On a chilly Christmas Eve three centuries ago, one of the most devastating storms in the history of Europe smashed into the coastlines around the North Sea, killing over 13,000 people, annihilating thousands of houses and wrecking countless farms.
The apocalyptic weather caused enormous floods to submerge coastal areas in the Netherlands, Northern Germany and Denmark by Christmas Day.
As the surviving population struggled with the wind and the waves, Arctic gales spread across the continent and caused a crippling frost to descend on the suffering victims.
1717 Christmas Flood, Germany, Netherlands.
These floods sparked a great dyke building project. The severity of the storms and floods were matched in 1953, when “only” 2,551 people died then.
… the crushing disaster of 1717 is now seen in the context of Dutch decline.
The country had experienced its golden age in the 17th century but, with this storm combining with other setbacks (including pressure from the growing British Empire), its time as a dominant European power was brought to an end.
1717 Christmas Flood, Germany, Netherlands.
The two worst floods of Passau, Bavaria, as far as we know, were in 1501 and 1595.
This is the future we expect if we spend trillions to reduce CO2 to “safe levels”? If we all drive electric vehicles will we be able to create a world as safe as 1501?
… the immense floods of 1784 which followed the unusually harsh winter of 1783/84 throughout Germany when sudden warm weather and torrents of rain filled the still ice-packed rivers.
The winter of 1783/84 is known to have been severe and long-lasting in a number of European countries. Two very cold spells occurred: at the end of December 1783 and in January 1784. Furthermore, it snowed heavily in the months of December 1783, January and February 1784. On 21 February 1784, a warm southerly wind led to a thaw which resulted in fast breaking-up of the ice on the frozen rivers and to catastrophic floods. This large-scale and long-lasting event took place in the present-day Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, northern France, Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics.
Thousands were asleep at the wheel, occupied with busywork, and an endless trail of minor crises. Each little step was worse than the one before, inexorably, but only a little worse. Like a field of corn that we never see growing — but one day it is over our head.
There is no time when everyone realizes together and lifts in mass protest. Instead, little moments tip the balance, one person at a time. And once awake, good people don’t want to be troublemakers. They are afraid to stand out.
Its all so human while it becomes something so horribly inhumane.
The form of the nation stays the same but the spirit changes to become something people would never have accepted even five years earlier. Like perhaps the idea that people who committed, at most, a minor misdemeanor, a trespass, could be kept without charges in solitary confinement for months on end.
We are a gregarious species. It is hardwired. Our great strength is also our greatest vulnerability…
So many wait for someone else to speak up.
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. They interviewed 10 Germans who talked about what it was like during the transition from normal to crazy Nazi nightmare. How it happened and how so many people went along with it.
UPDATE: The youtube contains a few MAGA type snippets at the end in a cheap attempt to conflate Nazism with Trump. They’re short, but a naked attempt to fog the meme. If anyone can find a better edit, I’ll replace it.
Biden won Arizona (theoretically anyway) by 10,457 votes. But mail-in ballots went forth and must have multiplied because 74,000 baby new ballots appeared in the final count that were never posted out. Strangely – after the election was over, 18,000 voters just disappeared off the rolls while 11,000 appeared from nowhere. The latter were people who weren’t on the rolls on November 7th, yet they voted, and then were on the rolls on by December 4th.
Despite Biden winning he’s had the most dreadful luck — the voting software was old and easily breached, and all the access logs showing the Democrat’s complete innocence were somehow completely wiped in March — just like that, poof? Then there were the ballots that were printed on different paper that bled, even though all votes were meant to be on bleedproof Votesecure paper?
And some people wonder why doubts about the Biden Government don’t go away…
More than 74,000 mail-in ballots were received in Maricopa County, Arizona than appear to have been mailed out, a forensic audit has determined. According to the auditors, 74,243 mail-in ballots were counted with “no clear record of them being sent.”
18,000 voters disappeared, 11,326 voters appeared — after the election
Logan went on to say they found around 18,000 voters who participated in the election, but were removed from the rolls soon after.
“They were on the voter rolls, they showed as voted, and then they were removed,” he said. “There could be a good logical explanation for that, but it seems like a large number to me.”
Another 11,326 voters in Maricopa County were not on voter rolls on Nov. 7 but mysteriously appeared on voter rolls on Dec. 4 and were marked as having voted in the Nov. 3 election, Logan said.
Strange poor quality paper
The auditors also found that large numbers of ballots bled through to the other side, potentially impacting votes. Maricopa County, Logan explained, announced before the election that it would be using special “VoteSecure” paper that that did not allow ink to bleed through to the other side of the ballot, yet they found thousands of ballots that were not on VoteSecure paper.
