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Things are turning around in India — starting within days of increasing the use of Ivermectin again. But where is the media? Who is reporting that the turnaround in some states of India has started within a couple of weeks of the expanded use of Ivermectin — the 50 cent old drug that has been used for 3.7 billion prescriptions worldwide, given to children to treat headlice, scabies and worms and is used by the ton on cattle and sheep farms. Hallalujah? Or read and weep — how much of the ghastly debacle could have been stopped before it even started?  Ivermectin starts again in India (shaded dark grey) @jjchamie On April 20th, New Dehli, AIIMs reccommended Ivermectin be added to the take home care package. So people getting tested would be able to start early treatment. Cases started slowing down almost immediately.  ….
On May 10th the Health Minister for Goa recommended the use of Ivermectin in Goa. Indeed, he offered it to the entire adult population. The next day, the WHO, ever so helpfully, warned against the use of Ivermectin in India.
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Sadly Tamil Nadu is going the other way, they used Ivermectin for three days, then stopped it, and bought up Remdesivir instead (a Gilead drug that costs around $3000 a patient.) Still, it’s handy to have a control group. Shame the people of Tamil Nadu are part of the experiment. Hard to believe the Chief Minister in Goa is M K Stalin.  … Twenty thousand doses of Remdesivir cost 60 million dollars, while 20,000 doses of Ivermectin go for a few hundred. Where is a developing country getting the 60 million dollars a day to purchase the Remdesivir? Why is their leader throwing away a cheap drug, Ivermectin, that has saved lives in other countries? India started using Ivermectin back on August 8, 2020 at the peak of the first wave. It’s not easy to find out when or if the use of Ivermectin slowed or stopped. Indeed it is strangely difficult to find anything on most search engines apart from fact checks that warn against the use of Ivermectin. There are claims that the use of the drug stalled in January, but very little official confirmation.  From Twitter Could the media get the situation more wrong?Back on April 28th at the peak of new cases in India the geniuses on Business Insider said it was the perfect storm for India and blamed, among other things, the slow roll out of the vaccine. Nameless experts even blamed Ivermectin. Experts said some doctors in India have – whether due to a lack of training or sheer desperation – tried administering medications that don’t work against the virus, like ivermectin, a prescription used to treat parasitic infections. “I’ve heard stories of people getting three, four, five, six meds prescribed to them, medications that have not been shown to be effective at all,” Kuppalli said. “I think people are just grasping for straws and that just adds to the chaos and the anxiety.” The message from one doctor in India: Keep reading → Imperfect storm on the way?
Adam Gaertner has posted a zinger of a provocative article, to say the least. Thanks to David Archibald author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia for pointing me at it. A New Mutation threatens a Fragile Recovery What if mass vaccination with imperfect vaccines could promote the survival of nastier strains of Covid? What if the leaky vaccines act like a filter for more dangerous versions of SARS2? This doesn’t happen with most vaccines, only “leaky” ones. But it has happened in chickens with a virus called Marek’s disease. Leaky vaccines generate a half-baked immune response — one that stops illness, but allows transmission, so a vaccinated person can theoretically infect others. This is bad but not awful — as long as the virus gets eliminated in a timely fashion. But if the virus can cloak itself from the immune system, and hide in protected cells, then it can keep replicating for a long time, and eventually, randomly, it will escape the imperfect immune response. Those mutants will be resistant to the antibodies or t-cell tricks. Thus newer strains of Covid may arise that are already pre-loaded with goodies to get around our immune system. This is not how pandemics normally work In most pandemics, after a few years, the nicer strains out-compete the nastier ones. Natural selection favours viruses that don’t kill or disable their human shedders. A sick body on the move is a more efficient spreader than someone flat out on their back in bed. It takes two things to break that pattern. One is a leaky or imperfect vaccine. The other thing is that this virus appears to have the ability (like Marek’s disease) to cloak itself from our immune system and hide in protected cells. This combination could make for a perfect storm, where vaccinated people feel OK, but viruses hidden away within keep sending out copies that test the half-baked immune response in a holding pattern until one lucky mutant virus escapes the net. The new variant is nastier and trickier than the last one and we need to redesign a new vaccine. Repeat, rinse, recycle a few times and we might be breeding a virus that is more easily spread and has a higher mortality rate — especially for unvaccinated people. This process is called immune escape, and once you know where to look, it seems virologists have been warning of it (and here, and here). But not necessarily expanding on just how bad it could be. They only mention that we might have to produce a new vaccine. (Gosh, darn, won’t Big Pharma be disappointed?) But there are reports of new “immune escape” variants, like the one in West Bengal. Look at what happened to chickens and Marek disease Photo by William Moreland. Who knew? In the last six years it’s been confirmed and accepted that vaccines played a role in creating a much nastier and deadlier form of Marek disease in chickens (MDV). Over the last 50 years, we’ve made vaccines that stop the chickens getting cancer and dying, but don’t stop them shedding virus and infecting other chickens. Unlike most viruses MDV can sit latent “for life” and slowly churn out copies while also suppressing the immune system. So each chicken becomes a kind of slow slot machine in a game of viral poker. The chickens immune system holds it at bay, but sooner or later, the virus finds an escape route around the immune system, becoming more infectious, more virulent, and effectively bypassing the current