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Tuesday Open Thread

9.4 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

FDA trying to rebrand a wonder-drug as just a horse dewormer

The FDA has launched a marketing program to rebrand the Wonder Drug from Japan as just a horse paste and thus bury the 3.8 billion doses given to very non-horsey humans, many of whom were in Subsaharan Africa. On another day this would be a hideously racist. When do 200 million Africans count for nothing?

The FDA may hope to save people from self-medication accidents, but will regret telling a half-truth-soup and burning up more of what’s left in their trust-bucket. After all, they want the public to trust them with their lives, but it only takes one eye opening conversation to undo years of propaganda. If the FDA are not mentioning that something like 200 million humans use Ivermectin each and every year — what else are they hiding? That it won a Nobel Prize and costs $1 a day?

The FDA and the Guardian and co, are training readers to mock anyone who even asks about Ivermectin. It’s the old Argumentum By Derision again. The tool of bullies, not scientists.

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian got the message the FDA was sending:

Ahead of full US authorisation of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, the federal Food […]

Monday Unthreaded

Because there is so much to discuss…

9.4 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

Backlash: Cancel culture boycott *increases* audience for GB News in the UK

GB News has only been running for 10 weeks in the UK but it has already been targeted by a campaign to boycott the advertisers.

However the boycott was twice as likely to get people to tune in.

This is how it works. Once the Virtue Signallers have overdone the bullying and the crowd knows it — the bullying itself works like a signpost.. By definition, the forbidden material will always be the most interesting. The politically incorrect shows are the most entertaining.

GB News joy as campaign to boycott advertisers has actually BOOSTED channel

Express.co.uk

While those wishing to boycott GB News may take brands removing their adverts as a win – a recent survey found it may have actually given the channel a boost.

A poll of 1,000 people conducted by CT Group, commissioned by GB News, gave the statement “consumer goods brands should not adopt overt political views”.

Of those polled, 57 percent agreed that brands shouldn’t take on “overt political beliefs”. And only 15 percent disagreed with the statement. When those surveyed were asked if an advertiser boycott made people more likely to tune into the […]

Weekend Unthreaded

7.9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Australian government needs coal subsidies to save grid from renewables subsidies

In Australia, the subsidy bandaids are piling up.

We subsidized weather-controlling generators in the hope that our electrical infrastructure could not only provide electricity but would also stop storms, floods and The Taliban. However the weather-controlling-generators were also weather-dependent, and it was costing quite a lot to add storage, stability, transmission lines and synchronous condensors. Who knew changing global weather would cost so much?

Once upon a time Australia had a full complete electricity grid that was cheap and efficient. Then we added inefficient things to it until we had two whole grids, one that changed the weather (in theory) and a spare one that filled in for all the other grids failures. For some reason it was not cheaper to run two whole grids rather than just one.

The subsidies were needed to drive out the cheapest player (coal power), but having succeeded, we then needed different subsidies to keep the coal power in.

What a tangled web we weave when first we lie to ourselves.

Grid and bear it: subsidised coal part of energy overhaul

Geoff Chambers, The Australian

Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas […]

Thursday Open Thread

8.3 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Not quite the path to freedom. Even 80% vaxed Australia could mean 25,000 dead, 270,000 with long covid

Most of Australia is living with freedom, not the virus. “Living with the virus” means long lockdowns in NSW. Who wants that?

The Australian Federal government wants to “open up the nation” when we reach 70 or 80% vaccinated, like it’s The Sign of Bethlehem, or something, but the No-Covid States are rebelling and it’s no wonder. Being free of Chinese Bioweapons means being free to dance, sing, work and send the kids to school — and the voters rather like that. No virus means no lockdown. The States with zero covid know that if they let the virus in even at 80% “vaxed” they’ll have less freedom. They might get to fly to London but they’ll have to give up Big Weddings, Parties, and possibly Grandpa too.

The key value is and always was hospital beds. The hospitalization rates mean even at the magical 80% double-vaccinated mark hospitals will be overwhelmed, forcing states to flatten the curve for months and stand in the street banging tin pots at 9pm each night to say thanks to strung out health workers. We don’t need modeling to know this, it happened already in places like the UK, Spain and Italy. […]

Rafe Champion guest post. The failure of wind power in South Australia

 

This work is supported by the Energy Realists of Australia. See the site for more information on Casualties on the Road to Net Zero.

