This should rattle the Wokeness Cage: Russia and China are actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis. US assets are being harassed with lazers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms. The Russians even launched a satellite into an orbit so close to a US Security satellite that from the ground people couldn’t tell if it was being attacked, then, in something like a James Bond movie stunt, the Russian satellite launched a little target and shot it, “dangerously close”. That was in 2019. We can see now why Trump set up “Space Force”.
Last week the news came out that China’s space program was going nuclear, and the 1MW reactor would be 100 times larger than the one NASA plans to put on the moon by 2030.
Gen. David Thompson from Space Force estimates China may overtake the US in space by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, China is a developing nation that doesn’t need to reduce CO2 emissions at all, and in the US, some schools for gifted and talents students are being closed “because they are racist and elitist“.
Hopefully, the thought of China weaponizing space might make people rethink climate change and education.
“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time,” [said] Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations…
Both the Russians and the Chinese are working on satellites that can attack other satellites, he said. For some time now there have been reports that China was developing a satellite that could claw another satellite or grab one with a robotic arm or a grappling hook. The Chinese government has several reasons to want to disable U.S. satellites, which have been useful in revealing concentration camps built to intern Uyghur Muslims and new Chinese nuclear missile silo fields.
In 2019, Russia deployed a small satellite into an orbit so close to a U.S. “national security satellite” that the U.S. government didn’t know whether it was attacking or not, Thompson said. Then, the Russian satellite backed away and conducted a weapons test. It released a small target and then shot it with a projectile.“It maneuvered close, it maneuvered dangerously, it maneuvered threateningly so that they were coming close enough that there was a concern of collision,” he said. “So clearly, the Russians were sending us a message.”
Thompson said China is sending up new satellites twice as fast as the US is managing to, and that the budding superpower is working on a system of global satellites aimed at surveilling any part of the world.
‘They’re fielding operational systems at an incredible rate,’ he said.
In theory it could disrupt or even disable US satellites which revealed information about China’s nuclear operations and the existence of Uyghur Muslim concentration camps.
‘The Chinese are actually well ahead’ of their Russian counterparts, Thompson claimed.
But Russia blew up an old spy satellite of their own two weeks ago, leaving a trail of debris of 1,500 trackable pieces circling the Earth possibly causing havoc for spacecraft for years.
*The rocket ended up going out of control and crashed in the Indian Ocean. China being good global citizens, NOT.
‘It’s sort of a way of ending all debate because if you attack him or have any debate over any of his edicts or his mandates, you’re attacking science,’ Paul said on Tuesday.
‘But this is a very, very dangerous sort of idea. The idea that a government bureaucrat represents science and that he is now untouchable – that it is sort of like you are now contradicting the all high priest of science, if you say anything.’
Ted Cruz wants to know: did he or didn’t he fund Gain of Function research?
[Ted] Cruz told Sean Hannity: ‘I’ve got to say, Dr. Fauci, I think, is the most dangerous bureaucrat in the history of the country. He talked about hurting science but I don’t think anyone has hurt science or hurt the credibility of doctors more than Dr. Fauci because throughout this pandemic, he has been dishonest, he’s been political, he’s been partisan.’
Referring to that interview, Cruz continued: ‘(Fauci) said, I represent science. I am science. I was laughing. It’s like Louis XIV, the sun king in France saying “I am the state.” It is this delusion of grandeur.’
There’s a five year jail term for lying to Congress.
Just another cheap, safe and long-used-drug for our Health Ministers to ignore
A new study looked at 944,000 US Veterans who had a Covid test sometime. Of those, 2,200 were alcoholics who were also prescribed disulfiram. We might expect alcoholics to crash and burn against Covid, but amongst them, strangely, infections were lower than in the non-alcoholics — 34% lower. And there were no deaths from Covid in the 188 either. Sadly the death rate in infected vets who caught Covid, but weren’t using disulfiram, was 3%.
It’s only a very odd observational study, not a randomized one. The mechanism isn’t known for sure, but there are suggestions the drug interferes with an enzyme the virus needs and may reduce hyperinflammation. Haven’t we heard that before?