vaccine. This process started in 1970 with the first vaccine which at the time stopped 99% of Marek’s disease. The disease originally had a low mortality but after 50 years, the MDV virus has become a kind of monster, and is considered to be 100% fatal to unvaccinated chickens. For a chicken, the odds are worse than Ebola. What have we done? How imperfect vaccines created the conditions to select for a nastier disease Andrew Read et al, in 2015: MDV became increasingly virulent over the second half of the 20th century [19,21–24]. Until the 1950s, strains of MDV circulating on poultry farms caused a mildly paralytic disease, with lesions largely restricted to peripheral nervous tissue. Death was relatively rare. Today, hyperpathogenic strains are present worldwide. These strains induce lymphomas in a wide range of organs and mortality rates of up to 100% in unvaccinated birds. So far as we are aware, no one has been able to isolate non-lethal MDV strains from today’s commercial (vaccinated) poultry operations [19,23]. Quite what promoted this viral evolution is unclear. The imperfect-vaccine hypothesis was suggested as an evolutionary mechanism by which immunization might drive MDV virulence evolution [2], but there has been no experimental confirmation. Our data provide that: by enhancing host survival but not preventing viral shedding, MDV vaccination of hens or offspring greatly prolongs the infectious periods of hyperpathogenic strains, and hence the amount of virus they shed into the environment. Andrew Read proposed this imperfect-vaccine idea in 2001, but it was purely theoretical until he was able to test and confirm it in 2015. His work was described by Ed Yong, National Geographic: The duo infected vaccinated and unvaccinated chicks with five different strains of Marek’s virus, of varying virulence. They found that when unvaccinated birds are infected with mild strains, they shed plenty of viruses into their surroundings. If they contract the most lethal strains, they die before this can happen, and their infections stop with them. In the vaccinated chicks, this pattern flips. The milder strains are suppressed but the lethal ones, which the birds can now withstand, flood into the environment at a thousand times their usual numbers. So don’t mix vaccinated and unvaccinated chickens, right? I can’t see this working in humans… Read and Nair also found that the “lethal” strains could spread from one vaccinated individual to another, and that unvaccinated chickens were at greatest risk of disease and death if they were housed with vaccinated ones. The chicken industry has learned to live with Mareks disease. Unvaccinated chickens though, have not. And the industry loses $2b a year as well. Chicks are reared separately from mum and dad apparently, so they can survive long enough to get the vaccine and get protection before they risk catching the disease. Some people keep unvaccinated backyard flocks, but those chickens don’t go on holidays, or to weddings or funerals and rarely meet other chickens. None of this translates too well to homo sapiens. Dystopia 2025? Look at the mutations in just one patient alone: To get an idea of how big a problem this could be, consider that one particular transplant patient who had Covid and was on immunosuppressants, was infected for 170 days last year before finally clearing the infection. Weigang et al 2021, followed him closely. They identified the different mutants as they arose, and also testing them to see if they could infect live cells in a lab. For those of us who like genetic engineering, this paper is like a reality TV show with live sequencing. Hot The patient developed mildly symptomatic COVID-19, and tested positive for 145 days. The daily swabs showed the virus was developing an array of substitutions and deletions of amino acids in the spike protein, which were partly resistant to neutralizing antibodies. Did remdesivir save the day? Using antivirals to stop extended infections makes sense, given the risks. (But why wait til Day 140 when we could start on Day 1?) The aim was to allow the body to mount a more effective antiviral response. On day 140 the patient remained RT PCR positive, and was put on remdesivir for 10 days. From day 149 to 189, all subsequent tests were negative, and the pathogen could no longer be isolated, indicating viral clearance. Do the math: There are 1-2 new mutations per month, per infected person? The typical rate of mutations is about 1-2 mutations a month, and this was confirmed in the present patient, with the relative stability of the viral genome over the early period of the infection. From day 42, mutations began to accumulate, including the D614G substitution that is now globally dominant. The researchers tested the various versions of SARS2 in mice and found that the mutations made the virus less deadly between days 35 and 105. But the virus was also picking up mutations that meant antibodies were not binding as well to it. The study thus supports the emergence of new variants that evade immunity in chronically immunosuppressed patients, as also reported with patients treated repeatedly with antibody cocktails and convalescent plasma. The variants in this study resemble the current UK, South African and Brazil variants, with escape mutations in the same spike region. (Weigang et al 2021). Those were some pretty serious mutations in just one guy? This doesn’t happen with all leaky vaccines. For example, Poliovirus vaccine allows some leakage but after fifty years of use, the virulence hasn’t increased. However shedding of poliovirus only lasts for two weeks, not months, not long enough to generate mutations perhaps? Where to next?If vaccinated people are or start to produce more deadly variants, there will be even more calls (if that’s possible) to vaccinate everyone on Earth plus their cats. People may use the term “herd immunity” but it doesn’t apply. Herd immunity means immunized people protect the vulnerable by not transmitting the virus. And even if we could and did vaccinate everyone (ignoring all the risks and ethical questions for the moment) that isn’t a solution. It’s just a temporary stop-gap until the next and nastier round in the arms race. Obviously we are not going to live like chickens with a highly fatal disease knocking off the unvaccinated. (Surely?!) Things we can do:
