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Saturday, February 19, 2022

Links - 19th February 2022 (2 - Climate Change)

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The climate alarmists never fail to use each significant weather event as proof of the coming climate apocalypse. While you’re reading the latest after the Tennessee Tornado, here is a chart of F5 tornadoes since 1954. Notice that they have declined over time and we’ve just been through a period of 8 years without an F5."

Facebook - "Despite the breathless climate reporting, global heat deaths by 2050 will still be much lower than current cold deaths This according to WHO's estimates of additional heat deaths from climate warming"

Facebook - "Contrary to breathless climate reporting: EU forests are burning *less* (not more) Burned area halved for EU Southern States 1980-2019 (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, ~90%) Trend down for Rest EU (even though many w/only recent data)"

The electric vehicle charging industry is doing everything except making money - "President Joe Biden’s plan to wean U.S. drivers off fossil fuels requires massive investment in public charging stations to power the electric-car revolution. So far, none of the companies that deploy the equipment has figured out how to make a profit. The dilemma boils down to demand, and there’s a certain chicken-and-egg quality to it. Most electric-vehicle drivers charge their cars at home, so many public charging stations get little use. But lots of people still driving gasoline-powered cars won’t consider going electric until they see charging stations widely deployed, for fear that they will run out of juice on the road. Speculators are piling into the industry, convinced that boom times are around the corner, while short sellers and other skeptics warn that some of these companies will go belly-up long before they figure out how to make money. Biden’s plan to spend US$15 billion to help create 500,000 more public stations by 2030 is feeding the optimism, with investors flocking to EV charging companies since his election. The risk is that the early movers will get badly burned, potentially souring capital markets on the industry for years to come... A decade into its existence, the industry is still hunting for a winning business model... Fuelling cars and trucks has always been a low-margin business, with gasoline stations making much of their money from selling snacks, coffee and cigarettes. The business is even tougher when it comes to EVs... The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 80 per cent of EV charging happens at home. Another vexing issue is the nature of using parking spots to double as charging locations. If a customer pulls into a space in her apartment complex at 9 p.m. and hooks up to buy a few dollars’ worth of electricity, more often than not, she’ll leave her car there until going to work the next day. No one else can use that charger for the next 10 hours, regardless of when her car is done charging. Then there is the relatively small number of vehicles involved. Americans bought 259,000 new electric cars last year, a record according to BloombergNEF, but it’s still just 2 per cent of total car and truck sales. And of those new EVs, 79 per cent were made by Tesla Inc., which has its own branded network of “superchargers” that can’t be used by any other electric car."

Facebook - "Driving an electric car 650km (400 miles) in 12 hours. needs 2 stops to recharge. and she's freezing the whole way to save battery. Just one German reporter's story"

Bjorn Lomborg: The electric car won’t get us very far - "Electric cars will achieve only tiny emissions savings at a very high price... Electric cars are certainly fun, but almost everywhere cost more across their lifetime than their gasoline counterparts. That is why large subsidies are needed. And consumers are still anxious because of the short range and long recharging times. Despite the U.S. handing out up to US$10,000 for each electric car, less than 0.5 per cent of its cars are battery-electric. Almost all the support goes to the rich. And 90 per cent of electric-car owners also have a fossil-fuel car that they drive farther. Indeed, electric vehicles are mostly a “second car” used for shorter trips and virtue signalling. If you subsidize electric cars enough, people will buy them. Almost 10 per cent of all Norway’s passenger cars are now electric because of incredibly generous policies that waive most costs, from taxes to tolls, parking and congestion. Over its lifetime, a US$30,000 car might receive benefits worth more than US$26,000 . But this approach is unsustainable for most nations. Even super-rich Norway is starting to worry, as it loses more than a billion dollars every year from exempt drivers. Though technological innovation will eventually make electric cars economical even without subsidies, concerns over range and slow recharging will remain. That is why most scientific prognoses show that electric cars will increase in sales but not take over the world. A new study shows that by 2030, just 13 per cent of new cars will be battery-electric. Governments that ban new fossil-fuel cars would essentially be forbidding 87 per cent of consumers from buying the cars they want. It is hard to imagine that could be politically viable. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2030, if all countries live up to their promises, the world will have 140 million electric cars on the road, about seven per cent of the global vehicle fleet. Yet, this would not make a significant impact on emissions — for two reasons. First, electric cars require large batteries, which are often produced in China using coal power . According to the IEA, just producing the battery for an electric car can emit almost as much as a quarter of the greenhouse gases that a gasoline car emits across its entire lifetime. Second, the electric car is recharged on electricity that almost everywhere is significantly fossil fuel based (though, in fairness, Quebec is an exception, with its almost entirely hydro-produced electricity). Together, these two factors mean that, over its first 60,000 kilometres, a long-range electric car will emit more CO₂ than a gas car. Having a second electric car for short trips could actually mean higher overall emissions. Comparing electric with gasoline cars, the International Energy Agency estimates the electric car will save six tons of CO₂ over its lifetime, assuming global average electricity emissions. Even if the electric car has short range and its battery is made in Europe mostly using renewable energy, its savings will be at most 10 tons. President-elect Biden wants to restore the full electric car tax credit , which means he will essentially pay US$7,500 to reduce emissions by at most 10 tons. Yet, he can get U.S. power producers to cut 10 tons for just US$60. What he plans to spend on electric-car subsidies could cut 125 times more CO₂ if he spent the money directly on emission reductions. If the whole world follows through and gets to 140 million electric cars by 2030, the IEA estimates that will reduce emissions by just 190 million tonnes of CO₂ — a mere 0.4 per cent of global emissions. In the words of Fatih Birol , head of IEA, “If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong.”... there is a much better and simpler solution. Again according to the IEA, hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius, save about the same amount of CO₂ as electric cars over their lifetime. Moreover, they are already competitive with gasoline-driven cars — even without subsidies. And, crucially, they have none of the electric car downsides, with no need for new infrastructure, no range anxiety and quick refill."

Allegra Stratton is right about electric cars - "Saying out loud what many people already think about electric cars, Boris Johnson’s climate spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has received a lot of green flak. Despite a prominent role in pursuing the Government’s green agenda, she admitted this week that she’s not yet willing to trade in her old diesel car for a sparkling new electric. Like many using the UK’s roads, for her a car is not just a virtue-signalling accessory only to be wheeled out for the odd short journey. She uses her car to visit relatives all round the country and, with small children, is understandably reluctant to volunteer for long recharging breaks... Edmund King, president of the AA, for example, said that on these long trips, the driver ought to take a break anyway, which could easily be combined with a 20-minute recharging stop. The reality is that such rapid recharging is rare and can take as long as four hours. Nor is it always convenient to have our rest breaks dictated by our battery level. Until the range of electric cars is significantly improved, fossil fuel cars will be far preferable for long journeys for most people. To convince sceptical consumers, governments across the world are showering prospective buyers with subsidies. Given the high up-front cost of buying an electric car, these subsidies are likely to end up in the pockets of the wealthy for whom this experiment is proving extremely beneficial. All of this has achieved only reluctant sales. In Germany, for example, the subsidy has now been jacked up above €10,000 for a full-electric car, yet these vehicles still account for only one sale in 10."

How can you charge an electric vehicle if you park on the street? - "One in three U.S. housing units does not have a garage, according to the 2019 American Housing Survey, and many of those households do not have their own parking spots. As gas stations slowly yield to electric chargers, the ratio of fueling nozzles to vehicles is plummeting, with some studies suggesting we’ll need as many as one charger for every two electric vehicles... In Los Angeles County, a study by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, estimates the need for 84,000 public and workplace chargers as soon as 2028—about five times as many gas pumps as exist today, says Cole Roberts, who leads the North American energy business for the consultancy ARUP. Roberts worked with LACI on a tool, Charge4All, to identify good places to install curbside chargers. Why so many chargers? Because right now juicing up an electric vehicle is slow. To understand the multidimensional infrastructural problem that is electric vehicle charging, it helps to recall that there are three types of EV chargers. The first, Level 1, is like plugging into a conventional household outlet and might replenish your battery by just a few miles each hour. The second, Level 2, can give a full charge overnight. The third, also known as “fast chargers,” can deliver a full charge in less than an hour. There’s a correlation between speed and cost. Each fast charger costs upward of $50,000 and, depending on the required utility work, can wind up being much more. Reliance on fast charging would put Los Angeles on the hook for billions of dollars in chargers just in the next decade. (Other factors to consider include charger utilization rates, durability, utility grids, variable energy costs … it’s complicated.)... a viral photo showed a car charging in downtown Los Angeles with a black power cord hung waist-high across a freshly painted bike lane. At $15,000 a pop, that’s not a mistake you want to make every day."

With Its Power Grid Under Pressure, California Asks Residents to Avoid Charging Electric Vehicles - "the California Independent System Operator (ISO) told residents several times to voluntarily conserve energy, including asking them on social media to stop charging their electric vehicles (EVs) during peak usage times. The operator also warned users to “[avoid] use of large appliances and turning off extra lights.”... It comes as the federal government and certain state governments—including California’s—have pushed to convert their respective fleets to electric vehicles. President Joe Biden, who was seen in May in a photo-op driving an electric version of the Ford 150, earlier this year issued an executive order and promised some $174 billion into the electric vehicles market. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, last fall announced he would set 2035 as a target date for ending the sale of petroleum-powered vehicles in the state... critics have suggested that if there are too many electric vehicles in use, it could potentially put a strain on state power grids and utilities... Matthew Moniot, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, noted if the state also increasingly relies on solar and wind power, that could pose an even more daunting challenge for power grid operators. Speaking to Newsweek, he said that less energy is produced overnight—when many electric vehicle owners charge their cars—by solar and wind."
Sustainability means renewable energy which means brownouts: "In 2019, California's in-state electricity net generation from all renewable resources combined, including generation from hydroelectric power and from small-scale, customer-sited solar generation, was greater than that of any other state"

Electric Cars Have One Problem: They Keep Lighting People’s Houses on Fire - "When EVs do catch fire, the flames can be extremely challenging to put out, as several high-profile crashes involving Teslas have vividly demonstrated... the potential for disaster is there. After all, a car battery is one massive store of potential energy ready to be unleashed."