Ivermectin appears to be better, but for people without access to it, at least there is the option to become an alcoholic. Thinking about the corruption at the FDA or the TGA will help. And if you are already an alcoholic, best get treatment now before they ban it.
It obviously needs a proper study. Bear in mind there were only 188 alcoholic veterans who caught Covid. But still, none of them died, and we’d expect 5 or 6 deaths in a group of 188 non-alcoholic vets.
Wonder what the drug might achieve in a non-alcoholic test group?
The message here is that we are living in a sea of antivirals, but our funding system, the bureaucracy, and our deep medical swamp are getting in the way.
The investigators found that people taking disulfiram, known as Antabuse, for alcoholism had a lower risk of infection with COVID-19 and were less likely to die from the coronavirus…
Listen to the sweet naivete of a Professor:
“This is a great candidate for a repurposed drug. It could easily be made available worldwide if we can prove it has a positive effect on patients with COVID-19,” said Chris Sander, a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School.
They noted that disulfiram has been prescribed for more than 60 years as a treatment for alcoholism, and that it’s safe, inexpensive, familiar to physicians, and widely used in many countries.
And he thinks those are good selling points. If only this drug were $3,000 a dose, barely useful and fully patented.
The media headlines have been everywhere, but the truth is we know very little.
Like everyone here, I was surprised at the *universal* instant Omicron media coverage which went from 0 – 100 in two seconds or less. I’m going to skip (for the moment) the obvious political questions like “is this the midterm election variant” and consider the virus.
…
We know Omicron has many mutations. We don’t know what the combined effect of them is. Presumably the particular mutations, and lab tests of antibody binding suggest it may evade vaccine or even natural immunity. However, many of these mutations are new and unknown, so the in vivo, real effect is only something the patients and doctors might know. And the doctors are giving mixed reports in South Africa. It may turn out to be a more infectious but nicer variant. We’ll know in a few weeks.
It’s certainly spreading fast. Case numbers have increased six-fold from 300 cases to 1,800 in just two weeks. Test numbers are up but test positivity has also risen from 1% to 3.7%.
Symptoms have changed. Doctors say that they noticed a change in the presentation of cases around 10 days ago. The symptoms were suddenly different, and while Dr Angelique Coetzee, said it appeared to be mild, (which is very encouraging) she was referring to young patients, and is still concerned about older patients. The new symptom list includes headaches, extreme tiredness, body aches and pains, but not a loss of smell, or coughing.
About 65% are not vaccinated. John Campbell interprets this to suggest that the unvaccinated are at higher risk, but if only a quarter of South Africans are double vaccinated, and the vaccines work, shouldn’t we see even more unvaccinated patients than that? Wouldn’t most of the young people be unvaccinated?
Omicron has already been circulating somewhere for more than a year
Looking at the evolutionary history of these mutations — the last and nearest branch was around May 2020. That means it’s likely that the Omicron variant has been silently spreading in a population that is rarely if ever tested or sequenced. That would explain why so many mutations seem to have “suddenly” appeared. Presumably if it was a variant that was very deadly, it would have come to our attention months ago, even in a remote African village, surely? Though if it has been circulating in Africa (and we don’t know that) it has probably been affecting a younger population, possibly one that’s fitter or leaner and which gets more sun (and Vitamin D). We don’t know the effect it has on the older, indoor, and more diabetic people of The West, and we don’t know much about the effect on people who are vaccinated, either. Assume that it has become more infectious recently, but collecting mutation for a long while.
It may be a blessing that this variant has evolved in a region that has low vaccination. It might be less deadly. But we don’t know that, yet. It’s possible that even a virus that is milder, but spreads much faster will ultimately cause higher mortality. (Think of SARS-2, compared to SARS-1). But the new variant might be good news. What we want, after all, is for it to evolve into a highly infectious mild disease.
The solution is still antivirals and borders (til we get antivirals)
The key to this is still antivirals. Because Ivermectin has so many mechanisms of action, many that apply to our own molecules (ACE2, TMPRSS2, Ribosomes, Importin) even if ivermectin didn’t bind to the new Omicron spike, it would still be very useful against the virus. So start right now. It should be offered to people at risk.
