Well that explains everything: Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero

Hands Up: It’s Net Zero now or a 1.5% interest rate hike?

So Australia is adopting Net Zero because the Global Financiers, who only want to save the world, would have refused to lend us money without jacking up our interest rates by 1.5%. The banker punishment would have meant a “17% investor exodus”.  Fancy a stock market collapse?

This remarkable admission comes in the modeling released today by the Morrison government. No one is even trying to hide it.

At least we can stop pretending this has anything to do with science or the voters. Just cut out the IPCC and go straight for the BlackRock Temperature Tax, eh?carbon credits, burning dollar note, fiat currency, carbon market.

Note the “penalties” are imposed by global financiers:

Modelling shows real cost of no net-zero carbon emissions

Greg Brown and Geoff Chambers, The Australian

Businesses and households would have faced interest rate hikes of up to 1.5 per cent under expected penalties imposed by global financiers if the government had failed to adopt net zero emissions by 2050, modelling for the Glasgow climate package shows.

The penalty regime would have sparked a 17 per cent investment collapse by the middle of the next decade, cutting 0.9 per cent from gross domestic product and making each Australian more than $650 poorer.

Households would have paid an extra $25bn a year to service home loans, and business and credit card debts.

If only Australia had its own sovereign currency? If only there were competitive money lending institutions out there, somewhere in the whole wide world who were happy to loan us money purely for profit? But no such luck.

Who knew bankers would turn down profits to protect the turtles?

The Elephant in the room. The vested interests rule.

Years ago, I said the corruption starts with the currency, and here it is unmasked. Australians voted for no carbon trading scheme, no carbon tax, and no more climate spending. But long before that we voted for Easy Money and that payday is here.

In theory the modeling was supposed to show how we will be $2,000 richer if we try to change the climate rather than if we leave that to the sun and just make things the customers want instead.

So much for capitalism, competition, and voting for policies.

Net Zero Australia Modeling

Offsets is code for “global emissions trading”.

 

The government revealed it ­received advice from Treasury that there would be a “capital risk premium” of between 100 and 150 basis points if Australia did not adopt a net-zero by 2050 ­target. This would increase borrowing costs on current levels by between $25bn and $38bn, according to economist Saul Eslake.

“It is almost certain that ­Australia would face some form of global response if it did not take on a credible 2050 emissions ­target,” says the government’s analysis of the modelling.

“This could take a variety of forms: increased capital costs for Australian governments, firms and households reflecting increased perceived financial risks; trade action against Australian exports intended to offset any competitive advantage derived from perceived weaker abatement policies; or lower demand for specific Australian products reflecting potential consumer concerns about a perceived lack of action on climate.”

Apparently all bankers really want to help the planet

A giant Spanish Bank once spent €100 b on Earth’s weather, cos they are nice people. Bank of America spent $50 billion to save the world. Citigroup commited $100 billion, Goldman Sachs pledged $750 billion. Banks are just falling all over themselves to help. Deutsche Bank built 70 foot high clock towers of doom, and produced their own climate science reports. Blackrock wanted Australia to shut coal plants faster.

They just worry about the poor and the polar bears, right?

And maybe because Climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture (for bankers).

Who voted for the Bankers?

The real rulers are the ones who decide the rules and the penalties.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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How many mechanisms do you need? Ivermectin works against Covid in 20 ways

Some claim that we don’t know how ivermectin works, but oh boy we do

Not only do we know how ivermectin protects us, we know many pathways in detail. Ivermectin is useful at every stage of the disease. In the early stages, it reduces the odds of people getting infected, stops the virus multiplying, which reduces the viral load and the spread of the virus to your friends and strangers on the bus.  It helps our cells warn neighboring cells to get ready for a viral attack. It stops the virus getting through the outside wall of our cells, and also stops parts of the virus getting into the headquarters of our cells, the nucleus, where our DNA is.

Ivermectin is also a zinc ionophone which helps zinc cross into cells so zinc can do the good things zinc does…

As the virus tried to assemble itself inside our cells one of the processing tasks involves chopping long proteins into shorter parts. There are many enzymes involved but ivermectin binds to one key one called a Chymotrypsin-like-protease. Ivermectin also conveniently binds to two of the virus proteins as well (called Mpro and PLpro). Basically, ivermectin is the glue no assembly line wants.

In the late stages, ivermectin is an anti-inflammatory drug that reduces the cytokine storm in something like six different ways.

Ivermectin is not just “gum in the works” it’s a kind of Swiss-knife-Velcro-tool — the most sticky, most useful, lock-and-key anti-viral.

With so many  mechanisms of action, it’s difficult for the virus to outsmart ivermectin and mutate around multiple blocks at once. We needed a three-drug-antiviral-cocktail to beat AIDS,  but in terms of resistant mutants arising, Ivermectin is an anti-viral cocktail all by itself. (Obviously used as part of a full medical program.)

Two researchers in Italy, Asiya Kamber Zaidi and Puya Dehgani-Mobaraki, published a paper detailing the 20 different levels of action. It’s quite the marvel, and it came out in May. (Don’t our Chief Health Officers read these papers?)

Ivermectin is the new penicillin

Penecillin changed the world. Imagine if they had banned it?

Click to enlarge:

Zaidi, Mechanisms of Action, Ivermectin, SARS-2, Covid-19

Zaidi, Mechanisms of Action, Ivermectin, SARS-2, Covid-19 (See below for the caption with all the acronyms listed in detail.)

 

As the researchers say, “The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive for the 55 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 23 trillion (p = 0.000000000000043)”.

Three ways to stop that virus getting in:

Ivermectin binds to the spike (at leucine 91), but it also binds to our ACE2 receptors as well  (at histidine 378). It clogs up the lock-and-key from both ends, and when compared to Remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin bound more strongly to the spike than any of them.

“The free binding energy of the spike protein (open) was higher in Ivermectin (−398.536 kJ/mol) than remdesivir (−232.973 kJ/mol).” (Ewaes 2021)

In this case “higher” means more negative. The higher it is, the more strongly something binds. Negative binding energies mean that binding is spontaneous, and doesn’t need an external energy source.