Shock, horror! COP26 has an electric car problem | The Spectator - "If absurdity were a source of renewable energy, the COP26 climate change summit might achieve its aim of saving the planet... there’s not enough places to power the luxury electric cars needed to ferry delegates around the city... a lack of charging points means the fleet now has to be re-charged by cooking oil-powered generators... Between 20,000 to 25,000 satraps, apparatchiks and flunkies will descend on the city for COP26. There are just not enough beds to accommodate them all. Wily Glaswegians, bless them, are cashing in: the Charing Cross Hotel is charging £3,818 for the first three nights of COP. Entrepreneurial home owners, meanwhile, are renting out their properties for between roughly £400 and £600 a night for a two bedroom house. Mr S hears that even UK ministers are struggling to get rooms anywhere near the city, such is the demand. If the organisers can’t even foresee a hotel shortage, how can they be expected to achieve Net Zero? And it’s not just officials. Steerpike understands that BBC staff going to COP have been told they can only ride in electric taxis rather than petrol-powered vehicles. To add insult to injury, the Beeb’s finest have been told that if their hotel doesn't have recycling facilities, they must dispose their waste into the correct recycling bins themselves. Given Glasgow council is currently embroiled in a stand off with its bin-men, will anyone even be there to empty them?"

Tesla owner blows up his Model S with dynamite over $22,000 battery replacement - "A Tesla Model S owner in Finland decided to blow up his electric car with dynamite after it needed a battery replacement, which Tesla said was going to cost $22,000. There’s not a lot of information about how much an electric car, or especially Tesla vehicle, battery replacement costs. It’s a hard question to answer since the vast majority of Tesla battery replacements have been done under warranty. Early on, Tesla offered eight-year unlimited mileage powertrain warranties for Model S and Model X... We recently reported on a case where a Model S owner was told by Tesla that he needed a $22,500 battery replacement. That wasn’t really an option since it’s basically equivalent to the value of the vehicle. Fortunately, the owner managed to find a third-party repair shop the fix the battery pack for a fraction of the cost – though the fix is somewhat controversial in the Tesla repair community."

Imagine electric vehicles in bad weather - " Imagine being stuck on a frigid night inside your car, like those stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia in a 48-mile backup for nearly a 24-hour standstill because of snow. Imagine being trapped in an frozen electric car with a long dead battery! Even with the great California year-round weather, the states’ EV user’s experiences do not bode well for projected EV sales in America...
1. The limited usage of the EV’s of about 5,000 miles per year is a reflection that the EV is a second vehicle, for those that can afford them, and not the family workhorse vehicle.
2. The primary owners of EV’s are the highly educated and financially well off, and not representative of the majority.
3. EV owner incomes rank among the highest in the country which may be a reflection of home owners that have easier access to charging their EV from their multi-car garages, or for those folks living in new apartments that may have access to more convenient EV charging capabilities. Most car owners park in the street.
4. According to ValuePenguin insurance, because electric vehicles cost more outright and are more expensive to repair, the average car insurance for an electric vehicle is about 23 percent more expensive than the cost for the equivalent combustion model.
5. The ethnicity of Tesla owner’s skews toward Caucasians, at 87 percent. Owners who identify with Hispanic ethnicity make up 8 percent of Tesla owners, leaving 5 percent to other ethnicities.
6. From that limited elite ownership group, there is a growing percentage of those California EV users that are switching back to gasoline cars, which is sending a message that may further deflate EV growth projections...
Imagine Florida with a hurricane coming toward Miami. The Governor orders an evacuation. All cars head north. They all need to be charged in Jacksonville. How does that work? If all cars were electric, and were caught up in a three-hour traffic jam with dead batteries, then what? Not to mention that there is virtually no heating or air conditioning in an electric vehicle because of high battery consumption.
If you get stuck on the road all night, no battery, no heating, no windshield wipers, no radio, no GPS (all these drain the batteries), all you can do is try calling 911 to take women and children to safety. But they cannot come to help you because all roads are blocked, and they will probably require all police cars will be electric also. When the roads become unblocked no one can move! Their batteries are dead.
How do you charge thousands of cars in the traffic jam? Same problem during summer vacation departures with miles of traffic jams. There would be virtually no air conditioning in an electric vehicle. It would drain the batteries quickly. Where is this electricity going to come from? Today’s grid barely handles users’ needs.
Frigid driving conditions: Did you know that 17 percent of car crashes in the United States happen in winter conditions? EV batteries must work harder in the cold, which is why they drain quickly in extreme temperatures. Low temperatures, such as 40 degrees or below, can decrease the driving range for EVs by 40 percent."

The Future with Zero-Emission Electric Vehicles - "a recent study by the Anderson Economic Group concluded that refuelling in the U.S. costs US$8.58-US$12.60 per 100 miles driven for a range of gasoline-powered vehicles, while recharging costs US$12.95-US$15.52 per 100 miles driven for comparable EVs. Going by these data, driving a typical 10,000 miles per year would increase the annual cost of motoring by about US$350. While noticeable, most car owners would probably consider this bearable. But this assumes stable electricity prices for the long term. More likely, power costs will climb significantly in response to increased demand associated with a burgeoning EV fleet and the ongoing government-driven shift to less efficient and more expensive “green” energy sources. The shift to EVs will clearly entail significant new costs for car owners and those who depend on them. Assuming that a typical EV will last 10-12 years, the changeover will cost the average Canadian car buyer at least $2,000 per year more than they would spend to replace a normal car. A home charging station will come on top of that. As will the added cost of charging their EV – already at least Cdn$500 more per year than gasoline or diesel, and set to climb. All-in, the additional costs are likely to be $4,000 or more per year. (For a family that needs two vehicles, that would be $8,000+ annually.) ... If Canada’s 25 million gasoline-powered cars and light trucks were replaced with EVs drawing an average government subsidy of $10,000 per vehicle, the cost to taxpayers would total some $250 billion – plus billions more as early adopters began replacing their first EVs. That is obviously unsustainable, and here too, something will need to give... the Government of Canada collects about $5 billion per year in excise taxes on gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, as well as approximately $1.6 billion per year in GST on gasoline and diesel. Provincial governments together collect approximately $8 billion per year from similar excise taxes... The federal government is already running record deficits, so it is highly questionable whether it can continue to subsidize EVs and the required infrastructure changes at the current rate... Last summer’s heat wave stretched the capacity of electric grids in some parts of Canada, suggesting there is little remaining margin. Electric generation will have to increase significantly to charge 25 million EVs in Canada. Where might that increased capacity come from?... replacing the energy output of a single 100-megawatt natural gas-fuelled power plant requires a minimum of twenty 170-metre-tall windmills, together occupying 26 square kilometres of land. By way of comparison, the province of Alberta uses on the order of 10,000 megawatts of electricity at any given time, and this will increase sharply if EVs proliferate as planned... There is also the question of recharging stations... annual lithium production was only about 82,000 tonnes in 2020, enough to power about 8 million new EVs worldwide. Moreover, much of that is used for industrial applications and for batteries in smartphones and other devices... Canada has about 530,000 tonnes of economically viable lithium and currently produces none. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government is encouraging the opening of a lithium mine in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, but the plan is facing opposition from First Nations and has yet to undergo environmental assessments. Lithium is a soft metal, found especially in South America. The current top producers are Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. It is highly reactive and inflammable and presents serious environmental concerns. Its production requires large amounts of water (500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium) and releases a variety of toxic chemicals into the environment. Of course, since Canada produces no lithium at present, there is no environmental concern here. All of that has been offshored... Environmental activists often give the impression that life in the green economy will be much like our current life except for a much smaller carbon footprint and a cleaner environment. The far more likely reality is that in the “green” economy envisioned for only a couple of decades from now, most of us will have to get about on foot, on bicycles and on public transit. Extensive travel, whether international or just road trips within Canada, will likely be reserved for the very wealthy. The rest will travel as we have mostly been doing during the pandemic – virtually – on electronic devices powered by lithium batteries."

Electric cars to get more expensive as battery costs soar - "The cost of lithium battery cells is rising for the first time after years of decline, with strained lithium supplies adding to rising prices of other cell materials."

Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries? - ""In 10 to 15 years when there are large numbers coming to the end of their life, it's going to be very important that we have a recycling industry," he points out. While most EV components are much the same as those of conventional cars, the big difference is the battery. While traditional lead-acid batteries are widely recycled, the same can't be said for the lithium-ion versions used in electric cars. EV batteries are larger and heavier than those in regular cars and are made up of several hundred individual lithium-ion cells, all of which need dismantling. They contain hazardous materials, and have an inconvenient tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly."

