Eight weeks ago, Australians weren’t that interested in the vaccines to an exotic foreign disease. Back then, only 7% of the population were fully vaccinated, and now, viola, it’s 21% of the nation (which is a quarter of all adults).
By letting the virus leak in to a Limo Driver, who could have been protected with a $50 Hazmat suit, and then being too slow to act, the Premier of New South Wales has lit a fire under the rush to vaccination, not just in NSW but indirectly across the rest of Australia, since nearly every state has now been infected with a Covid strain that has a post-mark from Sydney. By trying to do a minimalist response, she ensured maximal type of lockdown.
She’s now saying the Delta virus can’t be eliminated, even though most other states have done that, and everyone knows it.
Big Pharma must be delighted. The CCP too.
Australia and New Zealand were in a bubble of freedom and safety that was, unfortunately, antithetical to the advertising pitch and hit jingle — “Vaccines are the only way out”. Despite being 93% vaccine-free (or more) the two nations had one fiftieth the deaths-per-capita of the UK and USA, and less economic damage too, showing that hard borders beats vaccination for viral control. It stood as an example of a better way to deal with the average bioweapon. Any nations that locked out the disease could open their borders to each other, and their economy, and they didn’t need Big Pharma.
Australia and New Zealand had the luxury of watching the results of the epidemiological experiments and mass-mutation-games around the world. But that’s all at risk now, and the only solution (apparently) is mass vaccination.
It’s a national emergency, lets use the slowest medicine we can find?
Given that this slow medicine takes five to ten weeks to work, it remains unexplained why anyone would pick it to beat a surging epidemic with a doubling time of four days. Especially when there are other medicines that work in hours and are insanely cheap. The cost of a single day of lockdown in Sydney would cover free national doses of the drug that shall-not-be-named plus probably enough Vitamin D, Zinc, B6 and B12 to give 25 million people a lifetime supply and deworm all the cattle in Australia too. It’s almost as if the government is spending other people’s money?
I’m not suggesting that Big Pharma are running the NSW Department of Health. I’m just saying that if they were, all the Department decisions would look uncannily the same.
They must be very happy that Gladys is in charge of nearly the whole nation’s strategy.
If you would rather live without mandatory vaccination or at least be able to wait for more data, a longer safety record, or other choices, the Sydney outbreak is making it much harder.
The lockdown might have ended already if close contacts were given antivirals and Vitamin D.
There are almost no brave people left in academia, or sport, or the land of celebrity. When one of their own faces the axe for some random transgression of an invisible rule book on political niceties, their colleagues abandon them.
In academia, they’re supposed to be the intellectual cream of the crop –the individual giants who fought their way to the top. But it’s like we’ve selected for wary herding people instead. And perhaps that’s the point. When universities were turned into schools and businesses, and quirky philanthropist funding became predictable Big-Government largess, the mavericks and rebels didn’t fit and one by one were expelled, sacked — or just pushed sideways til they fell out. What’s left in the wasteland of academia, apparently, are the mid-wit networking climbers. The middling Ordinaires rose into positions above their due and became afraid of losing the sweeter deal than they deserved. If they were the top dogs in their field, and if that mattered, they could speak their mind, get sacked, and still be offered a new position at a competing institution. But second rung players don’t have that option. They won’t put their head above the parapet and say up is not down, and 3 is not 2.
Clearly universities don’t want to employ giants. They can’t control them.
This teacher, years ago, worked on something that an anonymous accuser suddenly declared was demeaning to Asians. The teacher’s years of service and excellent record counted for nothing. A petition was gathered among students, who were possibly also too afraid to look like closet racists by not signing it. Why would students show the integrity and bravery their teachers lacked? And thus a mob was born. The terms “homophobia” and “body shaming” was added somewhere along the line. There was no investigation in any meaningful manner. She was cancelled.
Mac Donald puts it this way: “Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defense.” … None of her active colleagues in 2020 protested, and the administration didn’t bother to investigate the charges.
How is it that the faculty said nothing and that administrators acted so precipitously to satisfy the angry kids?
It’s not just academics, it’s sports leaders and CEO’s who rush to appease too:
[It’s the].. college president who rushes to apologize for imaginary crimes, the CEOs who pour money into the coffers of Black Lives Matter leaders who despise the very system that the business heads otherwise uphold, the famous actor who turns his own (putatively) insensitive remark into a public drama of penitence . . . fear has turned them into timorous tacticians. Where is the confidence that naturally follows from accomplishment?
