Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

More News On The Progress Toward Eliminating Fossil Fuels

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | October 3, 2021

The bureaucrats of the world, particularly in the UN and developed countries, have the idea that they are going to eliminate all use of fossil fuels by somewhere around 2040-50. They have no conception of how to accomplish that, other than to order from on high that it shall occur and assume that somebody else will figure out the details. This gives the rest of us the opportunity to sit on the sidelines and observe how bureaucratic fantasy gradually runs into the brick wall of physical reality.

Back in June I covered the Report just out from Ren21 Renewables Now wherein we learned that in the ten years from 2009 to 2019, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for intermittent wind and solar power, the percent of world final energy consumption coming from fossil fuels had dropped all the way from 80.3% to 80.2%. Oh, but world final energy consumption was substantially up over that decade from about 320 to 385 exajoules, so despite all the strenuous efforts to reduce their use, in fact annual fossil fuel consumption had increased from about 260 to 310 exajoules.

And then just two weeks ago I covered the unfolding energy crisis in the UK. There, the mad rush to close coal plants and build wind turbines had left the country completely subject to just-in-time natural gas deliveries from others, particularly Russia. When a period of calm hit the North Sea wind farms, gas prices spiked by a multiple, and Britain was left closing factories and begging Russia for supply.

And there is plenty more news coming out on the same subject. Here are a couple of examples for today:

China. With the waning of the pandemic, all the rich countries of the West are back to wanting to consume lots of manufactured stuff. But of course the obsession with eliminating fossil fuels has gradually made the industrial energy supply of the rich countries more expensive and less reliable. (This is more true in Europe than in the U.S., but California and New York are doing their best to keep up.). Anyway, no problem, we’ll just get the stuff from China. So in recent months China has been in the mode of ramping up production. That will of course require much more energy. Do you think that it is going to come from wind and solar? Don’t be ridiculous. On September 27, Reuters reported that the ramp-up is causing massive energy shortages around China, and the solution is — coal. “China provincial governor urges more coal imports to resolve power shortages”:

China should work to import more coal from Russia, Indonesia and Mongolia in order to resolve supply shortages now crippling large sections of industry, said Han Jun, governor of the northeastern province of Jilin, one of the worst-hit regions. Speaking to local power firms on Monday, Han said “multiple channels” needed to be set up to guarantee coal supplies, according to the province’s official WeChat social media account. He said the province would also dispatch special teams to secure supply contracts in the neighbouring region of Inner Mongolia.

OPEC World Oil Outlook. On September 28 OPEC came out with its annual World Oil Outlook. This Report looks forward through the year 2045. It’s becoming increasingly impossible to get any straight information out of the American and European oil companies, as threats of lawsuits and regulatory actions cause them to mouth green groupthink and to pretend that they are planning to go out of business over the next couple of decades. But OPEC isn’t subject to the same pressures, so their Report is a much better indication of where knowledgeable people think things are going.

And where might that be? Here is OPEC’s chart of projected demand growth for petroleum from now to 2045:

In short, it’s continued growth in consumption all the way through 2045, albeit with the growth leveling off toward the end of the period. But basically, OPEC projects that any and all decreases in oil consumption achieved by the OECD nations (developed countries) will be offset and more by increases in the rest of the world.

OPEC also tries its hand at projections of demand for coal and natural gas over the same period. Here’s their chart of projected demand for natural gas:

It’s increases as far as the eye can see. Yes, they project that demand from the OECD countries will remain essentially flat at just under 30 mboe/d over the whole period; but meanwhile demand from the rest of the world is projected to go up dramatically from about 35 mboe/d to around 55 mboe/d.

In another chart relating to coal, they project a small decline in world demand from around 70 mboe/d today to around 60 mboe/d by 2045. Substantial declines in OECD nations will be offset by almost equivalent increases in places like India and Africa.

Do the people at OPEC know what they are talking about with these projections? I think that these figures are far more likely to be close to the mark than the fantasies coming out of the UN, where the talk is that the entire world economy will reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. For example, here is the UN’s IEA, November 17, 2019, discussing what they call a “1.5 °C scenario that does not rely on negative emissions technologies”:

This . . . [scenario] means a reduction in emissions of around 1.3 billion tonnes CO2 every year from 2018 onwards. That amount is roughly equivalent to the emissions from 15% of the world’s coal fleet or from 40% of today’s global passenger car fleet. The year by which different economies would need to hit net-zero in such a scenario would vary, but the implication for advanced economies is that they would need to reach this point in the 2040s. . . . [D]eveloping economies . . . would all need to be at net-zero by 2050.

Not happening. Do they have any idea how completely absurd this is?

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Panama police shoot targets in Arab clothing in Israel-run training course

Panama police shoot targets in Arab clothing in Israel-run training course [@PedroUnderdog09/Twitter]

MEMO | October 4, 2021

Images published on social media exposed Panama’s police officers shooting at targets dressed in traditional Arab clothing, including a headdress, during an Israeli-run training course.