Failure to recycle dead car batteries could cancel out benefits of electric vehicles

EDITORIAL: High energy prices part of climate plan | Toronto Sun - "high energy prices are not a failure of federal government policies, they are the deliberate and intended result of them. Their purpose is to discourage consumer spending by raising the cost of living so that consumers buy and consume fewer goods and services, leading to the generation of fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Right now, that process is on steroids because of a number of factors cited above that are occurring simultaneously, in addition to rising carbon taxes. But make no mistake. This isn’t temporary. It’s only the beginning"

We must go honest to 'go green' - "To be sure, producing and burning coal and oil have significant environmental impacts. But what goes unmentioned are the extensive benefits of affordable, reliable energy provided by coal and oil to make cheap electricity, power cars and underpin a modern economy. The ironic kicker is that economic wealth allows a nation to regulate and clean up the environment: its air, soil, water and emissions. Coal and oil are not green, but the wealth they create cleans up the environment. And, only wealthy nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Germany have been able to afford to begin to transition beyond coal for power generation. The global reality faced by the Biden administration is that poorer economies represent about two-thirds of the world’s population and they have a growing energy appetite. Just as the U.S. and Western Europe did, China is building an eye-watering number of coal plants to power its expanding share of global manufacturing. China now burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Notwithstanding silly emissions pledges, China has no plans for reducing coal. They can’t afford to. The reality is that only economic wealth will allow China and other emerging economies to begin to transition away from coal and clean up the environment. So why not just switch from dirty coal and oil to clean and renewable solar and wind? Two reasons: They are not renewable and they are not clean. Sure, during non-cloudy days and windy times, the wind and the sun can be captured and turned into electricity. But because the amount of energy is not “dense,” it takes scads of land and collectors — solar panels and wind turbines — to capture it. It also takes oodles of batteries to back up intermittent solar and wind so that everything keeps running uninterrupted. There is also replacement. The panels, turbines and batteries wear out after 10 to 20 years, and the metals, chemicals and toxic materials required to make them must be constantly mined, manufactured and disposed of in landfills. Coupled with some carbon dioxide emissions associated with those processes, solar and wind are neither renewable nor clean. To add to it, contrary to popular spin, solar and wind are not cheaper than coal or natural gas. The reported lower cost is misleading because it represents the cost of electricity at the generation source, the so-called levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), not the actual cost to the consumer. Intermittent solar and wind require almost 100 percent redundant and expensive backup power from natural gas plants or batteries to be reliable, which makes them more expensive to the consumer. That is partly why people in California and Germany pay much more for electricity. This higher cost is both regressive and inequitable to lower-income people. China controls 50 to 70 percent of global lithium, cobalt and polysilicon and is aggressively acquiring other mined materials to make batteries, turbines and solar panels. As we move to electric vehicles (EVs), we are essentially shifting control of transportation fuels from OPEC to China. Is that more secure? Mining practices for EV metals are known to violate human rights, especially those of children. Do we want to promote that?... The Biden administration, as a proponent of science, has a chance to represent the complex social, legal, political, economic and, yes, scientific challenges of energy"

Climate Policy Is a Money-Making Opportunity for the Elite - "“The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,” chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that the economy remains “highly dependent” on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is “carbon neutral today in our own operations.” It’s a claim open to challenge. “If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,” tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research. Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization... In normal times, before the Climate Emergency, it would be up to financiers and investors to ask the tough, unsentimental questions, such as: What’s the return on investment? How long is the payback period? But not when it comes to climate change. In its 2018 1.5℃ Special Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declined to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the net-zero target. The target, the IPCC declared, implies “risk assessments and value judgments” – as if this nullified the need to assess whether the benefits of net-zero outweigh the costs. At the end of his Reith lecture, Carney was asked by historian Niall Ferguson if he’d read Bjorn Lomborg’s most recent book, False Alarm. Lomborg calculates that each $1 spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions yields only 11 cents of future climate benefits. With trillions being spent on climate change, this estimate implies that a colossal burden is being placed on the current generation – especially those who can least afford to bear it – for little climate gain. Ignorance is no defense; nonetheless, Carney tried it. No, he hadn’t read Lomborg’s book, Carney answered Ferguson. He dismissed Lomborg’s as a “classic economic approach,” though he offered no data or evidence to show why Lomborg was wrong... All too predictably, Carney indulges his own taste for the apocalyptic. “We won’t have a financial system if we don’t have a planet,” he said in his Reith lecture. Last month, he made a 30-year forecast of annual climate deaths equalling total Covid-19 deaths by 2050 – the international deadline for net-zero – unless action is taken. Still, this is progress, of a sort. The Toronto climate conference, 33 years ago, compared the effects of climate change to nuclear war. How did that forecast work out? Carney uses his position to advocate mandatory climate disclosures for all large companies and argues that they should develop and publish plans to transition to net-zero. “What gets measured gets managed,” he says. At the same time, Carney is involved in setting up a carbon offset market – a market worth $50 billion to $100 billion a year, he anticipates. Like Glen Peters, Carney knows that corporate claims of net-zero are “crap,” but he expresses this awareness in the circumlocutory language of the central banker that he once was. Companies will be looking to reduce emissions, he says, “but for a period of time, they will also need the ‘net’ in net-zero, and they can only get that from a credible global market.” Having forced companies into emissions disclosures and net-zero plans, Carney then offers them a get-out-of-jail card – in effect, a toll on economic activity, paid by everyone, that will line the pockets of the green financial oligarchy. For climate true believers, however, offset markets are a sham and no substitute for genuine emissions cuts"

The Risks of Communicating Extreme Climate Forecasts - " In a new paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University’s David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that making such forecasts can be counterproductive. “Truly apocalyptic forecasts can only ever be observed in their failure—that is the world did not end as predicted,” says Rode, adjunct research faculty with the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, “and observing a string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures can undermine the public’s trust in the underlying science.” Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020. Fischbeck noted, “from a forecasting perspective, the ‘problem’ is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty.” In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events... The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed—across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out. Fischbeck continued, “It’s like the boy who repeatedly cried wolf. If I observe many successive forecast failures, I may be unwilling to take future forecasts seriously. That’s a problem for climate science, say Rode and Fischbeck... scientists, due to their training, tend to make more cautious statements and more often include references to uncertainty. Rode and Fischbeck found that while 81% of the forecasts made by scientists referenced uncertainty, less than half of the forecasts made by non-scientists did... scientists must take extraordinary caution in communicating events of great consequence. When it comes to climate change, the authors advise “thinking small.” That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term. “If you want people to believe big predictions, you first need to convince them that you can make little predictions”"
So much for "following the science". Yet climate change hystericists keep claiming the scientists were and are right
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises

Apocalypse now? Communicating extreme forecasts
The world is ending. The world has always been ending. The world will always be ending

List of Climate-Related Apocalyptic Predictions
Dataset used for the above. Notably, there're lots of predictions of doom coming from scientists, many of which haven't come to pass. So saying that we must listen to the scientists isn't a convincing cope either

The lurking threat to solar power’s growth | MIT Technology Review - "A few lonely academics have been warning for years that solar power faces a fundamental challenge that could halt the industry’s breakneck growth. Simply put: the more solar you add to the grid, the less valuable it becomes. The problem is that solar panels generate lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently more than what’s required, driving down prices—sometimes even into negative territory. Unlike a natural gas plant, solar plant operators can’t easily throttle electricity up and down as needed, or space generation out through the day, night and dark winter. It’s available when it’s available, which is when the sun is shining. And that’s when all the other solar plants are cranking out electricity at maximum levels as well... Wholesale prices are basically the amount that utilities pay power plants for the electricity they deliver to households and businesses. They shift throughout the day and year, edging back up for solar operators during the mornings, afternoons and other times when there isn’t excess supply. But as more solar plants come online, the periods of excess supply that drive down those costs will become more frequent and more pronounced... It could become difficult to convince developers and investors to continue building ever more solar plants if they stand to make less money or even lose it... So far, heavy solar subsidies and the rapidly declining cost of solar power has offset the falling value of solar in California. So long as it gets ever cheaper to build and operate solar power plants, value deflation is less of a problem. But it’s likely to get harder and harder to pull off that trick, as the state’s share of solar generation continues to climb. If the cost declines for building and installing solar panels tapers off, California’s solar deflation could pull ahead in the race against falling costs as soon as 2022 and climb upward from there, the report finds. At that point, wholesale pricing would be below the subsidized costs of solar in California, undermining the pure economic rationale for building more plants... study after study finds that storage and system costs rise sharply once renewables provide the vast majority of electricity on the grid."
Of course lots of communists on Twitter (on the original MIT thread) and a Facebook group I'm in were unwilling and/or unable to understand the problem of intermittency, even though all their objections were addressed in the post. To some, the problem was "capitalism" (what else?) Of course if you nationalise all energy infrastructure you "solve" the problem since the costs are now hidden

The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "Every time with these “pro-science” outfits, it’s trust the science as long as it agrees with their agenda. This Green New Deal meme completely strawmans the MIT tweet, as it was actually a part of a longer thread and article where scientists make a solid point about the pitfalls of solar... It has nothing to do with “monopolizing the sun,” that’s a total strawman. It has to do with the reality (aka science) of how solar and economics work. People don’t want a bunch of electricity midday and none at night, they want it on demand throughout the day, and solar doesn’t deliver that."

Samurai: everything you wanted to know

Samurai: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra

"‘The carrying of two swords was a marker of status not only of Samurai but of the occasional commoner who was on some temporary duty on behalf of a warlord or the Shogun itself. But it was pretty easy to distinguish, you know, who was a warrior and who was not a warrior just by looking at them in Tokugawa Japan’

‘What does the wearing of the two swords represent?’