Given the risk of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) in vaccinated people, and the risk it might pose to unvaccinated seniors and the co-morbid, it makes sense to shut borders for a couple of weeks, just to get more information. Though possibly it’s already too late, since the virus has been found in so many places. And if reports that Dutch Authorities detected Covid cases in 61 out of 600 passengers from South Africa on Friday morning are true, and those passengers are also vaccinated, wow? Did they catch it on the flight? Update: Apparently only 13 of the 61 cases were the Omicron variant.
The value of a travel ban is the time it gives to test the antivirals in the lab, test the virus against the antibodies, test the virus against the tests! How many cases are we missing?
Of course, it makes no sense to tell everyone that vaccines are the solution to a variant that might be able to escape vaccines. Not coincidentally, Big Pharma is suddenly saying they can develop a new vaccine pronto, which is why they were so keen on using the experimental mRNA vaccines in the first place. But we still have no long term data and much better alternatives.
Omicron has probably been circulating for a long time
In order to collect so many mutations and to have been undetected for so long, it’s likely this branch of the virus was wandering through a population that rarely gets tested. Presumably, they are also rarely vaccinated. This may turn out to be a good thing.
The new Omicron branch is marked in red below.
Omicron has probably been roaming for a year undetected. The last branch, marked with a black arrow dates back to May 2020.
Either that, or Omicron is an artificial variant, planted from somewhere. Who knows? It’s theoretically possible for a malicious gene lab to take a sample, add some tweaks, and drop it anywhere. We need mass testing to find the missing links to be able to say whether this is absolutely a natural infection branch, and find where it has been hiding.
It’s spreading fast
Cases have increased about six-fold in the last two weeks from around 300 to 1,800. Source: OWID
The current wave is tiny compared to the past three waves.
Omicron has rapidly overtaken Delta in South Africa, but this was during a time when cases were very low, so the sample size for the mass Global Headlines is surprisingly and suspiciously small (the trend line is heavily dependent on just a few cases).
For perspective, when Delta surged and overtook in May 2021 there were 400-800 samples on the graph in South Africa, but the current total tally on Nextstrain used to generate this “prevalence” graph was only 6 cases. (Mouseover the graph on the source page to see case numbers.) Perhaps there are many more samples that haven’t been reported to the Nextstrain database?
Obviously the trend of “rapid” growth is there, but the number of samples is small. Source: Nextstrain
Omicron has a lot of mutations
Many of these also occur in other strains and have been studied (top half). But many are new (bottom half). We really have no idea what effect the latter have. It may be nothing, or everything.
Omicron contains man shared mutations (top), but also many new ones (lower half). Source: Nextstrain.
How much of the public narrative does Bill Gates buy for $300m?
Buying national policy through backroom deals and party donations is so passe. For the Uber Rich it’s so much better to purchase the policy they prefer with glorious golden philanthropy. Be a hero, change the world, make money too.
Bill Gates runs his own branch of the Charity Industrial Complex. Other moguls buy a newspaper, but Gates buys influence one topic at a time.
Despite the reputation of funding the poor and downtrodden, somehow three hundred million dollars or more was gifted to the media. As if perchance the starving reporters of The Guardian needed it more say, than the malnourished of Chad?
Bill Gates has given $319 million to the media
Allan McLeod, Mintpress News
SEATTLE — Up until his recent messy divorce, Bill Gates enjoyed something of a free pass in corporate media. Generally presented as a kindly nerd who wants to save the world, the Microsoft co-founder was even unironically christened “Saint Bill” by The Guardian.
After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.
Even though this is “in plain view” there’s a level of deceit. If the people think the media is telling the whole news and nothing but the news, they might even believe they willingly chose the policy.
Others with $3.5 million or so are the deprived outlets like the BBC, CNN and The Daily Telegraph.
So at the same time as Google and Facebook were threatening the funding model of newspapers, radio and TV, Bill was helping them cover the costs of writing more on topics he was interested in.
Cynics might wonder if $300 million really buys much at all these days, but remember how cheap it was for the CCP to buy the New York Times? The masthead of record for the United States effectively sold out the nation for a piddling $100,000 a month. That was all that Chinese Communists had had to pay to “earn” sanitized stories of China that were little more than advertising, while stories of human rights abuses of Uigher concentration camps were quietly deleted. Imagine the effect it could have had if the New York Times had gone in hard with real news. Yet the cost to subvert that for President Xi was practically nothing.