The images, which caused controversy online, were published on Twitter by the National Police and the local Israeli chamber of commerce but were later deleted.

The controversy also drew criticism from the Panamanian Committee of Solidarity with Palestine, which said that the course promoted “violence and racism, so that anyone who wears a hijab or something similar can be classified as a terrorist.”

They added a request to the government in Panama to discontinue the intervention of foreign countries in training security forces.

“This training constitutes a violation of the protocols referring to the shooting courses that prohibit the use of distinctive figures of the Arab peoples as objects of hatred and persecution,” the statement said.

In response, the Panama police force issued an apology: “We are respectful of cultural, religious and ethnic differences. We regret that … a situation arose outside the nature of our mission and duty.”

The deleted Twitter posts claimed that the training was organised by the Israeli embassy in Panama

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | 5 Comments

Could the CIA be behind the leak of the Pandora Papers, given their curious lack of focus on US nationals?

By Kit Klarenberg | RT | October 4, 2021

Hailed as shedding new light on the global elite’s complex financial arrangements, the Pandora Papers pose many questions – not least where are the Americans? Are the authors unwilling to bite the hidden hand that fed them?

On October 3, the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced the leak of almost three terabytes of incriminating data on the use of offshore financial arrangements by celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members, and religious leaders the world over.

The ICIJ led what it called “the world’s largest-ever journalistic collaboration,” involving over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries, to comb through the trove of 12 million documents, dubbed the ‘Pandora Papers’.

Among other things, the data reveals the use of tax and financial secrecy havens “to purchase real estate, yachts, jets and life insurance; their use to make investments and to move money between bank accounts; estate planning and other inheritance issues; and the avoidance of taxes through complex financial schemes.” Some documents are also said to be tied to “financial crimes, including money laundering.”

While the publication of articles related to the documents’ bombshell contents is only in its early stages, the Consortium promises that the records contain “an unprecedented amount of information on so-called beneficial owners of entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota and other secrecy jurisdictions,” with over 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires named.

Despite the voluminous haul, many critics have pointed out that ICIJ maps of where these “elites and crooks” hail from and/or reside are heavily weighted towards Russia and Latin America – for example, not a single corrupt politician named is based in the US. The organization itself notes that the most significantly represented nations in the files are Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia and the UK – which seems odd, when one considers the Consortium identified over $1 billion held in US-based trusts, key instruments for tax avoidance, evasion, and money laundering.

Then again, past blockbuster releases by the ICIJ, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), its chief collaborator, have contained similarly incongruous omissions. For instance, in March 2019, the latter exposed the ‘Troika Laundromat’, through which Russian politicians, oligarchs, and criminals allegedly funnelled billions of dollars.

The OCCRP published numerous reports on the connivance, and detailed information on the many millions laundered via major Western financial institutions in the process, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase. However, not once was HSBC ever mentioned – despite the Troika having openly advertised the bank as its “agent partner,” and then-OCCRP data team head Friedrich Lindberg publicly conceding that HSBC was “incredibly prominent” in “all” of the Troika’s corrupt schemes.

The reason for this extraordinary oversight has never been adequately explained, although one possible answer could be that the OCCRP’s reporting partners on the story were the BBC and The Guardian. The former was headed by Rona Fairhead from 2014 to 2017, who also served as non-executive director of HSBC between 2004 and 2016. Meanwhile, the latter has long enjoyed a lucrative commercial relationship with the bank, which is surely vital to keeping the struggling publication’s lights on.

The April 2016 Panama Papers investigation, jointly led by the ICIJ and OCCRP, revealed how the services of Panamanian offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca had been exploited by wealthy individuals and public officials for fraud, tax evasion, and to circumvent international sanctions. The pair’s reporting, and resultant media coverage, focused heavily on high-profile individuals such as then-UK prime minister David Cameron, who profited from a Panama-based trust established by his father.

A key promoter of the Papers’ most lurid contents was billionaire Bill Browder. What the convicted fraudster, and indeed a vast number of news outlets that featured his comments about the leak, have consistently failed to acknowledge was that he himself is named in Mossack Fonseca’s papers, linked to a large number of shell companies in Cyprus used to insulate his clients from tax on vast profits he amassed for them while investing in Russia during the tumultuous 1990s, and disguise ownership of lavish properties he owns abroad.

As Browder has testified, he enjoys an intimate relationship with the OCCRP, having engaged them in his global crusade against Russia since his unceremonious ban from entering the country in 2005. Furthermore, many other mainstream outlets, including Bloomberg and the Financial Times, which he has likewise used as pawns in his Russophobic propaganda blitz, have reportedly declined to publish stories about his dubious financial dealings.

Such evident reluctance to bite the hand that feeds could well explain why the Pandora Papers appear largely silent on the offshore dealings of wealthy US nationals and US-based individuals.

Take for instance the fortunes of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and investor George Soros, which reportedly total at least $11.6 billion and $7.5 billion respectively – no information implicating them in any questionable scheme has yet been unearthed. It may not be a coincidence that both provide funding to the ICIJ and OCCRP via their highly controversial Luminate and Open Society ‘philanthropic’ enterprises.