Ivermectin binds SARS Cov-2 spike. Diagram. Chemistry. Molecule.

From Lehrer et al

 

Ivermectin also binds to TMPRSS2 — it’s not a celebrity molecule like ACE2 — perhaps because someone didn’t think through the PR campaign and call it “Empress2” or something pronounceable  — but it is just as important apparently as ACE2. It seems SARS-2 can’t get into cells which have ACE2 on the surface but don’t also have the TMPRSS2 enzyme there as well (Parmar 2021). Think of TMPRSS2 as a pair of secateurs wandering around the cell surface that need to prune the Covid spike before it can use ACE2 to get into a cell. TMPRSS2 is the not so catchy name for Transmembrane serine protease 2.

Ivermectin also had the highest binding affinity for TMPRSS2. By binding so well to all three — the spike, the ACE2 receptor and the TMPRSS2 secateurs that prune or prime the spike, ivermectin makes it much harder for the virus to get inside a cell.

Protecting the cell nucleus

Once inside a cell, the virus gains access to most resources and tools it needs to produce “baby viruses”, but there’s much more strategy to this war than just a hijacking. Some viral proteins will be sent like trojan gifts to get inside the cell nucleus —  which is effectively the command centre. To get through the locked “gates” into the nucleus, these proteins must get tagged by two labels called importin-α and importin-β   — they mark “the cargo” as something headed for the nucleus. But ivermectin also binds to importin-α, competing with it for spots, and again foiling the virus, clogging up the system and making it hard for SARS2 to send these proteins through the gates.

This is especially important because the nucleus will send out warning signals to other cells — and the viral proteins aim to stop that alarm system being triggered.

Ivermectin helps cells sound the alarm

One of the first cytokines or messengers that a cell-under-siege sends out is called interferon (these names have a kind of Star Trek feeling, don’t they?). Interferon works like an air raid siren. When it reaches other cells, it triggers an array of downstream effects. Cells ramp up their wartime defenses, like for example, making particular enzymes and immune markers they’ll need. But they also slow down the factories and machinery within them that make proteins. These are the same factories the virus wants to hijack and run at high speed to produce its own weapons and baby viruses. In effect, cells are sabotaging their own infrastructure temporarily, to buy time. Some white blood cells called natural killer cells, also respond to interferon. It’s a big deal.

This is such an important advantage for the virus there are at least three SARS proteins that antagonize or work against the interferon signaling system. If the virus can keep infected cells from releasing interferon, it can multiply unhindered for longer. This is all occurring during the early asymptomatic phase. Indeed, the interferon cascade will cause many of the symptoms that tell us we’re coming down with something — like the fever, the aches, and the “flu-like malaise”. Viruses that can slow this process can stop us feeling sick and keep us on our feet — unwittingly shedding baby viruses to infect the guys in the office or the kids at school.

The delay in interferon production not only helps the virus multiply and spread, but also increases the proinflammatory cytokines that cause so much trouble later.

Ivermectin is a multipronged anti-inflammatory

TLR4, toll like receptor 4

TLR4, Toll like receptor 4,   by  David Goodsell

The Covid virus isn’t the only virus that attacks our interferon signally system, though it is a real hallmark of SARS-2, and ultimately the virus wreaks havoc with cytokines on many levels.  Luckily ivermectin also works on several parts of the immune network and mostly the effect appears to be to slow down the key amplifiers that tend to run off the rails in bad Covid infection. Sorry, immunology is acroynm-hell, so bear with me, you’ll get some idea of just how many pathways are affected. For starters, ivermectin slows down the Toll- like-Receptor-4 (TLR4)– these are ancient guards that have been around for a long time. They watch out for signs of spare parts of both bacteria and viruses and even just chemicals that are bad, and have a “pivotal role as an amplifier”. We need our TLR4, we just don’t want it to get “stuck on”.

Strap yourself in, there is so much more. Ivermectin also blocks the NF-κB pathway (Nuclear Factor-κB). It suppresses the Akt/mTOR signalling, which inhibits PAK1 which reduces STAT3 and IL-6.  STAT3 induces C-reactive protein (or CRP), so less STAT3 means less CRP. These are big names in the world of immunology. Your doctor measures your CRP as a sign of inflammation. People interested in living longer talk about the mTOR system  — it’s a is a kind of master controller for the whole cell cycle. Meanwhile IL-6, or interleukin 6 is another messenger that goes “inflammatory” in diseases like diabetes, depression, Alzheimers, and atherosclerosis.  Obviously, it’s better to face Covid without having “raised inflammatory markers” at the start.

Stopping at least one kind of coagulation

Because ivermectin binds to the virus spike at the right point it stops the virus sticking to the CD147 receptors of red blood cells. Each virus has about 100 spikes, so we can imagine how a swarm of viruses would work like a kind of malevolent velcro to agglomerate red blood cells into blobs that can’t pass through blood vessels. There are lot of other ways blood can clot, but ivermectin smooths this form.

The safety tests have already been done

If ivermectin was a new drug discovery, and we read this paper, we might be spooked that ivermectin is so intimately and intricately involved with our core biochemistry. Wise researchers might warn that it may have significant unpredictable side effects and we should research it carefully — but most of those tests have already been done. Thanks to 30 years of mass human use with 3.8 billion doses we are aware there are only a few situations where ivermectin is dangerous, and doctors know all about that. People can still do damage through overdosing. Doses always matter. Ivermectin can bind to our GABA receptors if it can get across the blood brain barrier. In normal healthy people the blood-brain-barrier is intact and and the drug is actively excluded. Doctors should be free to prescribe this “off label”.

No leaky vaccine should be used without an antiviral back up.

Currently, infected people are generating nastier variants because the vaccines are leaky — vaccines reduce the severity (at least for some months) but they don’t stop people shedding and transmitting the virus. We risk generating more deadly forms of Covid — just as we have unwittingly generated more deadly forms of Marek’s disease in domestic chickens by giving them leaky vaccines for the last 50 years.