They’re nervous, very nervous—and they’re willing to violate the norms of their own workplaces and fields and personal ethics when the pressure comes, or at least to retire in fear as others commit those violations. One wonders if there is something about the ladder of achievement in 21st century America that robs individuals of integrity the higher they go.
“…like a form of cultural suicide has taken hold”
A society whose leaders are so easily cowed is heading toward a dark fate. To watch our prestigious academic chiefs bow down to a pack of irate 20-year-olds is to feel the American spirit drain away. To observe an eminence in the world of sports lose all his mojo and beg forgiveness for a lapse most of us chalk up to the ordinary sins of ordinary people is to suspect that an ethos of cultural suicide has taken hold.
The highly credentialed members of our society boast of their worldliness and tolerance and enlightenment, but there is now more freedom of speech and diversity of thought in an automotive repair shop than there is in the faculty lounge. Never has there been more insecurity among the smart set, never more caution in the boardroom.
Merit used to bring rewards:
Achievement hasn’t made them more comfortable, and it hasn’t brought them more freedom.
They know they’re weak, and that’s hard for a superior person to accept. Despising Donald Trump and his fans made them feel better. Trump is out, but they still have January 6, and people who resist the vaccine, and who push the audits…
We can all see where this is headed but it ain’t over yet.
Politically correct shackles are just words, so they can be defeated by words.
Support those on the front line of the cultural war, the politicians who take the hard road, the journalists who do a good job. The Peter Ridds of the world. Even a friendly message helps. Just say thanks. Share the messages you like, and the jokes. Spread the word. Subscribe, follow and link to the leaders you admire.
Thanks from me to those who take the time to name and shame the biased journalists and silent academics. If those cultural cowards fear student-mobs, they will fear organized grown-ups even more. Group-thinkers, after all, need to think they are on the same side as The Group. Never underestimate how much it will get to them if they find out thousands of polite steadfast adults disagree.
And every waking minute, mock political correctness in all its forms and never apologize for the great nations that we inherited, that defeated slavery, and gave women and men freedom and peace like no other civilization on Earth.
It’s a culture war, so fight with cultural tools. There is a reason the politerati warriors hate national flags. Use them.
This is what students were protesting against ion 1960 in San Diego
They want us to trust them, but if they won’t investigate cheap options, they don’t appear to have our interests at heart. Who do they serve?
Even if a long-used safe cheap drug reduced infections or deaths by 10% the cost-benefits of using it are obvious for everyone (except the companies that sell expensive competing products). The studies we have suggest one antiviral (and there are many others) could reduce infections by 86% and deaths by 50% or more. The antiviral successes against Covid in India, Mexico and Peru are there for all to see. If antivirals were being used in Sydney perhaps they could have halved the Ro (or more), slowed the spread, saved lives and businesses and shortened the lockdown?
Which brings us to the awkward questions that almost no one seems to be even asking: Why aren’t cheap low risk drugs already well tested ten times over? Why aren’t the TGA and Health Ministry urgently working to fix obvious clinical vitamin deficiencies like D3? Where is the ABC and our publicly funded institutions and our academics? Isn’t the point of publicly funded universities so they can do the research that corporates won’t do?
They want us to trust them, but if they won’t investigate cheap options, it doesn’t exactly sell themselves as groups that have our interests at heart. Vaccine hesitancy might be a lot less if people still trusted our institutions and knew they were considering all the options, not just the ones that happen to suit pharmaceutical stockholders. Just saying….?
Millions of Australians are extremely concerned about the federal government’s push to force hastily approved and poorly tested novel vaccines on the population, when adequate long term safety data is unavailable. It is also is of great concern that many notable doctors and medical researchers reporting successful treatment using cheap, safe generic anti viral drugs appear to be ignored by the government and TGA, due to these generic drugs being of little commercial value and not sponsored by pharmaceutical companies for approval by the TGA
We therefore ask the House to formally request that the TGA assess the use of Ivermectine and Hydroxycloriquine, in the recommended dosages and combination with complimentary drugs, based on the peer reviewed studies and data, and the recommendation of notable Australian medical researchers such as Proffesor Thomas Borody and Professor Robert Clancy. We ask that the house requests this of the TGA in the absence of sponsorship by a pharmaceutical corporation, seeing as both of these drugs are generic and of little commercial value to an individual company, and due to the conflict of interest many of these companies have with competing patented vaccines of far higher commercial interest. We believe that if this is performed thoroughly and transparently it will restore public faith in the federal government, and also provide confidence to the public that all options for treatment are being honestly explored.