So imagine the effect on news rooms all over the West when a few million dollars here and there lands on cash strapped editors with noble strings attached. Gates wouldn’t have to tell them how to report a climate change story, or a gender narrative — it was part of a culture that would permeate the tea-room.
Gates funded the media, journalism, in so many ways
The Gates Foundation even spent some $38 million on associations for journalists too, like the International Centre for Journalists, and the International Womens Media Foundation. It funded groups like Education Writers Association, and the National Press Foundation. It funded a few universities that train journalists
For groups like these a million dollars buys a lot of mileage.
It’s an Octopus:
“Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates. This is especially true of journalists working in the fields of health, education and global development, the ones Gates himself is most active in and where scrutiny of the billionaire’s actions and motives are most necessary,” MacLeod writes.
An unaccountable, unelected Octopus:
While the Gates Foundation fosters an air of openness about itself, there is actually precious little public information about what happens to the money from each grant, save for a short, one- or two-sentence description written by the foundation itself on the website,” he continued.
And these figures are just the primary donations. There will be secondary rivers of money, where groups funded by Gates divert streams toward the media too.
Media Gates keepers
That the Gates Foundation is underwriting a significant chunk of our media ecosystem leads to serious problems with objectivity….
[Tim] Schwab’s research has found that this conflict of interests goes right to the very top: two New York Times columnists had been writing glowingly about the Gates Foundation for years without disclosing that they also work for a group — the Solutions Journalism Network — that, as shown above, has received over $7 million from the tech billionaire’s charity.
Let’s not forget … the “MS” in MSNBC stands for Microsoft.
In May this year Daniel Westerman replaced Audrey Zibelman as the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator. She was appointed in the Turnbull era after she was tipped as a possibility for Energy Secretary under President Hilary Clinton. In the event their loss was our gain.
Daniel Westerman is now the head man in the organization that runs the operation of our grid and prepares scenarios for decarbonization of the power sector.
What questions would you ask him if you were on the panel to interview the candidates for the position?
Dr Aseem Malhotra is a consultant cardiologist and he’s calling for an end to mandatory vaccination while we investigate new results suggesting inflammatory blood markers are raised by the mRNA vaccines.
“We know now that heart attacks are an inflammatory condition.”
These same markers are used to estimate what the risk of a heart attack is. And the new higher markers hint that in this group of 500 patients, the 5 year risk of a heart attack has doubled, from 11% to 25%. They only followed these patients for 2.5 months, so the increased risk may well be temporary (apart from all the boosters, eh?).
Even if it’s temporary, Dr Malhotra points out that in the UK there have been 10,000 excess non-Covid deaths — many of which were due to heart attack and stroke. If the mRNA vaccines were increasing the risk of heart attacks, even temporarily, this would explain some of the excess deaths. Inflammation might be temporary, but death usually isn’t.
A few days after these ominous results came out, a whistleblower and researcher from a different group contacted Dr Aseem Malhotra to say that in imaging studies they have found inflammation in the coronary arteries after vaccination. But their group decided not to publish this yet because they are afraid of losing future grant money from the drug industry. The whistleblower was quite upset about this. Understandably.
How many other researchers and doctors are sitting on results too unpleasant to publish?
Malhotra also mentions that he’s heard from other medical workers that there has been an increase in heart attacks in the UK, and in younger people. Of course, it all needs a proper study, not just anecdotes and retrospective observations, or preprint abstracts. The increase in heart attacks could be lifestyle factors, it could be infections, or it could be due to people staying home and watching the telly during lockdowns.
Gundry: Blood markers suggest mRNA vaccines increase the risk of a heart attack
Dr Malhotra mentions results from the “Steven Gundry paper”. Gundry’s group has used a standard test to predict the risk of heart attacks in their patients for the last eight years. But they noticed that some of the blood markers they were looking for in the test were significantly higher after the second mRNA vaccination dose.
We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.
The blood markers they use in the PLUS Cardiac Test (GD Biosciences) include inflammatory molecules like Interleukin-16 (IL-16), as well as other like soluble Fas, and Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF). People at risk of cardiac arrest would typically get measured every 3 – 6 months.
