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US warns India over Russian weapons

Samizdat | April 6, 2022

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that India’s continued purchase of Russian weapons systems is “not in their best interest,” and that there will be a “requirement” that leaders in New Delhi swap some of these systems for US and allied armaments. India is the world’s largest military importer, and counts on Russia for nearly half of its external supply of weaponry.

Austin was responding to a question from Representative Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina), who described India as a “treasured ally” of the US and “the world’s largest democracy.” What, Wilson asked Austin, could the US do to convince “Indian leaders to reject Putin and align with its natural allies of democracy?”

Austin responded that the US has “the finest weapons systems in the world,” and would offer them to New Delhi.

“We continue to work with [India] to ensure that they understand that it’s not in their … best interest to continue to invest in Russian equipment,” Austin told the members of the House Armed Services Committee. “And our requirement going forward is that they downscale the types of equipment that they’re investing in and look to invest more in the types of things that will make us continue to be compatible,” he added.

Austin is not the first US official to talk of boosting arms sales to India. Former President Donald Trump inked a $3 billion arms deal with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2020, selling India Apache helicopters and Hellfire missiles, in an apparent bid to counter China in South Asia.

Despite this boost in sales, the US remains India’s third-largest arms supplier, providing just 12% of New Delhi’s lethal imports between 2017 and 2021. France provides 27% of India’s imported weapons, while Russia provides a whopping 46%, with all figures supplied by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

This partnership dates back to the Cold War, when India, as a founding member of the Non-Aligned movement, bought weapons from the Soviets without ever entering into a formal alliance with the USSR. According to some analysts, 85% of major Indian weapons systems to this day are of Russian or Soviet origin.

These include the Indian Air Force’s Su-30, MiG-21 and MiG-29 fighter aircraft, the Indian Army’s T90MS main battle tank, and the Indian Navy’s sole aircraft carrier, the Russian-built INS Vikramaditya. Furthermore, despite intense pressure from Washington, including veiled threats of sanctions, New Delhi has pressed ahead with acquiring the Russian S-400 air defense system.

It is unclear which weapons systems Austin wants India to “downscale” its investment in, but allied purchases of the S-400 in particular have irked Washington in the past. Turkey bought the Russian system despite repeated warnings from the US, and was sanctioned and booted from the F-35 fighter program in 2019 in response.

Austin’s call to divest comes as the US pressures other world powers to back its attempts to isolate Russia following the latter’s military offensive on Ukraine. While European nations have heeded the call and sanctioned Russia – even to the detriment of their own economies – India has refused to abandon its neutral stance and has continued to trade with Russia, despite the White House’s protestations.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

‘US can’t replace Russian coal supplies to Europe’ proposed sanctions fail to pass

Samizdat | April 6, 2022

The US coal mining industry is unable to expand production to replace Russian coal on the European market, the country’s biggest exporter said on Tuesday.

The comment follows a proposal by the European Commission to impose a ban on coal imports from Russia as part of a wider package of sanctions on Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine.

“I don’t see any ability for the industry to expand production. It’s like looking at a sweet dessert that you just can’t reach,” Ernie Thrasher, chief executive officer of Xcoal Energy & Resources LLC., the US’ biggest exporter, told Bloomberg.

The US is among the world’s top five coal exporters, and sells most of its coal to India, Brazil and South Korea.

According to Thrasher, most of the US coal output has already been sold under long-term contracts and there are few spare tons to deliver to Europe. With coal being the dirtiest fossil fuel, there has been little investment in new capacity, he explained, adding that tight labor markets and supply-chain bottlenecks caused by the coronavirus pandemic would also make it difficult to deliver extra tons for export.

According to media reports, potential buyers from some EU countries have already approached Indonesia and Australia, the world’s largest thermal coal exporters. But those countries have limited capacity as well. The EU wants to move away from Russian supplies, which meet 70% of Europe’s demand for thermal coal.

Shares of US coal miners surged after the European Union announced its sanctions plan against Russia on Tuesday. Coal prices in the US have been on the rise, surpassing $100 a ton last week for the first time since 2008.

‘EU fails to agree new Russia sanctions’

EU policy makers failed to agree Wednesday on a new package of sanctions against Moscow, including a ban on Russian coal imports, Reuters reports, citing its sources. The latest round of economic restrictions was proposed by the European Commission earlier this week.

Persons familiar with the matter explained the fiasco citing “technical issues” that needed to be resolved, including on whether a coal import ban would affect existing contracts.

The sources noted that it was not clear yet how the issues will be resolved, but the EU hopes to reach a compromise at a meeting on Thursday.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Pfizer Hired 600+ People to Process Vaccine Injury Reports, Documents Reveal

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 5, 2022

Pfizer hired about 600 additional full-time employees to process adverse event reports during the three months following the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of its COVID-19 vaccine, newly released documents reveal.

According to the documents, Pfizer said, “More are joining each month with an expected total of more than 1,800 additional resources by the end of June 2021.”