‘It just kind of represents that you're a warrior. I mean, in the Warring States period, swords were a sidearm, you know, they were not the main weapon that you would use in combat, just like you wouldn't go into warfare shooting your pistol or something like that. And so they become the proper military attire for a warrior who is not actively engaged in combat, but could theoretically be attacked or need to engage in combat. And so they were required to carry two swords. In fact, if they weren't carrying their swords, they could be punished. And there are plenty of anecdotes of Samurai during the Tokugawa period who really thought it was a bother to carry swords, because they didn't really need them. They got in the way. There's even a time period when there was a fashion trend among Samurai to straighten their swords, because they looked really cool with very straight lines. And there are complaints by local Lords telling their Samurai: look, don't straighten your swords, because it essentially renders them ineffective and you shouldn't be following these fashion trends. But it just goes to show how distant the samurai had become, from their predecessors who were actually engaged in warfare’...

‘How much of a Samurai’s career was actually spent engaged in conflict?’

‘I think it depends on the time period. So for in the Warring States period, say the 15th or 16th centuries, yeah, warriors are engaged in warfare quite a lot. Same with parts of the 14th century. But the bulk of Japanese history, warriors are engaged in other things. And it really depends on the time period. Sometimes they are doing bureaucratic work. So I mentioned that in the Tokugawa period, when there is no warfare, the samurai are mostly just doing bureaucratic work, depending on their particular status. They might also be engaged in some employments on the side to earn more money. And so there're examples of Samurai making umbrellas or toys. In some places there Samurai who are also doing a bit of farming. There are Samurai who are engaged in trading things. There was this wonderful autobiography called Mitsui’s Story, translated into English, and he's a low ranking Samurai and he talks about, he would buy and sell and appraise swords, he was a gangster sometimes. He did fortune telling to get money out of people. You know, he just did all kinds of other very unnoble things, if you will, in order just to get by, to make a living...

Most of the Samurai are rank and file samurai. And life for them was pretty tough, because they had a certain stipend that was attached to their status, and to their particular duties to the domain. And oftentimes that stipend was not enough. Moreover, even a low ranking Samurai was expected to maintain appearances, which might include having servants, a few servants or something like that. So they were really strapped for cash, you know, to put it metaphorically, and life was tough. And for a rank and file Samurai life could be boring. You know, one of the problems that a lot of domains face is that they have too many Samurai and not enough jobs. So let's say you're a low ranking samurai, and your father's job was to be the guard of the western gate to the castle three months out of the year, that would be your job. And that will be your first son's job, when you have a son, it's a very boring job, it doesn't pay a lot. So what do you do at  the rest of your time? You know, you might engage in employments, like I just mentioned on the side, somewhat secretly. You could do things like travel, you, there are a lot of Samurai who, who applied for permission to travel to Edo to study, whether that study is philosophy, or whether it's martial arts. Oftentimes, daimyo were more than happy, say, yeah. Okay, here you go, you know, go to Edo, do what you need to do, right, because it kind of got them out of their hair. And you do have examples of Samurai who are, who are just kind of fed up, their their occupation goes nowhere. And so there are a lot of writers, artists, playwrights, philosophers, physicians, who were originally members of the Samurai status group and essentially just left it to pursue this other occupation. Yeah, so so it was a tough life for from a samurai, I would say. And, in fact, at the end of the Tokugawa period, there are a lot of Samurai who are more than happy to abandon the status completely, because now they had freedom of movement. They had freedom of occupation more so than they did in the Tokugawa period. And they didn't miss being a samurai...

If you're a younger brother, essentially, one of the options is you could serve your older brother, and who wants to do that, right. So what you would try to do is maybe find another Samurai family that has daughters, but no sons, and then you would marry into that family, and you would change your last name, and you'd become the heir to that family. And one of the things to note here is that happened quite a lot. There's no notion of blood being important…

For the most part, there wasn't a lot of social mobility for Samurai and this was a source of frustration for a lot of Samurai that's where we get the, you know, kind of mini riots and protests by Samurai throughout the Tokugawa period is they're frustrated, you know, some of them are quite intelligent. They have ideas about how they think the domain should be reformed. But they have no vehicle for having those ideas known, and for reforms to be put in place. Now there are some domains, there's some daimyo, who are smart, and they realize, well, you know, here's this low ranking Samurai who's good at something, and maybe I should promote him upwards or put him in a position that allows him to help us engage in reforms. So there was some social mobility, but for the most part, no, you were pretty much stuck in whatever rank you were as a samurai...

Before the [Tokugawa] period, Samurai are not seen as a good thing. They're described as beasts. There's one nobleman who wrote about how warriors were no better than dogs. Right. So being a samurai was not seen as a good thing, you were seen as a as a murderous person, which in a country where Buddhism was very influential, being engaged in a profession where you're killing, theoretically, was not a good thing. Once we get into the Tokugawa period, there's this notion that Samurai should be much more cultured, they should be able to read and write. And they are seen as, or at least they depict themselves as morally and ethically superior to other members in the country, and therefore they have the right to be the rulers...

Tokugawa Ieyasu was a warlord who was supposed to help Hideyoshi’s son ruled Japan, but then decided to just you know, work for himself, which was often what happened among Samurai. You know, Samurai weren't loyal unto death, necessarily all the time, that's really a part of modern wartime propaganda rather than how Samurai actually were...

William Adams is in fact not allowed to leave Japan. And he and also Yasuke the the African man that he spoke of. And there's an Italian guy, there's another Dutch guy who become, they become Samurai in the sense that they're officially employed by either Tokugawa Ieyasu in the case of Bill Adams, or Nobunaga… they're employed by these military hegemons, and so they're given a stipend. In the case of Bill Adams, he's actually given a plot of land as well and some servants. And he's given two swords. And so he becomes a samurai in the sense that he is an employee of Shogun. They were not Samurai in the sense that we typically think of Samurai In popular culture, that is to say, they're not going out and fighting in wars, and you know, on horseback wielding swords and stuff like that. But in fact, they're more like the historical samurai, the historically accurate samurai, which is, you know, the bureaucrat who has various, you know, functions that have nothing to do with warfare. But they're Samurai because they're in the service of a military hegemon. So in that sense, we see a handful of European and also some Korean samurai...

[During the Tokugawa shogunate] certainly elite warriors tried to style themselves like nobility, they tried to bring in notions of behavior and ethics and virtue, from the nobility themselves, who in turn, were taking a lot of their ideas from Chinese philosophy. So there was an attempt by certain types of samurai, especially Samurai leaders, to make the samurai into a morally and ethically superior group of people, similar to the literati of China, with the difference being that a samurai is nonetheless a person who can engage in warfare, right? That's the big difference. So once we get into the Tokugawa period, there's a lot of emphasis on yes, you should be capable at the military arts. But you should also have a lot of cultured learning, you should tame yourself, there's in fact, that's the title of a book, The Taming of the samurai, where the samurai are not supposed to be engaging in fights, they're supposed to withhold their machismo, they're supposed to not be offended by other people and draw their sword and just fight someone. And in order to pitch that, or at least promote that idea, there's an emphasis on again, you know, studying Confucianism, or the commentary by Neo Confucian scholars. So there's this attempt to make them noble in some broad sense. But again, the reality is that especially lower ranking Samurai engaged in drinking, gambling, the example of our guy in the autobiography of Mitsui story, he's a gangster, sometimes he's tricking people out of money by being a fortune teller. So it would only be a very, very small group of Samurai who were diehards or zealots, if you will the extremists who really bought into the idealized version of the samurai, who might have actually been virtuous...

Even after World War Two, there's this notion promoted by companies and also the Japanese government that the modern businessman who is loyal to his company and will work unto death will work long hours, is the modern samurai...

Bushido is, for the most part, it is a creation of the modern period. The guy who popularized the term Bushido, Nitobe, who wrote in English. First, he lived in the United States in Pennsylvania. And he was trying to describe what are what makes Japan unique? What are the characteristics of the Japanese. And so he wrote this book that was heavily edited by a friend of his, American friend. And so he actually thought that he had invented the term Bushido. The term Bushido actually exists in the Tokugawa period, but it was so rare that he thought he had invented it. And so what he wrote and how intellectuals back in Japan reacted to that writing when it was translated into Japanese created this vision that there was some kind of accepted code or accepted practice among the warriors. There's a wonderful book about this written by my friend Oleg Benesch, called inventing the warrior way or something like this. And he talks a lot about he essentially traces how Bushido becomes a thing in the modern period. Now. The word Bushido does exist in the Tokugawa period. But it doesn't mean Bushido as a code of behavior for the samurai, it usually means like, the way of being a samurai in terms of you know, here's your occupation. And here's some of the occupational things. It's a very basic view of Bushido. Having said that, during the Tokugawa period, there are Samurai writers who do write works, that suggest here the things that warriors should and should not be doing...

Tokugawa Japan [had] suspicion of Catholicism, which was seen as a foreign religion with loyalties to a foreign God and a foreign institution in Rome. And there was also this notion that Catholicism was too exclusionary, that is to say, Tokugawa, he also had a lot of different religious advisors. But the only ones that he kind of punished were the the Catholics who were very, you know, it's our way or the highway. And there was also one type of Buddhism, that was also kind of expelled from Ieyasu’s inner circle, because they also believed you know, it's our way or the highway, like no other type of religion...
The new Meiji oligarchy, which is dominated by young, oftentimes unmarried, once low ranking samurai, they're the ones who are responsible for abolishing their own status. Because they understand that the samurai status is holding them back, it's holding Japan back in some sense, because it is seen as anachronistic, it is seen as something that is backwards, it is seen as something that is unmodern. And the Meiji oligarchs want to have a government, they want to have a bureaucracy, they want to have a military that looks like the West, essentially. And just as you don't see people walking around with swords in, you know, London in the late 19th century, or at least I don't think so, I'm not an expert. But you, likewise, the major oligarchs didn't want Europeans seeing that in Japan, so they actively in 1871, abolish the samurai status. And that brings an end to the samurai. Now, there were a lot of Samurai who were perfectly fine with this. And they were more than happy to give up the swords and the, and the hairstyle and just trying to figure out how to live in a new world. But then there were a lot of Samurai who were really invested in the idealization of the samurai, they were invested in the kind of elevated social status that the samurai had enjoyed. And they resisted. And in fact, the movie The Last Samurai, depicts a, one of the most famous rebellions against the Meiji oligarchy...

