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Election Day in SA

South Australia, SA, MapThis is a thread for voters in South Australia to talk about today’s state election.  After the Labor Party wrecked the electricity grid in South Australia, the Liberals appear to be set to lose after only one term. Please, locals or anyone with insight, tell us what is going on. I’ve only listened to 20 minutes of ABC radio in the last 3 months, but even 2000km away, I was informed of the Ambulance Ramping deaths, which now turn out to be exaggerated to the point of being misleading:

South Australian Labor will go to the polls having profited from an ambulance attack advertisement that was ruled inaccurate by the state’s Electoral Commissioner. (ECSA)

The fact that Labor kept running its ramping advertisements on Friday despite the ECSA ruling prompted one of the strongest outbursts from Treasurer Rob Lucas in a 40-year career which ends with his retirement on Saturday, labelling them “despicable lies”. “Labor’s campaign slogan should really be ‘Lie like your life depends on it’,” Mr Lucas said in the final statement of his career. — The Australian

No one seems to be asking the obvious question about Ambulance Ramping (which apparently is a problem in every state?). How much is it due to banning nurses, doctors and paramedics from working if they refuse to get injected? How much is it due to injuries from the new major health program of 2021 that has no long term data yet, and only suppressed data that Big Pharma fights to keep secret?

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IEA wants Energy Lockdowns: drive slower, ban cars on Sunday, ride share, and blame Putin

The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.

Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.

We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead.  Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!

The IEA have already whipped out a handy Report called A 10 Point Plan to Cut Oil Use also known as, Let Them Eat Cake.

The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.

As Marc Morano says:Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government regulators. ” — Climate Depot

 

Vladimir Putin and President Xi would be a lot more afraid of The West if we just drilled for more oil and more gas.

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Australian doctors get immediately suspended for Wrongthink, must publicly renounce unpermitted Association

Death by committee has a whole new meaning.

Australia's health practitioners

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency

Australians believe that their doctors are independent, because we have public and private medical systems and lots of “competition” between medical groups that appear to be run like businesses. What they don’t realize is that the bureaucrats entirely own the profession and it’s a monopoly from end to end. There is the illusion of freedom, but AHPRA suspends anyone who “holds the wrong views”. Once suspended a doctor is not permitted to practice, to write scripts, sometimes they are not even allowed to contact their patients.

AHPRA is not sacking doctors for bad patient outcomes, patient complaints, fraud or high risk medicine. For all the world it appears that the worst thing a doctor can do is suggest cheap solutions that get in the way of Medical Profits.

The government forcibly takes the money to fund Medicare from Australians but doesn’t let them have any choice about using those funds to talk to the doctor they prefer — only approved clone doctors. It’s communist medicine.

If there was a free market, Australians could opt out of Medicare and fund their own doctors.

The AHPRA Inquisition Against Australian Health Professionals

Caldron Pool

Who, or what, is AHPRA? Dr Jereth Kok was interviewed this week on the Caldron Pool show, and he explained that it is a “monstrous bureaucracy” in Canberra that rules over all Australian health professionals: doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, paramedics, osteopaths, pharmacists.

…AHPRA has become a Stasi-like enforcement arm of the Australian Government. It has devoted itself to purging every health practitioner in the country who dares to take a stance that is at odds with the decrees of the Covid bureaucracy.

Some examples are well known. Much adored Melbourne GP, Dr Mark Hobart, was purged by AHPRA in late 2021 for issuing exemptions to patients who were experiencing mental distress as a result of Victoria’s tyrannical mandatory vaccination regime. A few weeks later he was joined in forced exile by Dr Denes Borsos, who having lived through Eastern European Communism, has now been given a taste of Australian Communism.

The Covid Medical Network (CMN) are a group of senior doctors in Australia. They are having such an impact that even membership of the group is enough for immediate dismissal.

The most chilling part of the reasons given to Dr Brennan is this paragraph.

“It is not our role to evaluate the scientific validity of the letter. Our concern is that the letter strongly argued a highly polarised position, contrary to the public health order.”

In other words, the position argued by Dr Brennan and the CMN might be scientifically correct, and the position of the Australian Government scientifically incorrect. But as far as AHPRA is concerned, the crime lies in contradicting the Government’s position. The science is irrelevant.

Dr Paul Oosterhuis is one of the doctors suspended in Australia and he writes that the “bureaucrats are demanding” public renouncements of the forbidden groups “to the satisfaction” of the medical board — see the one below.  Doctors must not disagree with them in public. Read and weep. They have no freedom of association for doctors in Australia and no free speech.