The information was contained in a 10,000-page document cache released April 1 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and made public as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The latest revelations appeared in a document, “Cumulative analysis of post-authorization adverse event reports” of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, highlighting such adverse events identified through Feb. 28, 2021.

The document was previously released in November 2021, but was partially redacted. The redactions included the number of employees Pfizer hired and/or was planning to hire.

According to the unredacted document released April 1:

“Pfizer has also taken a multiple actions [sic] to help alleviate the large increase of adverse event reports. This includes significant technology enhancements, and process and workflow solutions, as well as increasing the number of data entry and case processing colleagues.

“To date, Pfizer has onboarded approximately 600 additional full-time employees (FTEs).

“More are joining each month with an expected total of more than 1,800 additional resources by the end of June 2021.”

The unredacted version also revealed the number of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses shipped worldwide between December 2020 and February 2021:

“It is estimated that approximately 126,212,580 doses of BNT162b2 [the Pfizer EUA vaccine] were shipped worldwide from the receipt of the first temporary authorisation for emergency supply on 01 December 2020 through 28 February 2021.”

The number of shipped doses previously was redacted.

Remarking upon this newly revealed information, Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender :

“The rollout of the Pfizer vaccine has led to an unprecedented number of adverse events reported — 158,000 adverse events in the first two-plus months of the rollout means that the rate of reported AE [adverse events] was approximately 1:1000, with many of the AEs graded as serious. This is based on a denominator of 125,000,000 vaccines distributed.

“It is no wonder that an army of 1,800 individuals was needed to process all of the information.”

Hooker noted the total number (1,205,755) of COVID vaccine adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 25, 2022, now eclipses the total number (930,952) of adverse events reported in the 32-year history of the database.

Dr. Madhava Setty, a board-certified anesthesiologist and senior science editor for The Defenderpreviously reported on the same Pfizer document, before the unredacted version was released.

“In that piece, I alluded to Pfizer’s admission that they needed more staff to process all of the adverse events being reported to them,” Setty said.

“It seems this document has now been updated. 600 FTEs [full-time employees]! … I wonder how many extra people the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection] has hired? Given how they are operating, I would say zero.”

Pfizer downplayed adverse reactions in request for full FDA license

The April 1 document release also included “request for priority review” — the documentation Pfizer in May 2021 submitted to the FDA for full licensure of its Comirnaty COVID vaccine.

In this document, Pfizer described its vaccine as fulfilling an “unmet medical need,” claiming:

“Mass immunization with a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 can dramatically alter the trajectory of the pandemic.

“According to policy briefing by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published on 31 March 2021, COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in the US with up to 100,000 additional deaths projected in the US between March and July 2021, many of which can likely be prevented with COVID-19 vaccination.”

Pfizer expressed “concerns” about lifting COVID-related measures, such as lockdowns, on the basis that the lifting of such restrictions would “counteract the impacts of this vaccination effort.”

The document states:

“Vaccination against COVID-19 began with EUA/conditional approvals in December 2020, in a phased rollout defined by national/regional guidance.

  • “However, there continue to be concerning trends that may counteract the impacts of this vaccination effort, including:
  • “[L]imitations in access to obtaining a vaccine due to infrastructure challenges (ie, clinic and appointment capacity and systems)
  • “[I]ncreasing viral transmission fueled by relaxed compliance with mitigations as the pandemic surpasses the 1-year mark (ie, masks, physical distancing, limiting travel)
  • “[I]ncreasing circulation of emerging variants of concern (which are currently driving continued spread of viral infection in Europe despite extensive mitigation mandates).”

Pfizer justified its request for full licensure of its COVID vaccine on the following basis:

“A vaccine program must be implemented expediently and rapidly expanded to have a significant impact on the pandemic course.

“Licensure of BNT162b2 is likely to enhance vaccine uptake by facilitating supply of vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech directly to pharmacies and healthcare providers/facilities.

“The greatest impact of BNT162b2 licensure may be direct supply to healthcare providers who serve vulnerable populations such as elderly patients and those who live in rural and underserved communities (ie, individuals who might be unable to navigate the challenges of securing vaccine access using the systems in place for EUA).

“Expansion of vaccine via licensure would ultimately improve the prospect of achieving population herd immunity to bring the pandemic under control.”

The same document glossed over the adverse effects for which the company previously admitted it hired a significant number of new employees to process, claiming:

“Based on Phase 1 data from the FIH Study BNT162-01, BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 [various vaccines tested during the trial period] were safe and well-tolerated in healthy adults 18 to 55 years of age, with no unanticipated safety findings.

“Phase 2/3 safety data were generally concordant with safety data in Phase 1 of the study, both overall and with regard to younger and older participants.”

This is despite hard figures regarding adverse reactions provided later in the document:

“Through 28 February 2021 (data lock point aligned with Pharmacovigilance Plan), there were a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events. Cases were received from 63 countries.

“Consistent with what was seen in Phase 2/3 of Study C4591001, most reported AEs were in System Organ Classes (SOCs) with reactogenicity events: general disorders and administration site conditions (51,335), nervous system disorders (25,957), musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders (17,283), and gastrointestinal disorders (14,096).