In the Tokugawa period, between six to 8% of the population in total was samurai. So that's not a lot... I have met people in Japan who were descended from samurai. For the most part, people don't go around really bragging about that, because they understand that most Samurai are the low ranking samurai... They might have family heirlooms. In fact, one of the guys that I used to train alongside in swordsmanship, who was also my mechanic, was descended from a samurai family. And he actually, before I left Japan, he said, look, I've got a whole bunch of swords that my family had. So I'm going to give you this one short sword that belonged to my family, you know, as kind of like a token of our friendship… Now there are descendants of like the Tokugawa family. So there are descendants of major famous warrior clans. And sometimes they will use that as you know, a talking point, you know, like, there'll be a speaker, you know, and it's, you know, giving talks about their family heritage or something like that. But that's quite rare. I would say...

The one thing to remember about the samurai is that they're so diverse in terms of their culture, in terms of their occupation, and that they change over time.’"

Links - 19th February 2022 (1 - Covid-19: Children)

More “Covid Suicides” than Covid Deaths in Kids
Clear proof all children need to be vaccinated

No Covid vaccine yet for children as young as five, despite regulators saying it is safe - "The mass vaccination of children as young as five will not yet go ahead, despite safety regulators giving the jab the green light. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said it wants more real-world evidence before recommending the jab, after it found that a million doses among five to 11-year-olds would prevent only two healthy children from requiring intensive care."

Britain may vaccinate children before sharing doses with rest of the world, Matt Hancock suggests - "a senior member joined a chorus of eminent scientists questioning the ethics of vaccinating children, who face virtually no risk of serious disease or death from Covid-19... "the trouble with that is an ethical question about safety.” While clinical trials have suggested the vaccine is safe in children, he said, these involved relatively small numbers. A fellow JCVI member, Professor Adam Finn, said the question of whether it is necessary to vaccinate children remained open. Meanwhile, Professor Russell Viner, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “Having a license doesn’t mean the vaccine should be used for all teenagers however. “Decisions about wider use in teenagers need to carefully balance the benefits and risks and the ethical issues involved in vaccinating children. “The early reports about myocarditis in young men need to be properly investigated and may not be related to the Pfizer vaccine, however they provide a warning that we should not rush into these decisions.”"

Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19? - "Bulk of COVID-19 per capita deaths occur in elderly with high comorbidities.
Per capita COVID-19 deaths are negligible in children.
Clinical trials for these inoculations were very short-term.
Clinical trials did not address long-term effects most relevant to children.
High post-inoculation deaths reported in VAERS (very short-term)."

Global Ethical Considerations Regarding Mandatory Vaccination in Children - "Whether children should be vaccinated against coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) (or other infectious diseases such as influenza) and whether some degree of coercion should be exercised by the state to ensure high uptake depends, among other things, on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. For COVID-19, these factors are currently unknown for children, with unanswered questions also on children's role in the transmission of the virus, the extent to which the vaccine will decrease transmission, and the expected benefit (if any) to the child. Ultimately, deciding whether to recommend that children receive a novel vaccine for a disease that is not a major threat to them, or to mandate the vaccine, requires precise information on the risks, including disease severity and vaccine safety and effectiveness, a comparative evaluation of the alternatives, and the levels of coercion associated with each. However, the decision also requires balancing self-interest with duty to others, and liberty with usefulness. Separate to ensuring vaccine supply and access, we outline 3 requirements for mandatory vaccination from an ethical perspective: (1) whether the disease is a grave threat to the health of children and to public health, (2) positive comparative expected usefulness of mandatory vaccination, and (3) proportionate coercion. We also suggest that the case for mandatory vaccine in children may be strong in the case of influenza vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Health experts urge caution on giving Covid vaccines to UK children - "Launching a programme of Covid-19 immunisations for children should be considered only in special circumstances, leading health experts have warned... Doctors would be giving vaccines for which there was limited information about possible side-effects to children who have nothing to gain from such a move, said Professor Adam Finn of Bristol University."

Opinion | As pediatricians, we say please don’t use precious coronavirus vaccines on healthy children - The Washington Post - "Speaking as pediatricians who are also vaccine researchers, we say: Please don’t make a priority of immunizing healthy children 2 to 11 years old against the coronavirus... in the United States alone, there are nearly 50 million children 11 and younger. Meanwhile, crematoriums are working around the clock in India. Overwhelmed hospitals are running out of oxygen in Brazil. Many poorer countries have yet to receive a single vaccine shipment. In this context, it is difficult to justify using limited vaccine supplies to immunize young, healthy children at little risk of severe disease from covid. There is a clear humanitarian and ethical imperative to use available vaccines to try to reduce deaths and hospitalizations everywhere, not just in wealthy countries. Ethical arguments aside, the fact remains that the greatest threat to children in countries with well-advanced vaccine programs comes from areas where covid remains highly prevalent. This risk is compounded by the emergence of strains potentially capable of escaping vaccine- and infection-induced immunity... With growing evidence that coronavirus vaccines prevent asymptomatic infection and onward transmission, an argument used to justify immunizing young children is that it would mean reaching herd immunity faster. That approach can be useful with influenza or pneumonia, because children play a large role in their transmission. But young children do not appear to be important transmitters of covid... the focus should be on those who are the most likely to transmit the virus; in the United States, with much of the elderly population vaccinated, that means young adults."
Too bad liberals don't care and just want endless boosters for everyone, including children
Another article that needs to be memory-holed, since we are now told that the vaccines were never supposed to prevent infection/transmission so claiming that they have failed means you are a stupid anti-vaxxer

Public health officials are dangerously destroying their credibility - "Public health officials and the media have employed an interesting strategy for the almost two years of this pandemic: lie to and manipulate the public to try to elicit their desired behavior. Some are better at it than others, who don’t realize they’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud. “Pediatric hospitalizations are becoming an increasing point of concern,” NBC New York reported Wednesday, a day after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the state has 184 child COVID hospitalizations, 109 of them in Gotham. “Dr. Mary T. Bassett, the state health commissioner,” NBC continued, “said pediatric COVID hospitalizations have doubled in the last three weeks. In New York City, they’ve quintupled in that time span.” Here’s the quiet part that NBC New York knew to keep out of its reporting but Bassett volunteered during the same hearing: “The numbers that we gave on pediatric admissions weren’t intended to make it seem that children were having an epidemic of infection. These were small numbers that we reported in our health alert. That was based on 50 hospitalizations, and I’ve now given you some larger numbers, but they’re still small numbers. It really is to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination.” A growing source of frustration for those following COVID data is the refusal to list primary diagnosis in reporting hospitalization numbers. Are children showing up “with” COVID or do they merely discover their COVID-positive status upon admission for other issues?... “We test anybody who’s admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have COVID, and we’re definitely seeing an increase in cases. However, we’re really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for COVID or in the intensive care unit for COVID.”... In a recent interview with the American Medical Association, Offit discussed the decision to vaccinate young children, weighing it against the risk of vaccine-related issues like myocarditis, a swelling of the heart. “There are never risk-free choices. There are just choices to take different risks,” he said. “And, clearly, the choice is to get a vaccine, which is the lesser risk.” This is messaging that resonates and treats parents with respect, able to make their own risk analysis without information or data being exaggerated or manipulated. Unfortunately for Offit and other forthright experts like him, officials like Hochul and Bassett — not to mention the media who breathlessly cover their statements without showing the full picture — are destroying faith in public health and the lifesaving gift of vaccines for a lifetime. The next time parents show up at a pediatrician appointment and find their children are due for immunizations against dangerous childhood diseases, will they consent? Will they trust that these vaccines are truly necessary or will they suspect they’re being lied to again?"