 

Ahpra tell doctors what to think

It is understood that the Western Australian doctor in question was threatened with suspension, and allowed to retain her licence subject to the conditions listed on the AHPRA website. Not only is she gagged from speaking publicly about any medical topic and forced to toe the “party line” on Covid; she is expected to demonstrate her loyalty to the regime by formally denouncing the heretical organisation CMN. With wording that is to the “satisfaction” of AHPRA.

Hands up who thinks your GP will tell you what they really think?

h/t David E

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Thursday Open Thread

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A Kalibr Missile just hit Net Zero: Germany wakes old coal plants, UK talks of backflip on gas, oil, fracking too

It’s was the last chance to save The Planet, but nevermind?

Get ready for the Great Reenergize-ment, we’ve reached a tipping point. Even the elite believers know a real threat when they see one. The ruling class, sitting on cushy taxpayer salaries, weren’t threatened by higher fuel prices and carbon taxes, but Russian missiles are another thing.  Only a few months ago we had only “ten years til the next mass extinction”. Now, everything coal is good again, and years of pompous energy policies are on fire.

In normal times these would be monster headline backflips with mass protests in the streets from fifteen-year-old school-skippers.

Hat tip to NetZeroWatch

Germany to fire up mothballed coal power stations

German FlagOne of Europe’s biggest energy companies is preparing to bring a string of German coal power stations out of retirement as part of efforts to wean the country off Russian gas.

These include plants that have been decommissioned, those that are scheduled to go off-grid this year and others that are currently kept on standby.

Robert Habeck, Scholz’s economy minister, has insisted there will be “no taboos”, throwing into doubt plans for the country to ditch coal by 2030.

Nothing bar anything is cheaper way of making electricity than waking up a dead coal plant. Shame Dan Andrews blew up Hazelwood.

Meanwhile the UK rethinks everything, and considers a last minute stay of execution for fracking wells

The only two viable fracking wells in the UK sit on 50 years of gas, but were due to be concreted to oblivion, starting any day now. These were the wells closed for fear of seismic activity so small people can’t even feel it.

UK Flag

Net zero rules for the North Sea are to be watered down under proposals aimed at freeing the West from its reliance on Russian fossil fuel in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

Officials are examining a plan that would allow new oil and gas drilling to go ahead on national security grounds, even if it violates a ban on schemes that could damage Britain’s bid to go carbon neutral by 2050.

Anyone remember Glasgow?

The move – which would be a major policy reversal just months after Boris Johnson pledged to lead the fight against climate change at the Cop-26 conference – comes as the Prime Minister pushes for more energy imports from Saudi Arabia and weighs up ending a ban on fracking.

The rumours from the UK have been released to soften up the news when it comes.  Sadly, if Boris just carves out national security excuses, the UK will still have a mess of carbon rules the plebians won’t be able to carve themselves out of.

Politico on those rumours:

SCOOP — NET ZERO CARVE-OUT: Johnson’s hotly anticipated energy strategy is not expected this week, raising questions over what exactly is holding it up. Playbook is told much of the work that has taken place on the strategy so far has centered on the government’s legal net zero climate change commitments. In order to accelerate licensing for new North Sea oil and gas fields, a key expectation of the PM, government lawyers are having to redraw the so-called climate checkpoints imposed by ministers, which block new licenses if they don’t align with Britain’s net zero pledges. Ministers are looking at adding a “national security” or “geopolitical consideration” clause that would allow them to bypass net zero red tape and quickly drill for more oil in emergency circumstances. A Whitehall source told Playbook that this was one of the main areas of focus in terms of North Sea oil and gas, with much of the rest of the package centered around accelerating renewable energy such as onshore wind and solar. There is also talk the PM could unveil the strategy in a major speech later this month.

Nothing sharpens the mind like a cruise missile.

Tactical exercise with the withdrawal of the Topol mobile ground-based missile system in the Serpukhov branch of the Strategic Missile Forces Military Academy

It’s not a Kalibr Missile, but it probably wrecks Green policies too. Photo by mil.ru

Vladimir Putin’s cruise missiles ‘could reach UK in an hour’ if Nato enters Ukraine war against Russia

Putin’s warships and submarines are capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles at UK cities and vital infrastructure from more than 1,000 miles from the east coast of Scotland.

Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow for sea power and missile defence at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “Do the Russians have missiles capable of reaching the UK? Yes, absolutely.”

Vladimir’s intention might not have been to unite and awaken the loopy West. Though the West has dug itself a big hole it didn’t need to jump into, and still needs to get out of.