All of this could stop, and all of this was known months ago.

*Immunology is alphabet soup. If I have vastly oversimplified, I trust commenters will correct me.

_______________________

UPDATE: Thanks to Red Edwards– this article has “been retracted”, but is still downloadable here.

The editors objections:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the methodology and the conclusions of this review article. Postpublication review confirmed that while the review article appropriately describes the mechanism of action of ivermectin, the cited sources do not appear to show that there is clear clinical evidence of the effect of ivermectin for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2. The Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the reliability of this review article. None of the authors agree to this retraction. The online version of this article contains the full text of the retracted article as Supplementary Information.

50 Studies are never enough. The article cites: real-time meta analysis of 52 studies listed at Ivmmeta.com. 2021 [on 2 May 2021]. Available from: https://ivmmeta.com/.

There are 65 studies there now.

_______________________________

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Thursday Open Thread

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Glasgow: electricity bills will go up £500,000 extra to pay COP26’s official windfarm to turn off

Some poor sods will be paying extra to help Griffith Wind Farms cover the cost of shutting down for part of the COP26 Superhero Costume Party.  If only that secret charge was listed on their electricity bill. Where is the transparency?

Big Lie Number 1: that the Glasgow COP26 event is powered by 100% renewables.

It’s hard to believe, but some people think the wind powered electrons can be tracked and relied upon.

There will be some accounting shell game where “100% of the annual supply” means they supply the whole years electricity in lumpy packets at times that no conference centre could run on. We know it’s wrong because lies don’t scale up. If the whole nation can’t be 100% renewable at the same time and in the same way, then the Conference centre isn’t 100% renewable either. It’s relying on coal and gas just like everyone else is.

The 100% renewable fakers are show-pony parasites on the system. They need the transmission lines, the back up, the inertia and the stable frequency but they Lord their 100% Renewable Badge knowing full well, that if everyone was “100% renewable” the system would collapse in a day.

… Dr Constable [of NetZeroWatch] claims that this is all “smoke and mirrors.”

He said: “Don’t be deceived by the smoke and mirrors, the reality is that like everyone else COP26 is running on grid electricity, where the bulk is conventional energy and security of supply is still guaranteed by nuclear, gas and even coal.

Coal keeps lights on at COP26 as low wind strikes again

Meanwhile, now that the celebrities have gone home the punters who flew from all over the world are locked out of rooms that are too small, and told to stay in their hotels and watch online.

Other UN participants fumed: “Wait wait. The biggest negotiating room at #COP26 has space for 144 people. There are 197 Parties to the UNFCCC. Who thought that was going to work?”

These people just cannot do maths.

h/t ClimateDepot

 

 

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Sea level height based on aerobics and other gibberish published in top science journals

Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.

It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “

They are shocked that  scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails.

In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published.

Indeed, no one even read the titles…

Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published

Nature

Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.

Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.

Guillaume Cabanac,  a computer scientist who uncovered nonsense papers, was shocked:

…it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.

The papers are computer generated junk:

 71 articles have abstracts or titles that contain the words ‘dance’, ‘aerobics’ or ‘sports’ in relation to geoscience, including the articles ‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’ and ‘Rock stress and deformation characteristics based on SVM and sports high-intensity interval training’.

And it’s all happened before — in 2014 at least 120 papers were “computer generated nonsense” and were published and later retracted. It’s emblematic of the entire academic sector really. An industry using AI to produce nothing, discover nothing, get published, and then write papers about it?

So who benefits?

But the scammers’ motivations remain a mystery to Ivan Oransky, a journalist who runs Retraction Watch. Even the article titles, which would be listed as part of an individual’s publication record, often do not make sense, he says. “The papers are so obviously terrible, so why would you want them on your CV?”

Many of the papers were from authors based at Chinese institutions, and most contained nonsensical phrases that Elsevier thinks came from the use of reverse-translation software to disguise plagiarism.

Perhaps Western professors are trying to plump out their bios with statements about “publishing 412 Nature papers” and just paid a paper-scam generator in China. But who’d really want their name on papers like these? These papers are so bad, they look like the hoax papers done purposely to expose the rot in academia.Will a team appear next week admitting the papers were faked to test the system? Or are there just too many incentives for Chinese or other academics to “publish or perish”?

Either way, Western Civilization is paying trillions of dollars to change the weather based on “The Science” according to peer review — which appears to have no more intellectual prowess than a Nigerian 419 email scam.

Peer review is anonymous and unpaid and worth every cent.

RELATED POSTS

REFERENCE

Holly Else (2021) Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03035-y

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Australia ‘a great disappointment’ sayth Lord Deben, man who made money from windfarms

Lord Deben, John Gummer. UK

Lord Deben, (John Gummer) UK

Australians heard how disappointing we are to Lord Deben, who earns £1,000-a-day  as chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). But the Australian-investigative-media didn’t mention that conflict of interest, or that Lord Deben’s private company was caught in 2019 being paid £600,000 from ‘green’ businesses, like windfarms and car battery makers, which he never declared. He says there’s no conflict of interest and that he  “complied with disclosure rules”.

So now we know the rules are inadequate.

Australia named climate ‘disappointment’

Canberra Times

Australia has been labelled “a great disappointment to the rest of the world” by the United Kingdom’s climate advisor for clinging to coal-fired power.

Imagine if the ABC introduced every Deben pronunciation with the information that Deben earned money from Green businesses and is paid to head a committee that wouldn’t exist if climate change was natural.

Scott Morrison accused of failing to understand the ‘urgency’ of climate change

The ABC

“What was so disappointing for us is the way it appeared your prime minister really doesn’t understand the urgency of what we have to do,” Lord Deben said.

For a guy heading up the UK Climate Change Committee, you’d think he’d know the beaches on 88% of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking.

“Nations around you will disappear beneath the sea because that’s what is going to happen to the South Pacific,” he said.