Gundry’s group followed 566 people both before and after their second vaccination to see how the PULS score changed. Strikingly many of the markers doubled. Frustratingly, the paper is a preprint and only available as an abstract (it seems). They don’t have a control group (as far as I can tell). The journal has added an “expression of concern”. Ain’t that the way. But it would be a shame to sit on results like these. Which is exactly what the other group Dr Malhotra talks about is doing, even though they have similar results.
Bad news for athletes born as baby girls – unless they start testosterone therapy straight away, it’s hard to see how they can win against babies with 18 years of DIY hormone “treatments” that help them grow six inches taller, with lower body fat, and larger hearts and lungs.
The old rules were silly, but the new ones are worse:
The previous rules for the participation of men in women’s sports were already unfair, with male athletes having to show that their testosterone levels were below 10 nmol/liter of blood for 12 months or more. Women’s standard amount of testosterone is .09 nmol/liter of blood. Even with the application of testosterone during a British medical study, women were only able to increase to 4.3 nmol/liter. The normal, healthy range for men is 9.2 to 31.8 nmol/liter.
Overturning the entirety of human history and understanding about biology, the IOC states that “No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged, or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”
At this point, it makes more sense to just drop women’s events entirely and make each race open. May the best human win.
Why have separate sex medals if there are no separate sexes?
Or were we hoping to inspire little girls to excel in sport, and perhaps stop women from being injured on the Rugby field…
One transgender rugby player who is six feet tall has been nicknamed “Beast” by teammates on the Porth Harlequins Ladies squad in Wales, BBC Sport reported.
We don’t want to offend anyone, but crushing dreams of girls is fine:
The IOC said testing athletes’ testosterone levels to verify that they are able to compete against women, who have far less testosterone than any male person, is “invasive” and “disrespectful.” They did not issue a statement on how invasive or disrespectful it is to force women to compete against bigger, stronger, men, or to allow men to take women’s places in athletic competition.
It’s not binding, so only countries that want to win medals will make the most of the opportunity.
These rules are not binding, but they do mean that every country can essentially decide whether they will send women to women’s Olympic sports events. “What we are offering to all the international federations is our expertise and a dialogue, rather than jumping to a conclusion,” said Keveh Mehrabi, IOC director of the athletes’ department.
In an open human competition which events will baby girls hope to grow up and win medals in? On a page called Great examples of women competing against men. There are examples from Horse racing, sailing, equestrian events, motorbike racing, and darts. But in sports outside those, there’s …
Billy Jean King v Bobby Riggs
How great a moment is it when a 29 year old woman beats a 55 year old man in three sets of tennis? Even the “great moments” list includes the story of Venus and Serena in 1998. The Williams sisters, at the peak of their game, thought they could beat any man outside the top 200. But Karsten Braasch, ranked 203 beat them both separately by 6-1 and then 6-2. Good on the Williams sisters for giving it a go.
One sport that the average woman can do better than the average man is ultra long distance swimming.
There’s something special about ultra-swimming, it seems. In 2014, for example, Knechtle published a paper looking at 30 years of finishing times for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim, a 28.5-mile loop around the perimeter of Manhattan. On average, the best women were 12 to 14 percent faster than the best men. Another study, published in 2015, looked at 87 years of finishing times for the 20.1-mile Catalina Channel Swim, and found that when “the swimming times of the annual fastest women and the annual fastest men competing between 1927 and 2014 were compared, women were 52.9 minutes faster than men,” Knechtle and his colleagues write.
Steven Munatones [is] considered one of the foremost experts on open-water swimming. A few years ago — purely to satisfy his own curiosity — Munatones analyzed the finishing times of men and women who participated in the biggest ultra-distance swims around the world. He did this for three years, keeping track of “12 or 13” races — he can’t remember exactly. He never intended to publish these results anywhere; again, this was for his own curiosity, as a coach and as an open-water swimming fan. Here’s what he found. “If you’re looking at the average times — the average woman is faster than the average man,” said Munatones, who is the founder of the World Open Water Swimming Association. “Which, frankly, I was surprised to see.”
