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?
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.”
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.
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 Rangappahas 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,” criedHuffPo’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.
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.
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🙂 )
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 results
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).
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…
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!)
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?
[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.
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.
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, 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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…
The GWPF have published a provocative piece by Professor Gwythian Prins, which I highly recommend. One chapter in particular captures the fragile moment around which global affairs is orbiting. The West, comfortable and corrupted, is only just starting to become aware of the duplicity and hostile intent of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum text of October 2020, setting out the strategy to 2035, told the nation for the first time in decades to ‘prepare for war’(备战) – meaning in any and all forms. It is true that the Chinese military build-up since 2000 has been relentless and remarkable. However, as we will see, at present we do not face open war, but instead war by other means.
The West needs to be aware of the 36 Strategems from an Era of War
“To Loot A Burning House”
Xi’s tactics are also informed by The Thirty Six Stratagems from the era of the Warring States, a manuscript which is probably a little older than Sun Tzu’s. However, both emerged from periods of great internal turbulence. The Thirty Six are usually grouped into six chapters, and three – two ‘war winning’ strategies and one ‘enemy dealing’ strategy – are most apposite in framing Xi’s conduct.
The first is kill with a borrowed sword (借 刀殺人); in other words, to use our inventions to attack us.
The second is loot a burning house (趁火打劫); to take advantage of an enemy’s misfortune. This metaphor facilitates the principle of ‘ghost attack’ – the perpetration of hostile actions with plausible deniability, such that the attacked party is powerless to retaliate without seeming to be the aggressor. An example would be the current Covid pandemic.
A bioweapon released close to the Lab it came from could be an accident. It’s plausible…
It also encompasses the idea of creating adverse circumstances – setting the house on fire – and pushing the enemy into self-harming behaviour. The third is an ‘enemy dealing’ strategy: hide a knife behind a smile (笑裏 藏刀), the tactic of concealing hostile intent behind apparent co-operation. Conduct over energy and climate policy appears to be a leading arena for this stratagem, as we shall see in detail.
The fifth columnists, the Greens, the university “friends”:
The spear-point for Xi’s ghost attacks is China’s Ministry of State Security United Front Work Department (UFWD): a multiheaded hydra. Xi Jinping has described it as ‘…an important magic weapon for strengthening the party’s ruling position…
The UFWD’s tactics towards us can also be seen to derive from long-standing Chinese strategies such as the Thirty Six. For example, employing the stratagem let the enemy’s own spy sow discord in the enemy camp (反間計), it has, with considerable success, ‘made friends for China’ within and across the western elite establishment. In the British case, that embraces the worlds of business (notably the 48 Group Club), of politics (green activists have been a particular focus for the UFWD54), and spans academia and universities, notably Cambridge under its current Vice-Chancellor, and Nottingham. Science and science publishing, where a naïve belief in the global community of science can, wittingly or not, be exploited to meet China’s objectives are especially targeted. Winning influential friends – ‘Fifth Columnists’ witting or unwitting – so as to destroy an enemy’s ability to resist is a classic indirect approach, straight from the pages of Sun Tzu, and conforming to the first of the ‘chaos strategies’ of the Thirty Six: ‘Remove the firewood from under the pot’ (釜底抽 薪). In western idiom, it is to draw the fires from the boilers to slow and eventually stop the engines.
Is it a coincidence that oil and gas prices are so high?
During 2020, in quick order, China made three long-term oil and gas agreements, with Iran, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.
If it’s a coincidence now, it won’t be in the future…
To hide a knife behind a smile
… China is currently building 250 GW of additional new coal-fired plant, more than currently exists in the entire USA (229 GW), and a 25% increase on current capacity. Alongside other conventional capacity, such as nuclear and gas, this will support a 50% increase in electricity consumption by 2040 (>10,000 TWh, as compared to 7,000 TWh today). Figure 7 shows China’s fuel mix trends, dominated by coal, and with ‘new renewables’ barely visible traces. We may therefore safely deduce that China has no intention of embracing western ‘green’ obsessions.
…
But has Xi revealed the hostile intent too soon?
With AUKUS formed, the Quad alliance, and nuclear subs on the way for Australia, there are signs the West is waking up (finally).
The new-found resolve of the Anglosphere nations may reinforce the views of those in Peking who have been doubtful of the wisdom of Xi Jinping’s abandonment of the first of the Thirty Six Stratagems (Deceive the heavens to cross the sea), for it is a sign that open hostility has awakened the Five Eyes, as they warned and feared. All officers in the Queen’s navies – RN, RAN, RCN, RNZN – hold Crown Commissions, and her navies are already fully interoperable, and share a professional culture those of the USA, India and Japan. Xi’s critics in Peking will fear that his aggression has prompted the making (or rather, remaking) of a global navy for the Free World, led by the English speaking peoples. We should not assume that his ascendancy is any more secure than that of previous emperors.