In a bioweapons arms race (with a virus, if not a nation) all the West should be setting up bigger and better biotech labs. A bonanza of discoveries will come out of these medical advances, but every month matters. We may be on the cusp of the new glorious antivirals era, much like the transformation we saw after World War II with antibiotics. Feeling sick, just pop in to the doc and get an antiviral on the way to work? Why waste another dollar on fake green energy if we can be biotech leaders instead? It’s possible that our immune system may have some extra tricks we don’t know abou Keep reading → …. Political correctness is the correct way to lose every election. By its very nature, virtue signalling is almost guaranteed to be an electoral disaster. The whole game is to get to the top of the pecking order and mark yourself as being above the unwashed riff raff. A long time ago, if your brain wave was a good idea, the riff raff would adopt it too, which was all fine and good, except then you need another different good idea. And when all that’s left are more absurd signalling displays: Can you control the weather with your plastic shopping bag? Can you set people free by vandalizing statues? Labor Parties all over the world suffer from the same thing. They stopped listening and caring what the workers think. h/ t David E Look at the massive disconnect here: Poll proves wokery lost Labour ‘red wall’ seats:Glen Owen, Mail on Sunday Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion on woke issues, a Mail on Sunday poll has found. The survey revealed that the party was overwhelmingly associated with support for politically correct issues – such as pulling down statues of historical figures – that are not backed by voters. The figures will add to concerns among Labour strategists that the party’s metropolitan image is alienating its working-class base, particularly among its former supporters in the North.  …. The Labor Party have an image problem. They tried to look politically correct and everyone believed them. At least the conservative government is trying to make it harder to cheat in the election: UK government to introduce criticised voter ID law this year …Britain’s government will introduce a new law this year to crack down on the potential for voter fraud and intimidation by including rules requiring voters to prove their identities, a move critics said could deter people from casting ballots. “Stealing someone’s vote is stealing their voice. We must go further to protect and modernise our precious democracy,” Chloe Smith, minister for the Constitution and Devolution, said in a statement. POST NOTE: And this is not a good thing for Western democracy. When the opposition party is captured by Wokeness there is no one left in the centre to argue for better policies. The so-called Conservative party slides toward political correctness too. Always better to have two strong major parties than none.
May 18th, 2021 | Tags: Elections, Political Correctness, Polls, UK, Woke | Category: Global Warming, Ideology, Politics, polls, UK, Woke |  Print This Post | | We panic about the next half degree of warming (above the 1.5 we’ve already had) but the depth of the ice age was savagely cold. For years the experts told us what Earth’s temperature was then, but apparently they were wrong. And yet corals and rainforest survived. Plus turtles, whales, kittens — lots of things. And all without research grants.  …  Nice line on the Nobel gas calibration with ground temperatures. Nice proxy. Two studies have come out in the last 10 months both showing that at its coldest point about 25,000 years ago, the Earth was on average six degrees cooler Celcius than it is today. And this new study includes estimates of temperatures of tropical land near the oceans which ought to be more stable and less prone to big extremes. This comes from a newer style of proxy based on noble gases dissolved in ground water. It appears to be quite an accurate proxy, judging by the graph to the right. And it solves a lot of problems with other proxies. We can take samples from all around the world instead of just the polar ice caps (like we can with ice cores). And it’s not dependent on living things which like higher CO2 levels and inconveniently move location as the climate changes. It’s always worse than we thought“The real significance of our paper is that prior work has badly underestimated the cooling in the last glacial period, which has low-balled estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases,” said paper co-author Jeffrey Severinghaus, a professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. “The main reason that prior work was flawed was that it relied heavily on species abundances in the past. But just like humans, species tend to migrate to where the climate suits them. The real significance is that 1. Experts are often wrong. 2. Real climate change is brutal. and 3. We don’t know when the next one is coming. If this is right, all the other big experts were not. But what’s two or three degrees between friends?
 Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of AP2 LGM cooling estimates to literature values. The worst cooling was in the Northern hemisphere in Europe and Canada. Horizontal scale is in degrees latitude. ie 40 = 40N and -40 = 40S.
So the study finds that natural climate change is larger than anyone thought, and the next ice age is more scary than anyone realized, but this apparently means CO2 is more awful than ever. It seems the tropics can cool more than anyone thought, therefore they can also warm more than anyone expected. Got that? Because whatever happened, CO2 did it. “The rather high climate sensitivity that our results suggest is not good news regarding future global warming, which may be stronger than expected using previous best estimates. In particular, our global review reinforces the finding of several single noble gas case studies that the tropics were substantially cooler during the last glacial maximum than at present. The unpleasant implication for the future is that the warmest regions of the world are not immune to further heating,” commented co-author Werner Aeschbach, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany. Of course, it all comes down to how these proxies are then used to guesstimate the effect of CO2 (while ignoring the effect of every other climate variable). Don’t get the idea that I’m 100% sold on the deep cold and the new proxy. It’s not confidence building when researchers announce results in terms of CO2 when they didn’t have