9.9 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

Guest post by Rafe Champion. The Geopolitics of Energy

Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.

Ukraine and the Great Energy Reset

Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.

The EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.

While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.

Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.

The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic. Read the whole story, it is not long, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.

STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_F6ilTV3rpY&ab_channel=IceAgeFarmer

 

A reminder about the situation in Australia:

 South Australia is leading the way in the green transition. Whenever the wind is low overnight SA has to import coal power from Victoria. So you know what is going to  happen when more coal capacity closes and there is no spare power in Victoria and NSW when the wind is low across SE Australia. Rafe blogs at NewCatallaxy Blog.

Is connecting intermittent energy to the grid ahead of storage capacity the greatest public policy blunder since federation?

10 out of 10 based on 56 ratings

A win: Australian Federal Court tosses out high schoolers climate case

The good news is that the experts are very unhappy:

Today’s disappointing federal court decision undoes 20 years of climate litigation progress in Australia

The Conversation

The federal court today unanimously decided Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change.

The ruling overturns a previous landmark win by eight high school students, who sought to stop Ley approving a coal mine expansion in New South Wales.

The bad news is that these same experts can’t see how profoundly silly their reasoning is:

So why was Ley successful? The federal court’s 282-page judgment offers myriad reasons for why no duty should be imposed on the minister. But what emerges most clearly is the court’s view that it’s not their place to set policies on climate change. Instead, they say, it’s the job of our elected representatives in the federal government.

Well, do we live in a democracy or don’t we?

If only Jacqueline Peel and Rebekkah Markey-Towler could persuade us that coal is a killer, they wouldn’t need to go to court to force their opinions on everyone else.

One of these two experts gets Australian government research funding for “climate change litigation” projects. Evidently she’s funded by taxpayers to steal rights away from them.

The whole case was silly beyond words. If the Environment Minister has a Duty of Care to stop a coal mine for fear of losses to these teens in future years, then surely the Treasurer also has a Duty of Care not to wreck the economy and put those same teens in debt on a frivolous pagan quest to stop floods, storms and droughts? Likewise, the Minister for Energy has a Duty of Care to make sure these students don’t grow up to live in a third world banana republic that can’t power factories to provide jobs or keep their quality of life as high as it was for their parents.  Where does it end? With a dictator running a command economy, and gulags for the dissidents.

From the original ruling we see the maths never added up:

In the ruling, Justice Mordy Bromberg noted that the expansion of the Whitehaven Coal-owned mine would lead to an additional 33 million metric tons (36 million U.S. tons) of coal being extracted over 25 years and 100 million metric tons (110 million U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

The world uses 8.5 billion tons of coal a year, and the court case was about 1.3 million tons of coal per year or 1 part in 6,500 of annual coal consumption.  Even if coal was bad, and even if warming was bad, and even if CO2 caused warming, this case still would not make sense.

h/t Michael K.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Did volcanic dust from Hunga Tonga cause flooding in Australia?

Hunga-Tonga Hunga Ha’apai

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai

By Jo Nova

Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent

On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world.  Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.

The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.

The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and some of that floating ash was still too high even as it returned on the second lap of the Earth at 25km above sea level.  On the other hand, some particles will fall out faster than others, others will be highly charged and possibly novel entities created in the monster lightning storm above the volcano, and some ash and particles will have been released at lower heights.

This post was inspired by Jennifer Marohasy who pointed out the weak La Nina conditions don’t really explain the floods in Australia this year. She wondered if the recent Australian rain was fueled by aerosols from Hunga Tonga and describes how rainfall has been linked to past eruptions in scientific papers:  after “El Chichon spewed 20 million tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere in 1982, Hong Kong recorded very high rainfalls as the dust arrived across the Pacific”.

The volcanic dust passes over Australia on Jan 18 -20

Hunga Tonga lies 20 degrees south of the equator at roughly the same latitude as Townsville in Queensland. So the densest band of aerosols circling the Earth westwards from the eruption would track right over Queensland.

Updating SO2 emissions of #HungaTongaHungaHaapai. The huge plume of sulphur dioxide was detected today, Jan. 18 by the #Copernicus #Sentinel5p #Tropomi sensor over Northern #Australia, keeping moving westward. #Tonga #TongaVolcanoEruption #AirQuality @WMO @BOM_WA @smitchell_sci

SO2 emissions of #HungaTongaHungaHaapai. The huge plume of sulphur dioxide was detected today, Jan. 18 by the #Copernicus #Sentinel5p #Tropomi sensor over Northern #Australia.