SA is the pioneer wind state and the first to experience the rapid increase in power prices that hastened the demise of the local car industry. They literally blew up the last of their coal-fired power stations although they still have gas which is just as well because during wind droughts they live on gas and coal power from Victoria.

RE enthusiasts laud SA as an RE powerhouse, the wonder of the world and the shape of things to come across Australia. That is true but not in the way that they mean. Look at the situation in SA in the recent week from August 12 to Wed 18.

The chart below shows the amount of wind power generated in South Australia hour by hour through August to date. The dotted line across the chart at 219MW is close to 10% of the installed capacity of 2,100MW and it marks the upper level of supply that I regard as a “wind drought”.

From the 12th to the 18th the supply was mostly under […]

Post coming soon…

Proof reader accidentally published before the final draft. Finished copy coming soon.

10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

Hello Conflict: Alphabet owns Youtube, Google and 12% of company that makes AstraZeneca Vax

Google and Youtube are to some extent the Police of our National Conversations. Somehow they are allowed to invest privately and simultaneously put people in jail according to rules they made up themselves. What could possibly go wrong?

Senator Malcolm Roberts asking some very good questions:

Consider the ownership of vaccine makers. Alphabet owns YouTube and Google. Alphabet owns 12 per cent of Vaccitech, which created the AstraZeneca vaccine. YouTube bans videos mentioning ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Aren’t these conflicts of interest? If ivermectin was approved for COVID, what would happen to big pharma’s hundreds of billions of dollars in profits? These profits are a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big pharma.

New business model? What if one hot drug created a market for other drugs:

Consider the vaccine maker Pfizer’s profits. It’s second quarter 2021 revenue was $19 billion, up 89 per cent. In three months, it made $4 billion profit. The European Medicines Agency discovered a definite link between Pfizer’s vaccine causing myocarditis. In September 2020, our TGA approved Pfizer’s Vyndamax drug to treat myocarditis. Our health department confirmed the AstraZeneca vaccine’s links with blood clots. Pfizer’s Eliquis drug treats blood clotting. […]

Guest post by Rafe Champion. Will it work to press on with more wind and solar power with existing storage technology?

PS: From Jo. Rafe Champion has been posting at the lost Catallaxy site for years so I offered him a home to try to fill the vacuum on Australian blogs for discussion on energy issues.

The dilemma Australia faces is that if we keep stuffing subsidized unreliable energy into the system we will force stable fuels out, and be carbon free, but we will also be free of 50Hz cycles, 24 hour power, aluminium plants, and manufacturing jobs. Policy-dreamers are using magical words like “battery” and “pumped hydro” as if Australia is a scaled up Mechano Truck run on Monopoly-money and we can expect reliable rain for the first time in 2 billion years.

by Steve Hunter

The Energy Security Board, chaired by Kerry Schott, has at last delivered a report to the Federal Government with proposals for market reforms to resolve a looming crisis in the national power supply or at least the NEM, the National Energy Market that covers the south-eastern states, excluding WA. The crisis is twofold – increasing grid instability and the threat of supply if coal plants are forced out of business prematurely. Both of those issues arise from […]

Tuesday Open Thread

7.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Even the Media turns on Joe Biden

Even CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times have stopped defending him.

These are the same teams that hid the Hunter-Biden Laptop from hell, the “10% for the Big Guy” scandal and that the FBI had possession for a whole year and did nothing.

As @gabrieljhays says “Hell Freezes Over”:

ABC (America) News said: ” when you listen to the President, he is saying things that simply do not comport with the reality.”

In the last week Joe Biden’s own Defense Secretary, and the Pentagon Spokesman both flatly contradicted him in the media. Tucker Carlson says that’s something that never ever happens.

The Afghanistan debacle was so complete, it’s like it was planned. Could someone merely incompetent achieve a perfect fail?

 

MSNBC

 

When you’ve lost the New York Times

Paul Mirengoff:

The New York Times has turned against Joe Biden on Afghanistan. For the last two days, it has covered for him. With only brief, passing mentions, the Times has suppressed the issue of American citizens trapped in Afghanistan.