Trump says:
The irregularities revealed at the hearing today amount to hundreds of thousands of votes or, many times what is necessary for us to have won. Despite these massive numbers, this is the State that Fox News called early for a Biden victory. There was no victory here, or in any other of the Swing States either.
The highly respected State Senator Wendy Rogers said in a tweet the hearing today means we must decertify the election.
Tucker Carlson on Georgia: “how is that not flat out criminal ballots?”
So its been a long time coming, but Carlson is now asking excellent questions about elections.
It follows Tucker Carlson’s bombshell report on Fulton County, Georgia that shows the voter integrity group VoterGA revealing thousands of votes appeared to have been erroneously marked in ballot tallies for Joe Biden.
“At least 36 batches of mail-in ballots from the November election were double-counted in Fulton County, that is a total of at least 4,000 votes,” he said.
Trump lost Georgia by 12,284 votes.
ht RossP, V, Wokebuster
PS: I just got out of hospital today. Feeling OK but very tired. I’m the all new metallic woman with a plate screwed into her bones (like so many other people). Thanks for all the shared stories and information. I feel lucky to have straight bones today when so many didn’t get that chance.
Good news: it’s quite an extraordinary result — six out of ten Americans are saying in the most blunt possible terms, that the media is not only biased, but actively working against the people and with hostile intent.
From this far down, there is no bounce. Only a full about-face with mea culpa and an Augean cleanout would even start to unwind this toxic position. And the Media puppets are not even close to that razing day.
The propaganda is falling on deaf ears and at this point, the harder they push, the worse it gets.
Voters overwhelmingly believe “fake news” is a problem, and a majority agree with former President Donald Trump that the media have become “the enemy of the people.”
A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” including 34% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t agree, including 23% who Strongly Disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
So most voting adults don’t want to listen to smug intellectual-babies, or toffee fashionistas tell them how unworthy they are. Civilization is straining at the edges, but the pendulum is swinging back. Resistance is building.
Trump called it Fake News in 2016, and the Media lived up to it. Years ago I remember writing about a survey that seemed astonishing at the time where something like 15% of the USA would describe the UN as “the enemy”. By late November 2020, fully 80% of Republicans described the media as “the enemy”, but now after 8 more months of plastic news, things are even worse. The 40% is nearly 60%.
Forty years of global warming have made East Antarctic summers even shorter and more miserably colder than they already were. (Save the wilderness — burn coal now?)
Surface Air temperature over East Antarctica (presumably in summer) from Hsu et al 2021.
East Antarctica is the vast mass of the Antarctic plateau which was, in theory, going to melt. If that three kilometer thick block of ice isn’t going to melt in summer, when exactly will it?
Remember when the poles were meant to amplify man-made global warming?
Not much of Antarctica is warming in summer.
These graphs come from a paper that Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone found. The authors Hsu et al think the cooling trend has a natural explanation (but if it had been warming, of course, no one would have asked that question). Hsu at al estimate that 20-40% of the trend is due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). And maybe it is, but they use climate models we know are broken. Curiously they predict the East Antarctic will keep cooling — which may be a first (for the models).
For what it’s worth the MJO is a massive convective atmospheric blob that rains its way from west to east across the Indian and then into the Pacific travelling east at 20 kilometers per hour or so. Over a couple of months it does a lap of the earth. Apparently it has a profound influence on both sides of the world — driving cold winter spells as far away as Canada and the US, and possibly, who knows, in Antarctica too.
Sudden tragic release of stored chemical energy in Beirut
It turns out storing Megawatts of high density energy in a confined space is “like a bomb”. Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is?
…according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.
With the potential for huge explosions, fires and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.
The batteries, designed as reservoirs of spare electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun fails to shine, are spreading around the British countryside. And this, says Prof Allison and his fellow scientists, could spell catastrophe.
It’s like a potential bomb,’ he says. ‘When batteries catch fire, you can’t just squirt water on them and put out the flames. It’s evident from our research that nothing has been done to tackle this problem.’
Given the size of the proposed plants, Prof Allison says this could, in theory, lead to an explosion several times bigger than the one that destroyed the harbour in Beirut last year.
The threat of fire is not merely theoretical. South Korea saw 23 battery farm fires in just two years. A recent battery fire in Illinois burned for three days and thousands of residents were evacuated.
Such blazes release highly toxic gases. One – hydrogen fluoride – is lethal if inhaled, and causes irreversible health effects after an hour of exposure, according to Public Health England.
The La Niña climate pattern is forecast to make a return this fall and last through the winter of 2021-22, according to an official “alert” issued Thursday, July 8 by the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), which suggests further global cooling as we enter the new year.