“As it gets worse for everyone else, people are simply not going to be prepared to trade with countries that don’t meet the same standards.”

There’s a pattern here. Lord Deben was also accused of misleading the UK parliament in 2013. He was chairman of a £500 million dollar water company that he claimed did no energy-related business,  but the company’s website boasted that they installed high voltage transmission lines for wind-farms. His daughter was also director in his Sancroft environmental consultancy.

Simon at AustralianClimateMadness explains Sancroft a long time ago:

Lord Deben, formerly John (Selwyn) Gummer, is a climate change evangelist who happens to be chairman of a company (which he formed) to advise other corporates on ‘environmental responsibility’.

But he’s also the chairman of the UK’s Climate Change Committee. So on the one hand he’s driving government policy towards tougher environmental and sustainability requirements, whilst on the other providing advice, at huge cost no doubt, to companies on how to manage those additional requirements. Anyone not able to spot the conflict of interest there?

If only three-million-dollars-a-day was enough taxpayer money to get Australian journalists to do internet searches looking for “Lord Deben, Conflict of Interest”?

 

 

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Doctor diagnoses death by Climate Change. How about deaths by socialism, junk science, and watching CNN?

Wind power, religious faith. Art.An ER doctor decided he wants to write down “the root cause” at least as far as an ER doctor reckons.  He’s not well versed in climate model infrastructure, hasn’t scanned for tropospheric hot spots, or Precambrian CO2 extremes, but he’s watched CNN so why not?

h/t Climate Depot

Let’s yank this chain and run with it:

B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from ‘climate change’

Times Colonist

The head of a Nelson, B.C., emergency department says it’s time doctors start looking at the underlying cause of medical conditions triggered by smoke and heat.

For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”

“If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” he told Glacier Media when asked why he did it.

It was late June, and British Columbia was trapped under a heat dome that even NOAA says was due to La Nina, not because of a coal plant in Guangdong. So the unfortunate lady in her 70s that lived in a trailer and died in the heat might have been a victim of La Nina. Cause of death, the Pacific Oscillation?

She’d probably be alive today if she had air conditioning and cheap electricity.

Who to blame for that then, Professors at Penn State that hid the decline? Or the media that hid the profs?

She might well be alive today if The New York Times had interviewed Nobel prizewinners who were skeptics with the same enthusiasm they interviewed teenage girls on national energy policy.

But don’t stop there in pulling on the root cause chain. Someone taught the journalists not to ask and some medical school didn’t teach doctors the difference between people and planets:

Roughly 40 doctors and nurses at the small hospital — all busy trying to manage a pandemic and their regular professional lives — came together under the banner Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health.

Just wait til the Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health get to lesson number one in “how to take Earths temperature.”

 

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“Let’s Go Brandon” threatens to Redpill the USA

It’s the laughter that gives it away.

The power of the phrase Lets Go Brandon is that it’s a coded message. In an unguarded moment it reveals how many people in the room get the joke. In a safe way, everyone who disapproves of Woke, political correctness, media activism or Joe Biden can see for themselves that nearly everyone around them does too.

For anyone who isn’t aware of what this strange social phenomenon is, read this. It’s a new form of mass rebellion in an era when cancel culture, censorship, and media bias suppressed the other options.

As Matt Taibbi explains, the masses are trolling the same media hacks and pompous elite players who were fine with four years of  yelling “F*^* Trump”.  And while F*^* Joe Biden is a protest cry, Let’s Go Brandon is so much better.  It’s politer, funnier and pops the media bubble too. Conservatives who would not be comfortable with a crass chant can get in on the joke. Anyone fed up with media propaganda can join in, which is a lot of people.

And that’s what makes it so dangerous for the Culture Controllers. They use kindergarten namecalling and bullying to win victories they don’t deserve but it’s all incredibly fragile. Bullies need to isolate people so they can intimidate them into silence. They can’t bully the whole crowd, and once everyone in the group realizes that they are all targets together, the weapon breaks. Bullies can’t mock a crowd that is mocking them. It’s an Emperors-New-Clothes moment.

The Culture Controllers have successfully twisted most of the potent Right Wing words into weapons against the right. It stops the non-left from getting together behind one banner. The “Alt-Right” was quickly turned from being a broad anti-establishment term to a White Supremacist badge, and good people fled.

The bullies are already trying to equate “Let’s Go Brandon” with ISIS.

The “Let’s Go, Brandon!” Freakout Goes Next-Level

Matt Taibbi:

A Southwest pilot earns ISIS comparisons for joking into a loudspeaker, as pundits continue to mass-forget the previous four years.

The phrase has since become a war cry for people all over the country, being at once a burn on Biden, the anxious, airbrushing press, and the corporate conglomerates who are taking pre-emptive action to try to prevent such outbursts from ever again darkening America’s door (“NASCAR and NBC have since taken steps to limit ‘ambient crowd noise’ during interviews,” as the AP put it).

Now WFBI agent Rangappa has essentially declared “Let’s Go, Brandon!” the equivalent of an ISIS war cry.  Supportive hand-wringing from press/natsec colleagues (is there a difference?) was instantaneous. “Donald Trump tried to overthrow American democracy and at least one Southwest Airlines pilot thinks that’s just fine,” cried HuffPo’s S.V. Date. “Come fly the extremist skies,” chimed in official #Resistance mascot Aaron Rupar.

Is it really possible that these people don’t get they’re being trolled? Part of the joke of “Let’s Go Brandon,” of course, is that you couldn’t go five minutes during the last administration without hearing someone in pearls or a bowtie screaming “Fuck Trump!” I don’t remember Rangappa pumping out “Osama de Niro” tweets after this celebrated Tony Awards appearance.