Arson must be one of the easiest crimes to hide by anyone half competent, but in Greece arrests are already happening. People were caught with cans of gasoline. There are so many fires, the Supreme Court prosecutor has called for an investigation into possible organised arson and is asking for sweeping investigative powers. On social media people are blaming arsonists and slow or inept government responses.
In Media-World, people are blaming climate change, because if the world was a degree cooler, the fires would put themselves out or something. Who knows?
Coincidentally, over in Algeria, strange things are happening too. The Interior Minister says 50 fires were started at the same time. In Turkey, recent arson is suspected to be a terrorist activity. A few days ago the Israeli airforce bombed Hamas targets to “counter #arson attacks“. And in California a professor of criminology was actually tracked, caught and arrested for setting fires “on the edge” of the huge Dixie blaze. He might be nuts, but the others may have a plan. Has anyone asked them?
Apparently CO2 turns nice people into arsonists, but it’s surely also possible there may be other interests at work, or who knows, even hostile adversaries? Instead of asking: who could benefit — witchdoctors and their minions blame coal power stations on the other side of the world and pray to the God of Solar Panels for mercy.
As reassuring as they are (to some) these primitive rituals blaming fires on climate change go off like a smoke bomb on the national conversation. While everyone is putting pins into the sixth element of the periodic table, we won’t be talking about reducing kilotons of fuel we leave lying around, near houses, birds and babies. Megajoules of stored energy is growing right out of the ground in towers for careless people, stray lightning, mental illness, religious extremists, and foreign threats to turn into a pyroclastic nightmare. Maybe we should think about that?
Here’s a tip to CSIRO And all academic institutions around the world, If you want people to trust the experts, you need to say something when journalists are telling people to stop fires with carbon credits and declare that “it’s the science”. Where The Hell Are You?
The prosecutor of Greece’s Supreme Court, Vassilios I. Pliotas, on Monday called for an investigation into a possible organized arson plot on the part of a criminal organization after fires ravaged the country for the past week.
“The excessive number of fires, of unusual intensity and extent, that have occurred in recent days, resulting in incalculable damage to the natural environment (especially the forest resources of the country), buildings, facilities, agricultural land and crops and tourist Infrastructures, even endangering the lives of a large number of our fellow human beings, as well as the “synchronization” in their manifestation, create reasonable suspicions of deliberate organized criminal activity and not only of a simple, accidental phenomenon of incidents of negligent behavior.
Current Witchdoctor Warning: Severe levels of Voodoo likely on all channels
Climate Fear Week is Here.
Your car exhaust causes bushfires, your roast beef leads to droughts and the wrong lightglobes could flood the nation.
Hurry, hurry, it’s your absolute last last-chance after the last last-chance to save the world. According to an unaudited, unaccountable UN committee, It’s Code Red for Humanity! Rush and install Solar Special Protection Shields on your home today to be sure no one inside is at higher risk of Malaria, Asthma, Obesity, Eco-depression, and to save Nemo from feeling reckless. (Why haven’t you done that already, you evil reef killer?)
Despite installing more renewables than any nation per capita on Earth, Australia is failing to cleanse the Earth of pollution. Likewise the USA and UK which have both reduced actual carbon emissions by more than nearly everyone else are only leaders when they vote for socialists. Too many windmills are never enough! (Don’t mention the eagles or the whales, but praise the Sharks, for they are the sacred spirit of Virtue Signalling.)
There are many things you can do to play your part to make the weather nicer for our grandchildren, or at least reinforce the religion. On ABC radio Perth 720 a caller rang in to say they’d stopped using tea-bags. (All hail the weather controlling activity of loose leaf tea!).