La Niña –-a natural cycle marked by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific Ocean-– is one of the main drivers of global weather — it is usually associated with colder global temperatures, droughts in the southern U.S., and increased precipitation in Australia.
Entering a La Niña event when global temperatures are already around baseline is significant.
If the climate pattern has the expected affect then we should brace for global temps to continue their overall downward trend –which began in 2016 (see link below)– to levels well below the norm.
We could conceivably be looking at UAH readings some 0.4C below the 30-year average by the spring of 2022.
A La Nina watch has been issued by CPC.
The updated run of the NMME has La Nina returning during late fall and early winter 2021. This progression is also supported by similar analog years. #ENSOpic.twitter.com/gPMVokOfDH
The news nobody wanted to hear (except perhaps Pharmaceutical giants): 29 new active cases in the NSW community.
Will NSW get desperate enough to try cheap drugs with low risks, mass production and promising results? It’s winter and the Delta variant is spreading. Contact tracing is rapidly being outpaced. The number of close contacts doubled overnight to 14,000.
NSW reported 44 new locally acquired COVID-19 cases, 29 of those were in the community while infectious and the number of close contacts has doubled from 7000 to 14,000 in the past 24 hours.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the lockdown was likely to be extended beyond Friday, July 16, unless there was a “dramatic turnaround” in coming days.
Antiviral hesitancy could be costing the state billions. What if an antiviral trial were offered to anyone who tested positive and their contacts, subject to medical advice (approved by their doctor)? It would be a great reason to go get tested. Got symptoms? — We may be able to help you and your family.
Some antivirals and vitamins like D3 appear to prevent the spread if given early enough — even by 80%. Calculate the obscene cost of every days delay.
Australia must have kilotons of some pharmaceutical grade drugs we could test, adapt and move quickly at costs of cents per dose. If it doesn’t work, we’ll know we tried.
The trust factor is going to shot to pieces when people find out.
While ice skating, slender left wrist successfully stopped ice rink from bruising hip. Now temporarily a one handed blogger. But grateful — thinking how different it would be in hunter gatherer days without handy people with xray machine. Wondering how well bones healed while wandering savanna fighting off snakes with sticks. (Yay, civilization).
Distal radius now has exoskeleton.
Like someone else’s arm
As a long time veteran of leg fractures in youth of both skiing and car accident kind, this is not unfamiliar territory.
Blogging will be more concise for a while. A good challenge …
Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, but having dropped restrictions, they are picking them up again only one month later as the Delta variant spreads.
In Tel Aviv, 75 students got infected at one party from a vaccinated person who had caught the virus from another vaccinated person. And though the UK data is better than the Israeli data, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, has had both of her vaccine doses but still has to self isolate for two weeks due to a “near exposure”. How confident are the UK health experts? Not very. With the UK only weeks away from the so-called Freedom day, will double vaxed people have to self isolate for two weeks each time they are exposed?
This belies the key point about “getting vaxed for the nation”. If being vaccinated is about keeping you out of hospital, not so much about infecting your friends, then getting vaxed is more for self protection. The cost-benefit equation might look good for high risk people, but changes dramatically for healthy young people. We need to know how much vaccination slows transmission yet it’s barely a part of the national conversation.
A month is a long time in pandemic world
Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash
In May the Pfizer vaccine was working respectably well against Covid cases in Israel, and the government relaxed the rules. Then the Delta strain arrived with plodding predictability, and suddenly the efficacy against infection fell from 94% to 63%. (Though the numbers are small).
Like every other country it arrived in, the Delta variant (formerly known as the Indian double-mutant) rapidly outpaced the other variants, and is now responsible for 9 out of 10 cases of Covid in Israel.
On the plus side, the Pfizer vaccine was 98% effective against being hospitalized by the UK Alpha strain, and it’s still 93% effective against the Delta strain. On the down side, the next mutants are coming. They might be nicer, but they might not.
The scandalous risks with leaky vaccines
With vaccines that are this leaky, we’re running the risk of creating nastier variants through a process called “immune escape”. That’s the selection path that converted a 1% chicken killer called Marek’s disease into a 100% killer. It took decades to do that, but it’s not a road we want to travel. The post I wrote on the danger of leaky vaccines was one of the most important on this site (in case you missed it). If you know where to look, you’ll find experts often talk in medical code about “immune escape” but rarely spell out how bad this could be.
The solution is so obvious we already did it years ago: use antivirals.