Let’s Go Brandon threatens to Redpill the USA about the FakeNews media, and the rank unpopularity of Mr 80-million-votes. The faster it spreads, the harder it will be for the namecallers to twist it into “domestic terrorism”. So run Brandon, run. The moment is here.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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After 26 COP meetings we are a Fossil Fueled World: Coal, oil gas give us 80% of the energy on Earth 

This is what Decarbonization Failure looks like:

After three decades of effort, twenty-six glorious international COP meetings, six IPCC reports, and the installation of around 400,000 wind turbines, the total energy supplied in the big renewable energy transition still amounts to about 5% of total energy production.

The artificial Global Green energy transition is but a decoration on the energy cake. Twenty five thousand commercial planes aren’t electric. 6,225 bulk carriers are not powered by solar panels. And 260 smelters are molten hot and none of them work on wind turbines.

While the media green junkies tell how inevitable the renewable energy transition is, the wave we ride is the massive increase in the use of coal, oil and gas.

And it’s still growing.

Keep reading  →

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Thursday Open Thread

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First Australian Covid Vax, approved overseas, but instead of a medal, we sack Prof Petrovsky

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky

We’re sacking Vaccine Professors for not taking the right vaccine?

Who knew? The first traditional vaccine for Covid that’s based on protein anywhere in the world  has been approved for use. It was designed in Australia, but can’t be used here. The Professor of the team that invented it received no help from the Australian Government, and is about to be sacked from Flinders Medical Centre** because he won’t take the mandatory Pfizer, Astra Zenica or Moderna injections. What would he know — he’s just a vaccine developer?

UPDATE: The SA Govt will now recognise the Covax-19 trial participants. This is a small step but good news. Prof Petrovsky won’t be forced to quit.

Instead of the committee-approved ones, has taken his own vaccine called Covax-19 or Spikogen. It has just been approved for use in Iran where Stage 2 and 3 trials were conducted. He said he would stand by his vaccine and even accept liability, unlike all the current vaccine makers who demand waivers.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky is hopeful though, that after “the excellent Phase 3 trial results” he will be able to get approval in many countries, maybe even in Australia? But our government-funded TGA won’t consider it until his team pays over $300,000 so they can assess it.

You’d never know the Australian government was trying to save Australians lives, or give our citizens more choices. Perhaps because they aren’t? If they were interested, they would surely find a way to fast track the assessment process and cover the trivial cost of reading a report from Iran. The Government has spent $1.9 billion on other vaccines, but can’t find 300k for the most successful Australian vaccine in years?

The situation is so comic, Petrovsky has had to resort to crowdfunding, so they can afford to pay our government to get approval. They have set up a GoFundMe page, which has already raised $290,000 out of the $326,000 already.

I’ve donated. (Don’t call me anti-vax, I put money into vaccine research🙂  )

GoFundMe:  Bring Covax-19 Vaccine back to Australia

UPDATE: Within 8 hours of posting this $36,000 was donated and the target reached. Thank you!

Judging by the comments there, there are already a thousand volunteers for a trial here.

Petrovsky tells us there are great results from the latest trial in Iran but he can’t make the resultsCoronavirus-vaccine. Photo
public yet. (He’s hoping his papers on that will be accepted so he can). He claims they meet all the FDA and other requirements to be approved. Apparently, in animal tests, after vaccination, they can challenge the animals with live virus and not only do they not fall sick, the team can find no recoverable virus in challenge tests, which is excellent. There’s no transmission to other animals either. He calls the vaccine “quasi sterilizing”. If it’s a lot less leaky that “all the rest”, it may even help mop up the nastier mutations we’re probably making by giving millions of people very leaky vaccines. Wouldn’t that be something?

Covax-19 apparently causes few side effects. Petrovsky claims there is no thrombosis, no fever, no myocarditis, and no myocardial infarction. No one needs to take a day off work…

Perhaps the biggest problem for Covax-19 is that it’s too good?

If I understand correctly, despite all these advantages, and it being home-grown, the government told him they couldn’t support a vaccine unless it was manufactured in Australia. But when he approached CSL — the main likely manufacturer in Australia — they flat out refused to even consider it. What can Petrovsky do? Maybe move to Tehran.

Right now, a certain leaky lab in Wuhan has another 19,000 samples from bat caves to play with. There are plenty of pandemics to pick from. Perhaps for the sake of National Security we need our own vaccination and pharmaceutical manufacturing base? We need supply lines and expertise here. Isn’t Covax-19 the perfect place to start?

Nuclear subs are all very well, but they can’t shoot pandemics.

Having dedicated his career to creating vaccines, Professor Petrovsky can hardly be called an anti-vaxxer. But he has safety concerns about the current rollout, and thinks mandates can’t be justified for something that is mostly done for individual benefits not for the community. He is also astonished at how fast the other vaccines were approved, and all damages waived, and doesn’t think the risk benefit can be justified at all for young children. He bemoans the lack of transparency. Don’t we all?

If Pfizer etc is so good, Why o Why are those Pfizer contracts top secret?

Comparing vaccines

A protein vaccine is a simpler creature than the new mRNA vaccines (Pfizer or Moderna). It’s simpler than Astra Zenica too, which is based on using genes inside a common cold virus vector. Novavax is also a protein vaccine (but it is not approved anywhere yet).

Like Novavax, Covax-19 uses a form of the infamous spike protein, but because the protein is made, purified and then injected, each person receives an exact known dose, and there is no need for any genetic material to be introduced inside our cells. There’s little risk of autoimmune disorders, like myocarditis, because the spike isn’t made inside our own cells and isn’t expressed on the surface of them. When healthy cells express the spike, our immune system is more likely to mistake them as a foreign threat which triggers the autoimmune disease.

The adjuvant used is also promising. An adjuvant is designed to wake up our immune systems so they pay attention to something that essentially poses no threat (in theory). In many vaccines the adjuvant is just aluminium hydroxide (would you believe), but Covax-19 doesn’t contain any heavy metals. Petrovsky uses the incredibly safe plant fibre called “inulin” plus a small oligosaccharide (a small odd type of sugar unit).