Remember Swine Flu? That Was More Deadly to Kids Than COVID - "According to a recent study from the UK, unvaccinated children are safer from COVID than even vaccinated adults of any age."
Clearly all kids must be forcibly vaccinated to "protect" them

Alex Marlow: Sotomayor 'Emblematic' of 'Pandemic of Misinformation' - "Alex Marlow highlighted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent false statement about American children “on ventilators” and in “serious condition” with COVID-19 as illustrative of broad-based ignorance driven by a “pandemic of misinformation.” During oral arguments on Friday as the Supreme Court considered challenges to the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine mandates, Sotomayor falsely stated, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, many on ventilators.” Marlow described Sotomayor’s demonstrated ignorance as a function of growing centralization of control and increasing politically-driven censorship over the digital flow of information by the technological oligopoly. “All the things that we can’t discuss because it goes against narrative … is becoming … a literal public health crisis,” Marlow stated in an interview with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL)... "Even PolitiFact rated this false, which they are not really in the business of fact-checking people like Sotomayor.”... Donalds observed how the Supreme Court’s leftist justices focused on attempting to evaluate the utility — not the constitutionality — of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates during oral arguments... “What Sotomayor is trying to do is come up with any logic stream, based on things that are just completely false, completely wrong. She’s trying to create her own logic stream in a bizarro universe with respect to COVID-19 in order to justify her supporting what Joe Biden is doing.” Donalds warned that left-wing Supreme Court justices expanding their scope of power beyond their defined roles as arbiters of constitutional legality are an existential threat to the American experiment in self-governance. “You can’t govern a nation” if the Supreme Court “becomes about whatever the whim is of the mob” or “the current Democrat president or Democrat majority,” Donalds concluded. “You cannot maintain separation of powers like that, and you cannot maintain a constitutional republic like that.” Marlow added, “[Sotomayor] is so bubbled that she thought this was real, or she’s lying. Both are equally disturbing for different reasons.” In a 2001 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Sotomayor described herself as a “wise Latina woman” while expressing her support for informal ethnic, racial, and sexual quotas for judicial appointments. She said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”"
Only the right is capable of spreading misinformation, of course

Rand Paul: 'Is Fauci Advising Justice Sotomayor?' - "there are currently about 4,000 children in the hospital due to the coronavirus... Additionally, data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) revealed that “0.1%-1.6% of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization” per the 24 states reporting a metric referred to as “cumulative hospitalizations.”... That is far from the only controversial assertion Sotomayor made on Friday; she also falsely claimed that the omicron variant is “just as deadly” as the delta variant."

WHO says no evidence healthy children, adolescents need COVID-19 boosters - "Israel has begun offering boosters to children as young as 12, and the U.S. States Food and Drug Administration earlier this month authorized the use of a third dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 12 to 15. Last week Germany became the latest country to recommend that all children between ages of 12 and 17 receive a COVID-19 booster shot. Hungary has also done so... “The aim is to protect the most vulnerable, to protect those at highest risk of severe disease and dying. Those are our elderly populations, immuno-compromised people with underlying conditions, but also healthcare workers”"

Estimation of US Children’s Educational Attainment and Years of Life Lost Associated With Primary School Closures During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic - "the decision to close US public primary schools in the early months of 2020 may be associated with a decrease in life expectancy for US children... Comparing the full distributions of estimated YLL under both “schools open” and “schools closed” conditions, based on the US studies and the European studies, the analysis observed a 98.9% probability and a 26.3% probability, respectively, that school opening would have been associated with a lower total YLL than school closure."
Even just looking at years of life lost, closing schools due to covid was more harmful than keeping them open

Why it might take more than a shot in the dark on vaccinating pupils to end school disruption - "The chances of a child dying from Covid is two in a million. It is more likely they will die getting hit by lightning. And yet on Monday, the Government unveiled plans for the mass vaccination of healthy 12- to 15-year-olds. How did it come to this? The answer may lie in the chaos in schools over the past 18 months created by one disastrous policy after another, which has resulted in two years of cancelled exams and huge disruption to children’s education. The solution, or so ministers appear to believe, is to vaccinate pupils to try and keep schools open rather than run the risk of yet another term of turmoil. The first problem for the Government was that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) did not recommend the rollout. Earlier this month, it delivered its long-awaited verdict, saying the “margin of benefit” of jabbing 12 to 15-year-olds was “considered too small” and citing the low risk to healthy children from the virus. Undeterred, Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, instructed Prof Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, to look again to see whether there was a wider benefit to society from vaccinating children... despite the JCVI’s pronouncement that the margin of benefit is “too small” to support the universal rollout of the Covid vaccine to children, the Government is pressing ahead with it not on health grounds alone, but on the ground that it will help to keep children in the classroom. This is despite dozens of Tory MPs warning that overruling expert advice risks “dissolving the bond of trust” between the public and the Government. Last week, 26 backbenchers wrote to Mr Javid saying that the Government’s willingness to “ignore” the JCVI is a cause for “serious concern”."
Given that even among the vaccinated, covid isolation is needed, fat hope
So much for listening to the experts

Parents Are Lying to Get COVID Vaccines for Young Kids - The Atlantic - "These days, the distance between ages 11 and 12 is more than a year. It is a chasm between danger and safety. Vaccines promise people 12 and older protection from COVID-19, but aren’t yet approved in the U.S. for younger children, and it isn’t clear exactly when they will be. Frustrated by the wait and desperate to protect their children, some parents are sneaking their 10- and 11-year-old kids across this chasm, and hoping not to get caught... David Reischer, an attorney based in New York City and a CEO of LegalAdvice.com, told me. “Parents lying about their children’s age to get children under 12 years of age vaccinated could be committing a crime, depending upon the jurisdiction where the consent form was unlawfully submitted,” Reischer said. Purposely misrepresenting information such as birth date, marriage status, date of death, and other vital information in state identity documents is unlawful in many jurisdictions... The possible medical consequences of these lies must also be considered. Robert Frenck, the director of vaccine research at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the principal investigator for most of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine trials conducted there, empathizes with parents, but told me he is concerned that vaccinating young children with doses meant for older children could be unsafe. Part of his job is to help establish the dosage that gives children the best combination of immune response and safety. According to Frenck, parents who are lying about their kid’s age are potentially increasing the likelihood of their child having adverse events post-vaccination, such as fever, chills, and headache... the Food and Drug Administration also urged parents not to get unauthorized vaccines for their young children. “Just like you, we are eager to see our children and grandchildren vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible,” the statement reads. “We have to let the science and data guide us. The FDA is working around the clock to support the process for making COVID-19 vaccines available for children.”"
I saw many liberals in the FB comments cheering this. Naturally.
Given that covid is less dangerous to children than the flu...

FDA delays Moderna vaccine for teens until heart condition studied: report
Covid hystericists must be very upset that they have fewer options to jab their kids with, since clearly the only harm out there is covid

Children below 12 starting to form majority of COVID-19 cases admitted to hospitals: MOH
Once again conflating children in hospital with covid and children in hospital due to covid

Sweden decides against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11 | Toronto Sun - "“With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” Health Agency official Britta Bjorkholm told a news conference."
Vaxholes are going to hate Sweden even more now

Why UK has been less keen than US to give Covid jab to children - "the JCVI has cited concerns over a very rare side-effect linked to Covid jabs among young people, myocarditis, including the potential long-term effects of the condition. Among other issues, the JCVI has also been concerned about the impact of rolling out Covid jabs to older children could have on the delivery of other school immunisation programmes. With children far less likely than adults to become seriously ill with Covid, there was an ethical concern over the appropriateness of vaccinating children to protect others. This was particularly acute given the uncertainty about the impact the vaccination of 12- to 15-year-olds would have on transmission in the face of the Delta variant. One expert, who is no longer part of the JCVI, suggested it could be better for children to gain protection from natural infection rather than taking a possible risk with a vaccine... Russell Viner, professor of adolescent health at University College London Institute of Child Health, and a participant in the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies during the pandemic, suggested there were a number of reasons why the UK and US have taken different approach, including cultural differences in medicine. “US physicians are generally much more pro-interventionist. In the UK there is a stronger recognition of the potential for harm,” he said. Viner also noted the US has been hard hit by Covid in terms of children. “Their health system does not protect the vulnerable and deprived as ours does,” he said... One source with knowledge of JCVI matters said a key difference between the UK and the US was that in the latter, parents may have to pay for expensive care for their child if they fell ill. The US has also had lower uptake of jabs among adults, which could be driving the push to vaccinate children to try stem the pandemic"
Clear evidence that The Science speaks with one voice, and anyone who disagrees is ignorant

Pandemic Restrictions May Harm Infant Cognitive Development, Study Finds - "For the overwhelming majority of healthy kids, there is no good evidence that they should have to wear masks, practice social distancing, and frequently miss school. Yet in much of the country, the restrictions on young people are currently more stringent than the restrictions on adults and the elderly. In large Democratic cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., schoolchildren are generally masked. And when it's time to eat lunch, they do so outdoors—even as the weather grows colder. Having to eat lunch outside in the cold is a punishment currently endured by school kids, and only school kids. Adults are eating indoors at restaurants and drinking indoors at bars. Now that D.C.'s mask mandate has ended, indoor gyms can once again let their customers go maskless—but in many places, masks are still required for indoor school sports. It doesn't make any sense that authorities are enforcing the harshest restrictions on the least at-risk people. The rules for the college-aged are, if anything, even more extreme: Many campuses severely limit interactions between students, require masks even outside, and discourage nearly all forms of socialization. What's occurring is something close to the exact opposite of the ideal: Whatever mitigation policies are in place for adults and the elderly, the policies for young people should be less restrictive, not more."
Covid hystericists will just blame "long covid" for all this

Yale epidemiologist: I would pull child from school to avoid vaccine - "Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch is advising parents to remove their children from any public school that forces students to get the shots. Risch said Sunday night in an interview that children with serious chronic conditions “should be considered for vaccination.” “Other than that, if it were my child, I would homeschool them”... Risch is a professor of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. A former member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology, he is an author of more than 350 original peer-reviewed research publications... He acknowledged that vaccination “is not a high risk that’s going to kill every child.” “However, it’s enough of a risk, that on the average the benefit is higher for homeschooling than it is for vaccination and being in school.” CDC statistics show children generally do not spread COVID-19 and have little risk of any adverse effects. The seasonal flu is more deadly among children than COVID-19, and the swine flu one decade ago was six times more deadly. The survival rate for children under age 20 who get COVID, according to the CDC, is 99.998%. And CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted in August the vaccines had become ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus... Levin noted the inconsistent messaging of public health officials, including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky saying last week that children who are vaccinated will still need to masks and White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “endless contradictions” in his many media appearances. “This has to be one of the worst year-and-a-half, two-year periods of information provided the American people by the so-called scientific and medical community that I can remember,” he said. Risch replied that the health community is “a top-down structure, and most doctors do not get their information by going back to the original studies and making up their own minds.” “They get fed the information from pharma reps or from what they’re told by society, and the conflicts are legion,” he said. “So it’s no surprise that most doctors don’t pay attention and think what they’re told (to think).”"