The intent is so obvious when studied under the right lens:
Free World builds towards weaknesses, Communist China builds towards strength
China seeks to deny resources to the Free World
It is simply using our green obsessions to its advantage and against our interests. In the terms of the Thirty Six, Peking intends to loot a burning house: it will encourage its competitors (us) to use thermodynamically inferior fuels in order to build in economic weakness, and will assist us in compromising our transport and electricity infrastructures. It will ignore biomass, tidal, geothermal and hydro as strategically insignificant. Nor will it involve itself in hydrogen, recognising that both the current ‘green’ and ‘blue’ routes to its production, as explained earlier, are unviable economically. But it will happily continue to manufacture wind power components and solar panels for us, and it will use uncompetitive market practices to displace western (and Japanese) competitors, and so dominate the markets for these items. In this way, China will weaken our manufacturing bases, while indulging our ‘green’ and ‘Net Zero’ obsessions and it will thus control these markets – and hence us – for so long as we allow it to do so.
There is much to be pondered, and messages to share from The Worm in The Rose, published by Net Zero Watch. It can be downloaded here.
Professor Gwythian Prins is Research Professor Emeritus at the LSE and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The Liberals doing their best to silence themselves.
Setting symbolic “targets” is not just a PR victory, and “jobs for the Green team” but a big blanket of silence conservatives stuck on themselves. By setting a public target, even if there is zero chance of it reducing CO2, being legislated, or reducing world temperatures by one thousandth of a degree, the most important win for the Green Blob is how it stops conservatives from pointing out the stupid flaws of the Carbonistas. By default it silences half the political machine in Australia and stops voters from getting a choice at the ballot box. Let’s all vote for One Party Democracy comrades!
This announcement carefully deprives the Liberals and National Parties of a key weapon in the up-coming-election, making sure they can’t win another 90 seat majority like Tony Abbott did without being able to criticize the Labor policies with killer one-liners.
They can’t mock the delusions they are aiming for themselves.
Changing Global Weather isn’t free you know. But wait… now it is!
The Labor Party think they can use windmills to stop the storms, but Liberals do too. The sensible half can’t accuse the Labor party of having delusional fantasies of trying to control the weather because there is no sensible half. They can’t say the Climate Models are failing, the predictions are junk, or that Australia has always had fires, floods and droughts and heatwaves all through our history.
They also can’t say that great new technology will fund itself because it’s useful, efficient and competitive. Remember how the government had to put in a Mobile Phone Target in 1992 so everyone would give up their landlines? Yeah, me neither. Only junk new tech needs ongoing forced subsidies, symbolic fantasy targets and mandates.
It’s a small consolation that the Morrison Government won’t legislate the “Net Zero” fantasy, but possibly only because they couldn’t get that grandiose nonsense through the House. So a tiny sliver of democracy remains, thanks to the fear felt by Liberal and National members who may lose their seats to One Nation, United Australia Party and Katter.
Scott Morrison will spend $120 billion of our money on technology because it might solve a problem that a foreign unelected, unaudited committee says we need to solve. So we’ll spent $120 billion on a plan to change the weather on Planet Earth. But we won’t spend one thousandth of that to independently check what the committee says. Almost all the climate scientists who support the IPCC decision are ones whose income increases if they find a crisis.
Scott Morrison’s $120bn new-tech plunge to hit net zero
The Australian
Scott Morrison has unveiled a “middle path” for Australia to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 which promises dramatic carbon reductions across the electricity and transport sectors and a massive investment of up to $120bn for emerging technologies to help achieve the Glasgow target.
The Prime Minister on Tuesday announced the government’s 126-page plan, promising it would not cause massive job losses and disruption to the regions and that Australians would be better off by $2000 on average by 2050 compared to taking no action.
Make no mistake, no Australian scientist is paid by the government to find holes or errors in the IPCC report
No university gets funding that depends on their success in making better climate predictions with space weather or solar factors and without CO2. No government funded research aims to find out if natural forces are more important than carbon dioxide. No team is offered two week foreign junkets 26 years in a row if they show that CO2 is largely beneficial and irrelevant and the IPCC is a one-sided propaganda tool of President Xi.
The ABC and the Nobel Prize committee are not interviewing people who question the IPCC’s conclusions unless they look like freaks with links to the Klan.
