2021: More Troubles Likely

This article is in the footprint of the 1972 Club of Rome report and the less apocalyptic 1997 Fourth Turning book by Strauss and Howe which both predicted a sharp inflection around the year 2020.  

It is hard to predict if 2021 will see a rebound after the extreme downturn of 2020 or an acceleration of the decline. Short of a major external shock, I would go 60/40 for "rebound" as institutions and structures in the West have not yet been weakened to an extent allowing a crash. But underneath the froth of activity, the declining ROI in the energy sector is relentless. New "discoveries" will be in the 60 to 100 USD range which people simply cannot pay for. 

With all the money printing, we should start seeing some inflation but the current recession destroys more money than is being created resulting in massive redistribution and misallocation of funding as most of the cash rains down close to the Eccles and Frankfurt towers. Look at Argentina and other "developing" economies as canaries in the coal mine... "Interesting times!"

 

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

Most people expect that the economy of 2021 will be an improvement from 2020. I don’t think so. Perhaps COVID-19 will be somewhat better, but other aspects of the economy will likely be worse.

Back in November 2020, I showed a chart illustrating the path that energy consumption seems to be on. The sharp downturn in energy consumption has occurred partly because the cost of oil, gas and coal production tends to rise, since the portion that is least expensive to extract and ship tends to be removed first.

At the same time, prices that energy producers are able to charge their customers don’t rise enough to compensate for their higher costs. Ultimate customers are ordinary wage earners, and their wages are not escalating as rapidly as fossil fuel production and delivery costs. It is the low selling price of fossil fuels, relative to the rising cost of production, that causes a collapse in the production of fossil fuels. This is the crisis we are now facing.

Figure 1. Estimate by Gail Tverberg of World Energy Consumption from 1820 to 2050. Amounts for earliest years based on estimates in Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospectsand BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy for the years 1965 to 2019. Energy consumption for 2020 is estimated to be 5% below that for 2019. Energy for years after 2020 is assumed to fall by 6.6% per year, so that the amount reaches a level similar to renewables only by 2050. Amounts shown include more use of local energy products (wood and animal dung) than BP includes.

With lower energy consumption, many things tend to go wrong at once: The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Protests and uprisings become more common. The poorer citizens and those already in poor health become more vulnerable to communicable diseases. Governments feel a need to control their populations, partly to keep down protests and partly to prevent the further spread of disease.

If we look at the situation shown on Figure 1 on a per capita basis, the graph doesn’t look quite as steep, because lower energy consumption tends to bring down population. This reduction in population can come from many different causes, including illnesses, fewer babies born, less access to medical care, inadequate clean water and starvation.

Figure 2. Amounts shown in Figure 1, divided by population estimates by Angus Maddison for earliest years and by 2019 United Nations population estimates for years to 2020. Future population estimated to be falling half as quickly as energy supply is falling in Figure 1. World population drops to 2.8 billion by 2050.

What Is Ahead for 2021?

In many ways, it is good that we really don’t know what is ahead for 2021. All aspects of GDP production require energy consumption. A huge drop in energy consumption is likely to mean disruption in the world economy of varying types for many years to come. If the situation is likely to be bad, many of us don’t really want to know how bad.

We know that many civilizations have had the same problem that the world does today. It usually goes by the name “Collapse” or “Overshoot and Collapse.” The problem is that the population becomes too large for the resource base. At the same time, available resources may degrade (soils erode or lose fertility, mines deplete, fossil fuels become harder to extract). Eventually, the economy becomes so weakened that any minor disturbance – attack from an outside army, or shift in weather patterns, or communicable disease that raises the death rate a bit – threatens to bring down the whole system. I see our current economic problem as much more of an energy problem than a COVID-19 problem.

We know that when earlier civilizations collapsed, the downfall tended not to happen all at once. Based on an analysis by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov in their book, Secular Cycles, economies tended to first hit a period of stagflation, for perhaps 40 or 50 years. In a way, today’s economy has been in a period of stagflation since the 1970s, when it became apparent that oil was becoming more difficult to extract. To hide the problem, increasing debt was issued at ever-lower interest rates.