The nonsense knows no bounds, and the Pagan faith runs strong, especially in Professors trained to mouth the advertising memes of General Electric, Panasonic and Vestas. They excel when investigated by ABC activist-journalists taught to toss fluffy-toy-questions at the feet of the ecologists who specialize more in grasshoppers and less in spaceweather. What do you say to Climate Deniers? — sayth the ABC-voice. When did you stop believing in science, sayth Lesley Hughes, biologist who wonders how 200 scientists could ever be wrong?
Cliches will save the day!
Protect your home against storms and fires!
How many solar panels does it take to stop a cyclone? The ABC-voice, didn’t ask, and the biologist wouldn’t know. But Bushfires in Greece prove that CO2 is dangerous, even if there is not one Climate Model on Earth that could tell us this time last year that the floods would be in Germany, the heat domes would be in British Columbia or that snow would fall in Southern Brazil.
It’s just bad, and all shades of badness are caused by CO2.
Neolithic shamans, chieftans, sorcerers and hofgothi all knew the secret of forecasting ambiguous-multipurpose-gloom. Modern professors are catching up with their astrologic wizard forefathers.
Perhaps we all should give up,
Using tea-bags when having a sup,
Better tea-leaves instead,
Which are easily read,
To forecast at the end of the cup.
Which industry spends more than any other in Washington? Big Pharma
Over the last 20 years no industry spent more than Pharmaceuticals and Health products on lobbying and campaign contributions. Fully $4,700 million dollars traveled from pharmaceutical giants to politicians, parties and lobbyists.
In 2018 the citizens of the US spent $345 billion on prescription drugs in pharmacies… which works out to about $1,000 per person per year. Adjusted for inflation, that has doubled since 1999 which is not that long ago. Despite competition, discovery and efficiency gains, Americans are spending more than ever.
Maybe Americans are getting much better painkillers, antibiotics, and blood pressure medications than ever before, or maybe government regulations are doing more to protect profits rather than people?
All that lobbying is quite legal, but it isn’t enough. Somehow Big Pharma keep getting caught being naughty as well, lying and hiding things from customers. And if there is no reputational damage from outright deceit and fraud, perhaps the billion-dollar fines are just another cost on the balance sheet. (If only The Media wanted to shine a light on that…)
From 1999 to 2018, the pharmaceutical and health product industry recorded $4.7 billion—an average of $233 million per year—in lobbying expenditures at the federal level, more than any other industry. Of the spending, the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America accounted for $422 million (9.0%), and the other 19 top companies and organizations in this industry accounted for $2.2 billion (46.8%). The industry spent $414 million on contributions to candidates in presidential and congressional elections, national party committees, and outside spending groups. Of this amount, $22 million went to presidential candidates and $214 million went to congressional candidates. Of the 20 senators and 20 representatives who received the most contributions, 39 belonged to committees with jurisdiction over health-related legislative matters, 24 of them in senior positions. The industry contributed $877 million to state candidates and committees, of which $399 million (45.5%) went to recipients in California and $287 million (32.7%) went to recipients in 9 other states. In years in which key state referenda on reforms in drug pricing and regulation were being voted on, there were large spikes in contributions to groups that opposed or supported the reforms.
Which company had the highest spend on lobbying and campaign “contributions”? That would be Pfizer, with $220 million from 1999 to 2018. But there are plenty of others following suit: Amgen spent $190m, Eli Lily — $162m, BIO — $150m, Merck — $143m and so on….
What does Big Pharma spend on advertising in The Legacy Media and on Facebook and Twitter and does that help buy one almost non-stop long advert dressed up as “news”?
Public Health England say viral loads appear similar among people infected with the Delta variant in both groups, meaning, theoretically, they are equally contagious.
But health chiefs insisted the current crop of vaccines still cut the risk of catching the virus in the first place.
Vaccinated people may be less likely to catch Covid (at least for a few months until it wears off) but when vaccinated people do get infected the viral loads are pretty much the same as when unvaccinated people do. In other words, fully vaccinated people can still be dangerous to the people around them. And if they fly in without quarantine, they can bring outbreaks and new mutants too. So much for the freedom jabs. Though, in fairness, at the moment, they still offer some freedom from hospital, just not freedom from masks, quarantines, and restrictions.
