far ahead of us all, the deaths have only just plateaued the last three days (we hope).
The peak of infections in South Africa was December 17th. So that’s a full month’s lag from cases to deaths.
Deaths may have only just hit the peak in South Africa. Graph OWID.
And right now, deaths are rising around the world, with the exception of Germany:
Source. OWID
There are plenty of ways this could have turned out differently. Even now, we don’t know the after effects or “sequelae” — like the long Covid tally, or how long natural immunity will last, or whether there is some inflammatory, or autoimmune side effect. A lot of people are turning up in hospital for other things, and being diagnosed with Covid. Most likely Omicron is ripping through the population faster and more asymptomatically than anyone thought, but what if there are other symptoms taking people to hospital that we don’t associate with Covid? We’d hope the docs have figured that out, but it would be nice to see someone in the media even ask the question.
We are not at the end of the Omicron track yet. And as long as we suppress safe cheap drugs and keep injecting 90% of the population with a leaky ineffective vaccine, the next variant-of-concern is in production right now.
Welcome to a world where El Salvador leads the way in medical care
As early as July 2020 El Salvador was trialling kits to treat Covid that included Ivermectin. Cases were starting to rise, so on August 9, 2020 the President Nayib Bukele made a national announcement that treatment kits and tests were available. Anyone with symptoms could call up the helpline and a box would be delivered to their home. The treatment kits included ivermectin, azithromycin, zinc, Vitamin D, Panadol, and an antihistamine.
By January 2021 cases were on the rise again and so Ivermectin was made available over the counter without a prescription for anyone to buy at pharmacies. Meanwhile the vaccine rollout began in February 2021. But by April 9 only 2.8% of the population was vaccinated. The rate of delivery increased from there.
Lucky El Salvador didn’t wait for the random controlled trials to develop a treatment kit. Wow.
The first Covid peak was the day after the President announced home deliveries of treatment kits. The second peak was day after the news was announced that Ivermectin would be available without a prescription.
Here’s El Salvador compared to the rich nations of the world:
On a cases per million basis, the “big” surges in El Salvador were … tiny. Especially when compared to the West.
Per capita cases of Covid. El Salvador managed the pandemic better than nearly anywhere.
The kits were described by one doctor as like a take away food delivery. Here’s a lady delivering some, as seen on a WHO video which praises El Salvador . It mentions masses of treatment kits (at 2:30) but does not list a single ingredient. Just like magic, getting a cardboard box will save you?
Vans were sent to homes of infected people to deliver treatment kits. (WHO Video)
By February 2021 El Salvador had delivered 200,000 treatment kits. But at this stage people were also buying itself for themselves from the local pharmacy too.
200,000 kits were delivered to homes by Feb 2021 | WHO Video
SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on Tuesday he takes hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that U.S. President Donald Trump has promoted as a way to ward off the novel coronavirus, though experts have warned about its safety.
Bukele told reporters that El Salvador was not promoting it anymore as a treatment, following the recommendation of the World Health Organization, though patients would still be able to take it as a preventative measure if they wished.
“I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,”Bukele said.
On a cumulative basis El Salvador has done exceptionally well
Only New Zealand has lower cases:
Few have done better than El Salvador. | Source: OWID
It’s fair to ask if El Salvador has done enough testing, but the test positivity rate varied from 3% – 15% which is on par with many countries. And in terms of total death rates per million from Covid — El Salvador at 587 per million was worse than New Zealand (10) and Australia(95) but lower than Canada (820), the UK (2,200), and the US (2,500).
How many of us would have predicted two years ago that we’d have more freedom and more competent medical treatment in El Salvador than we could get at home? Send these figures around the world. People need to know.
Scott Manley has done an excellent summary video of the Tongan volcano, much of the science and history of it as well as the effects thousands of miles away. The area around the volcano had completely reformed in the last ten years. He has collected some great footage together.
It’s interesting watching air pressure waves travel across Japan and the USA. Ken Stewart found the compression- decompression wave hit the east coast of Australia at about 5:16 Qld time and took 3 hours and 24 minutes roughly to get to Shark Bay, an average speed of about 1,160 kph. The decompression was about half an hour after the first peak and can be seen (still) in weather station pressure data.
Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai are roughly 900 years apart and this one was on schedule.
Thanks to Greg
…
A
The CliffMass weather blog noted that the pressure wave hit Seattle at 4:30AM local time, so the air pressure spike took 8.5 hours to cross the Pacific at about 664miles per hour. h/t WattsUp
Sending best wishes for the poor people of Tonga. Planes are on the way to help, slightly complicated because Tonga is still Covid free, and people there are not too keen on dealing with that at the same time as the recovery.