The reason women have an advantage in the water is because body fat floats better than bone and muscle. It’s easier for women to stay horizontal and reduce drag. It’s hydrodynamic.
But don’t get your hopes up. The fastest longest swims are still won by men. Munatones points out that at the most elite levels of ultra long distance swimming, like, in English Channel Swims, the fastest men still usually beat the fastest women. The events Knechtle studied, he claims, don’t attract the Olympian types. It’s interesting that at the highest level, in the English Channel Swims, the average women were 33 minutes faster than the average men. But males have wider distributions on most bell curves. At the thin tail, there may still be more men.
All this effort to find sports that women might, maybe, possibly could outdo men in — really brings us back to the point of the post. Ultra-long events are the only events without machines, tools or horses that people-born-as-women might have an advantage in.
Women will win Gold Medals for the ultimate in long distance events, longevity. Otherwise, biology is what it is:
It’s not likely that women, at either the amateur or elite level, will be sprinting faster than men any time soon, whether that’s on land or in the water. “Women have lower hemoglobin levels, lower oxygen supply to their limbs, a smaller stroke volume in their hearts, and generally less power in their muscles,” Eveleth explained.“But even if it’s unlikely that a woman will break into the mens’ world record circle for the 100-meter-dash, at mile 100, they are catching up.”
We’re following the science all the way to oblivion. Genes don’t matter. Hormones don’t count, and science is just a PR tool for tribal politics.
And how much do you really need to read if you are short of time and shelf-space?
Everyone will have favourite books and people who read a lot will have a lot of favourites but you might be unwilling nominate any, in the way that you are not supposed to express favouritism among your offspring.
To get the ball rolling I nominate two books that could in principle substitute for most of the climate books on my shelf, at least to get a thorough overview of the field before deep diving into selected topics.
This question came to mind because I am reading Michael Hart’s Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change and I nominate this book alongside Ian Plimer’s Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Rip-Off. It runs to 600 pages but it treats practically the whole range of issues in the field. Ian’s book provides some scientific depth that goes beyond Hart and it also covers the power situation in Australia. I see the impact of climate policies on the power supply as one Achilles heel of alarmism. The other is the impact of those policies on the environment.
Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.
Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a charity project, losing money from start to end. The GWPF highlights a new Norwegian report that shows that the Net Present Value of Dogger Bank is “minus £970 million.”
Britain’s biggest, newest offshore wind farm still isn’t profitable. It may be killing eagles and hypnotising crabs, but it isn’t cost effective at making energy, and it isn’t cost effective at changing the global weather either.
The report confirms as series of findings published by the GWPF and others [1–5], which show that offshore wind costs are very high, at best are only falling slowly, and are far above the auction strike prices being agreed.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch said:
“We have been warning since 2017 that there has been no revolution in offshore wind costs. Every time we get new financial data from offshore wind farms, the cost estimates go up. Just this week, our estimates for the Seagreen 1 wind farm have increased by nearly 20%, and those for Dogger Bank by a similar amount.”
The Government’s Net Zero plans rely on a five-fold increase in the wind fleet, mostly from offshore developments, and an extraordinary decline in the cost of the power it produces.
The latest findings mean that the costs of delivering Net Zero will increase by hundreds of billions of pounds, and probably by trillions.
The wind might be free, but collecting it over vast kilometers of ocean is not so easy.
There is something very cool, very curious, about being able to tune in to any station in the world. Spin the globe and pick a green dot. Hear Cher play in Novosibirsk, Russia, or Knights in White Satin in Port Chambers, New Zealand, and hear the same Uber Ads we hear in Australia in Peterborough, UK.
Radio Garden is a great talking point for the next family gathering.
Marvel at how many stations there are in America, and how few there are in China. Seriously. Are a billion people listening to the same ten stations in Guangzhou? Turns out there are a few more than it appears. A larger dot may link to 15 stations in the menu on the left.
But still, there seems a empty space there waiting for a civilizational mind to share.
Any station in the world…
There are not many stations in Africa. It’s a heartbreak kind of empty…
Somehow the world seems so much smaller.
On radio and in music English is the cultural paradigm. Many stations are not in English, but no other language appears on every continent, in so many songs.