“Post-authorization data have also informed the addition of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) related to the experience of reactogenicity to the product labeling.”

Release of Pfizer vaccine documents still in progress

Many of the documents released as part of the April 1 tranche appear to include more mundane information and data related to the Pfizer COVID vaccine trials.

These documents include:

  • Peer-reviewed scientific articles funded by Pfizer-BioNTech, titled “Phase 1/2 Study of COVID-19 RNA Vaccine” (August 2020) and “Safety and Immunogenicity of Two RANA-Based Covid-19 Vaccine Candidates,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2020.These studies supported “further evaluation of this mRNA vaccine candidate” despite the apparent appearance of serious adverse effects in one of the 12 participants receiving 30 μg and 100 μg doses of the BNT162b1 candidate vaccine during the trial phase. This, however, does not appear to have been the final vaccine formulation that ultimately received an EUA.
  • questionnaire that vaccine trial participants were required to complete, along with a study book displaying the information to be collected from those participating.
  • Documents outlining the randomization scheme used for identifying vaccine trial participants and those who received doses of the vaccine or a placebo.
  • Documents listing anonymized demographic characteristics of vaccine trial participants.
  • An anonymized listing of important protocol deviations.
  • Consent forms that vaccine trial participants were asked to complete, as well as other related documents submitted by Pfizer for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, and information regarding institutions participating in the IRB process.
  • Clinical study approval forms.
  • Audit certificates for vaccine trial locations.

The next set of documents — an expected 80,000 pages — is scheduled to be released on or before May 1.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

What They Got & What We Lost

By Todd Hayen PhD | OffGuardian | April 6, 2022

Stop the party, folks, it’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she is only taking a break.

I’ve written about this premature euphoria several times, warning that we really haven’t won a thing, not even one battle, until some heads roll. And there are no rolling heads to be seen. Not even a cursory fall guy having his career destroyed due to all the blame thrown his way.

I thought at first Fauci was going to get this honour with his mysterious disappearance as a precursor to his public fall from grace. But I was wrong. He is only off somewhere private to lick his wounds, assuming he even considers himself wounded, which I rather doubt.

No, we have won no battle, not even a skirmish. The enemy just backed off a bit. We woke up one morning and they were gone. The hill we were supposedly fighting for was ours.

Really? It doesn’t seem like both sides were fighting for the same hill.

So what happened? I know I am preaching to the choir here. I think most of us have a pretty good idea what happened. The Ukraine/Russia incident makes clear the conditioning that Covid has accomplished over the population of the world.

Suddenly all of the focus shifted, suddenly a new enemy was in sight, much like enemies of old—at least an enemy we could see. It was actually quite astounding how quickly all the profile photos on Facebook changed from “I Got Vaccinated!” to the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine.

As we stand on our deserted Covid hill, waving our own flag, and wanting the enemy to at least acknowledge how clever we were to see through their lies and subterfuge we wonder where everyone has gone. “Yea!!” we shout, “we’ve won!!”

No, we haven’t, and not only have we not won, we have lost—big time. Sorry to break it to you (and like I said, I think most readers of OG know this, maybe you can share this article with all those who don’t even know we were in a fight).

It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of the things they have won, and all of the things we have lost, but I will take a stab at the ones that stand out to me. First of all I think it is important to point out the things many of us think we have won—like the rescinding of mandated mask wearing as the first example.

Most states, provinces, and even whole countries have removed mask wearing in public as a “rule, law, or regulation” or whatever you want to call it. In Canada this is true as well. However, you still must wear a mask on public transit, in medical facilities, and quite a few other places. Why? That’s a “ha ha” question. There never has been a reason why, and there isn’t now. And even as this restriction has been “removed” many people are still wearing masks—everywhere.

I am not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Canada there is quite a large percentage of people still wearing masks, even those walking outdoors, or riding alone in their cars. This is the first example of “what they got”—blind obedience to the cause, even when the cause has officially been announced as being no cause at all.

The fear was created; the high morality of “following the authority for the good of the people” has been established. A superstitious effect follows the fear—wear a mask the same way one wears a talisman to ward off evil spirits (although that is probably more effective). A blind obedient habit follows the bowing down to authority. Soon people won’t even know why they first started wearing them, it is just a thing you do, like shaking hands when you meet someone (which we no longer do).

Of course the normies will say “why not? Why is wearing a mask so difficult to do?” Need I explain why? When it is used as a form of compliance to authority, when wearing one obliterates one of the prime ways humans communicate and socialize, when it is actually medically dangerous to wear one, and when there is absolutely no reason to—then we should get rid of them as soon as we can and should never have worn them to begin with.

The powers that ought not to be have won a very effective form of blind compliance, ready to implement at full force again with a snap of a finger. Not only are people still wearing them, it will take no effort at all to get the majority of the world’s population to don them en masse again.

They have also won, and we have lost, a sense of unsubstantiated fear of our fellow humans.