Vaccination clearly isn’t going to stop the spread, eliminate the virus, or do a lot to protect your loved ones or work colleagues. It makes it hard for companies to justify mandatory vaccination “for the greater good”. The question, “Would you sit next to an unvaccinated person” isn’t quite the loaded probe it was. And you can always reply: “Would you work with someone who was Vitamin D Deficient“? I mean really, they are defenceless.
When will companies set up mass Vitamin D testing and free supplements?
A couple of weeks ago the Israeli data suggested only 16% of people were still protected from infection six months after vaccination. Presumably Governments will argue that vaccines still reduce the burden on the health care system but new mutations may render that moot too.
The lines that matter in the graph below are the three in the bottom right. That’s the viral loads of the vaccinated, and unvaccinated, with Delta variant. The lines trailing up on the right are probably the last vestiges of the old alpha (UK) variant which only exists anymore in long recovering patients with low viral loads.
The graph shows the Ct values for people who catch the Alpha variant (called SGTF, shown in orange, red and brown) compared to those who catch the Delta variant (called All3P, shown in blue, green and purple). Ct values reflect the amount of the virus found in people’s positive nose and throat swabs, with higher numbers equating to lower levels of the virus. Public Health England compared levels between unvaccinated people, those who have had one dose and those who are double jabbed. It found that Ct values were almost identical, regardless of a person’s immunisation status
Being low on this graph is bad (for us, if not for viruses). The lower the Ct value, the higher the viral load. When there is hardly any virus (or fragments thereof) it takes a lot more cycles to detect and so has a higher Ct value.
NHS Test and Trace data – published in the PHE report – showed daily average Ct values for unvaccinated people who caught the Delta strain was 17.8.
Meanwhile, it was only slightly higher for fully-vaccinated Brits (18).
There are qualifiers, but it is an act of some optimism: We don’t know if the ages of both groups were the same, and if the vaccinated group were older they might have lower viral loads than unvaccinated people their own age. We need to follow both groups through their infections as they progress to know what the real peak is. These groups may have got tested as different points on the curve.
But the figures are similar to the US findings and the US CDC said “wear your masks” to the vaccinated:
The people don’t really want Electric Vehicles, so the US Government is thinking of forcing them on the buyers by squeezing the industry that makes them. There is talk of new rules which apply to the companies selling cars. The control of production could be hidden in something called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. By averaging the fuel consumption across a whole company, those brands will have to find a way to sell more EV’s and to limit their own sales of gas guzzlers. It’s a supply and demand thing, if a company can only make so many large internal combustion engine cars, the prices of those will be artificially high. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The poor will still pay more for cars than they do now, but the cheapest cars on the market will be EV’s — subsidized by inflated prices on petrol driven cars.
This is just a thought bubble for now, but obviously, the message is to buy your big cars and look after them. They’ll be hot property in the second hand market.
Say goodbye to the free market: The Soviets would be proud of it
Technically these are the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. The way they work is hidden in the name. They do not govern the average fuel use of cars used by corporations, which the name “corporate average” suggests. No, they govern the average fuel economy of cars MADE by corporations.
The way it works will be well hidden. Instead of telling you and me what we can buy, they in effect tell the car makers what they can make. I am not making this up.
The result is rationing and it has been for many years. The car makers limit the production of bigger cars and trucks, with higher fuel consumption, to stay below the standards. In reality what is rationed is stuff like power, size and safety. I have even heard that they raise the prices of big cars to cut the prices of little ones. This is called a cross subsidy.
So it sounds like the CAFE standards are going to be ratcheted down over less than a decade, until 40% of the vehicles sold are EVs.
Hopefully this abuse of the efficiency standards will be found to be illegal.
But as David goes on to explain, the Brits have their own form of weird plans to make big trucks run off electric overhead wires? See “Trolley Trucks” and read it at CFACT.
Imagine having hot wires strung just above all the nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highways, carrying enough juice to power all those big trucks. Massive accidents waiting to happen? How about them ice storms?
Seems like the wires will only run over the slow lanes, so maybe just 100,000 miles worth.
Blackouts due to unreliable electricity grids will clog up the roads and cripple the country. Good target for foreign adversaries.
How badly do our Health Ministers want to reduce Covid infections and deaths? Not much. If they were at all serious — before they hand out free vaccines, they’d hand out free Vitamin D supplements.
In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%. — Times of Israel
If only black lives mattered? Dark skins are so much more likely to be deficient, this is one of those absolutely easy wins for any politician, yet none of them are doing it?