According to Turchin and Nefedov, the stagflation stage eventually moves into a steeper “crisis” period, marked by overturned governments, debt defaults, and falling population. In the examples analyzed by Turchin and Nefedov, this crisis portion of the cycle took 20 to 50 years. It seems to me that the world economy reached the beginning of the crisis period in 2020 when lockdowns in response to the novel coronavirus pushed the weakened world economy down further.

The examples examined by Turchin and Nefedov occurred in the time period before fossil fuels were widely used. It may very well be that the current collapse takes place more rapidly than those in the past, because of dependency on international supply lines and an international banking system. The world economy is also very dependent on electricity–something that may not last. Thus, there seems to be a chance that the crisis phase may last a shorter length of time than 20 to 50 years. It likely won’t last only a year or two, however. The economy can be expected to fall apart, but somewhat slowly. The big questions are, “How slowly?” “Can some parts continue for years, while others disappear quickly?”

Some Kinds of Things to Expect in 2021 (and beyond)

[1] More overturned governments and attempts at overturned governments.

With increasing wage disparity, there tend to be more and more unhappy workers at the bottom end of the wage distribution. At the same time, there are likely to be people who are unhappy with the need for high taxes to try to fix the problems of the people at the bottom end of the wage distribution. Either of these groups can attempt to overturn their government if the government’s handling of current problems is not to the group’s liking.

[2] More debt defaults.

During the stagflation period that the world economy has been through, more and more debt has been added at ever-lower interest rates. Much of this huge amount of debt relates to property that is no longer of much use (airplanes without passengers; office buildings that are no longer needed because people now work at home; restaurants without enough patrons; factories without enough orders). Governments will try to avoid defaults as long as possible, but eventually, the unreasonableness of this situation will prevail. The impact of defaults can be expected to affect many parts of the economy, including banks, insurance companies and pension plans.

[3] Extraordinarily slow progress in defeating COVID-19.

There seems to be a significant chance that COVID-19 is lab-made. In fact, the many variations of COVID-19 may also be lab made. Researchers around the world have been studying “Gain of Function” in viruses for more than 20 years, allowing the researchers to “tweak” viruses in whatever way they desire. There seem to be several variations on the original virus now. A suicidal/homicidal researcher could decide to “take out” as many other people as possible, by creating yet another variation on COVID-19.

To make matters worse, immunity to coronaviruses in general doesn’t seem to be very long lasting. An October 2020 article says, 35-year study hints that coronavirus immunity doesn’t last long. Analyzing other corona viruses, it concluded that immunity tends to disappear quite quickly, leading to an annual cycle of illnesses such as colds. There seems to be a substantial chance that COVID-19 will return on an annual basis. If vaccines generate a similar immunity pattern, we will be facing an issue of needing new vaccines, every year, as we do with flu.

[4] Cutbacks on education of many kinds.

Many people getting advanced degrees find that the time and expense did not lead to an adequate financial reward afterwards. At the same time, universities find that there are not many grants to support faculty, outside of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) fields. With this combination of problems, universities with limited budgets make the financial decision to reduce or eliminate programs with reduced student interest and no outside funding.

At the same time, if local school districts find themselves short of funds, they may choose to use distance learning, simply to save money. This type of cutback could affect grade school children, especially in poor areas.

[5] Increasing loss of the top layers of governments.

It takes money/energy to support extra layers of government. The UK is now completely out of the European Union. We can expect to see more changes of this type. The UK may dissolve into smaller regions. Other parts of the EU may leave. This problem could affect many countries around the world, such as China or countries of the Middle East.

[6] Less globalization; more competition among countries.

Every country is struggling with the problem of not enough jobs that pay well. This is really an energy-related problem. Instead of co-operating, countries will tend to increasingly compete, in the hope that their country can somehow get a larger share of the higher-paying jobs. Tariffs will continue to be popular.

[7] More empty shelves in stores.

In 2020, we discovered that supply lines can break, making it impossible to purchase products a person expects. In fact, new governmental rules can have the same impact, for example, if a country bans travel to its country. We should expect more of this in 2021, and in the years ahead.

[8] More electrical outages, especially in locations where reliance on intermittent wind and solar for electricity is high.