The OCCRP’s roll call of financiers offers other reasons for concern – nestled among them are the National Endowment for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development, both of which avowedly serve to further US national security interests, and have been embroiled in numerous military and intelligence operations to destabilize and displace foreign “enemy” governments since their very inception. Moreover, though, there are disturbing indications that the OCCRP itself was created by Washington for this very purpose.

In June, a White House press conference was convened on the subject of “the fight against corruption.” Over the course of proceedings, a nameless “senior administration official” announced that the US government would place “the anti-corruption plight at the center of its foreign policy,” and wished to “prioritize this work across the board.”

They went on to state the precise dimensions of this anti-corruption push “[remained] to be seen,” but it was expected that “components of the intelligence community,” including the director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, would be key players therein.

Their activities would supplement existing, ongoing US efforts to “identify corruption where it’s happening and take appropriate policy responses,” by “[bolstering] other actors” such as “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” already receiving support from Washington.

“We’ll be looking at what more we can do on that front… There are lines of assistance that have jump-started [investigative] journalism organizations,” they stated. “What comes to my mind most immediately is OCCRP, as well as foreign assistance that goes to NGOs.”

These illuminating words, completely ignored at the time by Western news outlets, have gained an even eerier resonance in light of recent developments. Indeed, they seem to establish a blueprint for precisely what has transpired, courtesy of the OCCRP, the very organization it “jump-started” and financially supports to this day.

For its part, the media merely state that the ICIJ “obtained” the documents, their ultimate source unspecified. As such, it’s only reasonable to ask – is the CIA behind the release of the Pandora Papers?

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. 

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment

436 Randomly Generated ‘Peer Reviewed’ Papers Published by Springer Nature

By Mike Hearn  • The Daily Sceptic • October 3, 2021

The publisher Springer Nature has released an “expression of concern” for more than four hundred papers they published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. All these papers supposedly passed through both peer review and editorial control, yet no expertise in geoscience is required to notice the problem:

The paper can’t decide if it’s about organic pollutants or the beauty of Latin dancing, and switches instantly from one to the other half way through the abstract.

The publisher claims this went through about two months of review, during which time the editors proved their value by assigning it helpful keywords:

If you’re intrigued by this fusion of environmental science and fun hobbies, you’ll be overjoyed to learn that the full article will only cost you about £30 and there are many more available if that one doesn’t take your fancy, e.g.

Background

Peer-reviewed science is the type of evidence policymakers respect most. Nonetheless, a frequent topic on this site is scientific reports containing errors so basic that any layman can spot them immediately, leading to the question of whether anyone actually read the papers before publication. An example is the recent article by Imperial College London, published in Nature Scientific Reports, in which the first sentence was a factually false claim about public statistics.

Evidence is now accruing that it’s indeed possible for “peer reviewed” scientific papers to be published which have not only never been reviewed by anybody at all, but might not have even been written by anybody, and that these papers can be published by well known firms like Springer Nature and Elsevier. In August we wrote about the phenomenon of nonsensical “tortured phrases” that indicate the usage of thesaurus-driven paper rewriting programs, probably the work of professional science forging operations called “paper mills”. Thousands of papers have been spotted using this technique; the true extent of the problem is unknown. In July, I reported on the prevalence of Photoshopped images and Chinese paper-forging efforts in the medical literature. Papers are often found that are entirely unintelligible, for example this paper, or this one whose abstract ends by saying, “Clean the information for the preparation set for finding valuable highlights to speak to the information by relying upon the objective of the undertaking.” – a random stream of words that means nothing.

Where does this kind of text come from?

The most plausible explanation is that these papers are being auto-generated using something called a context-free grammar. The goal is probably to create the appearance of interest in the authors they cite. In academia promotions are linked to publications and citations, creating a financial incentive to engage in this sort of metric gaming. The signs are all there: inexplicable topic switches half way through sentences or paragraphs, rampant grammatical errors, the repetitive title structure, citations of real papers and so on. Another sign is the explanation the journal supplied for how it occurred: the editor claims that his email address was hacked.

In this case, something probably went wrong during the production process that caused different databases of pre-canned phrases to be mixed together incorrectly. The people generating these papers are doing it on an industrial scale, so they didn’t notice because they don’t bother reading their own output. The buyers didn’t notice – perhaps they can’t actually read English, or don’t exist. Then the journal didn’t notice because, apparently, it’s enough for just one person to get “hacked” for the journal to publish entire editions filled with nonsense. And finally none of the journal’s readers noticed either, leading to the suspicion that maybe there aren’t any.

The volunteers spotting these papers are uncovering an entire science-laundering ecosystem, hiding in plain sight.

We know randomly generated papers can get published because it’s happened hundreds of times before. Perhaps the most famous example is SCIgen, “a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations” using context-free grammars. It was created in 2005 by MIT grad students as a joke, with the aim to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence“. SCIgen papers are buzzword salads that might be convincing to someone unfamiliar with computer science, albeit only if they aren’t paying attention.