Social distancing has forced us into an unconscious avoidance of other people. I have not seen much handshaking going on, or even hugging. People now avoid each other, and I doubt if most of these avoidances are even conscious. This has established a deep sense of fear and loss of trust, which again makes us all easily manipulated. It will only take small insertions in the culture through media to basically push us anywhere they want us pushed.

The breakdown of social psychology is clearly part of the agenda, and I believe they can indeed count that as a “win”—a big one. The implications of this sort of thing are unconscionable, and range from a general disconnect from human interaction to massive unrest, impatience, and lack of tolerance—more violence, road rage, disputes, and tribal dissonances, not to mention higher rates of depression, anxiety, drug use, and suicide.

If we think of Orwell’s 1984 as any sort of playbook for this agenda, we can see the foundations laid for many of the more atrocious aspects of Big Brother’s world. The idea of continuous war raging somewhere in the world is certainly in place along with the confusion of which side to be on at any given moment. The propaganda is relentless and leaves us all in a sticky syrupy mess. Hate is an all-powerful stimulator for extreme nationalism and compliance to a singular narrative.

During Covid we were trained to accept nothing but one clearly defined truth, different perspectives were not allowed, as anything with a different view was immediately labeled as “misinformation,” “fake,” and “dangerous.”

There are no “second opinions” anymore, either a source of information is in line with the mainstream, or it is simply degraded as insanity, moronic, or “anti science.” There is no grey—only black and white.

During Covid we learned, through a very conscious manipulation, that there was only one way to see truth, and that polarized thinking can apply to anything the narrative wishes to apply it to. First, “all about Covid and vaccines” now “all about Ukraine and Russia.” Two very different events in nearly every way, yet each with one mainstream view that we all must be in alignment with.

The ease of applying censorship to nearly any situation is a huge win for them. Any contrary opinion has been all but obliterated—if information is labeled “mis” by the mainstream it is blocked. Contrary ideas and opinions on social media are deleted, those who are brave enough to speak out lose their jobs and their reputations are ruined.

Once we start marching to this drum—that anything that challenges the main stream narrative is false, fake, misinformation, dangerous or “anti science”—we are quite literally walking into a totalitarian state. After Covid this sort of censorship will just be that much easier to implement, and it will be that much easier to just go along with it, or worse, advocate it.

In more subtle areas we see the foundation firmly set for other agenda items such as Central Bank Digital Currency and digital ID’s, obviously the way having been paved by the infamous “vaccine passport.” The ground they have acquired through the Covid manipulation is clear, and substantial.

Anything they wish for in the future has been normalized by the events of the past two years, any radical demand made in the future has had its path greased by these events such as travel restrictions, bank closures (as punishment for supporting any sort of protest against the main stream narrative), forced medical intervention with no substantial medical purpose or reason, restrictions on gathering, redefining words in order to fit the agenda, on and on and on.

Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go, the “powers that ought not to be” could possibly have accomplished the initial stages of ridding the world of millions of “useless eaters” through the wholesale injection of god knows what into billions of bodies.

We may be seeing only the tiny tip of the iceberg with the thousands of deaths and injuries undoubtedly caused by the “vaccines”—probably effects the makers of the injections see as a minor annoyance when the major event could very well be the deaths of millions spread out over generations (or much less!)

If true, that’s a BIG win for them!—and an equally big loss for us. There is no turning this one around, no stopping it, as it has already been done and all we can do is sit and await the results.

So we have really won nothing, and we have lost an awful lot. In many regards what they have won is really just the beginnings of the foundation of what is yet to come. No one builds a nice foundation to a house without the intention of building the rest of the house that sits upon it. Even though a concrete slab isn’t usually much to look it, it has all the preparations built into it that allow a very complex structure to sit on it. The detail of that structure is yet to be built.

I am afraid it is going to be a very big and complex house and with its eventual erection the beautiful view we used to enjoy will be blocked—a view of freedom and creativity.

These two ingredients have always been necessary to ensure a future that all humans have the right to pursue—a future of life, liberty and happiness, all things surely worth fighting for. Stay on that hill; the battle has only just begun.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

UK censorship bill tasks Big Tech with deciding when something is “illegal” or “fraudulent”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2022

The UK’s current effort to censor online speech, the Online Safety Bill, will give the government broad powers to dictate content that the tech giants have to censor and empower the police to arrest people over what they post online.

While these new powers are chilling, they are at least still tied to the UK justice system which guarantees citizens the right to a fair trial and the right to appeal.

But some provisions in the Online Safety Bill skip the police and the courts entirely and instead require the tech giants, some of which are monopolies, to act as enforcers of speech.

The bill deputizes Big Tech to seek out and prevent their users from encountering “illegal” and “fraudulent” content without any oversight from the police or the courts. This gives these powerful tech platforms the freedom to brand something illegal or fraudulent without any of the checks and balances of the justice system.

The bill also gives these tech giants additional powers that aren’t granted to police and the courts, such as the power to set their own rules around how they’ll deal with harmful content. All they have to do is state how they’ll tackle harmful content in their terms of service and then apply these provisions in their terms consistently.

These Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts each year for supposedly being harmful. With their additional powers and the threats of punishment in the Online Safety Bill, the number of censored posts is likely to be even higher if the bill comes into force.

Although the Online Safety Bill does require platforms to give users the right to appeal content takedowns, these appeals are far more centralized than the right to appeal a UK judicial decision. Under the UK justice system, citizens have the right to appeal decisions and have them reviewed by independent judges. Under the Online Safety Bill, citizens have to appeal to the tech companies that took down their content.

By deputizing Big Tech, the Online Safety Bill also creates a dystopian censorship alliance between these powerful companies and the UK government. The government can dictate its censorship requirements directly to its Big Tech enforcers without the police gathering any evidence of an alleged offense and without prosecutors gaining a conviction in a court of law or even a court order.

These provisions that skip the police and the courts and give the tech giants new enforcement powers in the UK are just one of the many aspects of the Online Safety Bill that throttles UK citizens’ civil liberties. Other provisions in the bill take aim at privacy and give large media companies benefits that aren’t afforded to regular citizens.


You can get a full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.

You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.

The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Ninety Months (and Counting) of No Warming – and Now Small Signs of Cooling

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | April 4, 2022

Another month has been added to the standstill in global temperature, according to accurate satellite measurements compiled by the University of Alabama and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer (see above). The pause is now 90 months long. In fact a small downwards movement is now discernible, since the trend measured over the last 90 months is minus-0.01°C, which equates to minus-0.14°C a century. It must be noted, however, that such small movements, although widely used by climate alarmists in the upwards direction, are within the margin of error.

As I have noted in recent articles, the Spencer data has been kicked off Google AdSense for “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s monthly satellite update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google says it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”. Agenda-driven commentators almost invariably ignore satellite data, which has consistently shown less warming than surface measurements.

Satellite temperature measurements of the atmosphere are generally considered more accurate, because they avoid the urban heat distortions common to surface measurements. It is suggested that such measurements have been pushed higher over time as stationary measuring stations are enclosed by growing urban development. For instance, temperature measurements are common at busy airports. Before the planes arrived at Chicago O’Hare, one of the world’s busiest airports, it was rural orchard fields (as indicated by its IATA code, ORD).

Interestingly, however, the global temperature standstill is starting to show up in the surface record, as measured (above) by the Met Office HadCrut database. Here we see almost no movement over the last 96 months. The 0.04°C century rise is most definitely within the margin of error! But it would seem that the Met Office is failing to discuss these significant trends. This might be considered surprising, since in the U.K. we know that local temperatures have been plateauing for some time. The average temperature in the 2010s at 9.17°C was colder than the 2000s at 9.31°C.

Writing about the latest standstill in Watts Up With That?, the journalist and former political adviser Christopher Monckton described the pause as “one of the best kept secrets” in journalism. Monckton was a former lead writer on the Evening Standard and these days rarely minces his words. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic dare not lose face over the politics of climate change, he suggested. “They cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong, that they have been fooled, and that they have needlessly and expensively ended the free market in energy supply,” he added.

Two months ago, the seven-year satellite record was still showing a tiny warming trend with the Net Zero 1.5°C target achievable in 400 years’ time. Alas, for Thermogeddonites everywhere, even that small consolation is no longer available.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Can Australian Green Hydrogen Replace Russian Gas?

By Paul Homewood |  Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 5, 2022

According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

“Look at the deal just reached between Andy Fortescue and EON to ship green hydrogen (as ammonia) from his 200 GW planned solar and wind zone in Australia to Germany. Simply amazing. This is where the world is going”

The first thing to point out is that there is no deal to ship anything. It is simply a commitment to a research and study partnership. In particular, there is no obligation at all for Fortescue to spend a penny beyond this research. [Fortescue Future Industries, FFI, is, by the way the company. Andy Forrest is its Chairman – “Andy Fortescue” does not exist!]

But is green hydrogen really the breakthrough AEP thinks?

The first thing to note is that hydrogen does not grow on trees! FFI plan to use wind and solar power in Australia to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, an expensive process which also wastes some of the energy input.

The hydrogen is then combined with nitrogen in another expensive process to produce ammonia, which is more energy dense, and thus cheaper to ship. The ammonia then has to be cracked in another expensive process to split the hydrogen out again.

It therefore goes without saying that in energy terms hydrogen is much more expensive than the electricity used in the first place.

Solar power, of course, will be relatively cheap in the deserts of Australia. The IEA carried out a detailed study on hydrogen a couple of years ago, and reckoned that green hydrogen there would cost around $2.20 per kg.

That translates to $72.60/MWh, say £55/MWh. But on top of that we need to add all of the other costs.

The current, extremely high wholesale price of gas is about 270p/therm, or £92/MWh. Even now,  green hydrogen is unlikely to offer any significant savings, once all of the other costs are added in.

But there is no reason why natural gas costs should stay as high as they are now. Historically, market prices, which have reflected the “real” costs of extraction, have been around £14/MWh.