In most places in the world, oil products were available before electricity. On the way down, we should expect to see the reverse of this pattern: Electricity will disappear first because it is hardest to maintain a constant supply. Oil will be available, at least as long as is electricity.

There is a popular belief that we will “run out of oil,” and that renewable electricity can be a solution. I do not think that intermittent electricity can be a solution for anything. It works poorly. At most, it acts as a temporary extender to fossil fuel-provided electricity.

[9] Possible hyperinflation, as countries issue more and more debt and no longer trust each other.

I often say that I expect oil and energy prices to stay low, but this doesn’t really hold if many countries around the world issue more and more government debt as a way to try to keep businesses from failing, debt from defaulting, and stock market prices inflated. There is a danger that all prices will inflate, and that sellers of products will no longer accept the hyperinflated currency that countries around the world are trying to provide.

My concern is that international trade will break down to a significant extent as hyperinflation of all currencies becomes a problem. The higher prices of oil and other energy products won’t really lead to any more production because prices of all goods and services will be inflating at the same time; fossil fuel producers will not get any special benefit from these higher prices.

If a significant loss of trade occurs, there will be even more empty shelves because there is very little any one country can make on its own. Without adequate goods, population loss may be very high.

[10] New ways of countries trying to fight with each other.

When there are not enough resources to go around, historically, wars have been fought. I expect wars will continue to be fought, but the approaches will “look different” than in the past. They may involve tariffs on imported goods. They may involve the use of laboratory-made viruses. They may involve attacking the internet of another country, or its electrical distribution system. There may be no officially declared war. Strange things may simply take place that no one understands, without realizing that the country is being attacked.

Conclusion

We seem to be headed for very bumpy waters in the years ahead, including 2021. Our real problem is an energy problem that we do not have a solution for.

 

The Masks Are Coming Off

 

Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

I had intended to start the New Year with a heart-warming piece entitled, “2021: The Year of Censorship of Dissent”. It would have been a somewhat prophetical piece, shocking some readers with predictions of a coming crackdown on dissent, and causing others to hoot with laughter because they haven’t quite caught up with the times we are in. You know, the types who say things like “Oh perrrlease! Social Media companies are private companies and they have the right to decide who they allow on their platform” and “Stop making out it’s the gulag” etc.

Unfortunately, my plans were scuppered by the fact that media and social media companies — let’s call them Global Pravda — have come out of the blocks even earlier than even I anticipated, and have been censoring left right and centre. As a result, my intended “prophetical” utterance seems like yesterday’s news.

We’ve had the censoring of Talk Radio on YouTube. Although this was then restored after intervention at the highest level, I understand some of the wonderful conversations between Mike Graham and Peter Hitchens are still banned. YouTube have also banned videos from extremely qualified scientists around the world, including two lengthy interviews given in English by one of the most qualified microbiologists on planet earth, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi.

We’ve then seen the President of the United States being banned from Facebook, Instagram and more recently Twitter. I am no fan of Donald Trump, but it is clear that he has never used these platforms to “incite violence” – the excuse given for his ban –, and it is obvious that there something else going on there. And we’ve also seen numerous conservatives and scientists who oppose or question the mass quarantining of healthy people literally losing hundreds of Twitter followers in the last few days. Their followers are simply being deleted by Jack’s Magical Dissent Removing Algorithm, which has been invoked with a vengeance.

Last year really was nuts. It was a year when the authorities managed to convince people that even though they have no symptoms of an illness and feel as right as rain, they need to go get tested for the illness they don’t have, using a test that is not fit-for-purpose, such that they come away telling others that they have the illness they don’t actually have. Imagine doing that before 2020:

“Doctor, doctor, I think I have flu.”

“Oh really, what symptoms have you got. A cough? Achiness?”

“Oh no, I feel perfectly well. No symptoms whatsoever.”

“Then what makes you think you’ve got the flu?”

“I just think I might have it. Can I have a test?”

I imagine you’d have been laughed out of the surgery. Yet not only is this what people have been doing for over 9 months, but we’ve been told that people who aren’t ill need to be placed in quarantine and cover their respiratory passages with a piece of cloth, lest they spread the illness they don’t have to others. It’s quite mad, but we can at least comfort ourselves that it will be a source of amusement for our descendants.