Nearly half the people in the study were deficient, and half of those who were seriously deficient in Vitamin D would go on to develop a severe case. These were the people with levels below 20 ng/ml. Of all the people above that, only 10% would get a severe case. And just being “above 20ng” would still be classified as moderately deficient by many measures, yet it made such a huge difference.
It was a life and death thing — the mortality rate was 25%, fully five times higher for those who fell below the 20ng/ml bar.
The Israeli study looked at the Vitamin D levels of 1200 patients in their medical records before they got infected with Covid. This is important because although studies like the Indonesian study last year showed that people with low levels of Vitamin D were much more likely to die of Covid, those patients weren’t assessed until they turned up at hospital when they were already sick. We couldn’t be sure that something about Covid itself wasn’t chewing through the Vitamin D levels and causing the deficiency. So an Israeli team looked back through their records for up to 2 years to see what their last blood tests showed.
People with the lowest Vitamind D levels were the most likely to get severe Covid.
It’s a retrospective study, so the blood levels of D might have changed, yet despite that, the results still pop out of the data. Ideally we’d measure them just before they got sick.
Don’t wait til you’re in ICU to fix that deficiency. And definitely don’t wait for the CDC or Anthony Fauci to suggest it.
The biggest disadvantage with Vitamin D is that there’s no money in it.
Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma,heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish.
How cheap was it for the Chinese Communist Party to buy the American media? Like adding a room to a house.
Practically nothing.
The New York Times, the “paper of record” since 1851 in the USA became a tool for China for just $100,000 a month. It put stories out for years that were essentially nothing but Communist advertising. They and other newspapers had a deal with state run China Daily which sanitized and covered up human rights abuses like Uighur concentration camps.
The New York Times quietly deleted hundreds of advertorials that the Chinese Communist Party paid to publish on its website.
China Daily, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has been purchasing advertorial spaces in the pages of mainstream U.S. media outlets for the last decade, using the space to disseminate Chinese propaganda to millions of unassuming Americans. In return, U.S. newspapers such as the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal received millions of dollars.
The NYT has run over 200 advertorials over the last decade,
Key newspapers helped to hide that SARS 2 was lableak and a potential bioweapon. There is blood on their hands.
Last summer, as the COVID pandemic raged throughout the United States, people who still read the New York Times began to notice something very strange happening at the paper. Hundreds of articles that had appeared there, going back nearly a decade, suddenly vanished, they disappeared. There was no way to find them. Nothing like this had ever happened. The New York Times considers itself–very self-consciously– a living historical record. The paper maintains meticulous, searchable archives going back to 1851. Yet last August, a huge number of articles just disappeared. What was in them? We know the answer because a handful of history-minded readers preserved them when they were in print. Every one of them was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, designed to look like a news article.
One of them reads “China Watch: Diaoyu Islands Belong to China.” That’s the headline. Why would the New York Times, America’s paper of record, print propaganda’s from a totalitarian regime and pretend it was a news article? For money. …
What’s twenty million to buy the wealthiest country in the world?
Since 2016, the Chinese government paid $20 million to outlets like The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.
Imagine if the New York Times and others had reported rumors of the Chinese Bioweapon back in the days when President Trump wanted to shut the borders. The world could have kept the virus out. The UN WHO would have been recognised broadly (instead of just on skeptical blogs) that the organisation served China, was a public health menace and was culpable.
When China needed help to cover up the lab leak and bioweapon news, the supposed cream of the US Media were only too happy to help.
In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”.
At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.
As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia,…
Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda.
The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest.
The Times set the tone by calling anyone who asked about the lab leak as being a tinfoil hat nutter…
The CCP also controls access to a vast market, and The Times, like so many other corporations in the US was happy to sell out it’s own standards in order to gain access:
In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine.
In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Timeslearned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation
The elite media was China’s best friend, and a traitor to the USA.
The culture of hating-the-US-as-a-fashion-statement probably meant the editorial board didn’t even feel like they were selling out their own nation.