Will Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai make a difference to global temperatures or will just it provide a convenient excuse for cooling that may be on the way in 2022 anyhow?
Who would have guessed that giant protected monopolies would devolve into wallowing workplaces where sad-sack un-productive workers accumulate?
“Hazard Harrington” writes from the inside of Big Tech about the terminal decline, the dark moods, despondency and lack of productivity. When the most exulted culture at work are the most victimized, the miserable workers share their misery and nobody gets anything done.
Wokeness is that dead end where everyone can blame everyone else, and no one, apart from white men, can be sacked. So the people who can’t compete collect in a kind of Sargasso sea of civilization.
h/t Bill in AZ
UPDATE: Hazard Harrington’s account is now gone. Archive copy
… COVID/WFH [Working From Home] has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.
There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?” Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”
It’s bad to feel good:
It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.
She made some argument about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.
So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They’ve been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off.
Thus The Big Tech empires have become Soviet style microcosms — because they are protected by Big-Government and able to swallow up competition in a predatory easy way, they lost the hard edge of competition and gained the luxury of supporting and fostering every cultural soft whimsy, debilitating ideology, and self-defeating dark habit.
The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote.
We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was.
The churn in good workers leaves the last decent employees training everyone new. They can’t get anything done, but the new employees, probably remote, don’t get enough support to thrive either.
We’re running on the code written in years past. No major new product initatives are being launched.
Bosses have become left-wing therapists
We know Big Tech management will sack people with conservative or outspoken male views, or who just says “toughen up sunshine” because they are not paying enough deference to the Wokish totems. So it follows that the vacuum of realism was filled with red carpet support for anyone as long as they’re “sufficiently left” or a minority. They “can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment.” That in turn became the self-reinforcing spiral. The sensible left cajoled each other into becoming militant progressives and there was no one there to put the brakes on.
Management has become “understanding” to the extreme. Anyone who has had a bad sleep can be excused for the day.
“Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you’re far left only), share your sex life. This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts.
You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her. People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing.
Productivity is essentially zero, or less:
We had a woman who worked for us who was just awful at her job. Could not understand instructions at all. Could not do the job. Barely spoke English. She wasn’t just not productive, she actually dragged the team down. I worked with my Director to finally get her fired after…
…failing her Performance Improvement Program (PIP). HR told us they can’t fire her because she’s Asian and female and in California, that it’s just simply too hard. This was over 5 years ago.
And I’m not productive either. I’m constantly bombarded with anti-white, anti-male, woke propaganda. We’ve even had explicit discussions of assigning less work to URMs (under-represented minorities), because “life is really hard for them right now.” This suggestion was from a lesbian white woman with cats.
As productive as one person can be, you can’t add value when constantly thwarted.
I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities.
The Great Monopolies have become socialist corporations like the USSR, eaten from within, but running on momentum.
We are going to win this cultural war. Whereas conflict is the air we breathe, the delicate snowflakes of converged Corporate America can’t even handle reading the news headlines. Whereas our morale is antifragile, and we become more determined with every deplatforming, discrediting, and demonetization, their morale is breaking under the weight of their loneliness.
Big Tech leads the way, but the commenters below this extraordinary thread find similar themes in their own workplaces, in academia and “much of American society in general”.
America needs a mass emigration from Big Tech to Free Tech, and Big Tech is working towards that, banning their own most popular commentators. The more they ban the better. But here’s thing, Hazard Harrington is writing about the flaws of Big Tech from his Twitter account. He’s gone from 0 to 17,000 followers in just two months.
If you visit @HazardHarringto — tell him to make his exit plan now to take his readership with him. We all need an escape plan.
UPDATE: Judges decision is final. Djokovic to be deported. He faces a three year ban potentially. “An embarassing farce”.
No one looks good in the Novak Djokovic Deportation saga, but ponder what it says about the vaccines. We’re deporting the best tennis player in the world — not because of the germs he might spread, but to because of the ideas he might spread.
“It’s in the public interest” says the Immigration Minister
While some are cheering One Rule for All, ponder that we’re punishing someone because of what other people might do?
Djokovic is a political prisoner:
Immigration minister Alex Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption… [he] said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.
“Mr. Djokovic’s presence in Australia may pose a health risk to the Australian community in that his presence in Australia may foster antivaccination sentiment,” Hawke said in a document detailing his decision.
“His presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community,” Hawke said in the cancellation notice.
It’s a free speech battle. And yet Djokovic didn’t come here to make a political point. He wasn’t brandishing his state of unvaccination. He has steadfastly refused to discuss his medical choices.
If Australia can’t guarantee players in a Grand Slam will be free of political interference we don’t deserve to host one. Two other players with medical exemptions arrived in Australia and were moving around freely, but turned around and left after Djokovic was detained. It’s all so sordid. Renata Voracova was deported after being ordered to strip in a six-hour interrogation. Others like Frenchman Jeremy Chardy chose not to even come after having an adverse reaction to his first dose and deciding not to have the second.
If the border rule about vaccination was about health and not politics, it would have allowed people to use alternatives like testing, or quarantine, or effective antivirals.
It’s become a farce — a global advertising campaign that says “Don’t visit Australia”. Tourism Australia must be cringing.
It’s not “one law for all” when it’s selectively enforced
Some say deporting Djokovic is a victory for “one rule for all”. But only the unvaxxed will be given a legal visa, allowed to fly in, detained, and post hoc have all their details scrutinized by teams of lawyers and be turned into a media circus and a “lesson” for the public.
How many vaccinated tennis players got things wrong on their forms? Who knows? Apparently no one verified the details of Novak’s forms before he was given a visa, so presumably no one checked any other ones either. Will the Australian government go through all the vaccinated players applications now and arrest them on court if any got things wrong?
The unvaccinated are being punished and singled out.
“Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,” he said Friday evening.
Because we are certainly not protecting the hard border any more. Australia has had 1.5 million cases of Covid (that we know of) in the last four weeks. All of whom ultimately caught it in a chain from double-vaccinated travellers.
Perhaps Scott Morrison is afraid that people who had been forced into getting a vaccine they really didn’t want would realize they were bullied into it, and should have had a choice too?
The donations don’t excuse people breaking the rules, but in the PR game of Australia versus Novak, Australia looks embarrassing. Novak wants to play tennis. We are not being good sports.
After the government lost in court, they waited days til 5:50pm Friday night to announce they were revoking his visa for a competition that starts Monday. Presumably they figured they had a weak case and didn’t want him to have more time to appeal.
Australians justifiably hate the hypocrisy of the rich and famous getting exemptions, so this has lit a fire among fed-up Australians. But the real target of that anger should be spread a lot wider. If the rules really mattered, the government would have investigated all the visa applicants before they gave them visas. If it was about health then we can hardly block the unvaccinated when the vaccinated have the same viral loads. If we were trying to stop Covid on planes we’d ask people to take ivermectin.
Data from Public Health Scotland (PHS) is showing that not only are the “double jabbed” more likely to catch Omicron than the unvaxxinated — but they are more likely to be hospitalized as well. And that’s on a per capita basis and after controlling for age. The triple jabbed are less likely to end up in hospital than both other groups, but for how long?
DOUBLE-JABBED Scots are now more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid than the unvaccinated amid an increase in elderly people falling ill due to waning immunity.
It comes amid “weird” data showing that case rates have been lower in unvaccinated individuals than the single, double, or even triple-jabbed since Omicron became the dominant variant in Scotland.
Right now the double-jabbed are catching Covid twice as often as the unvaxxed in Scotland. Even the triple jabbed are slightly more likely to catch Covid than the unvaccinated.
Preliminary data for last week – which is age-standardised to adjust for the fact that younger people are more likely than older adults to be unvaccinated – shows a Covid case rate of 11 per 1000 in the unvaccinated group compared to 15 per 1000 for those who had received a booster or third dose, and 25 per 1000 for the double-vaccinated cohort.
Well that breaks the narrative: Who exactly is putting who at risk?
The people spreading Covid at the moment are more likely to be vaccinated than unvaccinated. Yet they are not the ones being banned from cinemas, bars and clubs.
The Double Jabbed are even more likely to end up in hospital
There goes the last main argument for mandatory vaccines. The hospital beds are not being filled by the selfish unvaccinated.
In the week ending January 7, the hospitalisation rate was also twice as high in the double-jabbed compared to the unvaccinated – 130 admissions per 100,000 versus 59 per 100,000 – but fell to just 15 per 100,000 in the triple-jabbed.
…
No wonder world leaders are telling the double jabbed to “get boosted”
The triple vaxxed are for the moment, thankfully, less likely to die (of Covid anyway)
All the death rates for Omicron are in the order of 1 in 20,000 which is a blessing. But given that death can take 4 – 8 weeks, it’s perhaps a little too soon to fix these ratios in stone for the Omicron wave that is still steaming:
In the final week of December, the death rate was 7.06 per 100,000 among the double-jabbed compared to 4.79 per 100,000 in the unvaccinated, and 0.21 per 100,000 in the triple-vaccinated.
The vaxxed and unvaxxed groups are obviously not the same to start with. Even when age is controlled the vaccinated may be working in riskier jobs, more likely to take Covid tests, and are a higher risk group. The unvaccinated may be healthier to start with, and also more likely to have natural immunity.
What about natural immunity?
Helen McArdle of the Herald Scotland (paywalled) tries to investigate why the data is so odd, but despite all the expert waffle, natural immunity is left til the end and only called “past infections”. If many people in the “unvaccinated” category are actually “immunised with the real deal” then the truly unvaccinated might not score so well if the people with natural immunity are taken out and put into their own grouping. I’m sure the experts know this, so it’s a little surprising they haven’t rushed out and done that? Why is natural immunity so hushed up?
What if natural immunity without a vaccine worked better in young healthy people than the quasi unnatural mixed immunity?
The data would look like this too.
The people getting in trouble now appear to be the ones who were due for a booster, but haven’t got it. So they were the first to be double jabbed and were higher income older high risk people. Their double-vaccine is long past it’s best-by-date. These are the people filling hospital beds, but no one is suggesting they should pay a health fee, lose their jobs, or be banned from flying.
Who’s caught more Covid, – the twenty-somethings
Over the whole pandemic the group who’s caught Covid the most in Scotland are the 20 – 24 year olds. Seen below in cumulative data with 100,000 cases per 100,000 population.
Our immune systems are a fully functioning type of AI, or rather BI — biological intelligence. After millions of years of evolution, the system is tuned for efficiency with feedback loops “up the kazoo”. We’re provoking a complicated system we don’t understand.
It’s quite possible, if we keep provoking it with something “non threatening”, rather than getting more excited, the immune system may get bored. It could also get tired, desensitized, or exhausted.
Robert Malone warned months ago that we need to test each round of vaccines and we can’t assume our bodies will respond the same way.
Whatever it is, the European Medicines Agency wants to put the brakes on the booster program:
Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency.
European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible.
Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency. Instead, countries should leave more time between booster programs and tie them to the onset of the cold season in each hemisphere, following the blueprint set out by influenza vaccination strategies, the agency said.
“We should be careful in not overloading the immune system with repeated immunizations” — Marco Cavaleri, the EMA head of biological health threats and vaccines strategy
He also said effectively that we don’t even know exactly how many antibodies people need to get protection. We can’t define the threshhold of protection. Some people with quite high levels of neutralizing antibody still got infected while people with low levels of neutralizing antibody that did not get sick in the trials.
This is a bit of a major problem I would think. Isn’t the usual test to see if someone has “protection” just a blood test looking for antibodies? If that doesn’t work, something is very wrong with the mental model we have for how vaccines operate? Is it some other antibodies that really offer protection, ones they are not testing for?
Why?
Last night in the -20 something of a January evening, several hundred people gathered on the side of the highway in a small Saskatchewan village, just as 1,000’s of others have done before us, and many more will continue to do. I expected only a fraction of that!
This is not just a trucker thing, it’s not just a vax thing, it’s way bigger than any of that. People can see that there’s something wrong, and are looking for an answer. Our legal, normally accepted political process has been hijacked by those who want an unaccountable system of government that transfers the power of the people into the hands of a few. The ones we elected to speak for us are, for a number of reasons, are unable/ unwilling to exercise their obligations to us as the check and balance against a move towards tyranny.
We are left dangling and frustrated as we don’t have a voice, and we absolutely to almost the last soul out here, know in our hearts that something must change, or we will lose most of what we, and our ancestors have worked our whole lives for. Freedom to live, work, and enjoy the amazing country we live in! Freedom to make choices that affect us and our communities. Freedom to take risks that we determine are right for our circumstances, not what some pencil neck somewhere has determined what is best for us. The evidence has been piling up for decades here, no unaccountable bureaucrat will ever be able to serve you and the best interests of your country better than an honest, community minded, unselfish individual. They almost always spend our capital building their own little empires, giving themselves raises and pensions, making themselves more visible and comfortable while the taxpayer works to support them! They aren’t accountable any more, our country cannot support this, and we all know it!
We need hope! We need a voice, and that’s why we left our warm homes last night, to go and see if this might be a voice that we can trust! We stood there,in the cold, vaccinated beside unvaccinated, farmers beside professors, kids beside seniors, men and women, waiting to see a glimpse of hope. A hope that these people who are spending their own resources, leaving their homes and businesses behind, to drive to Ottawa to try make a difference in our lives. It remains to be seen if they will succeed in convincing the elites in power that they are out of bounds, but I can tell you from simply looking around at what I see happening, they have started something bigger than any of us could have imagined! It’s time!
See it unfold (until Twitter censors it) #TruckersForFreedom and #ConvoyforFreedom and #TruckersConvoy2022. Please save or copy your favourite videos. They will be invaluable to redpill friends who think the news services are reporting honestly.
h/t Another Ian
UPDATE #1:
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*Headline of 150km changed to 70km while we wait for confirmation. One video report said 150km, but most are saying 70km.