It makes me quite nostalgic for the past. Well, 2009 anyway. Back then, when certain folks were trying to ramp up the fear and hysteria over the H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak (one Neil Ferguson prophesying 65,000 deaths in Britain), and Mexico announced a shutdown of much of its society for a time, the then Director General of the World Health Organisation, Dr. Margaret Chan, appealed for calm:

“In this regard, let me make a strong plea to countries to refrain from introducing measures that are economically and socially disruptive, yet have no scientific justification and bring no clear public health benefit. Rational responses are always best. They are all the more important at a time of economic downturn.”

Yet despite 2020 craziness, it doesn’t seem like it will hold a candle to 2021. If the first week or so is any barometer, it may be that 2020 was just the trailer or the warm-up act for the real thing. We’ve already seen the Chief Medical Adviser telling people who don’t have an illness to act as if they do have an illness. We’ve already seen the rollout of a vaccine, the study for which is not due to be completed until on 27th January 2023. And we’ve already seen international organisations telling us that restrictions are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, Salvation by Vaccine notwithstanding – although those of us who have followed things carefully knew this anyway.

Yet the real story of 2021 — if anyone is allowed to tell it — is likely to be mass censorship. What we are already seeing is, ironically, an unmasking. If 2020 was the year in which people put their Masks on, 2021 is already shaping up to be the year when the Globalists and Global Pravda really take theirs off. They are really going for it, blatantly censoring dissent, brazenly de-platforming alternative views, and shamelessly using technology to ensure that reasoned, fact-based challenges to establishment narratives are silenced.

It is ugly, its sinister and its menacing. And unless you are someone who longs to live in a more totalitarian state, you need to get wise to it now, you need to pray against it now, and you need to fight against it now. The masks are coming off and freedom is being crushed. Choose which side you want to stand on.

The Neo-puritans undoing of America

 

This article is the second part of a text by Thierry Meyssan, that can be found below. There indeed seems to be an irreconcilable gap in America today between two opposite visions of the country. The first one being the Jacksonian's.  

A similar non-discussion is also at work in Europe, hidden behind complex national identities. I find it amazing to witness this unraveling while energy diminishing returns on investment coupled with environmental collapse increase the divisions and accelerate the decline. 

The reality is that as ALL natural processes we are long past the overshoot part of the cycle and avoiding a crash is therefore beyond our grasp. The human side is giving meaning to what's happening and exacerbating the differences.    

After the USSR, the USA Collapses

By Thierry Meyssan

Voltairenet.org

January 20, 2021

 The Neo-puritans

In contrast to the Jacksonians, the groups raging against the still-in-office president Donald Trump are just as sure of their rightful place. Like Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, they claim a higher moral standard than the law; but unlike the English Republican, they do not use religious references. They are Calvinists without God.

They intend to create a Nation for all, not with their opponents, but by excluding all those who do not think like them. That is why they welcome the decisions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch to censor those who challenge the regularity of the election. They do not care if these multinationals arrogate to themselves a political power that contravenes the spirit of the First Amendment of the Constitution, since they share the same conception of Purity as they do: freedom of expression does not apply to heretics or “trumpists”.

Carried away by their zeal, they rewrite the history of this Nation, “light on the hill”, which came to enlighten the world. They do away with all class consciousness and magnify all minorities, not because of what they do, but because they are a minority. They purify the universities, practice inclusive writing, sacralise the wilderness, distinguish information from fakenews, overthrow statues of great men. Today, they are trying to remove President Trump from office, not because he organized the capture of the Capitol, but because he is the champion of those who took it. None of these heretics can have a place in the sun.

In the seventeenth century, the Puritans practiced public confessions in order to gain access to eternal life. In the 21st century, their successors, the Neo-Puritans, are still beating their chests for the “white privilege” they believe they enjoyed in order to attain immortality. Ultra-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Arthur Levinson, Sundar Pichai, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, John W. Thompson and Mark Zuckerberg are promoting a new ideology that claims the superiority of the digital man over the rest of humanity. They hope to defeat disease and death.

These very rational people have long ago abandoned reason to the extent that it is now impossible, according to two-thirds of Americans, to agree with them on basic facts. I am writing here about neopuritans, not trumpists.