Today, that is all changed. Not only is the issue of getting Americans out […]

How Climate Change helped the Taliban — don’t blame Joe, blame fossil fuels

Apparently the Taliban were not waiting for a US President to gift them with helicopters and guns and then run away. What they really needed was climate change:

How climate change helped strengthen the Taliban

Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban — likely without knowing climate change was the cause — has taken advantage of that pain.

According to the CBS News article, titled “How climate change helped strengthen the Taliban,” “Rural Afghanistan has been rocked by climate change. The past three decades have brought floods and drought that have destroyed crops and left people hungry. And the Taliban — likely without knowing climate change was the cause — has taken advantage of that pain.”

Wake up to the new reality that Solar Panels can stop the Taliban. When you see the crying children in Kabul, feel guilty because you eat meat, drive cars, and heat the world! Then go make yourself a Fairtrade Organic cup of Cocoa and know that you’re helping.

According to CBS News, the farmers were destitute, abandoning […]

Even 100% vaccination is not enough: 27 people on a cruise ship get infected, one dies

70, 80, 90 percent vaxed doesn’t look like the ticket to Freedom A cruise ship with only vaccinated people on board gets 27 cases of covid

Is this what “living with the virus” means?

Carnival Vista | Photo by antonio from Trieste, Italy

by J.D.Rucker:

…according to The Liberty Daily, every staff member and every guest on the ship was vaccinated.

“Somewhere near Cozumel in the Caribbean Sea, there’s a cruise ship that had zero unvaccinated people aboard but that still suffered an outbreak of Covid-19,” the report said. “This goes against the narrative that the reason for ‘breakthrough cases’ is due to too many unvaccinated people mingling with those who have taken the experimental injections.” It continued, “The Carnival Vista, which departed from Galveston, Texas, on July 31, has issued strict face mask protocols and ordered infected people aboard into isolation.

One 77 year old passenger who caught Covid on the ship has since died. Another is still in hospital in Belize and is said to be “in bad shape”. The family of the deceased lady is trying to raise $30,000 to cover the costs, which included an emergency flight back […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9.4 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Explaining NZ locked down with 1 case: Imagine a virus is like a house fire, how long should you wait?

Stepping right into the fray here with the hazmat suit on. Some very bright people are missing the point of locking down with only one known case.

Imagine a virus is like a house fire. When the flames start, we don’t say, “it’s just a curtain, it’s only 1% of the house.”

On Tuesday, New Zealand found one sole Covid case and locked down the entire nation immediately at, like, Defcon level 4. Which sounds bonkers, understandably, to someone living in a place that’s had 38 million cases. But the brilliant Glen Greenwald, bless him, just got this one wrong. “They seem demented (and) oblivious to the costs of sustained isolation” he said, at a point when NZ had sustained all of 13 hours of isolation its first national lockdown for a year.

In similar form, the excellent Nigel Farage, declared Jacinda Ardern had lost her marbles. In response to the foreign critics like these, defiant New Zealanders flocked to the #NZhellhole hashtag and let rip with thousands of scenic photos of ski slopes and beaches mocking what a tough life it was in the NZHellhole prison.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the death […]

Thursday Open Thread

8.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

All these years later and IPCC still depends on Argument from Ignorance

Thirty years later and the main two arguments of the IPCC are the Hockeystick and Ignorance Graph.

Essentially, the Chosen Expert Modelers look at the recent warming and say “‘we’re certain it’s CO2 because we can’t think of anything else”. Or more specifically, “we know it’s CO2, because our broken models don’t work without it”. Their models don’t work with it either but no one really cares.

These are the same models that don’t include any solar magnetic effect, solar wind factors or solar spectral changes. If the Sun was driving the climate, their models will never figure that out.

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Figure 1b of thousands in IP6.

This is the classic fallacy known for a few hundred years as Argument from Ignorance. The more ignorant the climate researchers are, the worse CO2 looks.

Ten long years ago, I described how to create a crisis graph in 6 easy steps, and two IPCC reports later, nothing’s different. A decade after I put Argument from Ignorance into The Skeptics Handbook II, Skepticalscience (remember them?) still has it on their To Do list.

9.8 out of 10 based on 86 ratings […]