From the Interview above:

1. Why has the Australian government refused to engage with Australian vaccine creators?
2. Why has CSL refused to cooperate with Australian vaccine companies?
3. What are in those secret commercial contracts with Pfizer et al?
4. Are there clauses that prevent competition and consideration of products that are actually safer for the Australian population?

Australians need a choice of treatment, and we need our own vaccine industry.

I believe he said Covax-19 was given to 16,000 people in Iran for Phase III Clinical Trials. Yet Greg Hunt, our Minister for Health, is not supporting this venture with even $10. Do Australian lives matter? It is outrageous that CSL is failing the Australian people.

Petrovsky explains that the reason the current vaccines are not very useful is because they just don’t reduce the Ro (rate of transmission) enough. Delta has an Ro of 6 – 8, so a reduction of transmission of 20% only reduces an R0 from 6 to 5. The exponential curves won’t be much different.

Petrovsky says they use the same spike otherwise but have removed the furin cleavage site because the spike without it works better as a antigen. I wonder if without the furin cleavage site, the free-floating spikes may be less likely to get into some cells. No one asks though and Petrovsky doesn’t say.

I look forward to seeing the results. Though it’s hard to beat some antivirals, and the long term studies won’t be finished for years…

The  GoFundMe  is nearly there!

h/t Flok, Brenda Spence, Vicki, Clarence.t. and Bob Dinn, Analytik, El Gordo,

*Confusingly there appears to be a UN program called “Covax” which is not the same.

**Correction: Originally read “Flinders University”, but is Flinders Medical Centre. Apologies.

Covax-19 is made and owned by Vaxine.

Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash

9.9 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Climate Doom Pantomime at Glasgow, the hottest party for the Uber Rich to jet into on Fossil Fuels

Think of Glasgow as a costume party for the Uber rich and it all makes sense

Everyone gets to hobnob, dress up in a Superhero prophet-of-doom outfit and pretend to save the world.

When the richest people in the world turn up, with PM’s and Presidents, and even the Royals do live photo tweets — you know the dry UN science conference has turned into the unmissable Olympics of Social Events.  Just being there is the fashion statement of the year.

The deals (or spin, such it is) is mostly done. The party is the reward. The World Stage beckons for politicians seeking to look important. While the offer of another glorious junket keeps the minor minions working hard all year.

And any fence-sitting politicians might be awed and swept away in the spur of the moment to offer more than they might have in the cold light of day. (Send them your barbs!)

Royals at Glasgow, COP26

Hobnobbing  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Twitter Account: @KensingtonRoyal

Glasgow has kicked off with a world record in hyperbole:

Never before have so many extreme metaphors exploded in the same conversation. We’re strapped to a bomb, with a clock stuck at one minute to midnight again for the tenth year in a row, and it’s time to end the chainsaw massacre of our forests, the genocide of children not born, and it will be worse than Hitler.

Where do we go from here? Stalin and Mao for next year?

Upbeat Boris says COP26 is ‘snipping the wires of the climate change doomsday device‘ as he hails deals to end ‘great chainsaw massacre’ of forests

Prince Charles called for the ‘re-engineering’ of the world’s financial and economic system…

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said ‘treating nature like a toilet’. ‘We are digging our own graves’.

[The] Archbishop of Canterbury, said that leaders would be ‘cursed’ if they didn’t reach agreement on climate change in the next fortnight.   … a failure to act would allow ‘a genocide on an infinitely greater scale’ than was committed by Hitler’s regime.

Importantly, whatever you do, don’t ask the people.

Here’s Mr Brexit Referendum himself saying that the people are tired of having a say:

Mr Johnson rejected the idea of a referendum on whether the UK should be aiming for Net Zero by 2050, saying the country had ‘probably had enough’ of such campaigns.

And he insisted the public should not be concerned about the estimated one-trillion pound cost of the drive over the next 30 years. Mr Johnson said British people are not ‘dumb’ and recognised that ‘if we don’t do this it will be an economic catastrophe’.

— Daily Mail

The serfs know changing the weather will cost the odd thousand billion pounds, sayth Boris, but they’re OK with that.

Lest the event sway your elected Rep, keep sending your scathing emails, your savage wit to them and their team. The Medieval Carnival of Weather Control in Glasgow is a pompous extravaganza of narcissists spending other people’s money to dress themselves in Saintly Green Glory.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Swedish study of 840,000 shows vaccine efficacy at 7 months at, wow, zero

This will make some public health officers sweat

In Sweden, a new study followed 840,000 people who were double vaccinated for nine months which is longer than any previous study. The researchers matched them or “paired them” with another 840,000 people who were the same, age, sex and from the same area. Out of this 1.6 million pooled sample, 27,000 people went on to get infected, and most of them were unvaccinated (21,000). So that’s not surprising, but underlying this data was an extraordinary trend showing efficacy falling month after month. In the first two to four weeks, the double vaccinated were very well protected. But by nine months later, the efficacy was not just zero, but negative.

The study considered protection against severe disease too, which lasts for longer, but after 6 months, the older men and people most at risk of Covid (sadly) were more likely to catch Covid that the matched same-age unvaccinated controls they were paired with. Nine months after vaccination, the average person is still less likely to end up in hospital, but protection is trending downwards for everyone.

No wonder the word on the lips of most state health officers is “Booster”

If only they had something better to offer than just another dose of the same thing?

From the paper:

In this study, vaccine effectiveness of BNT162b2 [Pfizer] against symptomatic infection waned progressively from 92% during the first month, to 47% by month 4-6 and from 7 months and onwards no effectiveness was detected. Effectiveness waned slightly slower for mRNA-1273 [Moderna], whereas effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 [AstraZenica] was generally lower. Overall, effectiveness was lower and waned faster among men and older individuals. For the outcome of hospitalization or death, effectiveness (any vaccine) waned from 89% during the first month to 42% from month 6 and onwards in the total population. There was notable waning among especially men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities.

Not surprisingly, this means that for high risk people in states where all good alternative treatments are banned, booster doses are the *only* option.