Meme - "Can someone call CPS on this "MD"?
Tatiana Prowell, MD @ @tmprowell:: "In case it helps to be concrete, my teen missed a step & rolled his ankle BADLY last night. In usual times, we'd go to his pediatrician or urgent care, get an x-ray. Nope. We'll sort it out when #Omicron settles. We have no confidence that health care settings are safe now."
Imagine being a doctor and thinking that omicron is more of a threat to your teen than a broken ankle

Meme - Show Me The Data @txsalth2o: "Why are people doubling down? It's hard to accept that you damaged your kids for nothing. It's hard to accept that you stole their prom, their first day of kindergarten, their little league championship and their chance of an athletic scholarship for nothing. It has to be a deadly disease, if it's not, that means that they were wrong. Being wrong cost their children dearly. So instead of waking up, saying "I was wrong" & trying to fix it, they're going to double down. Because acknowledging the damage they did is far too painful."

Covid and Age - The New York Times - "An unvaccinated child is at less risk of serious Covid illness than a vaccinated 70-year-old.
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who frequently writes about parenting, published an article in The Atlantic in March that made a lot of people angry. The headline was, “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.” The article argued that Covid-19 tended to be so mild in children that vaccinated parents could feel comfortable going out in the world with their unvaccinated children. Critics called the article insensitive and misleading, saying it understated the risks that children could both get sick and spread the virus... Today, an accurate version of her headline might be: “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Much Safer Than a Vaccinated Grandma.”... “Covid is a threat to children. But it’s not an extraordinary threat,” Dr. Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Southampton, has written. “It’s very ordinary. In general, the risks from being infected are similar to the other respiratory viruses you probably don’t think much about.”... Different elderly people will respond to the risks in different ways, and that’s OK. Some may decide to be extremely cautious until caseloads fall to low levels. Others — especially those without major health problems — may reasonably choose to travel, see friends and live their lives. The risks are not zero, but they are quite low. And few parts of life pose zero risk. As a point of comparison, the annual risk of death for all vaccinated people over 65 in Seattle this year appears to be around 1 in 2,700. The annual average risk that an American dies in a vehicle crash is lower — about 1 in 8,500 — but not a different order of magnitude... For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify... The risk of long Covid among children — a source of fear among many parents — also appears to be very low. All of which raises a thorny question: Should young children be vaccinated? I know some readers will recoil at the mention of that question, but I think it’s a mistake to treat it as unmentionable"
This won't stop the hysteria from people who try to bludgeon others with the "science"

National Mental Health Data Shows the Lockdown 'Cure' Was Worse Than COVID-19 for Children

Covid-19 disruptions killed 228,000 children in South Asia, says UN report

Friday, February 18, 2022

Links - 18th February 2022 (2)

Meme - "Find a spouse who looks at you the way Linda Sarsour looks at herself."
"Linda Sarsour: I am reading the final final manuscript (yes I learned there's always multiple finals) of my book and I cry every time. I can't wait for all of you to read it. I's heartbreaking, courageous, inspirational, moving - full of pain, trauma and yet so much love and hope - and most of all will make you want to get up and do something for the benefit of others. A Palestinian Muslim American mom from Brooklyn gets to tell her story and I sit here and imagine a little girl 40 years from now reading my book and knowing that we fought for her with everything we had, that I fought for her so she can be unapologetic about who she is. Coming very soon."

The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist. - The New York Times
"With an atheist as chief chaplain of Harvard University, you now get to say that secular atheism is truly a religion."

Jonathan Chait on Twitter - "One of the most important structural asymmetries in American politics is that Republicans have a mass media ecosystem that always supports them, while Democrats don't"
When you're so used to media bias that you take it for granted

Michael Hobbes on Twitter - "The far right’s love of farmers markets plays into a larger fascist talking point that idealizes pastoral life and demonizes ‘degenerate’ urban living."

Meme - "How Disney releases posters in China *Black Panther, The Force Awakens - black erasure*
I'm beginning to see a pattern here that I'm not so sure I like."

Meme - "Anvil- Anarchist Non-Violent Intervention League: The first Stalinist was born today. May he rot in Hell forever. Anticommunist Vladimir Lenin was born today. Crimes include disempowering soviets and factory committees. Using red army/secret police to crush strikes, unions, communist movements. Oversaw/allowed the terror tactics of Trotsky. And ruined the Revolution by establishing a state capitalist regime. "
"True communism has never been tried"

Meme - "Teacher: IF YOU FAIL, HOW WILL YOU GET A GOOD PAYING JOB?
Bureaucrat: NEXT ON THE AGENDA, HOW TO FIX OUR FAILING SCHOOLS?
Teacher: PAY US MORE MONEY"

Facebook - "Mary Poppins and Pennywise are creatures of the same species.  Each returns every 20-something years (Pennywise 27, Mary Poppins 25) to regenerate energy from a new group of children, but also have a tendency to return to those they met on their last visit (Pennywise returns to the Losers, Mary Poppins returns to the Bankses.)... Each has the same set of powers, in which they can take advantage of what lies in the children’s minds (Mary Poppins uses their imagination, Pennywise uses their fear.) Mary Poppins famously has a living reflection that can function separately from her, and Pennywise is shown to share this ability in Chapter Two. In each of these stories, the parents are oblivious to the fantastical situations being experienced by the children."

Meme - "Jae Yoon, you've been selected for an opportunity.
Hi Jae Yoon,
Your experience as Autopsy Assistant and Intern at Dr. Sidney B. Weinberg Center for Forensic Sciences stood out to me, when I came across your profile on LinkedIn. We're hiring at Moe's Southwest Grill, and I think you could be a great"

The Anatomical Machines - Museo Cappella Sansevero - "In the Underground Chamber of the Sansevero Chapel, housed in two glass cases, are the famous Anatomical Machines, or Anatomical Studies, i.e. the skeletons of a man and a woman in upright position with their arteriovenous system almost perfectly intact. The Machines were made by Palermo doctor Giuseppe Salerno"

Facebook - "Dried stingrays!!!! 👽 wth *Nasty faces*"

Meme - "New iMac
No USB No Ethernet No SD card No HDMI
Next update: NO SCREEN"

Katie Hannigan on Twitter - "When someone tells you "you can be anything you want!" don't listen. It's a baby boomer conspiracy to sell liberal arts degrees."

E-scooters prove perfect for a quick trip to A&E - "A quarter of people injured riding e-scooters were admitted to hospital, a new study has found, as researchers warned that too many were drunk or not wearing helmets.  Academics in Berlin found that one in five riders who came off the gadgets were over the legal drink drive limit and that only one in 100 was wearing a helmet."

Woman Befriends Mother's Murderer - is Then Murdered by Him - "A woman who befriended her mother’s and cousin’s killer out of a “spiritual obligation” has been stabbed and bludgeoned to death by the same man.  Martha McKay was brutally murdered at the Arkansas Snowden House, a colonial style home built in the early twentieth century and the same place where her mother and cousin were murdered 23 years ago by the same man, who she befriended... McKay, a longtime practicing Buddhist, had reportedly visited Lewis several times when he was in prison, despite the disapproval of her family. She had even written to Lewis while he was behind bars and supported his parole."

Technology, jobs, and the future of work - "Unemployment and underemployment are high around the world... In a McKinsey survey of young people and employers in nine countries, 40 percent of employers said lack of skills was the main reason for entry-level job vacancies. Sixty percent said that new graduates were not adequately prepared for the world of work. There were gaps in technical skills such as STEM subject degrees but also in soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and punctuality. Conversely, even those in work may not be realizing their potential. In a recent global survey of job seekers conducted by LinkedIn, 37 percent of respondents said their current job does not fully utilize their skills or provide enough challenge... Even while technologies replace some jobs, they are creating new work in industries that most of us cannot even imagine, and new ways to generate income. One-third of new jobs created in the United States in the past 25 years were types that did not exist, or barely existed, in areas including IT development, hardware manufacturing, app creation, and IT systems management. The net impact of new technologies on employment can be strongly positive. A 2011 study by McKinsey’s Paris office found that the Internet had destroyed 500,000 jobs in France in the previous 15 years—but at the same time had created 1.2 million others, a net addition of 700,000, or 2.4 jobs created for every job destroyed. The growing role of big data in the economy and business will create a significant need for statisticians and data analysts; we estimate a shortfall of up to 250,000 data scientists in the United States alone in a decade."
Of course, we are told that this time is different and we need Universal Basic Income

WB Exec Says Studio Knew Whedon’s ‘Justice League’ Was a ‘Piece of Sh*t’

Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age? - "Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, although several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Using data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, we analyze attitudinal change over a major portion of the adult life span. We document changes in party identification, self-reported ideology, and selected issue positions over this time period and place these changes in context by comparing them with contemporaneous national averages. Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change."