The volcanic dust cloud travelled west, arriving over Australia on January 18th and reaching the Indian Ocean on the far side by January 20th. It was dissipating as it moved, but could have left a trail of cloud seeding particles in the stratosphere over Australia. These in turn will be falling and blowing with the wind, spreading out through the Southern Hemisphere.

Strange rainfall patterns Across Australia in the week after the dust went through.

On Jan 21 and 22, flooding in the arid zones of South Australia was so severe, it washed out the one trans Australian railway line and the Stuart Highway as well. And this was in midsummer in an area that rarely gets any rain. Rainfalls in some areas of South Australia were 400% higher than normal.

Perhaps some parts of these falls were too far south, and perhaps the dust just wasn’t low enough in the atmosphere at this point.  But on the 16th of January there were slow surface and lower tropospheric winds blowing past parts of the Tonga cloud to the west.

Rainfall Australia 2022 January. Bureau of Meteorology

The downpour in central South Australia was so unusual it washed out the sole Trans-Australia “Indian Pacific” railway line running across the nation from East to West.

The line normally delivers 80% of Western Australia’s retail supplies on freight trains that are nearly 2km long.  The line took weeks to be restored and the shelves here in Perth are still running empty in somewhat random patterns.

Railway line Trans Australia flooding in January 2022.

Flooding has damaged parts of the freight line across the Nullabor.

 

Across Australia the rain for the whole month of January was generally heavier than usual

There is usually very little rain in central Australia in the hottest month of the year. When there are big falls in the deserts it is usually due to the remnants of a cyclone. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time.

And most of the rain recorded on this map occurred after the dust passed over.  The first two weeks of January were much drier.

Hunga Tonga was the tallest, wettest, most violent storm in our lifetime

The eruption that reached an astonishing 58 kilometers into the sky.

Height of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption reached 30 km (98 500 feet) a.s.l., Tonga

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption as it passed the 30 km mark (98 500 feet) a.s.l., Tonga |

 

The underwater explosion made Hungo Tonga very different. Unlike Pinatubo or El Chichon, it didn’t carry a large weight of sulphur dioxide, but did carry a lot of water. The blast punched so far up into the atmosphere, because it was powered by a massive expansion of water vapor as the 20 degree water hit 1000 degree magma. The steam powered column drove a mix of salt, ash and particulates right through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. It was possibly the biggest thunderstorm on Earth. The rising column generated a phenomenal 400,000 lighting strikes over a seven hour period. That towering electrical morass must have generated a wild-card mix of aggressively charged particles, and at altitudes we never normally see them. Who knows how long those zapped chemicals would take to drift back down to Earth and what mischief they might do on the way?

Lightning in Tonga

Lightning over Tonga |  Environment News Service

 

 

The dust returns to create spectacular sunsets on Feb 15th

by Kate Doyle, ABC

Lidar showed the sulphates and aerosols were back over Australia from Feb 15th:

The aerosols are still very high, well up in the stratosphere:

“[It’s] showing us what is probably mostly sulphate aerosols (maybe a bit of volcanic ash) around 25 km in height in the stratosphere, sitting well above the troposphere where the clouds are,” according to Dr Tupper [of Natural Hazards Consulting]

Earlier this week, volcanic aerosols could be seen in the stratosphere over eastern Australia using LIDAR imagery.(Supplied: NASA)

On February 15th volcanic aerosols could be seen in the stratosphere over eastern Australia using LIDAR imagery.(Supplied: NASA)

Since the initial explosion, the plume has been circling around the atmosphere, too high to affect our day-to-day weather, but adding a red glow to sunrises and sunsets. The plume has now roughly made its first full loop of the globe and has been travelling over Australia again this week.

“So that’s why we’ve seen these really glowing skies at sunrise and sunset,” Mr [Graham] Creed said.

“The interesting thing is that at sunset you can actually see the meteorological sunset, which is when the clouds change colour but as the sun goes over and it starts to go dark that’s when the volcanic ash was illuminated and was bending and refracting the light.”

Andrew Miskelly noted a haze in satellite images over Australia at the same time. Something is going on up there, but how much do we really know?

 

Hunga-Tonga isn’t expected to cool the climate much:

The latest estimates of the effect of Hunga Tonga are that the cooling impact will be smaller, because the amount of sulfur dioxide was only 2% of what the Pinatubo eruption released. However the underwater explosion reached far up into the stratosphere, nearly 40km altitude, so those particulates may be suspended for a long time.