The  effectiveness against severe illness seems to remain high through 9 months, although not for men, older frail individuals, and individuals with comorbidities. This strengthens the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third booster dose.

The study, of course, tells us nothing about how well Booster doses work.  But it does suggest that “Evidence based” is the most abused and misused phrase on Planet Earth.

The graphs (golly) suggest some trouble ahead:

The vaccines start off with impressive protection against symptomatic disease. However it falls quickly. By the eighth and ninth month the average vaccinated person appears to be more likely to catch Covid than someone who wasn’t vaccinated.

Swedish Vaccine, efficacy after 6 to 9 months. Graph.

Swedish Vaccine, efficacy after 6 to 9 months. Graph.

In the graph below, protection holds up well against severe disease for four months. But by nine months the average person is only 20% protected. That can’t be good.

Cities which rely solely and completely on vaccination to protect them may appear to cruise for a while, but by five or six months post vaccination, things may unravel unless the population has managed to catch the disease, recover and gain natural protection, or sweep through the Deep State and stop bureaucrats telling doctors what they can and can’t prescribe.

Unfortunately the window to gain natural protection while being protected by the vaccine is just not long enough to avoid overwhelming the hospitals.

Swedish Vaccine, efficacy after 6 to 9 months. Graph.

Swedish Vaccine, protection against severity after 6 to 9 months. Graph.

If only there was some other drug we could use, one that was cheap, safe, in large supply and  also worked against Covid in many stages? Imagine how many lives that could save…

In our wildest dreams this hypothetical cheap out-of-patent drug might even have been tested for us on states with two hundred million people to show how well it worked. If only…

Notice in this graph above, protection keeps improving for six weeks after the second dose? Our immune system spends weeks tweaking the antibody profile — and selecting slightly better antibodies. A fully mature immune response is slow,  another reason that testing vaccines is not a fast process. And perhaps giving a second dose while the first dose response is not even finished is not the best plan?

On the plus side, researchers tossed out anyone known to have caught Covid, so the study-groups didn’t have a large confounding slab of people with strong natural protection skewing the results — though a few people would have inadvertently or asymptomatically done that anyhow. (Swedish testing rates weren’t that great).

Maybe things are not as bad as these graphs look? (Boy do they look bad).

The problem with matched or paired studies is that whatever factors drive people to get vaccinated in the first place are the same ones putting them at risk of a poorer immune response. Obviously, people at higher risk of dying of Covid will be more likely to get vaccinated. The two groups don’t start out with the same risk. The negative “ratio” at the end may be exaggerated.

There are also behavioral unknowns. Do vaccinated people work in high risk areas like nursing homes? Are they more likely to stay home because they are the kind of person who worries a lot, or are they more likely to wander around ad lib post-vaccine, because they feel safe and protected?

And the group who got vaccinated nine months ago, are obviously not the same sort of people as put it off til September. High risk people were vaccinated earliest and they are the first to reach the “nine months” mark.

The Swedish study is large (to put it mildly) and they even tested a bigger cohort too. By relaxing the matching process they managed to put together a second sort-of-matched cohort of nearly 4 million people. That’s pretty much the whole population of Sweden and it largely confirmed the trends.

In other news, they found that mixing and matching vaccines appear to give a bit better protection than sticking with the same brand.

The real message though, that the authors didn’t say, was that we need to use the damn antiviral treatments we already have — and it’s a crime that we aren’t.

* * *

Unconnected with the study, someone somewhere put together a video that fits this occasion.

Possible Source: Instagram

h/t greggg

REFERENCE

Peter Nordström et al (2021)  Effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination against risk of symptomatic infection, hospitalization, and death up to 9 months: a Swedish total-population cohort study, Lancet, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3949410 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3949410

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UK Study finds Covid spreads just as easily from infected people who are Vaccinated

Covid, Coronavirus, Bioweapons.A new study shows vaccinated people are about 40% less likely to catch Covid, but if or when they do catch it they pose the same risk to the people close to them regardless of their vaccination status.

The study also confirmed that vaccinated immunity was falling within three months of vaccination. Presumably, if a vaccinated person is 40% less likely to catch Covid in the first place, then being vaccinated will reduce the odds of bringing the SARS virus home on any given day. But given that protection wanes so quickly and Covid has such a high exponential rate of spread, a temporary 40% reduction of the risk of catching the virus is not game-changing.

Relying on vaccination as the sole magic tool to suppress Covid is a fantasy that suits Big Pharma but not The People. And the Big Bad Risk of nastier variants coming from these super leaky vaccinees doesn’t even get a mention. Read the post on the dark vaccine-induced evolution of Marek’s disease in chickens. The arms race generated by 50 years of leaky-vaxxes turned a 1% killer into a 100% killer. We should not be mass vaccinating with a leaky vaccine unless we use an antiviral as well.

The Imperial College study shows that draconian rules isolating the unvaccinated from the vaccinated are not medically justified. Put another way, an unvaccinated person infected with Covid is no more likely to spread the virus than a vaccinated person.

The Imperial College study followed 621 people, and was unusually detailed in measuring the load curves of viral titres as they rise and fall. They found that when infected, both the vaxxed and unvaxxed reached similar peak levels of virus, which supports the idea that they are both just as infectious.

The Urgent need for Early Treatment

By measuring viral loads daily the Imperial College team confirmed that the initial rise of the virus is extraordinarily rapid for the first three days until it peaks. They also found that the early replication rate of the virus goes on to determine the trajectory of the whole infection. So action in the first few days is imperative. People who had the fastest rise and highest peaks also had the longest declines. It seems that whatever it is that slowed the infection in some people in the early days also helped to clear the virus faster. The authors don’t expand on this, but many other studies show early treatment, and especially prophylactic treatment is the most useful.

It is madness to send people home without an early treatment kit, and madness not to give that kit to all the household contacts to use before they get infected. That was the extremely successful tactic used in Uttar Pradesh which largely eliminated the virus.