Despite this origin, in 2014 over 120 SCIgen papers were withdrawn by leading publishers like the IEEE after outsiders noticed them. In 2020 two professors of computer science observed that the problem was still occurring and wrote an automatic SCIgen detector. Although it’s only about 80% reliable, it nonetheless spotted hundreds more. Their detector is now being run across a subset of new publications and finds new papers on a regular basis.

Root cause analysis

On its face, this phenomenon is extraordinary. Why can’t journals stop themselves publishing machine-generated gibberish? It’s impossible to imagine any normal newspaper or magazine publishing thousands of pages of literally random text and then blaming IT problems for it, yet this is happening repeatedly in the world of academic publishing.

The surface level problem is that many scientific journals appear to be almost or entirely automated, including journals that have been around for decades. Once papers are submitted, the reviewing, editorial and publishing process becomes handled by computers. If the system stops working properly editors can seem oblivious – they routinely discover they published nonsense only because people who don’t even subscribe to their journal complained about it.

Strong evidence for this comes from the “fixes” journals present when put under pressure. As an explanation for why the 436 “expressions of concern” wouldn’t be repeated the publisher said:

The dedicated Research Integrity team at Springer Nature is constantly searching for any irregularities in the publication process, supported by a range of tools, including an in-house-developed detection tool.

The same firm also proudly trumpeted in a press release that:

Springer announces the release of SciDetect, a new software program that automatically checks for fake scientific papers. The open source software discovers text that has been generated with the SCIgen computer program and other fake-paper generators like Mathgen and Physgen. Springer uses the software in its production workflow to provide additional, fail-safe checking.

A different journal proposed an even more ridiculous solution: ban people from submitting papers from webmail accounts. The more obvious solution of paying people to read the articles before they get published is apparently unthinkable – the problem of fake auto-generated papers is so prevalent, and the scientific peer review process so useless, that they are resorting to these feeble attempts to automate the editing process.

Diving below the surface, the problem may be that journals face functional irrelevance in the era of search engines. Clearly nobody can be reading the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, including its own editors, yet according to an interesting essay by Prof Igor Pak “publisher’s contracts with [university] libraries require them to deliver a certain number of pages each year“. What’s in those pages? The editors don’t care because the libraries pay regardless. The librarians don’t care because the universities pay. The universities don’t care because the students and granting bodies pay. The students and granting bodies don’t care because the government pays. The government doesn’t care because the citizens pay, and the citizens DO care – when they find out about this stuff – but generally can’t do anything about it because they’re forced to pay through taxes, student loan laws and a (socially engineered) culture in which people are told they must have a degree or else they won’t be able to get a professional job.

This seems to be zombie-fying scientific publishing. Non-top tier journals live on as third party proof that some work was done, which in a centrally planned economy has value for justifying funding requests to committees. But in any sort of actual market-based economy many of them would have disappeared a long time ago.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

This week’s elections could pave way for Prague to Czech out of EU

By Paul A. Nuttall | RT | October 4, 2021

The elections in the Czech Republic later this week have largely been ignored, but the political situation in the country is not only compelling, it could have ramifications for the rest of Europe, and in particular for the EU.

Czechs go to the polls on Friday and Saturday in legislative elections that will determine who will lead the country for the next four years. These elections have been getting little attention in the international press, mainly because the focus has been on the elections taking place in Germany.

The Czech Republic has been led by a coalition government since 2017. The senior partner in the coalition is the ANO 2011 party, and its leader is the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis.

Babis’ party is described as ‘populist’. An ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, he recently attended the Demographic Summit in Budapest, where Babis and his counterparts from Poland, Serbia and Slovenia announced their intention to oppose further mass immigration in Europe.

Babis is also opposed to further EU integration and determined not to see the euro replacing the country’s current official currency, the koruna. He claims his party “will not hand over the sovereignty of the Czech Republic to the European Parliament or the European Commission.”

Recent polls put the ANO 2011 party in the lead with 27%. The main opposition parties, SPOLU (an alliance of liberals and conservatives) and the bizarrely named Pirates and Mayors party are polling around 21%. Both are committed to combining their votes in an alliance to force Babis from power.

Indeed, some commentators, who it must be said are firmly opposed to Babis’ politics, are predicting that the Czech Republic could be heading towards a constitutional crisis. However, it is expected that President Milos Zeman will use his constitutional powers to appoint the leader of the largest party as prime minister.

In all likelihood, this will be Babis, and it will give him the first opportunity to form a coalition. However, even if this is the case, he will be facing a big problem, as his current coalition partners have seen their support fall off a cliff recently.

The Social Democrats, who share power with Babis, are only polling between 4% and 6% and may not even make the 5% threshold to have candidates elected to parliament. And this puts Babis in a difficult position because, devoid of his main coalition partner, he will be forced to look elsewhere.