Indeed NASA estimates the plume even reached 58km at it’s highest point, right up into the Mesosphere. “The Tonga plume was 1.5 times the height of the Pinatubo plume.”

Keep reading  →

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The Atlantic warns that Nuclear War is a climate problem (and you thought bombs were OK?)

Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:

“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”

Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach.  Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.

Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.

On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem

By Robinson Meyer,  The Atlantic

 Social media pundits are having a field day:

On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can imagine:

 “And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.”

He’s gently telling them their calls for a No Fly Zone might be more damaging for the climate than the demon-man himself. I don’t think they’ll get the message though. The whole package just won’t parse. He goes on to tell them nuclear war “carbon” doesn’t warm the world, it cools it, and cooling is awful.

After 26 UN COP meetings aimed at cooling the world by lowering carbon, this story will just bounce right off:

A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.

All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.

Ponder how far these people are from reality, even at the sensible end of the spectrum. He goes on to say that ocean acidification would get worse, the ozone layer would be destroyed, the world will be fried by extra UV radiation, and people will get skin cancer.

h/t Ed Driscoll, Instapundit

9.8 out of 10 based on 63 ratings

Coming to a civilization near you: The totalitarians wet dream — A Central Bank Digital Currency

Big Brother
Suddenly central bankers want to reach right into your wallet, follow you around, nudge your every decision, or just stop you spending your dollars less wisely than the average bureaucrat thinks you should. These are the same people who *know* you should be saving the Earth by eating crickets.

This is a great essay, part fiction, part nightmare, but already knocking on our doors. A Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC) is your digital ID card and social credit score wrapped into one and actioned with instant bank-freezing potential, honk, honk.

Imagine living off food-stamps.

Just Say No to CBDCs  says N.S.Lyons 

 You wave your phone at the pump. Nothing happens. You try again. Your phone buzzes, and you look at it. There’s a message from the Fed: “You have already spent more than the $400 maximum weekly limit on fossil fuels specified in the FedWallet User Agreement. Your remaining account balance cannot be used to purchase non-renewable energy resources. Please make an alternative purchase. Have you considered a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!”

You have in fact considered purchasing a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle. But they still aren’t very affordable for you, what with the supply chain shortages. Despite the instant credit the Fed would add to your balance when buying an electric car – plus the permanent ten percent general subsidy you automatically receive on every purchase as a BIPOC individual thanks to the Fed’s Reparations Alternatives for Comprehensive Equity (RACE) program – the down payment on a new car would still be more than you can afford, even with your new stimmie coins.

Well, you’re not going to be able to make it to work at the warehouse on what you have in the tank. How could you be so foolish? You’re going to have no choice but to park here and blow a bunch of money on hailing one of those sleek, incredibly expensive self-driving electric cabs…

Dystopia is at the garden gate:

But no, you’re actually reading Politico, and see with horror that President Biden has just released a “sweeping” executive order directing the government to immediately begin moving to comprehensively regulate cryptocurrencies while developing a digital dollar issued by the Federal Reserve.

A central bank crypto would bring massive new powers to central bankers, what’s not to like (if you are a central banker)?

Over the last several years, one central bank after another has released reports on what that might look like. As a summary report by the BIS recently put it, “Central banks’ interest in CBDC has increased as a potential means of delivering their public policy objectives,” while allowing them “to evolve in step with the wider digitalisation of people’s day-to-day lives.” Plus, “Profound, ongoing changes across finance, technology and society, as well as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, provide additional impetus” for doing so now while there seems to be the opportunity for some kind of reset, or something.

And so eight of the largest central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of Canada, among others) have decided to form a tentative consortium, with guidance from BIS, in order to “enable interoperability and cross-border transactions between [their] domestic CBDCs” as they move forward with development.

I didn’t know central banks had “public policy objectives”, I mean apart from supposedly keeping currencies stable and inflation under control. Who elected them?

World’s Reserve Currency up for grabs?

But it’s suddenly urgent now because the US is the worlds reserve currency, but that could disappear in five minutes as Russia gets canceled and forced into bed with China, and China is already road-testing a Digital Yuan. Thanks to Justin Trudeau freezing the $10-Trucker-donors to hell — everyone now knows just how insecure all western currencies are. And Joe Biden’s cancellation of Russian oligarchs suddenly means the whole world is reconsidering what “trust” means.

Where the USD was trustworthy, everyone now knows the rule of law means nothing if you are a political enemy.

In banking, trust means everything. That bit of useless paper called a dollar is just an IOU. We all trust that it will be worth something next week.