Their fanaticism had already provoked the English Civil War, then the American War of Independence and the American Civil War. President Richard Nixon’s first fear was that it would open a fourth war that would tear the USA apart. That is where we are now.

Part of the power has already tipped democratic institutions into the hands of a few ultra-billionaires. The United States that we knew no longer exists. Their agony has begun.

 

Why Hardly Anyone Trusts The Virus 'Experts'

Covid year-1...

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress or the Fed.

For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream tend to experience covid-19 as a non-event while people low levels found the infection life-threatening.

There are obvious questions about causality here, so calling vitamin D a “cure” is going way too far. But if it has even a marginal effect – and the data suggest considerably more — a rational government would, you’d think, be handing out vitamin D like Halloween candy. In fact, since we’re mandating/prohibiting all kinds of other behaviors, we might expect vitamin D consumption to be required along with masks and social distancing.

Even covid-czar Anthony Fauci recently said:

“If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending — and I do it myself — taking vitamin D supplements.”

So why aren’t family-sized bottles of vitamin D arriving in the mail from the CDC? A cynic might wonder if the fact that Big Pharma doesn’t make much money from cheap, widely available supplements plays a role in the government’s apparent lack of interest.

Now about those lockdowns. Tom Woods has been producing charts that appear to show virtually no difference in virus outcomes between US states with aggressive lockdown policies and those without. California, for instance, has shuttered most of its small businesses and imposed widespread curfews, while Florida hasn’t. Here’s the result:

As for the rest of the world – where they’re supposedly doing better than the US – the pattern of zero correlation between lockdowns and virus spread seems to be holding. France imposed a full national lockdown in March – after which the virus spiked. Then they added mask mandates (indoor and outdoor), with fines attached. And daily new cases soared.

Then of course there’s the lying. Dr. Fauci first claimed that masks don’t help – when he believed they did help — because he feared mask shortages for health care workers. He also admits to changing the official line on herd immunity according to what he thinks we’re ready to hear.

And, in what sounds more like incompetence than dishonesty, he’s apparently been answering the question “when will life go back to normal?” with whatever pops into his head at the time. In early 2020, it was the coming Autumn. In July, it was “a year or so.” More recently it’s “well into 2021.”

But the biggest and by far the most outrageous reason for this growing mistrust has to be the World Health Organization which, well, read for yourself:

WHO official urges world leaders to stop using lockdowns as primary virus control method

The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 urged world leaders this week to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method.”

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. David Nabarro said to The Spectator’s Andrew Neil. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Nabarro went on to point out several of the negative consequences lockdowns have caused across the world, including devastating tourism industries and increased hunger and poverty.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said. “Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

In the United States, lockdowns have been tied to increased thoughts of suicide from children, a surge in drug overdoses, an uptick in domestic violence, and a study conducted in May concluded that stress and anxiety from lockdowns could destroy seven times the years of life that lockdowns potentially save.

The health care establishment could have saved a lot of time — and embarrassment — by just asking regular people about this stuff.  But then they would have made a lot less money.

In Final Act, Trump Admin To Present 'Bombshell' Findings Blaming Wuhan Lab For COVID-19, WHO Cover-Up

As reported on Zero hedge this morning (link bellow), the Trump Administration will put what it knows on the table about the origin of Covid-19. 

What I struggled to understand, at least at the beginning was why so many scientists would go to such length to cover their Chinese colleagues. That is until you understand that the P4 technology was coming from France, the virus coming from Canada and other sources... In other words, they are all in this together!

On the other hand, we can be certain that we are dealing with brilliant people from the fact that instead of having a discussion about the risk of such research, we get a policy of accelerated genetically modified vaccines on a grand scale.

So as in most other human endeavor, the solution to our man-made problems is to do more of what generated the problem in the first place.  Who, not WHO, would have known?

In Final Act, Trump Admin To Present 'Bombshell' Findings Blaming Wuhan Lab For COVID-19, WHO Cover-Up

The Trump administration will present 'dramatic new evidence' that the virus which causes COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to the Daily Mail, which adds that outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will make a "bombshell" announcement that SARS-CoV-2 did not naturally jump from bats to humans through an intermediary species - and was instead cultured by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where both Chinese and foreign experts have warned of shoddy bio-security for years.