The ‘elsewhere’ in this case is most likely to be the Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD), which is the most Eurosceptic political party in the country and is polling around 11%. The SPD is committed to a direct democracy law that will allow citizens to force referendums, and the one the party wants most is a referendum on Czech membership of the European Union.

SPD leader Tomio Okamura has made it clear that any negotiations for his party to join a future coalition will be conditional on holding such a referendum: “One of the fundamental conditions is for the government manifesto… to include a referendum law including the possibility of a referendum on leaving the EU or potentially NATO.”

Now this places Babis in a difficult position because, although he is a Eurosceptic, he does not envisage the Czech Republic leaving the EU anytime soon. Moreover, he is opposed to the idea of citizen-led referendums, or at least he would like prohibitive barriers implemented, such as a requirement for a huge number of signatories to force a referendum.

Another problem is that a direct democracy law would require the support of a three-fifths majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. However, the upper house, which is elected for a six-year term, is dominated by a pro-EU majority.

Nevertheless, the fact that an EU referendum is on the agenda could be seen as an outlier to where the Czech Republic is eventually headed. And let us not forget, the Czechs are not alone here. Recently, there have been noises in Budapest about the need for a referendum on EU membership in Hungary.

Although largely ignored, the elections in the Czech Republic this weekend will be fascinating, but even more enthralling could be the political “horse trading” that follows – the outcome of which could have ramifications for the rest of the EU.

Paul A. Nuttall is a historian, author and a former politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 and was a prominent campaigner for Brexit.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , , | 1 Comment

Wind Power Suffers More Setbacks

By Jack Dini | Principia Scientific | October 4, 2021

The Wall Street Journal reports that wind turbine makers are facing a quadrupling of transportation costs and increases in steel, copper, aluminum and carbon fiber prices, making wind turbines ever more expensive.

Top wind turbine makers are struggling with lower earnings as rising raw material costs, problems shipping the hulking machines, and uncertainty over the future of US subsidies pressure their businesses.

In sharp contrast to claims by the renewables lobby, the costs of wind energy is not falling, empirical data shows. Despite industry claims, the building of wind farms in deeper water is costing more rather than less. (2)

Added to this, a number of locations across the US have had problems with existing wind farms.

South Dakota

A South Dakota manufacturer of wind turbine blades plant, Molded Fiber Glass (MFG) shut its doors permanently in August, sending shock waves through the local community. More than 300 workers lost their jobs, forcing locals to take a hard look at green energy proponents’ promises to provide good paying jobs for American workers. (3)

South Dakota’s prospects for becoming a bigger player in the energy sector have suffered another setback in recent months. In addition to the MFG plant closure, the Biden administration’s decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline means South Dakota and many other states will not benefit from having the now-canceled infrastructure project transport 800,000 barrels of oil a day through their states.

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

A maker of components for wind turbine blades is closing its manufacturing plant in the Lehigh Valley. The work done in the Lehigh Valley plant will be transferred to a plant the company opened two years ago in Matamoros, a city in northeastern Mexico. A memo to the employees said;

“During the past year, we have experienced challenging market conditions as the near-term market in North America has been influenced by consolidation, leading to a reduction of the blade manufacturing footprint in North America as well as reduced production at the continuing locations.” (4)

Little Rock, Arkansas

GE owned LM Wind Power closed its turbine blade plant in Little Rock, Arkansas in April 2020 in a move affecting about 460 workers. The closure of the plant was due to commercial factors, not the coronavirus pandemic. This closure is a reversal for the plant, which was the subject of an expansion program as recently as 2017. (5)

Rhode Island

Block Island wind farm off the state of Rhode Island was the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States, located 3.8 miles from Block Island in the Atlantic Ocean. Recently, four of the five Block Island’s wind turbines stopped running this summer. Islanders say the turbine blades stopped turning several weeks ago, even on windy days. David Collins suggests that there is more trouble with the turbines than anyone wants folks to know. (6)

Missouri

Ratepayers should not be on the hook to pay a return for an asset that can’t fully operate. Every night for months, turbines at Missouri’s largest wind farm sit idle to avoid killing endangered and threatened bats. And now, as the wind farm’s owner, Ameren Missouri, seeks permission to increase customers’ rates, consumer advocates are sounding the alarm. They argue customers shouldn’t have to pay the full cost of the wind farm on their bills if it’s not fully functional. And at least one fears the company won’t meet state standards for renewable energy. (7)

Ameren is currently seeking a rate increase from customers worth nearly $300 million, including costs that it hopes to recover from ratepayers. But consumer and business advocates filed testimony estimating that the wind farm is only operational about 75 percent of the year.