Trust is the difference between business-as-usual or a bank run and the overnight collapse of the currency.

US dollar image, IOU, fiat currency.

Would you like money with an expiry date?

We The People have continually thwarted central bankers by saving money when they were supposed to spend. But a new digital currency means the government can decide if you should save:

When word first arrived that the People’s Bank of China “has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start,” Western monetary policymakers – who struggled for years to use negative interest rates to stop people from saving – probably spat coffee-flavored milk beverage all over their monitors. But that is still pretty midwit-level creative thinking.

There are so many micro-control possibilities – -central bankers could change the price of everything based on your identity. Are you the kind of person supporting LGBT small businesses? Give yourself a bonus. “Thanks for supporting diversity”.

It’s that bad…

The implementation of a CBDC could represent the single greatest expansion of totalitarian power in human history. Never has there been any regime with such omnipotent insight into and control over its people’s every transaction as what CBDCs may soon make possible.

h/t David E

Image: TheSimmer0

9.9 out of 10 based on 86 ratings

Not informed, no consent: 1,200 people died in the first 3 months of Pfizer vax. Why was that data hidden?

When the unvaccinated die of Covid they get turned into advertising material for Pfizer. But when people died in the weeks after after getting the vaccines, the companies, the institutions and the media did their utmost to hide it.

A group of doctors and researchers wanted the 326,000 pages of FDA data used to approve the Pfizer vaccine, but neither the FDA or Pfizer would give it them. So the doctors put in an FOIA, and again the FDA hid the data, so the doctors sued the FDA for withholding it.

FDA Logo US Food and Drug Administration

Serving Big-Pharma with all the funds they can get…

But when pressed they said they needed 55 years to redact out all the juicy bits so “people couldn’t cherry pick” or something like that. When pushed, the FDA told the judge they really needed 75 years to provide it.  This was the same FDA that supposedly read all those 326,000 pages in detail in just 108 days in order to speedily approve the vaccine “with the utmost of care”.

The intrepid doctors group calls itself the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency or PHMPT. And they are finally getting somewhere.  In January a Texas Judge ordered the FDA to produce documents at a blistering speed (compared to the previous 75- year-schedule). It really is an avalanche of information — with something like 50,000 pages a month due out each month.

The first of those secret batches came out  last week. So after millions of people have been injected with the Pfizer vax, now we find out that in just  the first three months of use (from December 2020 onwards) there were 42,000 reports of adverse effects and 1,223 deaths.

This is justice delayed. People have lost their jobs and some have lost their lives. The data should have been public from the beginning.

But it’s a denominator free zone

As John Campbell points out below, we don’t know how many people were vaccinated in total. Even the number of doses shipped in those three months has been redacted. Were deaths a one-in-one-thousand thing, or a one in a million? Who knows? Pfizer does. So does the FDA, and so possibly do elected representatives. But the punters getting injected don’t.

Pfizer documents. Vaccine

Pfizer Vaccine data (Document  5.3.6 postmarketing experience.pdf)

Steve Kirsch points out that the code (b) (4) (in the gray box in the image above) is legal speak for “Trade secrets” telling us the profits are at the start, middle and end of everything about this. It’s not about public health.

Who has informed consent?

Adverse Effect, Pfizer Vaccine.

Table 1 (Click to enlarge)

Why did it take court orders to get information used to force a medicine on millions of people?

John Campbell has built quite a following and is fully vaccinated himself. He’s conscientiously assessed the risks according to the publicly notified data. He’s a very honest player, just the kind of person we’d want training nurses.  But when he describes these documents below, he’s not a happy camper. From about 18.2 minutes, he’s quite flummoxed. There is some soul searching going on.

“I would have thought this was a complete scandal. The mainstream media don’t seem to be interested…”

He’s very troubled, framing this as equivalent to something like Watergate and in the context of the hippocratic oath: It appears we’ve done some harm.

It’s just destroyed trust.

This is just the beginning of the RedPill for the West. Oh boy has trust been lost.

More info: Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency

h/t Sharon W, Scott of the Pacific, Brenda, MP, Another ian, Old Ozzie, StJohnof Grafton, Jill J.

_______________

PS: There is talk that Pfizer has delisted. But it’s not clear that this is anything other than a technicality.  Advice welcome.

10 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.7 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Guest Post by Rafe Champion: Soviet Sabotage of our Energy Supply

There is talk about Soviet funding for green groups to block shale gas fracking and coal mining. This is not a new thing.