Vaccinated People Easily Transmit COVID-19 Delta Variant in Households: UK Study

The Epoch Times

A year-long study from the Imperial College London published in The Lancet on Thursday found that the Delta variant is still highly transmissible within a vaccinated population.

Their study, which surveyed 621 participants, found that of 205 household contacts of people who had the Delta infection, about 38 percent of household contacts who were not vaccinated tested positive, compared with 25 percent who tested positive among vaccinated household contacts.

“By carrying out repeated and frequent sampling from contacts of COVID-19 cases, we found that vaccinated people can contract and pass on infection within households, including to vaccinated household members,” Dr. Anika Singanayagam, co-lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Immunity from full vaccination also dropped in as little as three months, their research also found.

But the critical line from the paper talks about the “secondary attack rate” (confusingly known as SAR) which means the rate of infections the primary case causes.

We identified similar SAR (25%) in household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases as in those exposed to unvaccinated index cases (23%). This finding indicates that breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people can efficiently transmit infection in the household setting.

What about natural protection — The big invisible factor?

One of the major limitations of this study is that it doesn’t even mention previous infections or natural immunity at all. It’s like a blindness. Some of the unvaccinated and the vaccinated in the UK have already had Covid and have natural protection which appears to be better and longer lasting. So the statistics are pooled values. Are prior infections more likely in the unvaccinated or the vaccinated groups?  If the number of prior infections is higher in the unvaccinated group the study will underestimate the benefits of vaccination for people with no immunity. But if prior infections are more likely in the vaccinated that will make the vaccine appear to be more protective than it is. They could have done antibody testing on both groups and found this out. Even though vaccinated people have antibodies to the spike protein, people with natural protection have antibodies to the nucleocapsid as well.

If someone was infected with Covid they would go on to infect about a quarter of their household. This seems rather low compared to studies on the original Wuhan variant in the early part of last year. The reduced spread is probably explained by both vaccination and natural protection. But people may also be changing behaviour and reducing their contact with the newly diagnosed cases. Perhaps some are treating themselves “off label” to stop the spread as well.

Those viral load curves

The details on the rapid growth of the virus in the early days reinforces the need to do early treatment or even better — prophylactic care. Most people don’t get symptoms til after the viral load peaks — they won’t even know the virus is multiplying unless a close contact has tested positive. And if that early treatment can reduce the rate of growth of the virus, it will also likely reduce the length of the illness and infection.

These are log scale graphs, so even a small decline in the initial rate of rise could make the infection much less severe and much less infectious.

Viral loads Early Wuhan variant. Graphed.

Viral loads Early Wuhan variant. (Click to see all samples)

Viral loads with the delta variant declined slightly faster as did viral loads in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.

 

Viral loads-delta

Viral loads of Delta infections. (Click to see all samples)

 

From the paper itself:

Vaccination was found to be effective in reducing household transmission of the alpha variant (B.1.1.7) by 40–50%…

Keep reading  →

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Who needs windows anyway? Study shows homes near wind turbines need airtight shut windows

Welcome to your prison comrade

A new Taiwanese study investigated wind farm noise on people in homes made of sandstone, concrete, iron or bricks. And they measured the low frequency noise inside and out, and with windows open and closed. Given the health risks involved, they advised that governments ought to set limits on how close towers can be, and recommend airtight windows that nobody opens much.

Windpower plant Germany.

pixelrockerz

Perhaps someone should have done more studies like this before the world installed 750GW of wind power?

The same people that panic about the effect of a hot weekend on your grandchildren a hundred years from now, don’t seem so worried about whether the wind towers destroy your sleep or put you at risk of heart attacks today.

Thanks to MasterResource.

From the introduction of a new paper in Taiwan on the effects of wind turbine noise on people:

LFN [Low Frequency Noise] exposure has been found to cause a variety of health conditions. Exposure to LFN from wind turbines results in headaches, difficulty concentrating, irritability, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus, aural pain sleep disturbances, and annoyance. Clinically, exposure to LFN from wind turbines may cause increased risk of epilepsy, cardiovascular effects, and coronary artery disease.

It was also found that exposure to noise (including LFN) may have an impact on heart rate variability (HRV).

HRV  — The variability of our heartbeats — is a sign of how healthy we are, and how relaxed we feel. To brutally oversimplify — stressed people have a more robotic predictable pattern, but relaxed people’s hearts  beat with more flexibility. Slower heart rates usually have more variation. It’s a vast topic. HRV predicts mortality after heart attacks. It’s even been connected with concentration and decision making ability, depression and anxiety.

Who needs windows anyway?

They concluded:

In view of the adverse health impacts of exposure to turbine-generated LFN, it is recommended that the government set regulations on the requisite distances of wind turbines from residences, for houses near wind turbines to be equipped with airtight windows for sound insulation, and for residents living in close proximity to wind turbines to have their windows closed most of the time to reduce LFN transmission.

How many heart attacks should we have today to avoid one heatwave in 2100?

———————-

LATE NOTE: Unintended consequence number 12,003.   Closed windows would also increase the spread of viruses indoors, unless the homes had an upgrade on the airconditioning. And without the open-window option for temperature control, homes will use more electricity for heating and cooling. So people get sick more and emissions increase…

And let’s not start on sick-building syndrome, or on the effect that flickering, infrasound, and pulsing have on all the animals for kilometers around these towers. If it harms humans, we can assume that cows, sheep and spotted quolls don’t sleep as well. Who’s done that study?

REFERENCE

Chun-Hsiang Chiu et al (2021)   Effects of low-frequency noise from wind turbines on heart rate variability in healthy individuals,  Scientific Reports

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Great Speech: The Oil execs are owed an apology

Even here in Australia the grilling of the Big Four Oil companies made it on the news. For some reason SBS didn’t include this speech.

Florida Rep Byron Donalds let’s rip on the committee’s intimidation tactics, on their rank infringement of freedoms to speak, to do business, and to hold opinions. He savages them for wasting time on a circus like this instead of building an economy.

Best part is 25 seconds to 2:10.   What an excellent speaker…

From Twitchy

 

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