The Britsh government (Daily Mail and all), meanwhile, dismissed the claims in advance - saying that 'all the credible scientific evidence does not point to a leak from the laboratory.'

This is of course patently false, as several prominent microbiologists - including one who worked in the Wuhan lab - have said it was likely created there and likely escaped. Two weeks ago, US National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger said there was a "growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus," while French intelligence warned of the possibility of a 'catastrophic leak' from the lab due to poor bio-security over a decade before the outbreak.

The lab’s highest security ‘P4’ section was built with French help in a deal signed off by Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But after it opened in 2015, the French contingent due to work there were pushed out by China’s military. -Daily Mail

Meanwhile, China scrubbed "hundreds of pages of information" spanning over 300 studies conducted by the WIV, including some which discuss passing diseases from animals to humans. Totally normal behavior from innocent people, we're sure.

Pompeo is also set to cite close links between the Institute and the People’s Liberation Army.

He will point out its highest security section has always had a ‘dual use’ military and civilian purpose.

He is also expected to accuse the World Health Organisation of assisting in a Chinese cover-up by refusing to probe the lab’s possible role.

Its ten-person team tasked with investigating the pandemic’s origins will arrive in Wuhan tomorrow – but there is no mention of the lab in its official terms of reference. -Daily Mail

"We don’t know whether this virus was natural or artificially created, and if it came from the lab, whether this was an accident or deliberate. It would be immoral and foolish to allow any sort of cover-up," said former Brexit Secretary David Davis, who added that it was 'vital' that the WHO team investigate.

"If it emerges the virus did come from the lab, China will become the pariah of the world," he added.

That said, MIT / Harvard doctor Alina Chan, who has been investigating the origins of the pandemic, doesn't think the WHO is suited to conduct any investigation.

"We have to take the necessary steps to do a proper investigation and, based on the available information, I don’t think the WHO is up to the task," said Chan. Stanford professor of microbiology David Relman, meanwhile, has voiced fears that the WIV was genetically engineering natural viruses to make them more transmissible - writing in November that "If SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again."

According to Sam Armtrong, China expert with the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, "The global public has a right to know exactly what was going on prior to the emergence of this deadly pandemic. The question cannot be shirked."

And as Edward Lucas writes via the Mail, "All the evidence points to cover-up...(but the truth can't be hidden for ever):

*  *  *

Secrets, lies and thuggery are the hallmark of the Chinese Communist regime. And in the mystery of the devastating Wuhan virus, all three are combined.

The strongest evidence of a crime is a cover-up. And the Chinese authorities have provided that.

They have fought ferociously to prevent an international inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.

Their repeated obstruction of the World Health Organisation’s fact-finding missions has provoked even that notoriously supine body to protest.

Even now, WHO investigators are being prevented from accessing the vitally important laboratory in Wuhan that is likely to be at the heart of America’s allegations.

Experts have been questioning the Chinese authorities’ account of events for a year. Now, it appears, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is to make a direct accusation.

Was it really pure chance the virus first attacked the human race in the only city in China with a research lab specialising in manipulating the world’s most dangerous viruses?

That would be as odd as a new disease emerging in the surroundings of Britain’s top-secret biological defence research establishment of Porton Down in Wiltshire.

To this day, scientists who support the theory that the virus is a mutation that emerged from Wuhan’s ‘wet market’ have not been able to find a convincing candidate for the animal in which this mutation actually occurred.

The official explanation is the new virus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China.

But as Chinese professor Botao Xiao pointed out in a paper in February, no such bats are sold at the city’s markets. And the caves where they live are hundreds of miles away.

That paper disappeared from the internet. Mr Xiao — perhaps mindful of the fate that awaits those in China who promote inconvenient truths — disavowed it.

Many scientists privately assumed an engineered virus released via a laboratory accident was at least as likely as the idea of a series of stunningly unfortunate chance mutations.

After all, Shi Zhengli, the Chinese scientist nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’ was a regular visitor to those caves. When news of the outbreak broke, she initially feared that a leak from her research institute was to blame.