[Indeed Jo wrote last week: Russian-linked groups donated to anti-frakking Green groups because they love the planet right?]

In case you were wondering why we have no nuclear power and why the sensible old-time conservation movement turned into a radical green monster, the late John Grover told the story in his book Struggle for Power (1980). This is a summary of the chapter on the birth of the anti-nuclear program under the guise of “respectable” consumer advocacy in the US and also the worldwide network of communist agencies and their fronts.

To summarize the summary:

In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller network, began to work with the “Union of Concerned Scientists” to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against nuclear power (NP). They worked on several fronts: Legal action to delay projects; Lobbying Congress and Government agencies; Propagandising the churches; Advertising directed at the general public.

Exaggerated dangers and innuendos of industry incompetence were widely accepted and the industry had no strategy to respond.

“To cut a long story short, thanks to Ralph Nader’s initiative, there exists a well co-ordinated coalition of interest groups in the USA with all the attributes of a major corporation: well planned, influential, with strong political and financial support, well-tested strategies, professional communication expertise and tremendous legal punch. About 600 full-time “environmental lawyers” operated on a budget of at least 45 million dollars in 1977 and about one-third of this was spent purely on energy-stopping.”

The major agencies involved in this effort were Consolidated Intervenors, doing legal activities to impede developments; the Union of Concerned Scientists, mostly funded by Dr Henry Kendall of MIT; Business and Professional People for the Public Interest in Washington to front Government committees and inquiries; Friends of the Earth co-ordinating environmental groups and disseminating information by advertising, books and pamphlets; Environmental Action, National Intervenor and The Public Media Centre dealing with publications and presentations.

The role of the churches

Keep reading  →

9.6 out of 10 based on 45 ratings

Surreal: Fake Russian claims of bioweapons labs, not so fake

Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?

Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:

Ukraine has Biological research facilities…  which in fact we are quite concerned about —  that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.  So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…

So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?

Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that

“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”

I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures the bio-research.

We’re in a Biotech Cold War.

h/t Panda, and Bill in AZ

9.4 out of 10 based on 63 ratings

Evil or just greedy? Time to talk about The WEF

WEF, World Economic Forum

….

The World Economic Forum, was founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab where he hit upon the winning idea of organizing a ski holiday for the worlds richest people, described as a management training session or something tax deductible. Like most of these conferences, once the richest of the rich were there, everyone else had to be as long as the riff-raff were kept out. The importance of it was almost certainly not the official speeches but the deals done over drinks-with-new-friends at the bar, or on the piste. It was a chance to meet with Moguls on the moguls.

The foundation is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies, possibly in lieu of the taxes they don’t pay to their home countries. The 1,000 corporate members are all theoretically “$5 billion dollar entities”, except the ones that are $5 Trillion dollar entities, so they are kind of like the UN of the corporate world, with five times as many members and without the hanger-on-erers. (Fifty of the UN’s members would be too small to qualify).  At best, the WEF is the ultimate corporate conference club, and at worst, a kind of quasi corporate world government. The truth is somewhere in between, but where?

The WEF elites fly in to Davos in late January every year in private jets while they figure out how to save the world from fossil fuels. In their spare time they probably swap names of pliable politicians, or even meet them. They can also find out the names of great accountants, and swap ideas on how to deal with unacceptable citizens.

JP Sears is on fire in this video:

brought to you by Primal life Teeth Whiteners*


I wonder if Klaus hired Professor Yuval Noah Harari to speak at Davos 2020, so everyone that quoted him could be called a conspiracy theorist nutcase? It could work.

It’s hard to say these lines without sounding like a Technocratic-psycho:

“This whole idea of humans have this soul or spirit and nobody knows what’s happening inside them, and they have free will, that’s over.”

Data might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships, by hacking organisms elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.

People could look back in a hundred years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over…

If we succeed in hacking life, this will be the greatest revolution in biology, since the very beginning of life.

Soon, at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. My brain, my body, my life, does it belong to me or to some corporation or to the government….

This is the intelligent design of the IBM Cloud the Microsoft cloud.

 — Professor Yuval Noah Harari

He’s like the decoy Fake Time Magazine cover used to hide the real Time Magazine cover.

The gloss is coming off

The WEF is tax-exempt, which is a pretty rich wicket, and the Swiss government taxpayers pay for security at Davos, which is worth about 32 million Swiss francs a year. On top of that the taxpayers pay another few million for “extra security”.  But the free run is feeling some friction. Last year a few Swiss politicians and civil society groups criticized the security bill, and the Swiss government announced they’d cut it back by a million or so each year. Go, democracy, Go.