to. Confirmation bias? Would you like more circular reasoning with those green colored glasses?Thanks to obsessive Government funding, the point of every new proxy is to recalculate the “climate sensitivity” of CO2, never to test the climate models, or calculate the effect of the sun, the moon or the effect of space weather on Earth. But they effectively are using a model to find a number that “shows models are right”. If solar-magnetic-wind-or-cosmic-factors affect the climate, the models (and researchers) are oblivious. Instead of finding “the sun did it” they will auto-attribute most of the Sun’s driving force to CO2 instead, because the models assume all those solar effects have zero effect on Earth’s weather. And because the magic stardust of CO2 will always explain all the gaps, researchers will never find out how much influence the solar factors have because they aren’t looking. Keep reading → May 16th, 2021 | Tags: Glaciers, Global Temperatures (last 2000 yrs), Ice Age, Ice Cores, Paleoclimate | Category: Cryosphere, Geology, Global Warming, Holocene, Paleolithic | Print This Post | | … This week a mild Coronal Mass Ejection off the sun blasted past Earth. It was only a mild CME with solar winds at 500km per second, which is a medium kind of speed. The experts were all predicting a G1 class Geomagnetic storm, and were a bit astonished when we got much bigger G3 storm instead. (NOAA’s G scale runs from G1 up to G5). This occurred near the minimum weak point of the solar cycle, and we’re going to get much bigger blasts as Cycle 25 ramps up. But if mild CMEs can rattle the Earth’s magnetic field this much, things might get much more exciting when moderate or strong CME’s shake the cage. Satellites and networks could be in trouble. “Grid’s Away”… Is Earths magnetic field weaker or more vulnerable than we thought? How could we miss that? As Cap Allon of Electroverse said: “Nobody saw the KP Index hitting 7. …when I say nobody, I mean nobody predicted this: not NASA, NOAA, ESA or IPS in Australia.” It was not dense, and the filament released was hardly cause for concern. “There is absolutely nothing in the history of space weather that advises the expectation of a strong geomagnetic storm off a mild CME produced by the eruption of a small plasma filament,” says Ben Davidson of SpaceWeatherNews.com. What happens when the next one hits on the heels of a coronal hole stream? Or if the filament was bigger? What happens when that X-class solar flare is launched in our direction? Keep reading → May 14th, 2021 | Tags: Magnetic Field, Solar Flares, Solar-Magnetic | Category: Astronomy, The Sun | Print This Post | | In 2020, the WHO did not protect even one country, but now says they just need more money and more power. The WHO should be disbanded, it failed at the one most important job it was set up to do — stop pandemics. It’s only a year too late, but the WHO is finally telling people they could avoid deadly pandemics. A new report is out, with former New Zealand PM Helen Clark admitting only that the World Health Organisation was a week too late in calling it an emergency. After that tiny mini-culpa, then she blames slow nations for “wasting the month of February”. Though Clark seems to have forgotten the same stupid nations were all following WHO’s advice at the time. This is what failure looks like — Tedros, the WHO Director General on Jan 29, last year When he could have saved the world, he was being a one man Xi Jinping fan club. Listen to this shameless rave: …Tedros said it is admirable that the Chinese government has shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic. President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability, Tedros said. He said that China has released information in an open and transparent manner, identified the pathogen in a record-short time and shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in a timely manner with the WHO and other countries. China’s measures are not only protecting its people, but also protecting the people in the whole world, he said.  Tedros Adhanom So the WHO was the main enabler of bioweaponsThe West wastes $5 billion dollars every year on an organization so corrupt it has been captured and turned into a Chinese advertising agency that directly works against the interests of the Western nations that fund it. Here’s Helen Clark, forgetting: “The WHO didn’t get enough information quickly enough. “ If only they had a twitter account, they could have seen the carnage live? “So many delays but we also looked in our report at the month of February when most countries took a wait and see approach rather than aggressively moving to either keep the disease out or contain the spread and that proved to be very, very harmful as well.” As it is, Helen Clark has 1,000 words on the ABC and doesn’t say “border” once. And Leigh Sales helps her get away with it. Admitting they failed (a tiny bit) is only a tool they use to demand more moneyWHO ‘needs more powers’ says independent panel co-chair Helen Clark For the world to prevent the next crisis, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response recommends a more independent World Health Organization, a new council that would maintain a political commitment to pandemic preparedness and response, and a financing facility that can disburse $50-$100 billion at short notice. Tedros is up for re-election and wants another five years to cover up for China. As I said on Feb 1, there were $13b reasons why Tedros went out of his way to praise President Xi of China… Follow the chain, or rather the Belt and RoadThe WHO Director General is Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia. From 2012 – 2016 he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the one party government that rules Ethiopia. This is the same party that borrowed billions from China to build a railway line, then struggles to pay it back. In Africa, Ethiopia is the second largest debtor nation to China — owing $13 billion. As Foreign Minister Adhanom praised China for African loans, looks like he was the man to line them up. We also note that the one-party ruling party of Ethiopia is called the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front which was once a Marxist Lenninist far left group — labels it dropped after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Thanks Maurice for these tips). A million people signed a petition to sack him but he’s still there. Give us our money back!