References

1. “Wind turbine makers struggle to profit from renewable energy boom,” wsj.com, August 24, 2021

2. “Offshore wind costs rising, not falling, data shows,” energyvoice.com, September 11, 2017

3. Bonner R. Cohen, “South Dakota wind turbine manufacturer closing its doors,” Environment & Climate News, August 2021

4. Jon Harris, “Wind energy company closing Lehigh Valley manufacturing plants, shifting work to Mexico,” June 4, 2021

5. Andrew Lee, “GE’s LM wind power to close US turbine blade factory,” rechargenews.com, April 14, 2021

6. David Collins, “The Block Island wind farm has largely shut down,” the day.com, August 7, 2021

7. Allison Kite, “Missouri’s largest wind farm isn’t running at night for fear of killing endangered animals,” missouriindependent.com, September 9, 2021

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

Twitter backtracks after censoring a mother’s obituary

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 4, 2021

Twitter’s fact-checkers appended a “misleading” alert to an obituary about a young woman who allegedly died after contracting a rare blood-clotting condition provoked by the COVID-19 vaccine.

After being accused of going so far with its censorship that it would resort to censoring an obituary, Twitter relented to the backlash and reversed the censorship.

The woman in question, Jessica Berg Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of two, died in the first week of September from Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, a rare blood disorder in which small clots grow throughout the body, damaging platelets and preventing blood from reaching key organs. According to her obituary, Wilson’s greatest life ambition was to “be the best mother possible” to her daughters Bridget and Clara.

“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat,” it read.

Kelly Bee, a Twitter user, posted Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary with the statement, “an ‘exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions,’ passed away from COVID Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia. She did not want to get vaccinated.”

However, Twitter flagged the post as “misleading” and blocked it from being replied to, shared, or liked.

The majority of critics were outraged that Twitter was censoring an obituary and they responded by urging their followers to help the tweet go viral in violation of the company’s warning. Twitter has since removed the “misleading” designation and revoked the shadowban.

Additionally, several bloggers, including Ben Domenech of The Federalist, retweeted the obituary. Ben’s tweet reads: Who @Twitter decided it was okay to say an OBITUARY is ‘misleading’ ?”

Another tweet said “Twitter is now censoring obituaries,” – posted by Sean Davis.

Furthermore, Sebastian Gorka, who worked in the Trump administration’s Department of Defense, tagged Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a tweet asking what aspect of the obituary was incorrect or “misleading.”

“Hey @jack, Jessica was healthy and died. Why are you censoring that fact as ‘misleading??” he said.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

“My name is Bill Gates, King of Kings”

Source: The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates | INTIDOMAIN 
By Richard Hugus | October 4, 2021

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

The evidence is in. Gene-manipulating injections advertised as a “vaccine for covid 19” have killed and injured many thousands of people. Instead of providing immunity to an alleged virus, the shots actually harm the immune system and turn it against us. The spike proteins created by the shots spread out to attack major organs in the body, leading to a thousand and one different health problems, including heart attacks, myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes, blood clots, spontaneous abortions, neurological disorders, depression, and death. Yet the medical establishment is urging everyone, including pregnant women and children, to get the jab. The ghost standing in as US President recently decreed that if people refuse the shot they will lose their job. This is coercion to accept a medical intervention known to be a danger to human health — a crime against humanity. Half the population of the country is now facing this coercion.

This only makes sense if we reason that the authorities want to harm us, or that there is something so important in the injection that they don’t mind harming us, as long as we get the injection. Bill Gates said early in 2020 that everyone on the planet should be “vaccinated.” Perhaps his dream was that when that is accomplished there will be no one left who will not be genetically modified (to Gates’s secret specifications) and thus no one left to hold him to account.

One of the most insidious arguments put forward by the authorities is that we are facing a health crisis so serious that individual freedom must be sacrificed for the common good, and therefore no one has a moral right to refuse the Frankenshot. This argument quickly comes down to whether human beings have inalienable rights — rights given to us by God, which the state does not have the power to take away or overrule. To accept or reject any substance being given to us is obviously such a right. And after this we can discuss the details — that the purpose of the “vaccine” is unclear, that its contents are unknown, that it has proven harmful to thousands of people, that we were not informed of adverse effects, that natural immunity should be recognized, that tests establishing the alleged disease were fraudulent, that there is no emergency, that there are safe alternative treatments, et cetera. But if we understand that the state is a lesser power, then we understand that it does not have the authority to order substances injected into our bodies.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

-U.S. Declaration of Independence

The cabal behind the medical tyranny we are facing doesn’t believe we have God-given rights because they don’t believe there’s a God in the first place. They apparently think that since they are billionaires, and billionaires have a lot of weight to throw around, that they can be gods. They also seem to believe there is nothing they are forbidden to do to other people because other people do not have souls — they are just biological entities evolved through random nature which the rich, by virtue of their power, are free to manipulate and improve upon. To technocrats, nothing is sacred. So it makes sense to them to risk injuring pregnant women and children and even experiment on the whole human race (beside their chosen few). Those who resist are now being segregated and punished, like Palestinians in their own land. Perhaps occupied Palestine is the oligarchs’ model for our future.