Over $79 billion dollars has been fed into one side of a scientific question, while almost none has been put into auditing the reports. (And that was in 2008, it’s worse now).
Yet again Australians vote for something and get the opposite. Toss the idea out of the airlock that this has anything to do with science, trees or weird weather. In a world of corruption and superpowers there are bigger forces at work.
As I said a week ago —the Net Zero pledge was apparently tit-for-tat for nuclear submarines. We get their subs; they get our promise to cripple-our-grid. Which sounds bizarrely unlikely, as if we needed more solar panels to fry the foreign frigates, or more windmills to foil their radar. As if, lord help us, a 0.0001 degree cooler climate will make us harder to invade? Sure. No one ever went to war with a solar powered tank. (Though NATO is thinking about it.)
Read Scott Morrison’s freaky words again. Join the dots. He told the party room that “climate change action had become a key pillar of the western alliance” which means AUKUS (or Australia-UK-US for foreign readers), and that “…there were economic and security imperatives in transitioning to a carbon neutral future.” He also said we need the western alliance “now more than ever”. In the same flavour, just today we hear suddenly that taxpayers will spend $1.8b to buy up a South Pacific telco so the Chinese don’t get it first. The Quickening is here.
There is no mistaking that our PM came back from the US with the AUKUS deal and now suddenly, magically, and nonsensically we have to sabotage our grid in order to defend ourselves. So ponder that we wouldn’t have Net Zero if Donald Trump was still the US President, and we wouldn’t have Net Zero if China wasn’t targeting us aggressively with trade sanctions for daring to ask where the virus came from.
Everything looks different under the Sino red glare
Image by Chris Feser
There is bullying going on by some very big fish. Obviously Boris and Biden leaned on Scott Morrison. But who leaned on them? The list is long — China benefits if we cripple our industrial energy base, raise costs, are less competitive and “demand manage” factory blackouts and random time-off for smelters. A sick grid makes a sick competitor.
But there are so many other groups with their hand in this pot too. The crisis-scientists need “the crisis”, the UN needs a reason to be, the Bankers want their new Fiat Currency with billion dollar profits, and the EU wants others to wreck their grids so their own doesn’t look so bad. Bureaucrats need bureaucracies, and teenagers need a spirit to guide them and a mission that makes sense, but all they can find is Greta. And Big Business wants easy money from Big Bankers, and Big Government. (Customers are such a fickle demanding group.) Why target customers, when you can schmooze with Big Money and be treated like a rock-star by the media, — not to mention any names Andrew Twiggy Forrest.
Glasgow was looking like another complete flop as India, China, Brazil and Russia stay away. The political players needed to find a soft target to be leaned on to keep the PR moment going and apparently Australia was it. We’re the fourth biggest fossil fuel exporter in the world, but we’re a lot easier to push around that the three ahead of us.
As Terry McCrann says — it’s a unilateral energy disarmament
We’re breaking up our energy weapons while our adversaries are building theirs up.
… it is hard to avoid the comparison with the 1930s. That what almost the entirety of the world has embarked on is the energy equivalent of that decade’s appeasement.
Indeed, worse than appeasement: across the developed world, it’s unilateral energy disarmament in the face of the 2020s version of Hitler’s Germany – President Xi’s China. Back then, the political class turned a blind eye to Germany’s re-arming; now the far more numerous – and believe me, greater numbers do not spell greater cognisance – political class turns a similar blind eye to China’s energy re-arming.
This is a China which not only already has the world’s biggest ‘fossil fuel armoury’, so to speak – emitting close to 30 per cent of all global CO2 emissions. But a China which is intent on building its ‘fossil fuel armoury’ ever bigger; is embarked on building, according to Global Coal Plant Tracker’s mid-year analysis, a further 88GW of coal-fired power.
Not planning, not ‘thinking about’, but building, right now – more than three times the entire generation capacity of Australia’s brown and black coal fired power stations.
The hope is that the Nationals have done a deal involving nuclear power — for their sake as well as ours. If they don’t have a serious win up their sleeve from craven caving on “Net Zero” they will be toast at the next election.
It’s Defcon 1 time again for conservative Australians.
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?
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.
Xi’s tactics are also informed by The Thirty Six Stratagems from the era of the Warring States, a manuscript which is probably a little older than Sun Tzu’s. However, both emerged from periods of great internal turbulence. The Thirty Six are usually grouped into six chapters, and three – two ‘war winning’ strategies and one ‘enemy dealing’ strategy – are most apposite in framing Xi’s conduct.
Recent Comments