That thought alone should have prompted a full-scale and searching inquiry. Instead, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a diktat: ‘Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.’

But even the Chinese regime cannot hold back the truth forever. Over the past twelve months independent research, official leaks and news reports have strengthened the lab-leak hypothesis.

In February a Taiwanese professor, Fang Chi-tai, highlighted a curious feature of the virus’s genetic code, which would make it more effective in attacking targeted cells. This was unlikely to be the result of a natural mutation, he suggested.

Much scientific research involves modifying viruses to understand how they function. Many observers have worried for years that the risks of such experiments are not properly thought through.

Lab safety procedures are riddled with potential loopholes and flaws: breakages, animal bites, faulty equipment or simple mis-labelling can all lead to a deadly pathogen reaching its first human victim. If so, such carelessness has now cost tens of millions of lives.

Yet we should be clear. The Chinese authorities are ruthless. But even they would not unleash a global plague.

Only in the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists is Beijing deliberately waging biological warfare on the West.

Paradoxically, such speculation — promoted by among others President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon — may have hampered the search for the truth, by making the lab-release theory seem racist and politically toxic.

In February, in Britain’s politically correct medical journal, the Lancet, scientists published an open letter denouncing ‘conspiracy theories and rumours’, urging solidarity with Chinese colleagues.

Yet it was just those colleagues who were bearing the brunt of the regime’s frantic attempts to censor the truth about the outbreak.

The Chinese regime prizes self-preservation above all — certainly over the truth, or the health of its own people, let alone the lives of foreigners.

#Covid-19 #CovidVirus #WuhanVirus #Covid19 #Virus #Covid

 

Without Freedom Of Speech, What Is Going To Happen To America?

Thank god there are still people like Michael Snyder below capable of reason. But clearly, the downfall of America is accelerating and with it, it's the whole concept of individual freedom which is at risk. It could well be that the Chinese were right all along in the end!

 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

It is quite ironic that many of those that are always telling us that we need “diversity” in our society are also some of the strongest voices against a “diversity of viewpoints” on social media.  The founders of this nation wanted to make sure that nobody would ever take the right to freedom of speech away from us, and that is why it was enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  Unfortunately, courts have greatly eroded that right over the last several decades, and now we are facing an all-out assault on freedom of speech that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  And once freedom of speech is completely gone, all of our other rights will soon follow, because there will no longer be any way to defend them.

When the United States was established, government was really the only major threat to free speech.  In early America, corporations were severely limited in size and scope, and that is because our founders were determined not to let them get too big or too powerful.

Our founders knew that enormous concentrations of money and power would be great threats to freedom, and that has definitely turned out to be the case.

In the old days, if you wanted to express yourself you could grab a soapbox and head down to a local street corner.  The reason why we use the term “marketplace of ideas” today is because people literally used to gather in marketplaces and town squares and exchange ideas with one another.

In our time, the Internet has become the place where we all gather to exchange ideas, but unfortunately control of all of the most important gathering spaces is in the hands of a very small group of colossal tech corporations.

When Facebook, Twitter and others were first growing, they generally allowed people to say pretty much what they wanted to say, and information flowed pretty freely.

But censorship has escalated dramatically over the past four years, and it reached a crescendo the other day when Twitter announced that it would be permanently suspending President Trump’s account.

How would our founders feel about that?

Tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter now have more money than many entire countries do, and in many ways they also have the same level of power that many national governments possess.

Just think about this – President Trump could never take away your ability to express yourself, but Facebook and Twitter can.

Of course big corporations dominate just about every other aspect of our society as well.  These collectivist institutions have become extremely dangerous, and they are really starting to throw their weight around.

Until the power of the big corporations is addressed, we will never have a truly free society again.

Just like leftist governments, big corporations seek to gather as much money and as much power under a single umbrella as possible.

Our founders wanted to empower the individual, and that is why they wanted to limit the size of government and that is why they also wanted to limit the size of corporations.

Sadly, it wasn’t just President Trump that got booted off Twitter in recent days.  Hordes of conservative accounts have been wiped out, and this has led many to use the word “purge” to describe what has been happening.

On my Twitter account, I have literally lost more than a thousand followers in just a few days.  Others have lost a lot more.