Antivirals are the antibiotics of the viral world. When we couldn’t find a vaccine for AIDS, we used a cocktail of antivirals. We’ve already got a suite of candidates against Covid: like Ivermectin, HCQ, EXO-CD24, Bromhexine (cough syrup), Budesonide (used against asthma). Not to mention all the vitamins and minerals that might give us a boost too like Vitamin D, C, B6, B12, etc, etc.
If we want to stop lockdowns, we need to get antivirals approved and stop the new mutants coming in until we do. Unlike leaky vaccines, antivirals should also prevent the development of nastier mutants.
Do antivirals stop most vaccinees catching and leaking the virus? Why the heck don’t we know that already? Looks like someone is afraid the trials will show the antivirals work so well we don’t need vaccines.
h/t Serp, Raving, Ian. Dave B.
So much for the mass speedy vaccination in Israel
Officials to weigh reimposing some virus restrictions as Delta variant spreads
The Times of Israel, July 3, 2021
75 pupils contract COVID-19 from a vaccinated person at school party in Tel Aviv; former Health Ministry deputy director calls to bring back ‘Green Pass’ system
This week, at least 75 high school pupils were confirmed to have contracted the virus at a Tel Aviv end-of-year party, after a student was infected by a vaccinated relative. That relative contracted the virus from another vaccinated individual who had recently returned from London, according to Channel 13 news.
Unfortunately Times of Israel was slightly ambiguous. Was the superspreader at the party vaccinated, or were they a student who was infected by a vaccinated person a day or two earlier? This matters. Can vaccinated people still be superspreaders? We need to know!
A whole vaccination campaign that bought four weeks of freedom?
The Times of Israel, July 3, 2021
Former Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto said the country should consider returning to the “Green Pass” system that differentiates between vaccinated and non-vaccinated citizens regarding access to certain venues and activities.
According to the ministry, over 5.62 million people — out of Israel’s population of more than 9.3 million — have gotten at least one vaccine shot. Of those, close to 5.2 million received a second dose.
We’re in an arms race with an inanimate chemical code
Image: Scientific Animations
The UK has a lot more data than Israel, and in the UK Pfizer has only fallen from 90 to 80% efficacy at stopping symptomatic infection. The UK data is probably much closer to the truth than Israel’s is, but the point that matters is the trend. With each mutation we can expect the vaccines to get less effective. We’re in an arms race with an inanimate chemical code that is running experiments currently in 11 million bodies (plus cats, ferrets, mink and any other mammal it can infect). Will we ever catch up? Each new vaccine still needs time to be developed and tested. Even in the experimental mRNA vaccines, where substituting snippets of code can be done faster, there is still a need to test to make sure the antibody response does not trigger an autoimmune disease, or accelerate the next infection, or send the body off making less effective antibodies.
How long does vaccine protection last …?
Why is Israel as low as 63%? As usual in biology, there are many possibilities: the people may have different genes, diets, deficiencies, past infections, and it may be a different age group infected. The vaccines were given six months ago to some people in Israel. One expert in Israel wonders if they are already starting to wear off?
Netanyahu said in a video released on his social media channels that “from conversations I’ve had with some of the best experts in the world, I believe the third vaccine [dose] should be given to the over-50 population starting in August, in order to finish the task by the end of September.”
He said that no one currently knows when a drop in immunity will leave the population susceptible to infection once again.
If any lives actually mattered to our health authorities they’d be reassessing the antivirals and giving people and their doctors the choice of medications instead of pushing and pumping only one solution in a non-stop advertising campaign.
For a whole year more people were dying in Mexico than normally died. There’s been one long bloodbath there and an untold story. Mexico may not have hit the “photogenic” headline stage that Brazil, Iran, and India did, but nonetheless, somewhat unnoticed, it’s been continuously bad. Mexico has the dubious honor of being one of the worst for testing, with positivity rates at the virtually the highest in the world, running at 35% and even reaching over 50% at times. Few countries have had higher rates (currently only Tunisia, Namibia, maybe Colombia are worse). The Case Fatality Rate has run at 12% for a year, only confirming that there weren’t enough tests to know the real scale of the infections. The excess deaths graph tells its own story. The wave of 2020 ran for a whole year with deaths running at 50 – 100% higher than in a normal year. Since the pandemic began some 350,000 excess deaths have been recorded. The death toll for Covid in Mexico may be 60% higher than the official Covid casualty count of 230,000. As winter made the situation even worse, things got desperate enough (finally!) for cheap treatments to be organized.
Ivermectin use at 200 microgram/kg started on December 21 and was gradually rolled out across Mexico. It took months, but finally, for the first time in a year, Mexican deaths are back to normal, and even slightly lower.
Obviously some countries are too rich to use cheap drugs. For them, only patentable ones with big profits attached can “solve” this crisis.