Back in the eighties people laughed at scientists who talked about the threat from asteroids. Then we got better tools, and started tracking them. Now we are finding more every night.
Not only are there 27,000 near Earth asteroids that we know of, in the rest of the solar system we have found a few more, like 750,000. All this since the late 1990s.
Some computer somewhere is tracking all those orbits and arcs into the future. How often do these rocks run into each other and generate surprises?
“If you talk to the scientists who were studying this in the ’80s, there’s a phrase they often refer to called the giggle factor,” Carrie Nugent, a planetary scientist at Olin College in Massachusetts, told Space.com. “They’re basically saying that they couldn’t talk about this scientific topic without people kind of laughing at them.”
It looks like we’ve probably found all the big one-kilometer-wide asteroids that might pose a problem. And the little rocks will just burn up on entry. So it’s the middle sized ones (140m – 1000m) that we don’t know about which pose the biggest threat.
Despite finding 27,000 near Earth objects, the experts guess that we still don’t know where 60% of the “half kilometer” type ones are.
For a change, it’s nice to talk about a science that’s not political.
If a big rock were on the way it would put Woke science back in its box.
Here’s another unpatentable, natural, safe molecule that appears to work against Covid and will probably never be mentioned by any Chief Health Officer who wants a cushy job with the WHO or Pfizer.
The Melatonin Molecule by Jynto
An Iraqi group enrolled 158 Covid patients, and gave half of them 10mg of Melatonin a day. All patients got “standard care”, meaning they all got remdesivir, dexamethasone, and an anticoagulant, but some 82 lucky patients were randomly picked to get melatonin as well. The average age of participants was 56 and most of them were men (70%).
By Day 17 a quarter of the control group were suffering from blood clotting (or thrombosis), but only 11% of the melatonin group were, or half as many.
By Day 11, eight patients in the control group had developed sepsis. Only two patients taking melatonin did. Sepsis is a systemic condition where basic things like blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature are running awry, and things are getting out of control. By Day 17, a third of the control group had sepsis, but only 8% of controls the test group with melatonin did. It’s the kind of condition that kills people.
Indeed mortality in the melatonin group was 1%, but in the control group it was 17%. These study numbers are small, but no one needs to do a Chi Squared test to see if that’s significant. (p=0.001) All up, thirteen people died in the group that didn’t get melatonin, but only one person died in the group that did.
The authors (Hasnan et al) stay very calm and merely conclude, Adjuvant use of Melatonin may help reduce thrombosis, sepsis, and mortality in COVID-19 patients.
I feel a bit sorry for the unlucky sods in the control group. But in reality, I feel sorry for all of us. Many of the aspects of melatonin that make it appealing as a potential helper against Covid have been known for a long time. Melatonin is not just a sleepy-hormone, it’s also anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-viral and immunomodulatory. Yet here we are, discussing tiny Iraqi studies 23 months into a global pandemic because there aren’t large controlled studies of tens of thousands of people in the West.
These patients took melatonin for two weeks. The total cost is around $1.20 for the full course.
These numbers could be affected by other factors the researchers didn’t know about. But they tried to control for things like asthma, heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.
For a long time the FLCCC Math protocol has included melatonin 6 – 12mg at night “until discharge”.
Melatonin is an ancient hormone that our pineal glands produce each night. Children make a lot of it. As we get older, we make less. It’s quite likely that this is one of the reasons children cope better with Covid infections than older people do.
I’ll have more to say about this soon. There are other papers…
h/t Scott for prodding, Old Ozzie, Peter C, FatAl, Hanrahan, and Bill in Oz, Sunni bakchat, Conan Kirtan, Dave in the States for mentions a long time ago.
Easy Money Begats Easy Billionaires, who build Easy Foundations, which are easily captured. And before you know it, the apolitical becomes political, and the political becomes a lobbying machine. Big Money becomes Huge Money and Huge Money wields power.
And a perfectly good civilization goes to waste.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
How Charity Foundations Damage Western Societies
by John Smoke, im1776
by Freestocks-photos
Charities are as large as the entire University sector.
Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.
John Smoke adroitly connects the dots and draws the spiral vortex that draws most charities in.