"support your friend just like you support a celebrity that doesn't know you exists" Sticker

Facebook - "My advice to my students is the same as my advice to myself--and to everyone: Seek the truth. Speak the truth as best you understand it. Do not permit yourself to be bullied into silence. Do not allow yourself to be shamed into saying things you don't believe or expressing yourself inauthentically--by, for example, embracing movements or endorsing slogans about which you have reservations. Do not let fear of the mob or lust for acceptance or applause--or the desire to get ahead--dictate what you say and don't say. When you feel the temptation to "go along to get along," resist it... Do what you think is right, with (as Lincoln said) "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." But do not immunize your views and actions from criticism. Remind yourself--often--of your own fallibility. Engage those who do not share your views and be open to their questions and challenges. Respect others and do not let disagreement destroy friendships or prevent them from being formed. Do not demonize thoughtful people--you will find there are many--who arrive at conclusions different from yours on important questions. It is possible that they are right, or partially right, and your view should be abandoned or revised. Avoid wrapping your emotions so tightly around your convictions that you become a dogmatist. Try your best to avoid looking at things through an ideological lens or some particular narrative. Otherwise you will interpret everything you "see" as reinforcing what you already believe. Examine things from different angles and perspectives. Don't allow yourself to grow so deeply attached to your opinions that you favor them over truth itself. Falling in love with your opinions will blind you to truth. Contrary to popular belief, a self-critical spirit does not induce paralysis. Strive to be your own best critic. Think for yourself. Never outsource that job. Shun conformism and groupthink. In fact, learn to shudder when you see them. They are the road to Hell. Don't be a knee-jerk contrarian. Don't be a knee-jerk anything. But remember that the crowd is often wrong. History is replete with examples--tragic ones. Bear constantly in mind that though misfortune or evildoers can take nearly everything else from you, they cannot take something inestimably precious: your integrity. That is something entirely in your hands and under your control. If it is lost, it is because you gave it up. Hold onto it tightly; never yield it."

How An Obscure British Comedy Sketch Became The World’s Most Repeated TV Program - "British comedian Freddie Frinton and 72-year-old actress May Warden. Frinton first made a name for himself in the music halls and variety shows of wartime Britain, and after World War II added a sketch to his show entitled "Dinner For One."... Miss Sophie has long outlived her four closest friends—Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommeroy and Mr. Winterbottom—but places are set at her dinner table regardless, with James valiantly stepping in to impersonate each one... part of the skit’s success lies in Frinton’s expert physical comedy (which needs no subtitles and so works across the language boundary) and partly in its short running time, which for many years made it the perfect short to fill time between broadcasts. After being used sporadically as little more than a time-filler over the next decade, in 1972, German television network Norddeutscher Rundfunk decided to schedule it at 6 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The viewers loved it, and a now annual tradition was established... ironically, for such a quintessentially British sketch, it has yet to be shown in its entirety on British television"

Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend - "Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk... When his girlfriend of five years, Helen "Holly" Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn't come back to pick them up.  And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned... Einhorn claimed that his ex-girlfriend had been killed by CIA agents who framed him for the crime because he knew too much about the agency's paranormal military research."

AITA for applauding my neighbour’s “night time activities?” : AmItheAsshole - "A few nights ago my wife and I were woken up by the neighbors in the apartment above ours very explicitly and loudly trying to expand their family. They must have been going at it for an hour, and it was fairly frustrating as I had work the next day. After they were done I played an applause track through my Bluetooth speaker held up to the ceiling to try and make them aware of the relative thinness of the floor. I found out today that they have reported me to management for harassment."

Austrian motorist runs over artist lying on road during 'performance' in Salzburg - "A motorist has been charged by police after he ran over an artist in the middle of a 'reclining performance' in Salzburg’s Residenzplatz on Wednesday after mistaking her for a mannequin or puppet.  The 41-year-old artist, from Tennengau, was performing what she called a “reclining performance” in the old town and lay down on the ground.   Police said the woman had been told by several locals and passers by that laying down on the ground in that area was dangerous, but clearly the warning was not heeded.   Later in the day, a 71-year-old motorist drove over the woman while trying to reach an inner courtyard.   He told police he saw an obstruction in the road which he thought was some kind of doll and was unable to move around her, so he decided to run it over lengthways.   It was only when he heard screams and felt a drag under the car that he decided to stop.   The artist was injured and transferred to Salzburg University Hospital.   Police said an alcohol test carried out on both the driver and the artist was negative. Police also indicated that they were unsure why the artist did not move when the motorist approached her.   She told the police that she the performance was part of an art fair and that it was not her first such performance – although it was the first performance which ended in such a way.   Police charged the man with driving causing negligent bodily harm, although the public prosecutor must decide whether or not to push charges"
Poor driver, who got into trouble because of an idiot artist

Meme - *mouse befriending frog, frog eating mouse*
"Not every friend that looks like a friend is a friend."

Utah woman loses hair, dignity, confidence in phone scam convincing her to shave head - "Megan Randolph is mad. And devastated. And in her own words, her confidence has been "rocked."... Randolph had been convinced to shave her head down to the skin, and her eyebrows, in exchange for a couple of thousand bucks."
They setup a GoFundMe to "scam" others

Meme - "My Cancer won guys. Goodbye. Last Online 9 Years ago"

FALSE: Road Runner Tunnel Crash - "In March 2016, a number of news sites published items about a (nearly too funny to be true) accident involving a Fiat and a wall painted to look like a Looney Tunes’ Road Runner-style fake tunnel... that painting had been removed in December 2015 to avoid crashes and that no such crash had occurred by the time it was painted over"

Dance troupe withdraws from Chingay 2021 after dancers face 'cyberbullying' over tap dance segment - "The 10 dancers were supposed to tap dance in tutus while donning lion dance costumes, while the rest of the performers will be in traditional costumes... Lion Dance Singapore added that Chingay parades are to showcase "diverse cultural identities" instead of "destroying a cultural image in the name of creativity", and called for the dance segment to be dropped from this year's parade."
Clearly culture is static and doesn't change, and different cultures never influence each other

Facebook - "Bryan Fogel’s first documentary, “Icarus,” helped uncover the Russian doping scandal that led to the country’s expulsion from the 2018 Winter Olympics. It also won an Oscar for him and for Netflix, which released the film. For his second project, he chose another subject with global interest: the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist, and the role that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, played in it. A film by an Oscar-winning filmmaker would normally garner plenty of attention from streaming services, which have used documentaries and niche movies to attract subscribers and earn awards. Instead, when Mr. Fogel’s film, “The Dissident,” was finally able to find a distributor after eight months, it was with an independent company that had no streaming platform and a much narrower reach. “These global media companies are no longer just thinking, ‘How is this going to play for U.S. audiences?’” Mr. Fogel said. “They are asking: ‘What if I put this film out in Egypt? What happens if I release it in China, Russia, Pakistan, India?’ All these factors are coming into play, and it’s getting in the way of stories like this.” “What I observed was that the desire for corporate profits have left the integrity of America’s film culture weakened,” said Thor Halvorssen, the founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation (HRF), who financed the film and served as a producer... compare and contrast Netflix's response to catering their content (read: censoring) for the Saudi market vs. their social media feed post-George Floyd."

Meme - "Reality can be whatever I want
So I made myself look human and slept with Scarlet Witch
While Mantis saw the whole thing"
On Oldboy

NSmen Can Get Reservist Packs For ICT, No Need Chiong To E-Mart Before Reporting - "Singapore company D&G Marketing has created 7 types of reservist packs filled with various handy essentials that an NSman would typically need for ICT. Squeezing your thick SAF uniform into your already tight bag can be a frustrating experience. But with Pack 1, you can simply fold your uniform and fit it in the bag nicely to free up space for other essentials."

Chicago car thief participates in Zoom court hearing for stealing a car from inside another stolen car - "This guy, Joshua Slaughter (sweet name ngl), was arrested for allegedly stealing a Dodge Charger."

Woman, 67, finishes 10 bowls of curry noodles at Tampines food court in 45 minutes before dine-in ban - " The stall owner said that he was initially surprised to receive the order from the elderly woman, saying that a young person typically can eat up to four bowls. He can at most eat five to six bowls so he was in disbelief initially. He then told Jiang that if she really can finish all 10 bowls, it will be on the house... The stall owner commented that he has never come across an elderly person with such a huge appetite."

Brexit: UK risks being flooded with cheaply produced food, EU warns
Brexit was supposed to be terrible because it was supposed to lower the price of food. Amazing

Panic over chlorinated chicken in UK 'based on myths', says US offical - "other chemicals like acetic acid are beginning to replace the practice and says less than 20 per cent of US poultry is currently treated with chlorine. The Foreign Agricultural Service administrator hit back at EU standards and said procedures in the US are ‘more advanced and more modern than what you find in Europe’. He added: ‘In a lot of ways it (the EU approach) is old-fashioned, it’s based on traditions, not based on modern science and technology.’"
Ironically, liberals like to bash "conservatives" for being afraid of change

Don't get into a flap about chlorinated chicken! - "Chlorine-washed chicken is safe. The paper’s author, Peter Spence, highlights that the volume of evidence: the process is deemed safe not just by US regulators, but also by the EU’s own scientific advisors. The European Food Safety Authority has said four types of chemical rinse, including chlorine dioxide, ‘would be of no safety concern’: a person would have to eat around 5 per cent of their body weight in chicken every day (nearly three whole birds a day for the typical British man) to reach the safety limit, according to European Commission data. Drinking water poses a far greater risk, making up 99 per cent of the disinfection byproducts consumed in a typical daily diet. Chlorination kills harmful bacteria often found in chicken. Immersing poultry meat in chlorine dioxide solution of the strength used in the United States reduces prevalence of salmonella from 14% in controls to 2%. EU chicken samples typically have 15-20% salmonella."

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