TdeF in comments: It’s time to “Defund the UN”If Democrats can demand the disbanding (defunding) of the police force and ICE for immigration, surely the world can demand the defunding of the massive so called United Nations. It has metastasized into an another evil group seeking world domination, as has the EU. We need UNEXIT. The only thing which should remain is the Security Council. The other 80,000 people can go home. Including Helen Clarke and the other Carbon Tax queens. …
Surely the UK government must be working out that electricity supply is a major tool for foreign disputes. Currently about 10% of the UK electricity comes in via undersea cables*, but that is set to rise to 25%, according to the Daily Mail. Surely alarms are ringing? This is not even the first time this outrageous threat was made. Macron himself threatened it last October too. See “Hands Up! Your money or your Fish!“ There is a very uneasy power balance here: The right to fish in British waters is worth about 650 million euros to EU fishermen, but European energy markets were worth up to £2.3 billion for the UK. Not only does it leave the UK in a weaker negotiation position, but a selfish foreign player could also ambiguously twist the knife with well timed, deniable, cable accidents costing millions of dollars and wreaking havoc. A blackout in 2017 left many travellers trapped in underground train systems for hours, with many resorting to mobile phone “torches” to find their way out. Chaos. Smart political players lecture gullible patsies on setting “net zero” targets to change the weather, while making sure they use nuclear power or just repeatedly fail to meet their own targets. In this case both leaders are playing a popular vote-winning card for their domestic audiences. There is a lot of puffery theater going on. But underneath that are very real vulnerabilities that will matter when things unravel due to pandemics, wars or economic crashes. Who knows, what if a third party submarine decided to target those cables? Could they get away with that in the Channel? Greater military minds than I will know more about what’s possible with submarines in the Channel — remembering that it doesn’t need to be a big sub to damage a power cable, or perhaps, even a sub. How about fishing boats, anchors or divers? h/t GWPF UK faces electric shock: Jersey fishermen row shows our reliance on Europe for power could land us in big trouble, expert warnsby Harriet Line, UK Daily Mail Tony Lodge, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said the UK is setting itself up for ‘almighty trouble’ by the end of the decade. He warned that Britain is offshoring its energy security and emissions to Europe, leaving it vulnerable if the Continent’s surplus of power is reduced. On Tuesday French maritime minister Annick Girardin said Paris would cut off electricity to Jersey – which gets 95 per cent of its power supply from France – if the dispute was not resolved. Mr Lodge yesterday said this had ‘inadvertently exposed’ the ‘very dangerous’ threat of being too reliant on a foreign supplier.
Shutting off electricity to a foreign country is nothing short of international gangsterism. The very idea of it shames a great democratic nation such as France. It would be a hostile act that would put lives in danger. Without electricity, Jersey’s hospitals and many other vital services would be impaired. *The UK Daily Mail said “8%” but last October the Times said 10% with a lot more detail. Half of the total incoming supply is from France.
 … We already knew the CCP were acting guilty, destroying all the samples and telling us it was like the flu when it wasn’t. They were blocking it from flying around inside China, but exporting it internationally. Sharri Markson, at The Australian, has received documents from the US State Department showing that in 2015 Chinese Military scientists were chatting and strategizing in fairly malevolent ways, about how useful bioweapons could be. As far as weapons-of-mass-destruction go, bioweapons are as cheap as chips, could overrun hospitals, strike fear into the hearts of soldiers and people, and wreak chaos on the economy. Tick, Tick and Tick. These weapons are self replicating, as long we feed them new bodies. Think of them as like miniature F-111s that can disassemble the enemy infrastructure and turn our ploughshares into their F-111s so to speak.  Image: Scientific Animations The question for the last year, was not so much whether it was a man-made creation, but whether it was released deliberately or not. To that end, we don’t know, but if a hostile state was going to release it deliberately, you’d think they would aim for somewhere other than “next door” to the virology lab it was created in. That military chiefs may have been discussing this is not unusual. Probably teams in every major nation have run wargame scenarios with coronaviruses as bioweapons — the thing that makes this different is that it can be traced to people at or near the top, and no one appears to be pretending to be a good global citizen. It’s all in the phrasing… Chinese military scientists discussed weaponising SARS coronavirusesThe Australian Chinese military scientists held talks on bio-weapon benefitsThe paper describes SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons” and says they can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”. Titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bio-weapons, the document outlines China’s progress in the research field of bio-warfare, saying a third world war would be fought using biological weapons. It’s a bargain WMD: … bio-weapons could be mass-produced at 0.05 per cent of the cost of traditional weapons when compared to the cost per square kilometre of damage. The study also examines the optimum conditions under which to release a bioweapon. “Bioweapon attacks are best conducted during dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather because intense sunlight can damage the pathogens,” it states. “Biological agents should be released during dry weather. Rain or snow can cause the aerosol particles to precipitate. “A stable wind direction is desirable so that the aerosol can float into the target area.” There were 18 authors, and one Xu Dezhong, a top level scientist was reporting to the top honks of the CCP, especially during the first SARS outbreak. Curiously, he thought the first SARS was a bioweapon and one of his 50PhD’s wrote a thesis on that. In a chilling echo of many states’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors note that the release of a bio-weapon could have secondary effects by placing enormous burdens on a country’s healthcare system. Using the example of an attack on a city of five million with 10 per cent of the population requiring hospitalisation, the document notes it could “cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse”. Some of China’s senior public health and military figures are listed among the 18 authors of the document, including the former deputy director of China’s Bureau of Epidemic Prevention, Li Feng. Ten of the authors are scientists and weapons experts affiliated with the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, ranked “very high-risk” for its level of defence research, including its work on medical and psychological sciences, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Defence Universities Tracker. Whatever we do, don’t let Tedros or the WHO run the “investigation”:World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has previously said there needs to be further investigation into the possibility of a lab accident in Wuhan, criticising his own team’s inquiry — that claimed a lab leak was unlikely — for not being thorough or extensive. Tedros could have saved the world but worked for