The ultimate goal may be the power that previous master-slave relationships were not able to achieve — a “read/write” capability in which the master has full surveillance power over the slaves and gives the orders for them to follow. Subtracted from the slave population, of course, will be those few billion dissidents and “useless eaters” who don’t fit in with the plan. They will be terminated. From this point of view it also follows that the genetic makeup of any living thing is just software which today’s sophisticated scientists can splice, delete, modify, or re-create as the masters see fit. From this point of view humans are no different than GM corn, soy, or cotton. GM humans can be used to bring in a nice profit as well because the masters will own their patents. Perhaps Monsanto agribusiness is another model for our future.

Taken to its logical extreme, reality itself is in the hands of our would-be masters. With proper control of the media, people can be made to believe anything, like that an illness similar to the flu is a “pandemic,” or that someone who has no symptoms of illness is actually sick, or that the unvaccinated are selfishly threatening everyone else with death, or that anyone who strays from the narrative is spreading “misinformation,” or that if someone goes into convulsions directly after getting jabbed it is not due to the poison that was just injected into them, or that a serum that injures and kills is “safe and effective.” In this world, the truth is what the powerful say it is, regardless of the facts. The powerful are a locomotive big enough to just run past any anomalies and contradictions, leaving us bewildered.

However, the ambitiousness of this insane program foretells its failure. History is full of great tyrants with grand plans who came in with spectacular fame but suddenly fell in disgrace, erased by time. The oligarchs’ main weakness is their lack of any sense of limits. Gaining some power, they then want it all. They reach too far, too soon, and expose themselves in the process. And then common humanity — always patient to a fault — finally decides to stand up and become a locomotive itself, running back over the entire plan and returning us to sanity.

If the world is going to see a great reset, it will not be the one Klaus Schwab and his Davos gangsters had in mind.

We should take heart. So much has been revealed! It’s as if the world’s worst criminals burst into the courtroom and offered up a horrendous public confession.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Another Study Links Low Vitamin D to Risk of COVID

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | October 4, 2021

Another preprint study, published September 25, 2021, shows the correlation between low vitamin D levels and the risk of getting COVID-19.

In this retrospective examination of one population study and seven clinical studies where vitamin D3 levels were measured on the day of hospitalization, researchers said, “The two datasets provide strong evidence that low D3 is a predictor rather than a side effect of the infection.”

They suggested that it may be possible to “prevent or mitigate” new COVID outbreaks by simply raising people’s vitamin D3 levels to 50 ng/ml or above. Even though they said they believe vaccination is part of the fight against COVID, they added that the ongoing evidence of the part vitamin D plays in the risk for contracting the infection is especially important because the virus continues to mutate, which challenges the effectiveness of the vaccines.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 2 Comments

New Zealand Abandons Controversial ‘Zero COVID’ Policy

But lockdowns will remain until 90% of population is vaxxed

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | October 4, 2021

New Zealand has announced it is dropping its controversial ‘zero COVID’ policy after numerous critics pointed out that such an approach to eliminating the virus was impossible.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the announcement earlier today during a press conference in which she acknowledged, “The return to zero has been extremely difficult.”

“What we have called a long tail has been more like a tentacle that has been difficult to shake,” she added, noting that the delta variant of the virus forced a change in policy.

Critics had repeatedly asked how the country expected to maintain a ‘zero COVID’ policy given the emergence of new variants of the virus and decreasing efficacy of the initial round of vaccinations.

However, with 48% of the population fully vaccinated, no return to normal is expected anytime soon given that Ardern has said 90% will need to be fully vaxxed before the lockdowns will end.

Kiwis have faced continuous lockdown measures almost as brutal as their Aussie neighbors since the beginning of the pandemic.

As we highlighted  in August, Ardern mimicked Australia’s top public health official by telling citizens, “Don’t talk to your neighbors,” after the country went into full lockdown as a result of just a single COVID case being detected.

Authorities also previously announced that they would put all coronavirus infectees and their close family members in “quarantine facilities” even if they refuse.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

“Natural Immunity” Is a Political Problem for the Regime

By Ryan McMaken – Mises Wire – 09/21/2021

Since 2020, public health technocrats and their allies among elected officials have clung to the position that absolutely every person who can possibly get a covid vaccine should get one.

Both the Mayo Clinic website and the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, for example, insist that “research has not yet shown” that people who have recovered from covid have any sort of reliable protection. Moreover, the CDC page points to a single study from Kentucky claiming that people with natural immunity are more than twice as likely to contract covid again, compared to people who have been vaccinated.

This narrative is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates are a one-size-fits-all policy insisting that virtually all adults, regardless of whether or not they’ve already had the disease, receive a covid vaccine. The official position is apparently this: nothing except the vaccine can provide any sort of resistance or immunity. So get a vaccine. No exceptions!

Health technocrats have repeatedly insisted that “the science” points unambiguously toward everyone receiving a vaccine, even to the point of pushing vaccines for children. All this in spite of the fact the risk to children from covid is far less than a dozen common daily risks, such as riding in an automobile.

The regime has attached itself closely to a vaccinate-everybody-no-matter-what policy, and a sudden u-turn would be politically problematic. So it’s no wonder there’s so little interest in the topic.