Allowed to function freely, markets will quickly correct the current imbalance of supply and demand, and prices will fall accordingly. It clearly makes no sense at all to spend literally hundreds of millions developing a green hydrogen alternative.

Indeed if we go down this route, we are locking in the current unaffordably high prices of gas for the long term.

So why are FFI and E.ON getting into bed on this one? The answer is simple – subsidy hunting.

There is no question from a technical point of view that green hydrogen can be produced and shipped in bulk in this way. But neither FFI or E.ON, nor for that matter their bankers, are going to invest big money just in the hope that the Ukraine crisis goes on forever.

There is only one way this project will get off the ground. They will be wholly dependent on subsidies from the EU or German government. This is most likely to be in the form of Contracts for Difference, already being mooted for hydrogen production in the UK.

Such a scheme would offer a guaranteed price to FFI and E.ON, with the cost passed on to consumers.

Finally, let’s put the production numbers into perspective.

The deal talks about 5 million tonnes of hydrogen a year. That equates to 165 TWh. In comparison, the UK consumes 855 TWh a year. Europe as a whole uses close to 6000 TWh annually.

Clearly this FFI project will make no more than a dent in the overall gas market.

Finally, one last number. The FT talk of a 200 GW wind and solar zone in Australia to make this happen.

Currently the global capacity of solar power is only 707 GW, and in Australia it is a tiny 17 GW.

It seems like we will need an awful lot of solar panels, simply to replace a tiny amount of gas!

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

You’ll Miss Fossil Fuels When They’re Gone

By Alysia Finley | Wall Street Journal | April 5, 2022

Progressives may loathe oil and gas, but modern life doesn’t work without them.

What would a world without oil and gas look like? We’re getting a preview: surging prices for food and other everyday goods. Oil and natural gas aren’t needed to only generate energy. They’re also critical for an array of products including face masks, diapers and vegan leather.

Consider fertilizer, which is produced using hydrogen from natural gas (the molecule CH4). Natural gas accounts for about 75% to 90% of fertilizer production costs. Russia and Belarus are large producers, and uncertainty about sanctions has reduced their exports. But skyrocketing natural-gas prices in Europe have also pushed fertilizer producers such as Norway’s Yara and Hungary’s Nitrogenmuvek to curtail production. Some suspended operations last fall when Russia slowed natural-gas deliveries.

As a result, fertilizer prices last month hit a record. Many farmers are scaling back land in cultivation. Some say they plan to use less fertilizer, which could reduce crop yields. Others are switching from planting corn and wheat to soybeans, which require less fertilizer.

The fertilizer shortage couldn’t have come at a worse time. The war is disrupting grain shipments from Russia and Ukraine, which account for a quarter of global wheat exports. Wheat prices last month hit a record. While Americans will have to pay more for cereal and pasta, Africans could experience severe food shortages.

At the same time, food manufacturers report that the cost of plastics for containers and packaging is soaring. Plastics are made from oil and natural gas, which are in short supply globally.

Hydrocarbons known as natural-gas liquids are used as feedstock for petrochemical plants. Ethane (C2H6) is isolated from natural gas and then processed into ethylene, which is converted through a chain of chemical reactions into polyethylene—the most common plastic in use today, found in shopping bags, water bottles, catheters and even bulletproof vests.

U.S. shale fracking produced a gusher of natural-gas liquids including ethane. As a result the cost of plastic feedstock plunged and petrochemical investment exploded. Ethane prices today are about half of what they were in 2011, though they crept up this past year as demand increased. In 2018 the American Chemistry Council estimated that 333 chemical-industry projects valued at more than $200 billion had been announced since 2010.

With so much gas from shale fields, the U.S. in 2015 became the world’s top exporter of ethane, surpassing Norway. Ethane exports have increased to 508,000 barrels a day from nothing in 2013 and have become a major feedstock for petrochemical plants in Canada, China, Europe and India.

One little-appreciated fact is that some cheap plastic products imported from China are made from ethane fracked in the U.S. Overseas petrochemical plants also use the petroleum-based hydrocarbon naphtha as a feedstock. Russia is a major exporter of naphtha, but fracking has made low-cost American ethane more globally competitive.

Another common byproduct of natural-gas processing and oil refining is polypropylene. There’s a good chance you’re wearing something with polypropylene. It’s in iPhone cases, fitness apparel and female sanitary products. Early in the pandemic, Exxon Mobil tapped its petrochemical supply chain to ramp up polypropylene production for face masks.

Polypropylene is also often used in appliances, medical sutures, food containers, furniture and plastic drinking straws. Progressives in places like Seattle and San Francisco have banned single-serve plastic straws. Yet they mandated face masks, which are made from the same raw material. Surgical masks are now among the most common kinds of litter in California, especially near schools.