President Xi instead. As I reported on Feb 2 last year, this is the WHO Chief who told us to keep the borders open so the virus could infect the world. As I reported on Feb 4 this is the same man who was Foreign Minister of Ethiopia around the same time that nation became the largest African Belt and Road debtor. Tedros is probably angling to run the second WHO investigation just to keep control of the process, stop other investigations and create another whitewash. Right now, the rest of the world needs to form the G199 or something “Everyone but China”The world needs to band together to stop China getting away with anything, and to get it to behave like a good global citizen. Sharri Markson has written a whole book — What Really Happened in Wuhan, soon to be released. It’s not clear why an Australian journalist got the info before US ones, but given the US had a role in setting up the lab at Wuhan, and US journalists have religious objections to discussing anything that might show Donald Trump in a good light (especially at the expense of the Guru-Fauci), it may have been easier to release in Australia. There is some small consolation in knowing that if the CCP accidentally let this cat out of the bag, it will only help the West get ready for the next one. h/t to GlenM
May 12th, 2021 | Tags: Bioweapon, China, Coronavirus, Virus | Category: China, Microbiology, war | Print This Post | | … UPDATED: See below The Western World has mostly succeeded in reducing emissions by shifting their emissions to factories in developing nations. In industries like Steel, Cement and Plastic as much as 20 – 50% of all production has gone overseas. All this was achieved in just 20 years or so…  … In the game of emissions reductions the West will become irrelevant (and in so many other ways too): …The even more important and larger question: even if the US succeeds, what about everyone else? Over the last 25 years, the developed world shifted much of its carbon-intensive manufacturing of steel, cement, ammonia and plastics to the developing world. As a result, developing world adoption of wind, solar, storage and nuclear power may end up being the primary determinant of future global emissions outcomes. That has certainly been the case over the last decade: Europe and Japan reduced primary energy use by 4%-6% but developing world increases were 6x higher than their reductions –Michael Cembalist, JP Morgan Annual Energy Paper
UPDATE: David Wojick makes the good point that some of shift is due to an increase in China for China’s own use, as opposed to a loss in the West. But the shift is still real (perhaps less so in the US compared to countries which “decarbonised” without the benefit of massive shale gas production). Consider steel production from the Yearbooks of WorldSteel from 1998 to 2019 . Despite populations growing over that 20 year period, Australia produces 40% less steel, the UK production fell 60%, Canada fell 17%, France fell 36%, USA produces 12% less steel, and Germany 14% less. The nations that adopted some of the highest UN carbon fashion stakes also suffered the greatest losses. China’s steel production grew 1000%. The Australian population has grown 30% since 1998. US population has grown 20% (and unknown others?). China’s has grown about 17%. Patterns of energy use tell the story: here’s the shift in the last ten years. Focus on the tan colored columns in the graph below. The US has not changed, but the EU and Japan have shrunk. The blue columns are only a projection.  … After the Legacy Media, comes the Legacy Superpower. REFERENCES-Michael Cembalest, JPMorgan, 2021 Energy Review h/t Thanks to Rafe Champion at Catalaxy and Old Ozzie. I knew they were bad, but this was blistering: Big Tech’s Monopoly Creepby Napolean Linarthatos, The AmericanConservative … generations that come after us will have the opportunity to wonder how on earth we had been duped for so long and so pathetically by a few Big Tech monopolists, how it was possible to have such a grand accumulation of power and wealth preserved by a system so bluntly corrupt in its modus operandi. In October 2020, the House Antitrust Subcommittee issued a damning report of steamrolling corruption. It was so brazen, Amazon even sold counterfeit copies of products until the targets gave in — even big names, like Nike. The supergiant went into business against smaller companies, dumping product on the market in impossibly good offers, until it beat them, and stole their customers, and then bought them anyway. (After that customers discovered the deals were not so sweet.) Employees of Amazon even admitted they used private customer data to find market opportunities for Amazon to exploit. The situation is so rapacious now that little companies are not even bought out anymore, they are just cloned and crushed. And it’s not just Amazon. Smaller partners of Apple might find themselves suddenly competing with a new inhouse Apple product, only to also find that Apple updated the OS in ways that made the original product look faulty. In the year 2017, Facebook and Google captured “an astounding 99% of revenue growth from digital advertising in the US.” Thus, though astonishing, it is no surprise that, “due to Google and Facebook’s dominance, ‘the average growth rate for every other company in the sector was close to 0’.” It’s got to the point where startups against any flavour of the Big Tech oligarchs are so likely to fail that investors are balking, and this segment of the market is known as “the kill zone”, where few who enter survive. Killing with Counterfeits (how is this not illegal?) The Amazon abuse in question was about counterfeit PopSockets products sold on Amazon. The founder of PopSockets, David Barnett, “testified that ‘Amazon was aware that large quantities’ of counterfeit PopSockets products were selling on its platform, but that Amazon allowed the problem to continue until PopSockets agreed to spend nearly two million dollars on Amazon marketing services.” In a free market economy, Amazon would have readily apologized to PopSockets and got on with cracking down on the illegal products. But when 63 percent of the online searches for products start on Amazon, then PopSockets has to give in to what even Tony Soprano would call extortion. Basically, Bezos’s Amazon wanted a piece of the business if PopSockets wanted the problem to go away. Would you like predatory-price-wars with that?Lina Khan, recently appointed to the Federal Trade Commission, has documented the case of Quidsi, once “one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce companies.” Quidsi was very successful selling many different products through its subsidiaries, like Diapers.com. Amazon wanted to buy Quidsi back in 2009 but the founders of the company declined. It was then that Amazon used its size, reach, and financial heft to start a price war against Quidsi.
It was not long before Quidsi was sold to Amazon for $545 million. David Evans says: Obviously these are the companies we want in charge of public speech. They are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Ponder the timing: The Predatory behaviour of the Big Tech menace was laid out a month before the US election last year but at the time, as scandalous as it was, few realized the triumph of the report would be neutralized weeks later, as the Big Tech played out its election gambit, thwarting the political oppononents that threatened to break the monopoly. How prescient the headline here from October 2, 2020: Alexis Keenan
Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, told the subcommittee on Thursday that Congress, not the Supreme Court, should regulate Big Tech. “It is quintessentially a congressional job to respond to this threat,” Teachout said, calling for “significant” new legislation.