It’s a sign that the people are starting to notice the WEF and there may come a day when politicians don’t want to mention their WEF membership. Who wants to look like a patsy?

My favourite description of the WEF is that they are globalization’s “Mafiocracy” of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.

“They promote common ideas, and serve common interests: their own.”

The Transnational Institute

There is some limit to WEF power, but what is it? 

It would be very useful in comments if commenters can talk about what the limits are. When do the WEF get thwarted? The WEF is obviously a hot and influential club, like a radioactive octopus, but Klaus Schwab presumably brags like any shameless compulsive promoter would. So some of the politicians in his fold may be in a cult, but others just spent a weekend skiiing.

__________

*There’s something good about seeing little corporates fight back against the biggest of the big ones.

h/t David E, Mark, Scott of the Pacific, Bill in AZ, Old Ozzie, Jill J, OriginalSteve, Brenda, Mantaray, Vlad the Impaler, Bob Dinn, Konrad, David Maddison, Marksman, Truthseeker, another Ian, Klem,  Jelly34, Alistair Crooks, Len, Beth the Serf, John Connor II, Tides of Mudgee, Neville, Beowulf, Rod Stuart  and Chris D

9.8 out of 10 based on 68 ratings

Guest Post by Rafe Champion: Famous last words?

Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.

Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.

Really?

In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.

Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.

He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.

This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.

While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.

Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.

The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic.

Read the whole story,  it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.

STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.

You can take the conspiracy theory out of the story and it is still terrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_F6ilTV3rpY&ab_channel=IceAgeFarmer

 

AND A BIT MORE TO GO ON WITHA REMINDER ABOUT THE SITUATION CAUSED BY OUR ENERGY POLICY

 South Australia is leading the way in the green transition and whenever the wind is low overnight SA depends on local gas plus imported coal power from Victoria.

https://newcatallaxy.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/05/wind-power-fails-in-sa-vic/

10 out of 10 based on 66 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

8.7 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Biden Sells Alaska Back To Russia So America Can Start Drilling For Oil There Again

The joke

Biden Sells Alaska Back To Russia So We Can Start Drilling For Oil There Again

 

Babylon Bee

ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.

Jen Psaki praised Biden’s brilliance in finding a solution that would prevent an energy crisis while also preventing new drilling on American land. She pointed out succinctly to journalists, “You see, it’s not American land anymore; it’s Russian land.”

The truth

Joe Biden needs to stop buying oil and gas from the Russian dictator, but rather than getting it from the US or Canada he’s talking to a dictator in Venezuela.

President Biden is scrambling to contain soaring oil prices, which closed at more than $123 a barrel on Monday. It speaks volumes about this Administration that it’s seeking help from Vladimir Putin’s client in Venezuela and our estranged Saudi allies rather than U.S. shale producers or our Canadian friends.

The Saudis and UAE are the only OPEC members that appear to have spare capacity, but they’ve rebuffed Mr. Biden’s pleas to increase supply. One reason is they don’t want to alienate Mr. Putin, who has become a power broker in the Middle East. Mr. Biden should never have alienated the Saudis, but we’d be much better off if he simply encouraged U.S. energy production.

 Ed Morrisey explains why the Democrats keep getting blamed for high gas prices:

The problem isn’t that “Big Oil” wants to keep production low. It’s that Joe Biden, Hassan, and the rest of Senate Democrats have made it clear for years that they want to force “Big Oil” out of business entirely. They’d rather put money in the hands of Iranian terrorists and Putin’s imperial army than put it on the household tables of American oil workers. Even the sight of Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine hasn’t changed their calculus on their opposition to American production of fossil fuels as a necessity for strategic leverage in a very dangerous world.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board slams Biden and Democrats for seeking oil from malevolent dictators in Tehran and Caracas rather than in the good ol’ USA. It makes no sense from a security perspective, nor from an economic perspective:

Easing Venezuelan sanctions would be a strategic blunder that provides a financial lifeline to Mr. Maduro while doing little to ease the oil price spike. Venezuelan oil companies say they can increase production by several hundred thousand barrels a day in eight months. The war in Ukraine may be over by then. …

Shale producers can increase production twice as fast as Venezuelan oil companies, and the profits would go to U.S. workers and shareholders rather than another dictatorship.

The anti gas and oil thing was never about the weather, and not about CO2 either. It’s not about the workers, the voters, or the environment either. Just power and money.

9.9 out of 10 based on 90 ratings