Despite headlines declaring the World is Committed to Cutting Emissions, and that ( pick a nation) is an “isolated pariah” — the truth is they were all supposed to “update their emissions targets” but 42% of nations, including the two largest, haven’t. Worse, the updates were supposed be done by the end of 2020, and the UN extended the deadline, so they are already double late. And since China effectively promised to do nothing til 2030, all it had to do was say it would do nothing again, so that’s double-late on a non-promise, and it can’t even do that?
In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
South Africa hasn’t put in its own update, but it has asked for money:
Nothing is more important than saving the Earth, and everyone is doing it except (… where you live…).
Glascow COP 26 could end up as another dud. Except even when it’s a dud it’s a success. The junket is the point. It’s the two week glorious reward for all the Climate Fans. Plus the headlines are already written, the late night prolonged finale will still “affirm” the commitment of blah, every nation, blah. Large meaningless numbers of dollars and gigatons will be massaged into subheaders to woo the distracted into thinking something important just happened.
And in the end, a group of bureaucratic grifters will have forged out a lifestyle of foreign flights, heroic subsidies and unaccountable grants.
And the weather will have done whatever the weather was going to do, while they all pretended they could control it.
We are installing wind and solar power at a great rate and the expectation is that this will go on and RE will increasingly penetrate the system as coal power fades away. In the SE we still have just enough conventional power to get by almost all the time but the tipping point will come when we lose another couple of coal stations and we will need to have a continuous supply of RE. There will not be enough conventional power to keep the lights on through windless nights.
Note from Jo: With the sad demise of Catallaxy, I invited Rafe to continue here blogging about energy and electricity in Australia. So the format of the blog will flex somewhat to try to fill some of that void.
We all heard about the Tesla Megabattery fire in Victoria last Friday, but you may not know it only started operating on Thursday night. Or that 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters took 76 hours to get the blazing battery under control.
So it burned for three times longer than it operated.
Luckily no one would put a large Tesla battery inside their home, eh?
…
Firefighters were essentially helpless to stop the 13 ton lithium battery from burning, but they did stop the rest of the battery plant catching fire.
“…we cannot put them out with water or anything else. The best way to deal with these things is to let them burn until they are burnt out. If we try and cool them down, it just prolongs the process. …this wind is helping us by keeping it burning fairly freely,” the CFA’s Assistant Chief Fire Officer Ian Beswicke said.
“But we could be here anywhere from 8 to 24 [or even 76] hours while we wait for it to burn down.”
They also measured air quality and issued warnings to residents to get themselves and their pets indoors, close windows, and turn off their heating and cooling so they didn’t breath in the toxic smoke. (That must have been a fun weekend in midwinter.)
No price is too high when you’re saving the planet.
A fire at French renewable energy giant Neoen’s Victorian Big Battery at Geelong continued to burn into Sunday, with fire crews awaiting experts from Tesla to assist in opening the Megapack battery that first caught ablaze.
The fire started at the partly federally funded 300-megawatt Tesla Megapack battery project at Moorabool on Friday morning. Fire crews quickly containing the blaze but were unable to extinguish it completely to determine what started it. A Country Fire Authority spokesperson said the fire had been contained to two battery packs, but sparks flared up every so often, re-igniting the blaze. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
The Tesla battery is expected to become the largest in the southern hemisphere, capable of discharging 450 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, as part of a Victorian government push to transition to renewable energy.
Luckily no one was injured, but some nearby crops will be enriched in heavy metals.
Don’t put one of these near your home
The first sign of any operation was at 6:15pm the night before. Some part of the plant was operational for at least 16 hours.
So really it burned for four times longer than it ran for.
The incident did not disrupt the grid, but if the battery plant was operating on a hot sunny day and it caught fire, Victoria might not be so lucky. If this had been a coal plant on fire, presumably someone would have already calculated the cadmium and lead effect and how many spotted-quoll-years were lost.
Bill S and David B, David Archibald. Rafe. Jim Simpson.
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Australia and New Zealand were in a bubble of freedom and safety that was, unfortunately, antithetical to the advertising pitch and hit jingle — “Vaccines are the only way out”. Despite being 93% vaccine-free (or more) the two nations had one fiftieth the deaths-per-capita of the UK and USA, and less economic damage too, showing that hard borders beats vaccination for viral control. It stood as an example of a better way to deal with the average bioweapon. Any nations that locked out the disease could open their borders to each other, and their economy, and they didn’t need Big Pharma.
Climate Fear Week is Here.
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