Read it all: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/big-techs-monopoly-creep/
May 9th, 2021 | Tags: Tech-Giants | Category: Big-Government, Corruption, Free markets, Social Media, USA | Print This Post | | … For five decades, experts have been predicting renewable energy would supply 20 – 50% of the US Electricity Grid. Instead it’s taken twice as long to get to one fifth of the original prediction. (And to get to that pitiful 10%, that includes Hydropower). Renewable Energy is the wordsmiths Great Hopium. The seductive temptation of “free energy” rolls on, never mind about the vast infrastructure and land it takes to capture a low density energy source. The price for “free fuel” is expensive maintenance, costly transmission, extra stability charges, and eye-bleeding storage costs (or an entire national spare grid for “back up?”).  For fifty years people have been overestimating the renewables transition. The graphs comes from the JPMorgan, Energy Review. Even back in 1970, the need for 24 hour supply and frequency stability were well known. A search online did not find a copy anywhere of Bent Sorensen’s original 1970-ish prediction, but it did find about 500 articles and nine of his books, showing that if at first you don’t succeed, you can make a career out of it. Joe Biden is also marching down Failure Boulevard: What are the odds? Globally we used to get 95% of all our energy from fossil fuels. After half a century and a trillion dollars, now that’s plummeted all the way down to … 85%. Yeah. : How is the global energy transition going? Taken together, the aggregate impact of nuclear, hydroelectric and Can any readers can find the original quotes listed in the graph above? I wonder which part of the “forward projections” failed the worst. They knew the wind and sun wouldn’t work all day, so were they depending on the birth of a Super-battery that never came? REFERENCES-Michael Cembalest, JPMorgan, 2021 Energy Review h/t Thanks to Rafe Champion at Catalaxy and Old Ozzie. May 8th, 2021 | Tags: Predictions (that went wrong), Renewable Energy | Category: Energy, Renewable, USA | Print This Post | | Evil weather-destroying equipment will be banished:  Photo Kwon Junho Victorians building new homes will be denied the choice to pick their preferred heating and cooking appliances in the hope that this will stop storms and droughts for their great grandchildren. As household prices rise, the money that could have been used for holidays, health, or education will be used to enrich a few corporations and make a small percentage of the population feel important and calmer. If only the low carbon revolution was clean, green and cheap, no one would have to ban anything. Suffer the children: Push to turn off gas to help reach state’s climate goalTom Cowie and Nick O’Malley, The Age Gas appliances including heaters, hot water services and cooktops would be phased out under a proposed moratorium on new gas connections to Victorian households to help the state achieve its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by up to 50 per cent. Victorians are the nation’s biggest users of natural gas for heating, hot water and cooking due to the state’s historically cheap and plentiful supply piped in from Bass Strait since the 1970s. But the state may need to cut back on gas if it is to meet its climate goal, announced on Sunday, to reduce greenhouse pollution by 28 to 33 per cent of 2005 levels by 2025, and 45 to 50 per cent by 2030. “I love cooking on gas too, but there are certain luxuries that we are going to have to abandon if we are serious about climate change,” City of Yarra mayor Gabrielle de Vietri said. Even though unreliable energy will “theoretically” fill that void (and raise those prices), what are the odds Victoria will just have to build new gas plants to make electricity? Instead of piping gas to homes and burning it there, gas will be burned at distant plants and converted to electricity, which will be transported miles. First they came for Coal, and the Gas industry didn’t protest… Keep reading → May 6th, 2021 | Tags: Fossil Fuel, Victoria | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Fossil Fuels, Free markets, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … Mutations of SARS2 are roaming. Currently there are 19 million active (known) cases of Covid. Due to copying errors, mistakes are accumulating in the genes of the virus. It’s a relentless process of trial and selection. A trillion monkeys on keyboards blindly working its way around vaccines, and immune systems. To beat this, we need to understand it. Below is a map of known variants created from the samples which have had full sequences done. This is the remarkable “Nextstrain“ — an opensource tool. I have labelled a few clusters by their “country names”, (though we’re not supposed to do that. Let’s all say “WuFlu”.) The family tree of SARS-Cov-2 starts at the bottom left corner with two samples from Wuhan around Christmas 2019. This is called the 19A clade, which appears to have almost died out now, though there are still remnants left of this original virus in corners like Iran and PNG. Otherwise, the Wuhan 19A virus has been superseded by its children. The branches and time marches to the right. The code for one full virus is 29,000 bases long and as best as I can tell, all the dots on the branches have been sequenced in full. At the Nextstrain page you can mouseover and click on every point to find out which lab and town the sample came from, and which mutations it has. Be aware the “tree” above is heavily shaped by the nations doing the most testing and sequencing. Australian labs pop up often, sampling the cases flying into airport quarantine. But India has done very little sequencing and Mexico even less. Some African nations have virtually none. So there will be thousands of invisible branches and strains that we can’t see above, because no one has tested them. The only reasons the Indian and Brazillian variants are not branching as much as the UK variant is because those variants haven’t yet dominated countries which do a lot of sequencing. That not-so-fortunately is about to change as smart wealthy countries have, daftly, let these variants in. The UK variant has spread farThese graphs below on the Nextstrain Covariants by country page show the predominance of each variant. The UK variant is marked as an orangish brown. It was first noticed in October last year, but within a few months was responsible for nearly every infection in the UK. Similarly, throughout the European lands the takeover is almost complete. The US is a different cauldron. There, the pink zone is successfully competing with it in the USA graph is the Californian “484K” variant. But starting to spread are both the #P1 Brazillian variant and the Indian ones. But the strains that will dominate in just a few months time may be invisible now. It’s an arms race The graphs below show that the newer faster-spreading variants usually wipe out the older slower ones. Partly this is because a new strain brings a new wave, and as infections rise (not shown in these graphs) the proportion of older strains is squeezed out. But in the end the faster-spreading arrivals breach the previous norms for quarantine, restrictions, and hospital care. After new cases rise rapidly and set off alarms, governments and citizens inevitably raise their own level of response. The new stricter restrictions, by default, then wipe out the old slower variants. Obviously, some combination of restrictions, masks, isolation and lockdowns work — starving the old variants out of existence by depriving them of new bodies, but at great expense. The cheapest restrictions, of course, start at the border. (Just stop the flights!) A hard border means almost no need to lockdown. It also means no new mutants arise within that country.  The UK variant has taken over nearly everywhere in Europe. The grey background were the unknown variants.