The inconvenient truth for progressives is that petrochemicals are ubiquitous and indispensable. Replacing oil and gas as an energy source poses enormous technological challenges. Replacing them as a product feedstock would be next to impossible. As much as progressives loathe fossil fuels, they can’t live without them. Drive an electric car or ride a bike? Streets are paved with asphalt, which is made from petroleum bitumen. The cost of asphalt, by the way, is also soaring in tandem with oil prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted how even a modest decline in the supply of oil and gas can send prices for energy and raw materials soaring. Government policies that restrict oil and gas production won’t only increase energy prices. They will raise prices and lead to shortages across the economy. Welcome to the wonderful world without oil and gas.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Proposed UK law will jail people whose speech causes “psychological harm” with “no reasonable excuse”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 5, 2022

The UK’s Online Safety Bill, a sweeping online censorship law that’s currently making its way through Parliament, will force Big Tech platforms to censor some categories of content that the government has deemed to be “harmful” and will introduce new criminal offenses for posts that are deemed to cause “harm” without a “reasonable excuse.”

The bill gives the Secretary of State new powers to brand some content as harmful and platforms that fall under the scope of the bill’s regulations have to prevent children from encountering this content and allow adults to “increase their control over harmful content.”

Not only does the badly-written Online Safety Bill base most of its censorship requirements and these new criminal offenses on the vague term harm but it also ambiguously extends beyond the idea of physical harm to the realm of what it calls “psychological” harm.

As if the definitions are not far-reaching enough, it further demands that simply the “risk” or “potential” of harm is to be treated “in the same way as references to harm.”

The examples of harm that are listed in the bill are equally ambiguous – such as; when “individuals act in a way that results in harm to themselves or that increases the likelihood of harm to themselves.”

Another badly-worded and wide-ranging example includes; “where, as a result of the content, individuals do or say something to another individual that results in harm to that other individual or that increases the likelihood of such harm (including, but not limited to, where individuals act in such a way as a result of content that is related to that other individual’s characteristics or membership of a group).”

These unclear and far-reaching definitions not only trample over the free speech rights of the British public, but also make it impossible for platforms to determine how to comply with the bill. That’s because many posts could be considered harmful under such broad and flighty definitions, especially when combined with the postmodern idea that speech can be psychologically harmful and with increasing sections of the public that expect to be coddled.

Adding to the lack of clarity, just days before the final bill was published, the UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, one of the main proponents of the bill, has contradicted the bill’s own wording.

Dorries tried to defend the bill by saying those who fear that “the Government wants to ban legal content if it ‘upsets’ or ‘offends’ someone” have a “complete misunderstanding” of the bill.

Dorries even tried to argue that some of the bill’s provisions would actually reduce the risk of platforms being pressured into removing legal content by activists “who claim that controversial content causes them psychological harm.”

However, in the era of safe spaces, the vague definitions leave the notion of determining psychological harm open to wide interpretation, likely causing platforms to play it safe and over-censor speech to avoid facing the whims of whichever government is in power.

This lack of clarity around the definition of harm also extends beyond the censorship requirements in the bill. There are two new criminal offenses in the Online Safety Bill that reference this term – a “harmful communications offence” and a “false communications offence.”

The harmful communications offense defines harm as “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress” and describes a harmful communication as intentionally sending a message to “cause harm to a likely audience,” – ominously adding; when there’s “no reasonable excuse.”

It comes with a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

The false communications offense describes a false communication as sending a message that contains “information that the person knows to be false” with the intention of causing “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” when there’s “no reasonable excuse.”

It comes with a maximum penalty of 51 weeks in prison.

The UK’s police forces are already internationally infamous for using another vague and subjective term, “hate,” to justify adding people’s podcasts and tweets to their register of over 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents.” And with these new criminal offenses outlined in the bill, the police would have the power to arrest and charge UK citizens who are accused of causing someone “psychological harm” with speech that would be legal if it was communicated offline.

The censorship requirements and new criminal offenses related to harmful content are some of the many threats to civil liberties posed by this Online Safety Bill. It also threatens privacy and gives larger media outlets special exemptions that aren’t afforded to regular UK citizens.


You can get the full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.

You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.

The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Positively False – Birth of a Heresy (2012)

Question Everything

Have we been hoodwinked by the biggest blunder in modern medical history? Positively False – Birth of a Heresy traces the challenge over the past 25 years to the scientific orthodoxy which maintains that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Joan Shenton reaches back to 1987 through her extensive archive of broadcast and non-broadcast video material and combines it with current footage. She shows how dissident scientists, journalists and activists have voiced their concerns about the way the infectious hypothesis for AIDS took over from the toxic one and highlights the impact the dogma surrounding a viral cause for AIDS has had on people’s lives.

The film travels through Africa, Europe and the United States revealing the way plague terror, financial objectives and scientific skullduggery have led to tragic examples of toxicity and death from antiviral drugs, social stigma, broken families, fear of sex, homophobia and imprisonment. Positively False – Birth of a Heresy is produced by Meditel Productions Ltd and The Immunity Resource Foundation in association with Yellow Productions.

http://immunity.org.uk

http://positivelyfalsemovie.com/

http://andireiss.wordpress.com/yellow…

April 6, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Lockdowns were not just an untested public health measure. They were a new paradigm of governance.

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | April 4, 2022

From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.

While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them.

Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968, 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lockdown entire populations. And we did not do this because it does not work. In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.

These devastating economic consequences were not the only major societal shifts ushered in by lockdowns. Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?

What emerged during lockdowns was not just a novel and untested method of trying to control a pandemic by quarantining healthy people. If we view lockdowns outside of the immediate context in which they supposedly functioned in early 2020, their real meaning comes into focus.

Changes ushered during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment “in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play,” as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This new paradigm began to emerge in the wake of September 11, 2001.

The basic features were already sketched back in 2013 in a book by Patrick Zilberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, called “Microbial Storms,” (Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013). Zilberman’s description was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.

Already in 2005, for example, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu (avian influenza) would kill 2 to 50 million people. To prevent this impending disaster, WHO made recommendations that no nation prepared to accept at the time—including population-wide lockdowns. Based upon these trends, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.

Even earlier, in 2001, Richard Hatchett, who served as a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council, was already recommending obligatory confinement of the entire population. Dr. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an influential entity coordinating global vaccine investment in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. CEPI is a brainchild of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Like many others, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war,” on the analogy to the war on terror. I confess that I took up the martial rhetoric early in the pandemic: in a March 2020 piece entitled, “Battlefield Promotions,” I issued a call to action encouraging medical students to stay involved in the covid fight after they had been sent home. While the piece had some merit, I now regret my deployment of this military metaphor, which was misguided.

A kind of overbearing medical terror was deemed necessary to deal with worst-case scenarios, whether for naturally occurring pandemics or biological weapons. Agamben summarizes the political characteristics of the emerging biosecurity paradigm:

1) measures were formulated based on possible risk in a hypothetical scenario, with data presented to promote behavior permitting management of an extreme situation; 2) “worst case” logic was adopted as a key element of political rationality; 3) a systematic organization of the entire body of citizens was required to reinforce adhesion to the institutions of government as much as possible. The intended result was a sort of super civic spirit, with imposed obligations presented as demonstrations of altruism. Under such control, citizens no longer have a right to health safety; instead, health is imposed on them as a legal obligation (biosecurity).

This is precisely the pandemic strategy we adopted in 2020. Lockdowns were formulated based on discredited worst-case-scenario modeling from the Imperial College London, which predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S.

As a consequence, the entire body of citizens, as a manifestation of civic spirit, gave up freedoms and rights that were not relinquished even by the citizens of London during the bombing of the city in World War II (London adopted curfews but never locked down). The imposition of health as a legal obligation was accepted with little resistance. Even now, for many citizens it seems not to matter that these impositions utterly failed to deliver the public health outcomes that were promised.

The full significance of what transpired over the last two years may have escaped our attention. Perhaps without realizing it, we just lived through the design and implementation of a new political paradigm—a system that was far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously done by Western nations.

Under this novel biomedical security model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy, nor the communist nations of the east, ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.

Social distancing became not just a public health practice but a political model and the new paradigm for social interactions, “with a digital matrix replacing human interaction, which by definition from now on will be regarded as fundamentally suspicious and politically ‘contagious’,” in Agamben’s words.

For the sake of health and human flourishing, this new normal should never be normalized.

April 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Amazon’s proposed employee chat app has a list of banned words: “union,” “slave labor,” and more

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 5, 2022

Amazon will not allow employees to use phrases that highlight the company’s shortcomings in a planned chat app, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The app would have an automatic filter to block terms such as “slave labor,” “union,” “pay raise,” and even “restrooms,” probably due to reports of employees using bottles instead of restrooms to meet deadlines.

A source for The Intercept said that in November, the company’s executives met to discuss plans for an employee chat app. The main feature of the app would be posts called “Shout-outs,” which would allow employees to applaud other employees for good performance.

The “Shout-outs,” would be integrated with a gamified reward system, which would allow employees to be rewarded with virtual badges and stars for achieving objectives that “add direct business value,” according to the documents.

However, the executives noted “the dark side of social media,” with the solution being to closely monitor posts to maintain a “positive community.” The head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, suggested that the app should be one-on-one, like dating apps, not forum-based like Twitter and Facebook.

The executives also agreed that the app should have an “auto bad word monitor.” The filter would flag offensive and inappropriate phrases. However, it would also prevent employees from terms that could be used to criticize the company or those that could be used to organize a union.

“With free text, we risk people writing Shout-Outs that generate negative sentiments among the viewers and the receivers,” a document summarizing the program states. “We want to lean towards being restrictive on the content that can be posted to prevent a negative associate experience.”

According to The Intercept, terms that would be banned include “Union,” “this is concerning,” “slave,” “slave labor,” “prison,” “unite,” “committee,” “restrooms,” “grievance,” and “injustice.”

“Our teams are always thinking about new ways to help employees engage with each other,” said Amazon spokesperson Barbara M. Agrait. “This particular program has not been approved yet and may change significantly or even never launch at all.

“If it does launch at some point down the road, there are no plans for many of the words you’re calling out to be screened. The only kinds of words that may be screened are ones that are offensive or harassing, which is intended to protect our team.”

April 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment