Beijing Cancels Meeting Between Chinese, US Defense Officials
Samizdat – August 5, 2022
Beijing has cancelled a meeting between Chinese and US defense officials following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that Beijing has decided to cancel bilateral working meetings between US and Chinese defense officials and halt cooperation between the two countries on maritime safety.
The Foreign Ministry also said that China temporarily suspends cooperation with the United States on issues such as repatriation of illegal migrants, judicial assistance, transnational crime, and climate change.
On August 2, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan on a trip she claimed shows the US’ unwavering commitment to the island, as Reuters put it.
Pelosi’s visit, however, was met with outrage from China, as Beijing regards the island as an inalienable part of the country.
On August 4, shortly after Pelosi’s departure from the island, China launched live fire drills in several areas around Taiwan.
The United States officially supports Mainland China’s claim to the island.
Google Censors Basic 2-Question Survey on COVID
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 4, 2022
Google denied permission to use its Google Surveys platform to publish a brief survey about people’s experiences with COVID-19 and myocarditis, according to Steve Kirsch, executive director of Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.
Kirsch on Wednesday reported the rejection, telling readers of his Substack post:
“Clearly, they don’t want anyone to know the truth. The only truth they want you to know is what the government tells you.”
Kirsch said his team put together a two-question survey, and Google rejected both questions. Here’s what Kirsch and his team tried to ask:
1. Has anyone in your household (including yourself):
a. Had COVID
b. Is now unable to work because of a COVID infection
c. Died from COVID
2. Has anyone in your household (including yourself):
a. Had the COVID vaccine
b. Had a diagnosis of myocarditis after getting the COVID vaccine
c. Died from the COVID vaccine
“Apparently, Google won’t let you ask any questions related to … COVID or the vaccines. Wow. Just wow,” Kirsch said.
Kirsch, a tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, included a screenshot of Google Surveys’ explanation for why it wouldn’t allow their survey.
According to Google Surveys, the team’s survey questions were problematic because:
“Surveys that request information related to certain medical topics or vividly describing a certain medical topic issue are a non-starter.
“In this scenario we must reserve the right to allow or not allow surveys with these topics at our sole discretion.”
Google Surveys also said the questions must be removed because questions involving “offensive, obscene, gruesome, hocking or distasteful content” are unallowed on their platform.
Questions about COVID and myocarditis deemed ‘offensive’
Google does allow its own survey data about COVID-19 on its Google Health platform.
Google Health — whose stated mission of “helping everyone, everywhere be healthier through products and services that connect and bring meaning to health information” — touts a “COVID-19 Open Data Repository.”
According to Google Health’s website, their data repository is “one of the most comprehensive collections of up-to-date COVID-19-related information to help public health professionals, researchers, policymakers and others in analyzing, understanding, and managing the virus.”
Google says the data come “from authoritative sources, gathered automatically as well as from volunteers and contributors, and is updated daily or more frequently.”
According to the website:
“We aggregate data from hundreds of data sources to ensure global representation.
-
-
- Authoritative sources (governmental, health, universities)
- General sources (news media, publications)
- Crowdsourcing (volunteers, contributors)”
-
Google Health also states: “We welcome your contributions.”
According to Google, its Google Health initiative helps “researchers and scientists in advancing the science of public health” and provides “researchers with datasets and tools they can use to discover novel insights in support of public health.”
Kirsch suggested Google wouldn’t allow his team to run their survey because it questioned the official COVID-19 government narrative.
Kirsch said:
“We already know from other surveys we’ve run that the vaccines are not safe. Disallowing such surveys is a danger to society.”
“I can’t wait for the day when I hear a Google executive admit, ‘It was a mistake to censor this information and make it difficult for the public to learn the truth about how unsafe these vaccines are.’
“Will that day ever come? Probably not.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Fairfield, Iowa.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Twitter Censors Pfizer-Injured Israeli COVID Vaccine Director
Boffin suggested that the monkeypox outbreak was connected to mRNA vaccines
Kanekoa’s Newsletter | August 3, 2022
Professor Shmuel Shapira, M.D., MPH, served as the Director General of the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) between 2013 and 2021, where he led Israel’s effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Prof. Shapira is also the founder and head of the Department of Military Medicine of the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine and IDF Medical Corps. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at Reichman University in Israel.
Shapira previously served as Deputy Director General of the Hadassah Medical Organization and as the Director of the Hebrew University Hadassah School of Public Health. He is a Full Colonel (Res.) in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served as the IDF Head of Trauma Branch.
He has published more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific articles and is the editor of Essentials of Terror Medicine, Best Practice for Medical Management of Terror Incidents, and Medical Response to Terror Threats.
Last week, Twitter censored Prof. Shapira—who was “physically injured” after his third Pfizer vaccine—and forced him to remove a post which said: “Monkey pox cases were rare for years. During the last years a single case was documented in Israel. It is well established the mRNA vaccines affect the natural immune system. A monkey pox outbreak following massive covid vaccination: *Is not a coincidence.”
Prof. Shapira, who started his Twitter account in January 2022, has grown increasingly critical of the mRNA vaccines since he first denounced the Israeli Genesis Award for being delivered to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
On January 18, 2022, Shapira said (translated from Hebrew by Google): “The Israeli Genesis Award was given to the CEO of Pfizer, so wretched. Instead of giving it to an Israeli scientist, and all this for a mediocre, short-acting vaccine that yielded Pfizer a profit of billions, a wretched and exiled one. Bourla will be appointed the King of Israel now. Let me remind you that vaccinated Israel is the fourth-leading in the number of corona patients in the world. There is a championship!”
On February 6, 2022, Shapira asked: “What grade would you give to a vaccine that people are vaccinated with three times and get sick twice (as of today)? Not to mention significant side effects[.]”
On April 9, 2022, Shapira said: “The CEO of the company, millions of whose vaccines were used in Israel for vaccination, stated in an interview with NBC that Israel serves as the world’s laboratory. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first case in history where experimental guinea pigs paid an exorbitant rate for their participation.”
On May 13, 2022, Shapira said: “I received 3 vaccinations, I was physically injured in a very significant way as many others were injured[.] And in addition, my trust in the nature of the decisions and in the processes of making them has been severely eroded. No one asked and checked. I will fight with all my might so that truthful answers regarding all decisions and not just regarding the vaccine are given[.]”
On June 7, 2022, Shapira said: “We are talking about vaccine five in two and a half years. When the vaccine is planned for the sequence from January 2020 (the great-grandfather of the great-grandfather of the current variants). A vaccine that does not prevent infection does not prevent morbidity. And it is allegedly attributed to significant side effects to say the least. Why? What is the logic? Which authority approved? And don’t say that it prevents a serious illness, no one has proven it.”
On June 8, 2022, Shapira said: “I will continue and ask why give an outdated fifth vaccine that does not prevent disease and apparently causes many significant common side effects.”
On July 5, 2022, Shapira discussed the “son of a 36-year-old Australian friend” who developed “severe ventricular arrhythmias and went into heart failure” only “days after the second Pfizer vaccine”.
“The compensation is automatic by the Australian government,” he said. “Despite the behavior of their government they admit to the connection and the phrase ‘no connection’ does not appear in the lexicon.”
On July 15, 2022, Shapira shared a chart of New South Wales COVID rates showing an increased risk of COVID infection with every new dose of the mRNA vaccine on which he commented: “According to official data from Australia the more you are injected the more likely you are to get sick as the fourth injection jumps the chance dramatically. According to this study it is supposedly an anti-vaccine at least according to what I have been taught.”
On July 18, 2022, Shapira said: “I am not anti-vaccine, I am anti-stupidity, anti-fake science, and anti-incompetent management.”
On July 28, 2022, Shapira said: “T warned me to remove the T connecting MP to C. Each day I understand better where we live and in which year.”
In other words, Twitter warned him to remove the tweet connecting monkeypox to the COVID vaccine.
On July 31, 2022, Shapira shared a link to the OpenVaers COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Reports which showed a total of 1,357,937 reports including 170,151 hospitalizations and 29,790 deaths, above which he simply commented: “Safe & Efficient”
Chief Medical Officer of Health was paid record cash bonus during height of lockdowns
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 1, 2022
During the height of lockdowns and mandates, when Albertans were fed daily fear propaganda, Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta Deena Hinshaw received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a cash bonus.
Last year, Hinshaw reportedly received $227,911 in “cash benefits,” nearly as much as her base salary of $363,634. This brings Hinshaw’s total annual earnings to over half a million at $591,545.
“The scale of the response to this unprecedented public health emergency required an extraordinary amount of additional work from the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the Vaccine Task force, the Pandemic Response Team and others, which is reflected in the recent disclosure,” explained Ministry of Health spokesperson Mark Feldbusch in an email.
As previously reported by The Counter Signal, earlier this year, Hinshaw admitted that Alberta Health Services (AHS) reported non-ICU patients as ICU patients throughout the pandemic.
“As we have been doing continual quality assurance work with our data, it was identified over time some units in some hospitals have shifted back and forth between being available for use as an ICU unit or a non-ICU unit,” Hinshaw said.
“In some of our historical data, patients admitted for COVID treatment were categorized as being in ICU when the unit they were on, in fact, had been changed back to a non-ICU unit at that time.”
In other words, the figures were wrong. The entire time that ICU numbers were used as a key point to justify lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports in Alberta, the government intentionally or unintentionally utilized eschewed data, if not outright manipulated data.
Now, it looks like misreporting figures used in a fearmongering campaign apparently made Hinshaw worthy of a taxpayer-funded bonus.
New Evidence: Fauci Imposed a Vaccine Delay that Cost Trump the Election
By Toby Rogers | July 31, 2022
I. Fauci fires Trump
Think back to July 2020. Trump and Fauci were at war with each other. Key leaders within the Trump administration, including Peter Navarro, wanted to fire Fauci. There were riots in the streets as people protested the murder of George Floyd. And new evidence shows that behind the scenes, Fauci was working to torpedo Trump’s chances for re-election.
We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block safe and effective treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in order to prolong the pandemic and create the market for Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks — which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.
This key piece of information comes from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon. Cultural capture and too many shots apparently prevent one from connecting the dots, so I will do it for him.
Most people already know the broad brush strokes of the Moderna story — they had never successfully brought a product to market before Operation Warp Speed. They were grifters — they took $25 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 to develop mRNA products that never worked and another $125 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2015 for a vaccine for Zika that also failed. But Fauci really liked these grifters and so when the pandemic began in 2020, BARDA directed $483 million to Moderna for Covid-19 vaccine development — and Moderna cut NIH in on the patents. That gave NIH and especially Fauci control over what came next.
The key paragraphs from Loftus’ WSJ essay are here:
Dr. Zaks [Chief Medical Officer for Moderna] had wanted to use a private contract research organization to run the whole trial, but NIAID officials wanted their clinical-trial network involved. Eventually, Dr. Zaks backed off, and both entities participated. “I realized we were at an impasse, and I was the embodiment of the impasse,” Dr. Zaks said.
Next, when Moderna’s 30,000-person study began enrolling volunteers in July 2020, the subjects weren’t racially diverse enough. Moncef Slaoui, who led Warp Speed’s vaccine efforts, and Dr. Fauci began holding Saturday Zoom calls with Mr. Bancel and other Moderna leaders to “help coax and advise Moderna how to get the percentage of minorities up to a reasonable level,” Dr. Fauci recalled.
Drs. Fauci and Slaoui wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment, to give time to find more people of color. Moderna executives resisted at first. “That was very tense,” Dr. Slaoui said. “Voices went up, and emotions were very high.” Moderna ultimately agreed, and the effort worked, but it cost the trial about an extra three weeks. Later, Mr. Bancel called the decision to slow enrollment “one of the hardest decisions I made this year.”
The claim that Fauci cared about racial diversity in the clinical trial is a lie. How do we know this? Later “clinical trials” for Pfizer and Moderna in kids looked at antibodies in the blood, not actual health outcomes, in only about 300 study participants. The number of people of color enrolled in those undersized trials were in the single digits (literally two or three Black participants total) — so those results were not statistically significant. Yet this did not stop authorization. It appears that Fauci’s delay tactics were designed to accomplish a different goal.
Let’s do the math:
Moderna released their preliminary results — claiming 94.5% effectiveness — on November 16, 2020.
The presidential election was less than two weeks earlier — on November 3, 2020.
Trump lost by less than 1% of the vote in 4 key swing states.
Fauci’s demand to slow down enrollment in July 2020 cost Moderna 3 weeks.
If Moderna had released their results 3 weeks earlier — on October 25, 2020, Trump would have scored a major win in the final week of the campaign and won the election.
It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.
What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which would have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 — just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favor by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.
The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the Democratic Party machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden.
As you know, the results of this criminal scheme are gruesome. The Covid-19 shots authorized right after the 2020 election have made no discernible impact on the course of the pandemic. Far more people have died of Covid-19 since the introduction of the shots under Biden than during the Trump administration when no Covid-19 shots existed. The Covid-19 shots have negative efficacy and even quadruple-dosed Biden and quadruple-dosed Fauci have contracted Covid-19, twice. These are the deadliest and most toxic shots in the history of the world.
So what started out as a grift turned into mass murder and a crime against humanity.
And now it’s happening again…
II. Pfizer and Moderna move up the release date for reformulated Covid-19 shots in the effort to help Democrats win the midterm elections
On Thursday of last week, the White House and the FDA told their favorite stenographers at the NY Times that Moderna and Pfizer are going to release their reformulated Covid-19 shots, that will completely skip clinical trials, in mid-September.
As readers of my Substack will recall, back on June 28, Pfizer said that the fastest the reformulated shots could be released was October; Moderna said “late October or November” — provided they could skip clinical trials (which of course the FDA granted because they work for Pharma). Did Pfizer and Moderna not understand their own production capabilities? How did Pfizer and Moderna suddenly speed up their production schedule by 6 weeks?
It appears that once again, the public health gatekeepers are doing politics not science. If shots go into bodies in the last two weeks of September, Democrats will claim progress against Covid during October right before the midterm elections on November 8. It’s basically the political win that these same actors denied to Trump (it’s not a public health win, as I will show below).
What’s likely driving this is that Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, CDC, and NIH all want Democrats to retain the House and Senate in order to prevent hearings into their bungling of the Covid-19 response. Of course they also want to keep the Covid-19 vaccine gravy train going as long as possible.
But, you’re surely saying to yourself, we know that these 5th dose reformulated shots are likely to cause catastrophic harms. We’re already seeing a 5% to 15% increase in all-cause mortality across the most heavily vaccinated countries as a result of non-specific effects from these shots. There are 29,790 VAERS reports of death following these shots and this is likely an underestimate by a factor of 41 (so actual death toll = 1,221,390). These reformulated shots are going to use a form of mRNA never tried before and skip clinical trials altogether, so the harms could be even worse. There also seem to be cumulative harms from these shots — the more doses, the more messed up the immune system, the more vulnerable one is to Covid and all sorts of other diseases including cancer.
So how exactly do they plan to get away with this, especially right before an election?
The same way they always get away with it — they own the media. Pfizer and Moderna will rush out press releases claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The CDC’s in-house newsletter, MMWR, will rush out articles and janky studies claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The mainstream media will dutifully report that these reformulated shots are a miracle. Meanwhile, people you know and love — coworkers, friends, neighbors, and family — will be getting injured and killed by these shots. Yet all of the stories in the news will be hosannas about the genius of Tony Fauci, Peter Marks, and the FDA. Billions of dollars of dark money from Pharma will flow into Democratic Congressional campaign coffers. If Democrats can retain the House and Senate they will reward Pfizer and Moderna by blocking any inquiry into the failed Covid-19 response. Win, win, win for Pharma. Everyone else loses.
Which brings me to my last point….
III. Republicans, you have to step up and fight for us or you will lose
Republicans thought that they could take back the House and Senate simply by not being Democrats. Most Republicans did not really fight for us, they just sat back and let Dems destroy themselves. That plan was working until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Now the Republican advantage in the generic Congressional ballot (‘which party do you prefer’) has evaporated. Pelosi has passed a range of popular bills. Manchin has fallen in line so Biden will likely get some late legislative wins. Gas prices have declined somewhat. And now it appears that Democrats, who were left for dead just weeks ago, will retain the Senate and may retain the House.
IF REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ FAILED RESPONSE TO COVID!
No more sitting back. No more making warrior mamas do all of the emotional labor for our country. If Republicans want to win they have to make it clear that they will fire, arrest, and prosecute Fauci (and all of his lieutenants) as soon at Republicans take power. Fauci funded the creation of the chimera virus, blocked access to safe and effective treatments, and inflicted deadly toxic vaccines on the entire population. Over 2 million Americans are dead as a direct result of Fauci’s corruption (1 million dead from/with Covid, over 1 million dead from the shots). If Republicans cannot be bothered to sink this two-foot putt then they don’t deserve to win. If Republicans want the votes of the 18 million single-issue medical freedom voters who decide every national election these days — that’s what they have to run on: #ArrestFauci!
What The Future Holds For Our Climate Leaders
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 28, 2022
If my posting has been a little light for the last month or so, it’s because I’ve been working on a big Report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the subject of energy storage as a means to back up electricity generation from wind and solar facilities. The Report is basically finished, and now going through an editing process. It will probably be published some time in September.
In doing the research for the Report, I have had occasion to look carefully into the plans of many countries and U.S. states that claim to be the “leaders” in climate virtue, specifically on the subject of how they intend to reach the goal of Net Zero carbon emissions from generation of electricity. These climate “leaders” include, in Europe, Germany and the UK, and in the U.S., California and New York. One would think that for any jurisdiction pursuing Net Zero ambitions, and seeking to abolish use of fossil fuels, it would be completely imperative that some energy storage solution absolutely must be found to provide back-up for the electricity system when the wind and sun are not producing. But what my research has shown is that every one of these jurisdictions seeking to be the leader toward Net Zero has given astoundingly insufficient consideration to the energy storage problem.
I previously have covered some of the more incredible deficiencies in the Net Zero planning of these places, for example in “Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?” on May 16, and “And The Winner Is, Germany!” on June 29.
The single most astounding universal failure of all jurisdictions pursuing Net Zero is the failure to pursue any sort of working prototype or demonstration project of a Net Zero electricity system before committing the entire jurisdiction to the project on the basis of a blank check to be paid by the taxpayers and ratepayers. Who has ever heard of such a thing? in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison wanted to start building central station power plants to supply electricity for his new devices like incandescent lightbulbs, he began by building a prototype facility in London under the Holborn Viaduct, and followed that with a larger demonstration plant on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan that only supplied electricity to customers within a few square blocks. Only after those had been demonstrated as successful did a larger build-out begin. Similarly, the provision of nuclear power began with small government-funded prototypes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, followed by larger demonstration projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Only in the late 1960s, twenty years into the effort and after feasibility and cost had been demonstrated, were the first large-scale commercial nuclear reactors built. No competent person would take any other approach.
But somehow our politicians have now become so filled with hubris that they think they can just order up a functioning wind/solar electricity system and assume that backup energy storage devices will magically get invented and it will all work fine and not be financially ruinous, all by some arbitrarily-ordered date in the 2030s.
Today, all the mentioned jurisdictions and many more have embarked on ambitious Net Zero plans, and yet there does not exist anywhere in the world a functioning prototype or demonstration project that has actually achieved Net Zero in electricity generation, or anything even close. Indeed, it’s worse than that. There is a fairly substantial project that set out to achieve Net Zero (although they weren’t using the term at the time, which was 2014), and has fallen remarkably short. That project is on the island of El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. El Hierro installed a collection of wind turbines and a pumped storage/hydro reservoir as back-up to great fanfare, but it struggles to achieve 50% of the electricity from the wind/storage system over the course of a year. The rest comes from a diesel generator. The system operator puts out monthly statistics (with substantial lag), typically with excited verbiage about “tons of carbon emissions saved,” without ever admitting that the system has totally failed in its original goal of getting rid of the fossil fuel piece. Instead they now have three redundant systems for providing the electricity — wind turbines, hydro reservoir and turbines, and the diesel generator — all of which must be paid for, and all to provide the same electricity that the diesel generator was fully capable of providing on its own. The cost has been calculated at about 80 euro cents per KWh, roughly 7 to 8 times average U.S. consumer rates; but the cost is largely hidden from El Hierro ratepayers by subsidies from the EU and government of Spain.
My research also covered in depth the question of how much energy storage would be needed for various jurisdictions to fully back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system without any use of fossil fuels. Credible calculations previously discussed here have included the calculation of Roger Andrews, done in 2018, that either California or Germany would require at least about 25,000 GWh of energy storage to back up a fully wind/solar generation system for a year without use of fossil fuels; and a calculation by Ken Gregory done on very similar methodology in late 2021 showing that the full U.S. (lower 48 states) would require about 250,000 GWh of storage for the same purpose. These are truly huge numbers.
Facing such requirements to reach Net Zero and banish fossil fuels from the electricity system, the plans of these jurisdictions for acquisition of storage are quite shocking. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie reported on April 11, 2022 that Germany had announced plans to acquire all of 8.91 GWh of energy storage by 2031 — a ridiculously puny amount if Germany is actually serious about Net Zero. Utility Dive reported on April 12, 2022 that New York had plans to acquire all of 6 GW of storage (likely corresponding to about 24 GWh, since the batteries are to be of the lithium-ion type that generally have capacity for four hours of discharge at full capacity). This figure is only slightly less puny than Germany’s. Another piece from Utility Dive on April 6, 2022 reported that California’s regulators had ordered utilities to acquire what would be the equivalent of about 42 GWh of storage as part of the Net Zero plans of that jurisdiction. All of these storage acquisition plans are in the range of about 0.1% to 0.2% of the storage that would actually be needed to achieve the Net Zero goal.
So what will the future of energy usage actually look like in these places as fossil fuels get phased out and wind and solar take over, with woefully insufficient energy storage to cover the intermittencies? To get an idea, let’s take another look at the Report for California put out by consultancy Energy Innovations on May 9, with the title “Achieving an Equitable and Reliable 85 Percent Clean Electricity System by 2030 in California.” Note that this in not actually Net Zero, but only 85% of same. Here are a few tidbits. First, their graphic on the nature of the transition:
We’re going to have a “paradigm shift” in “RA,” which seems to mean “Resource Adequacy.” Check out that list on the right under “clean reliability resources” — “Energy availability depends on weather.” Are you starting to get the picture now?
Read through the report until you get into pages in the mid-30s, where the subject becomes what they euphemistically call “demand response.” It’s a lot of bafflegab to make it seem oh so pleasant. Excerpt:
Demand-side measures can substitute for supply-side resources and therefore contribute to resource diversity; their increased availability hedges against the risk of deploying new clean supply-side resources too slowly (including generators and storage). For example, the technical report finds that deploying Load Shift could reduce load by 1,500 MW in the early evening hours solar output falls, hedging against battery deployment challenges such as supply chain. . . . Demand-side measures also provide complementary reliability, resiliency, and public safety benefits to supply-side solutions or imports, as they lie closest to the affected load. While centralized generators provide the bulk of our power under most system conditions, they can be rendered less effective or useless under certain disaster conditions.
This is bureaucratese meaning “we’ll turn off your electricity at random times when we feel like it.” Get ready for this, California, Germany, et al. I guess New York is on the same path too, but I have my secret escape plans ready.
Biden’s Back-to-Back COVID Diagnoses Undermine Administration’s Narrative on His Health: NYT
© AFP 2022 / MANDEL NGAN
Samizdat – 31.07.2022
Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 a second time on Saturday, just days after his announcement Wednesday that he had been given the all-clear following last week’s diagnosis.
The president’s COVID rebound case, while mild, will undermine the White House’s narrative on his health and “complicate his effort to turn his illness into a positive story,” The New York Times believes.
In its story on the president’s re-diagnosis, the liberal newspaper pointed out that the 79-year-old president, whom detractors have been attacking mercilessly over possible signs of dementia and a series of slips, falls, and flubs, has shown eagerness to display his physical prowess, “especially as he forecasts plans to run for a second term in 2024.”
Biden, the NYT recalled, showed himself working at the White House throughout his first quarantine after testing positive on July 21, and then sought to present Wednesday’s COVID all-clear as a “triumphal return to work in person.”
“Instead of the narrative of beating the virus, however, the president’s rebound case reinforces the unpleasant reality that the pandemic refuses to go away. Although the death toll has fallen dramatically, Covid-19 remains a fact of life for Americans, some of whom [mostly the vaccinated] have been infected multiple times,” the paper noted.
It added that the re-diagnosis would push back the president’s plans to travel the country to push his agenda and campaign in support of Democratic allies, who face a walloping at the upcoming November midterm elections, according to recent polling.
The NYT also questioned what impact Biden’s re-diagnosis might have on Pfizer – the pharma giant and advertising revenue moneybag that manufactures Paxlovid – the oral drug taken by Biden after his first COVID-19 diagnosis which has come under growing scrutiny for so-called “rebound” cases.
“Paxlovid rebound has become a source of debate within the scientific community and among Covid patients,” the newspaper carefully explained, admitting and that the real number of rebound cases is “likely significantly higher” than the low single digits referred to by Pfizer in its studies.
“Either way, experts stressed that Paxlovid has been notably successful in preventing more severe Covid-19 illnesses and hospitalizations,” the paper stressed, referencing the commonly used talking point in US media referring to both COVID treatments and vaccines. Previously, when studies revealed that the FDA-approved Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson jabs were subject to a “breakthrough infection” rate of 25 percent or more, particularly against Omicron variants, the pharmaceutical companies, government, and media shifted the goal posts, pointing instead to their [claimed] “protection against severe illness, hospitalization and death.”
In a video address following his re-diagnosis Saturday, President Biden, who had been double-vaxxed and double-boosted before getting COVID the first time, emphasized that he was “feeling fine,” that “everything is good,” and that he would be “working from home for the next couple days” with Commander, his German Shepherd.
Parliamentary Pizzazz
Fireworks in French Parliament as the government’s proposed legislation to extend vaccine passports and other covid restrictions was rejected by the Assembly
Resisting the Intellectual Illiteratti | July 31, 2022
The government’s Covid bill was brought to the lower house on Monday July 11th and the stormy debates started right away, lasting into late Tuesday night, amidst interrupted sessions and even a motion of censure against the government (which, sadly, fell short of the necessary votes to be successful).
The Macron government’s main aim with the Covid bill was/is to extend the use of so-called health passes for all travelers coming into and out of France, creating a sort of “border pass.” What’s interesting is that on that Monday evening, I think it was, a motion was introduced by an opposition party to cut out the entire article dealing with this provision. The article in question, Article 2, would require anyone coming into or leaving France, regardless of nationality, to show either a negative PCR test, proof of recovery or proof of injection at the border. It would also make it possible to require children (between 12 and 18, I think) to use a health/border pass for travel as well.
Unfortunately, this bold move to scrap article 2 right out of the gate fell short of the necessary votes (by only 14 votes), and the debates raged on. It was a blow to all of us, especially those of us present at the protest next to the Assemblée on the 11th, because we were all hoping that the new lot of parliamentarians would do the right thing immediately.
But then, to everyone’s surprise, just a day later the newly elected députés ended up doing just that, when Article 2 was taken out of the bill by a majority of parliamentarians in the opposition who were able to set aside their differences on this crucial issue. In subsequent votes, another article was removed, and the bill ended up passing with only the first article intact. But it is now a watered down version of what the government wanted.
As things presently stand, the state of emergency and the dictatorial powers it has conferred on the executive for the last 2.5 years will come to an end on the 31st of July 2022. In addition, health passes (rebranded as border passes) cannot be brought back for travel at the border or for any other reason. For anyone.
So not only will lockdowns, curfews and business/school closures be off the table (at least not without the parliament passing a new law), but the government won’t be allowed to issue mask mandates or set capacity limits on businesses. Those are the very positive outcomes of the vote.
On the downside, medically meaningless and invasive testing and contact tracing will continue, with the intolerable and absurd obligations and restrictions they entail becoming more and more normalized. So even if the positive developments are not to be scoffed at, the nightmare is far from over and the battle is in no way won.
The bill is now before the Senate — whose composition, unlike the lower house, has not changed — where the majority right-wing Les Républicains, who lent their support to just about every totalitarian measure that has come before them since 2020, could easily vote the 2nd article back into the bill. The text is currently being studied by a Constitutional Law Committee (about which little has been reported) and tomorrow, Wednesday July 20th, it will be debated in the Senate, with the session open to the public, so broadcast.
It has been reported on a government website that amendments have been introduced by Senators, perhaps providing for some limited return of mask mandates or the health/border pass, but what these are exactly won’t be known until tomorrow, when the debates are held.
The Macron government was up in arms over the lower house’s amputation of the second article from its precious bill and has vowed to use all legal means and pressures to get the evil parts put back in by the sénateurs. Whatever the outcome in the senate, the bill will be the subject of further discussion and another vote in the lower house, which has the final say in the legislative process. A possible wild card that the government could still use would be to claim an unacceptable deadlock between the two houses and call for the creation of a joint parliamentary committee to find some compromise.
Even if this were to happen, the lower house will still have the final word in the legislative process. However, the wheeling and dealing that takes place in such drawn-out situations tends to favor the government.
Our hope is that the momentum created from the small victory over article 2 will gather force and prove to be unstoppable. Perhaps the efforts of the heroic groups of scientists, researchers, and doctors (and the alternative media that have given them a platform) who have spoken out over the past year and challenged the official narrative have made a difference. Even the most obtuse of the parliamentarians will know by now that the injections don’t prevent transmission or infection, or that a positive PCR test is not a “case,” at least not in the way that word was used up until long-established principles of public health and basic scientific facts were subverted in 2020.
The one thing I can’t quite understand in connection with this covid bill is how the government is still getting away with maintaining the suspension of the several thousand nurses and doctors who refused to take the experimental injection last September as part of their new Orwellian conditions of employment.
Of the 15,000 who have been prevented from earning a living in the healthcare professions for the last 10 months, it is believed that perhaps up to 5,000 have pivoted to other jobs or sectors, and may never return to healthcare. But it seems that the majority of those whom the government suspended do not want to do anything else and desperately would like to return to work to help sick and injured people get better.
During a time of chronic shortages in the healthcare system in France, and in light of the aforementioned reality that the injections don’t protect patients from infection from hospital staff, one would think the government would cede ground on this critical issue and allow the sorely needed personnel to go back to work. But not only is the Macron government continuing to refuse to allow thousands of experienced doctors, nurses and orderlies back to work, it continues to get away with saying that the so-called vaccinations are necessary to protect patients.
It is maintaining this delirious position not only amidst increasingly vociferous and vehement calls by the opposition parties in the lower house to reinstate the thousands of healthcare workers but also in light of the fact, now well documented and part of the public record, that the Macron gouvernement has reduced public hospital capacity by something like 18 thousand beds over the past 5 years and that perhaps 5 thousand of these were closed during the worst months of the pandemic. At the same time the government and the MSM are working hard to ramp up fear again, warning of a coming 7th or 8th wave (I’ve lost track), once again in complete contradiction to publicly available epidemiological data. The cognitive dissonance is unprecedented.
What I’m not clear about is how Macron, through his Prime Minister and Health Minister, will be able to keep healthcare workers suspended from their jobs after the state of emergency ends on the 31st of July. I would have thought the Parliament could find some way to legislate the healthcare workers back to their jobs either before or after this date.
If an absolute majority of lawmakers from several very different parties who are usually at each other’s throats (socialists, far-leftists, right and far-right) can agree that health/border passes must not be brought back, the same people can surely agree that over 10,000 healthcare workers vital to the health of the nation should have their right to earn a living restored to them, along with their right be free from medical coercion.
Although many have spoken out publicly against this continued outrage, what is missing, in my view, is for some high-profile dissident or attorney to publicly make the argument (for which it seems there is no shortage of evidence) that the Macron government has committed, in some form, reckless endangerment to human life by reducing hospital capacity and suspending thousands of health care workers during a so-called public health emergency. How wonderful would it be if someone just floated the idea.
Yet even during the most polite and thoughtful discussions between government officials and dissident academics, or during the more bold and humorous exchanges between critical media hosts and their guests, I have never heard it respectfully submitted — with all the careful wording and gentle tones that could be used to soften the accusation — that the closing of hospital beds and the suspension of healthcare workers, both by the thousands, in the middle of a pandemic must be considered a criminal act and should therefore be prosecuted as such. There must be some mathematical modeler on our side up to the challenge of estimating how many lives may have been lost due to these irrational and reckless actions taken by the government.
It’s maddening to see that after all the headway made in bringing certain basic facts to public attention (in this case, facts having to do with the uselessness of the injections for healthcare workers), the livelihoods of thousands of doctors and nurses essential to the health of the nation remain in the hands of Macron’s Prime Minister, who has once again said, peremptorily, that letting them return to work “is not on the agenda.” Such arbitrary, arrogant power would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It continues to be extremely worrying.
Prior posts from this author:
More New Studies Affirm Rising CO2 Leads To Land Surface Cooling By Driving Earth’s Greening Trends
CO2-induced greening may reduce land surface temperatures by -0.7°C over the next 80 years.
By Kenneth Richard – No Tricks Zone – 28. July 2022
Earlier this year we highlighted a new study indicating the rising greening trends in the last four decades can be attributed to the change in precipitation patterns and “the physiological impact of rising CO2.”
Greening-induced increases in evapotranspiration lead, in turn, to an increase in the global cloud cover. Increases in cloud cover reduce incoming solar radiation. A decline in incoming solar radiation cools the surface.
So rising CO2 concentrations ultimately contribute to global-scale greening, and, consequently, to a surface cooling that offsets warming projections.
Image Source: Wu et al., 2022
Another new study indicates the “greening-triggered energy imbalance… causes sizable time-lagged climate effects.”
From 1982-2014 Northern Hemisphere greening led to warmer winters (2 months of the year), but land surface cooling for the other 10 months. The overall greening-induced cooling reduced Northern Hemisphere temperatures by -0.14°C during this period, as the summer (June-August) cooling amounted to a “strong and significant” -0.044°C per decade.
Alkama et al. (2022) report that the “emerging greening signal has been detected by satellites in the last three and a half decades and attributed to the increase in atmospheric CO2.” They quantify the estimates for CO2-induced greening/cooling by 2100 at -0.71°C.
Probably because it doesn’t advance the anti-fossil fuel energy agenda, Alkama and colleagues point out that the cooling effects of CO2-induced global greening “are largely ignored in climate treaties”.
Image Source: Alkama et al., 2022
Other recent studies support the conclusion that rising CO2 greens the Earth and “Earth greening cools land surface temperatures.” It’s as if there’s a consensus.
Image Source: Chen et al., 2020
Image Source: Piao et al., 2020
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NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
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