Indeed, in a September 10 interview, senior covid technocrat Anthony Fauci claimed that the matter of natural immunity was not even being discussed at government health agencies. Fauci’s response suggested that the facts of natural immunity warranted discussion at some point in the future. But the comment certainly fit the dominant regime narrative nonetheless: the facts of natural immunity don’t matter for now. Everyone should just get vaccinated:

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta asked if people who have already recovered from COVID-19 should still be required to get the vaccine.

“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” [Fauci] said Thursday on CNN. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”

Maybe someday they’ll get to talking about it.

But some physicians aren’t as obsessed with pushing vaccine mandates as Anthony Fauci, and the evidence in favor of natural immunity is becoming so undeniable that even mainstream publications are starting to admit it.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover, the dogmatic “get vaccinated” position constitutes a lack of honesty about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:

[W]e can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while still being honest about the data. In my clinical experience, I have found patients to be extremely forgiving with evolving data if you are honest and transparent with them. Yet, when asked the common question, “I’ve recovered from covid, is it absolutely essential that I get vaccinated?” many public health officials have put aside the data and responded with a synchronized “yes,” even as studies have shown that reinfections are rare and often asymptomatic or mild when they do occur.

And what are these studies? Makary continues:

More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.

The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:

The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention position about vaccinating children also dismisses the benefits of natural immunity. The Los Angeles County School District recently mandated vaccines for students ages 12 and up who want to learn in person. But young people are less likely to suffer severe or long-lasting symptoms from covid-19 than adults, and have experienced rare heart complications from the vaccines. In Israel, heart inflammation has been observed in between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 males age 16 to 24; the CDC has confirmed 854 reports nationally in people age 30 and younger who got the vaccine.

A second dose of the two-shot mRNA vaccine like that produced by Pfizer and Moderna may not even be necessary in children who had covid. Since February, Israel’s Health Ministry has been recommending that anyone, adult or adolescent, who has recovered from covid-19 receive a only single mRNA vaccine dose, instead of two. Even though the risk of severe illness during a reinfection is exceedingly low, some data has demonstrated a slight benefit to one dose in this situation. Other countries use a similar approach. The United States could adopt this strategy now as a reasonable next step in transitioning from an overly rigid to a more flexible vaccine requirement policy. For comparison, the CDC has long recommended that kids do not get the chickenpox vaccine if they had chickenpox infection in the past.

The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ  (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note that “[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…. As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59.”

And yet, the authors note this fact doesn’t appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:

The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.

This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”

But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health” officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing booster shots for everyone.

This Is Why There Should Be No Mandatory Medical Treatment

Of course, mandating vaccines—like mandating any medical treatment—would still be immoral even if we could list a dozen studies suggesting boosters are a boon and that natural immunity is no good.

What if there were twenty-five studies “proving” vaccines are better than natural immunity, but only twenty studies “proving” natural immunity is better? Would coercive vaccine mandates then suddenly be justified? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many advocates for repressive covid policies think the world should work. For these people, policy is just a matter of adding up the number of studies “proving” their side is right, and then claiming this justifies forcing mandatory medications on millions of human beings.

(It never works in reverse, of course. The fact that there’s a lot of evidence—as Makary points out—against vaccines for those who have natural immunity, the dominant narrative is nonetheless that vaccines are “necessary” and “worth it” for everybody, always and everywhere.)

In the real world, however, many medications—including these new vaccines—come with risks that must be weighed against potential benefits. These decisions can only be made at the individual level, where patients must make their own decisions about what substances to put into their own bodies. In other words, blanket policies proclaiming “everyone must receive this medical treatment immediately, or else” contradicts the realities of the uncertainties and varying risk levels that affect individuals. The facts of uncertainty and informed consent were once considered a mainstay of medical ethics—and of any political ideology that actually respects self-determination and basic human rights. Unfortunately, the philosophy of “public health” appears to be uninterested in such trivialities.

At this point, it would be embarrassing for the regime to admit what actual scientific inquiry has shown: that natural immunity is generally superior to receiving the vaccine. The regime doesn’t like to be embarrassed, and neither do the countless doctors and nurses who have long toed the regime’s political line. So expect more of the same.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Covid in Sweden: Everything on the table

Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | October 2, 2021

A group of German celebrities have started the campaign “alles auf den tisch”, which literally means “everything on the table”. It’s a reaction to the shocking lack of indepence and critical oversight that has been exhibited by journalists ever since the pandemic began. The purpose of the campaign is to break through the blinkered media narrative that exists in relation to covid, and allow a wider range of thoughts and opinions to get out.

In order to accomplish this, the celebrities have interviewed a large number of doctors and scientists who have thus far been sidelined by the mainstream media, and put the interviews up on their site allesaufdentisch.tv. The campaign appears to have been pretty effective so far, since the site crashed on launch due to the massive amount of traffic it was getting. Luckily it’s up and running again now. As a part of the campaign, I was interviewed by violinist Linus Roth. We talked about happenings in Sweden, the covid death rate, and lockdowns. The interview is short but sweet, only around twenty minutes long.

October 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , , | Leave a comment