Ivermectin use began being rolled out on December 21, 2020. @jjchamie
How many lives would have been saved and how many lockdowns could have been prevented?
Obviously excess deaths in a pandemic are also due to hospitals being overwhelmed, and shortages or restrictions and the failure of normal healthcare. It may be years before those factors can be unravelled and a better estimate of Covid deaths can be made.
Concerned about hospital capacity in the summer of 2020, the Mexican government devised an aggressive testing regime, ramping up from 3,000 tests per day in June to around 24,000 antigen tests every day by that November, according to TrialSiteNews. Mexico City Ministry of Health head Oliva López later announced that doctors will give ivermectin and azithromycin to treat COVID-19.
“The Ministry of Health has identified that there is enough evidence to use in people positive for SARS-CoV-2, even without symptoms, some drugs such as ivermectin and azithromycin,” López confirmed in a press conference.
Local authorities created a home-treatment-kit, including ivermectin, for its 22 million-strong population on December 28, 2020, following a spike in cases of COVID-19.
Dr. Juan J. Chamie-Quintero, a senior data analyst at private Colombian university EAFIT, followed the trends in hospitalizations and deaths in Mexico City before and after the government implemented its ivermectin treatment program.
If you only email friends one link — make it this story. It’s the biggest medical scandal since 1850— Why is a cheap safe drug being ignored? Could it be that there would be no medical emergency and no need to rush out other riskier new treatments which are still classed as “experimental” if there was a safe alternative? There are billions of reasons to ask this question but newspapers wouldn’t publish the story. In desperation, some Americans are going to court to get rulings to order doctors to use Ivermectin on their loved ones. Even if they win, sometimes hospitals still refuse to use it on patients with few options left. One family hired a helicopter to take their mother away from intensive care in a hospital that refused to give Ivermectin (and had a happy ending). The debate is so suppressed, there are rumours the US President was treated with it in secret last year.
The FDA and others will say there is little evidence of success so far, but that’s a scandal in itself. Why are there no large trials? And why are other drugs like Remdesivir approved with only one trial? Ivermectin is so safe some 3.7 billion doses have already been used around the world. The inventors won a Nobel Prize for its discovery in 2015. We’ve known it might be useful since April last year, when an Australian group searched through many cheap safe drugs looking for any that might help against Covid. The news then was “Another possible cure for coronavirus, found in sheep dip: Ivermectin”. This was just a lab study, and it suggested doses would need to be too high. Even so, successes keep turning up in the real world? By July last year there were already signs Ivermectin could save as many as 50%. Why were large trials not started then? The UK trial is hobbled from the start.
Australia and the UK can close one coal plant each, but Asia will build 600.
There’s a socially awkward moment coming at the G20’s next dinner, but despite the combined selfish evil of the theoretical Asian Planet Wreckers, no one will really say much, put trade embargoes on, or boycott the Olympics.
Ultimately, everyone at the table knows that Carbon Voodoo is a Western dinner party game, not a serious pollutant.
Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
They are all developing nations, apparently, so they can be forgiven, even though the list includes number 2 and 3 on the Worlds Biggest Economies list, and one of these fledglings just left the nest and landed on Mars.
Why are they knocking back all the cheap solar and wind power? Could it be that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are filled with stupid people who can’t add up. Or is it that they can do the sums and they noticed that every nation with renewables also has expensive electricity?
Once upon a time, scientists would say only 30 year trends counted. Now, all weather is climate except when it isn’t. Climate modelers know the heat over North East America was caused by your beef steak, but the cold over New Mexico was not even worth mentioning. (Nor apparently was the minus 81 in Antarctica a couple of weeks ago).
This [heat dome] happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”
A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the main cause was a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.
Given that climate modelers can’t predict a La Nina more than six months in advance, they also can’t predict the likelihood of Heat Domes in any given year.
Anthony Watts explains that the heat was a weather phenomenon created by air being compressed as it flowed downhill.
High pressure rotates clockwise, causes sinking air, and creates downslope winds (Foehn winds), which heat up because the air compresses as it flowed down the slope of the Cascade Mountains from east to west towards Portland and Seattle. It’s like the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. It’s the same effect as using a bicycle pump to fill a tire. The pump gets warm, not from friction, but because of the gas (air) is being compressed. Conversely, aerosol cans get colder, because gas under pressure is escaping and decompression occurs inside the can. This is described by science, known as the Adiabatic process.
Anthony also points out that as the heat dome moved past the temperatures fell in hours by an astonishing 52F (29C). That was another record drop in temperatures, and all on the same day, but who’s counting?
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