It starts so gently:
Imagine a billionaire. He’s an apolitical man. The driving purpose of his life has been to create goods and services for consumers and to provide shareholder value. He’s seventy years old, and suddenly realising he won’t be around forever starts thinking about his legacy. He consults his younger wife. She is also apolitical. After a few days or so of consulting each other they decide to find a way to donate 800 million to charity. They set to go and speak to their wealth advisors, to consult on where to go from here.
by hansLinde
Gradually the mildly left leaning middle managers attract the moderately left, who employ the passionate left. Each round of funding attracts the harder-hard-liners, and gradually reaches more edgy projects. What starts off as “child poverty” becomes a plan to “counter digital hate”. Before long it’s a communist enclave pulling on the levers of power, armed with lawyer-sharks, millions of dollars, and professional fund managers to leverage the long term advantages of a large fund. It’s legal, but crazy.
Then there is way these machines may be handed to the spouses of said Billionaire after they expire or divorce. And thus some people driving national policy are not accountable to the voters, or the shareholders, but only to their own whims, or the whims of those who manipulate them.
Universities set the culture, but the Charity Machine makes it real
Charities are the main intermediary unit between academia and journalism. They can imbibe whatever is coming out of universities, turn the issues in question into campaigns, and then use those campaigns to secure coverage in media outlets. This all serves to exert pressure on liberal-democratic legislatures, getting them to copy-paste the charity’s findings into legislation which lawmakers can rubber-stamp.
The Charity industrial complex can go on indefinitely, long beyond their creator:
Unless we collectively do something to stop them, these charitable foundations are set to go on indefinitely too. Assuming their investments are managed prudently (most hire professional investment managers), there is no reason for them not to continue splurging billions for years to come. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was founded in 1904 by a Quaker pacifist. By the 1970s it was funding Communists in Mozambique. It’s now one of the biggest charitable foundations in the UK, funding racial demagogues and cybertron armies alike.
Same goes for the Ford Foundation, set up of course by Henry Ford, who at least judging by the international grants it made in 2021 ($656 million worth), has also gone Communist. When George Soros dies, do people really expect his influence to suddenly stop? It won’t. It will be continued by the same machine that is currently in place, and probably going even crazier and more unhinged once the old man kicks it.
While personalising attacks on oligarchs such as Soros can be useful, what we are dealing with here is a structural problem.
This excellent essay does not describe the evil spawned by easy money from corrupt currencies based on thin air and IOUs — but the power of the billionaire flows downstream from that.
While some billionaires are gifted and wise, the Easy Billionaires who grew rich through predatory capitalism and monopolistic control might not be the kind of people we want running the country.
Note from Jo: This is a change from the last 5,000 posts. Rafe has written and edited this entirely a guest. Given the dearth of independent blogs in Australia since the end of Catallaxy, it seems an experiment worth trying.
Introducing myself. Jo has taken me on board as an occasional contributor after the old Catallaxy Files closed down and I was homeless. Due to the break I have not got back into the routine of posting four or five times a week on a wide range of topics and I am now spending more time wind-watching with the Energy Realists of Australia. You can see how we are taking on the renewable energy farce here. My thoughts on other issues can be found on my personal website.
Back to the topic.
Why are supposedly quality journalists so misguided on climate change?
Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan have clearly taken on board the alarmist global warming narrative. To explain the context for overseas readers, Kelly and Sheridan are very senior and respected journalists on The Australian, the one national daily that Rupert Murdoch established in 1964. That paper along with a handful of other metropolitan dailies represented the quality journalism in the country. The Australian maintained that reputation longer than several others but the situation had changed since the woke offspring of Rupert Murdoch have assumed more control.
Never mind the performance of the hacks, what has gone wrong at the top of the profession and the once-were reputable newspapers?
Global warming and the reduction of CO2 emissions will probably be seen as the signature issue of public policy at the start of the third Millennium alongside the emerging role of China.
In this situation it behooves journalists who have access to a large readership among the educated public to obtain the best grasp of the issues that they can manage, given their training and their capabilities.
Buying national policy through backroom deals and party donations is so passe. For the Uber Rich it’s so much better to purchase the policy they prefer with glorious golden philanthropy. Be a hero, change the world, make money too.
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