It’s barely visible above — but seeping into the latest UK data (top left graph above) is a tiny barely visible, green wedge. This is the ominous strain from India. In India, the new double mutants are growing rapidly, but despite the catastrophe unfolding, they’re still only half of all the samples. Most of the variants in India are “grey”. Not known.  Indian new variants of covid (green). The Indian variant has arrived in South Korea. See how fast it is growing.  … To appreciate how much data is held in this system, here’s the information for one “dot” in the orange section growing from the “UK Variant” branch. A 41 year old man was diagnosed in Raipur India, 3 to 7 days ago. His sample was sequenced with a full list of mutations. (To see this, mouseover a dot, then click inside the black small data box to see the larger more detailed one. Or not. It’s a nerdy thing. But you will be able to appreciate just how far and fast these versions are travelling.) You can, if the urge takes you, trace the branches and see how often the strains are leaping borders. Even if you are a data nerd, and not a Covid one, the Nextstrain system is impressive. The data can also be sliced by country, by region, by strain and by mutation. Scroll down — agog. Click particular strains in the legend to clear the clutter out.  … Things we know The virus exists. PCR is useful. The virus has been sequenced in full many times. Symptoms and transmissibility are linked to different variants. Never before has the world had live data like this. Yet we still need more. There is almost no data from so many countries that matter. The variants are coming — as long as people are getting infected somewhere, this virus is adapting. New variants may well throw a spanner in the works of vaccine programs, and natural immunity. Herd immunity to a virus that no longer exists may not be useful, and in some cases can be a disadvantage. Eliminating the virus stops the mutations arising. Vaccination will slow the development of new mutations locally, but once they arise it will select for viruses that escape the vaccination. PCR looks, smells and acts like a useful test. The PCR test is used to sequence viruses (and to do legal, forensic, medical and paleo-fossil studies). Like any tool, it can be overdone, abused, or faked. But the tree at the top of the page was made with a continuous branching structure and with data from hundreds of independent labs on five continents. That suggests, Occams razor style, that despite the masses of money and vested interests doing their best to skew results, that the bulk of these PCR tests and mapping would be hard to fake. Restrictions are eliminating strains: That less infectious strains are universally wiped out shows that restrictions (as expensive, ugly, and unpopular as they are) do work. If the higher restrictions were used, without the presence of the newer strains, obviously that would eliminate all versions of Covid. (See Australia, NZ etc). As the virus gets more infective and transmissible, restrictions would need to be harder and faster. Eventually a nicer strain of Covid will probably arise, one which doesn’t overwhelm hospitals. It may however become a nastier strain on the path to being kinder. Spanish flu did that and took three years. We need antivirals: The arms race means there will be an ongoing competition between our immune systems, vaccines, anti-virals and new strains. “Herd immunity” is likely only a temporary illusion. Antivirals that act on our enzymes or entry portals are more likely to work against multiple strains because our biochemical machinery isn’t changing like the virus is, and it’s much harder for the virus to find a new port of entry into our cells, or a new path to hijack. If we used antivirals as well as vaccines, we’d prevent more mutations and eliminate clusters faster. This is why it is still a rank scandal of the highest order that our public medical research dollars have not focused first on antivirals and our public health responses failed to do the most useful, cheapest restriction of all — just closing borders. Anthony Fauci should have been fired a year ago. The UN WHO is responsible for every case outside China which could have been stopped. It was obvious to anyone with microbiological training on Twitter by February 2020 that the borders should have been sealed. The WHO should be defunded immediately. It serves the CCP but fails the world. The Indian strain looks bad, it’s hard to tell how bad, the data is awful (as in, poor testing, inadequate sequencing, high positivity. What’s the actual mortality rate? Who-the-heck knows. ). The governments dilemma is the competing duty of care to people at home versus abroad. One case getting into the community could cost millions to resolve. But we owe it to citizens to find a way to get them home. I’d like to see us offer them tents near military air bases (or something!) and give them at least one path to return? It’s not five star, but it might still be better than a small apartment in Delhi. Those with better options will just wait. The desperate will be grateful to get home anyway they can. See: Nextstrain and Nextstrain Covariants by country .. |
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