Many conservatives have been fleeing to Parler, but over the past several days the big tech giants teamed up to take that entire platform down…

Parler will likely go offline for “a while” Sunday evening given Amazon Web Services’ decision to suspend the upstart social media platform after Wednesday’s U.S. Capitol riot, executives said Sunday.

“We are clearly being singled out,” Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff told “Fox & Friends Weekend” one day after Apple suspended Parler from its App Store even as it surged to the No. 1 spot in the free apps section earlier in the day.

I was absolutely stunned when I heard that had happened.

These people are not playing games.

For the moment, Gab.com is still up, and their traffic has surged more than 750 percent in just the last few days…

Gab.com, the free speech friendly social network, says traffic has increased by more than 750 percent in the past few days, following the blacklisting of President Donald Trump from most mainstream tech platforms.

“Our traffic is up 753% in the past 24 hours. Tens of millions of visits,” said Gab in response to a question about slow loading speeds.

But how long will it be before Gab is taken down as well?

The big tech companies don’t want diversity, they don’t want competition and they don’t want dissent.

What they want is complete and total domination.

Cancel culture is not good for our society.  If everyone with viewpoints that are not “politically correct” is eventually “canceled” we will have a society that looks a whole lot like communist China.

And I suppose that is precisely what a lot of people out there truly want.

It is not always easy to listen to viewpoints that you consider to be offensive.  Personally, I do not like most of what my fellow citizens are saying in 2021.

But in the United States we are not supposed to silence opposing viewpoints that we do not like.  Instead, we are supposed to strive for victory in the marketplace of ideas by showing that our viewpoints are better.

Unfortunately, the big tech companies have decided that millions of Americans should no longer be allowed to participate in the marketplace of ideas because their viewpoints are just too offensive.

Ironically, many of those that are doing the censoring have the most offensive and the most dangerous viewpoints of all.

Needless to say, if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future for America.

Without free speech, the system of government that our founders established simply won’t work.

What is the point of even having elections if we can only express one point of view?

In China, no dissent is allowed and one political party runs everything on a permanent basis.

America appears to be heading in the same direction, and there are millions of people in this country that are actually quite thrilled that this is happening.

Here's an interesting report of the electric "disturbance" that just took place in France at the beginning of 2021.

In our short span attention society, there are still decisions with long term consequences, one of which concerns energy.

Carbon may or may not be a long term risk for mankind (I believe the case is not as clear-cut as usually presented.) but the consequences of misleaded decisions will be with us for decades to come. 

The wind and solar paranoia currently running amok in the West is one of them. For technical reasons, you simply cannot run a modern electrical grid on wind and solar alone since the base load cannot be guarantied at night and especially in winter as will be demonstrated in the coming years.

One of the main factors differentiating developed and developing countries over the last 50 years has been a stable electric supply as you cannot run a modern economy on an unreliable electric network. 

The fact that in the US and now in Europe, electricity blackouts are becoming more common is to my opinion an ominous sign of things to come.

What we are facing currently, more than anything, is an energy crisis for which there is no simple solutions. Diminishing returns on investment in the energy sector guaranty that the coming decades will be harsh, short of a very unlikely technical breakthrough in fusion at ITER. This will be compounded by wasteful decisions to over-invest in expensive and unreliable energy sources for which there is no turning back as the trillions of dollars currently wasted on fanciful projects will not be available when needed.

Stay tuned... and prepare!

Near electricity blackout over Europe was triggered in France due to "Polar Cold Wave"

P Gosselin
No Tricks Zone
Tue, 12 Jan 2021

 

A further analysis of last Friday's European near power blackout shows that the problem had begun already one day earlier in France, due to cold weather, says a German expert.

At wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft Bayern, Jörn Künzle provides background on what was behind Europe's near blackout last Friday, January 8, 2021.

Disturbance began in France

Quoting energy expert Dr. Michael Schneeberger, "The disturbance in the European grid was triggered in France. Already on January 7, France's RTE (Le Réseau de Transport de l'Électricité) was forced to take essential parts of the electricity-intensive industry off the power grid. The RED alert level was ordered for the entire network of France."

Polar wave

The following reasons were decisive, according to Michael Schneeberger's research:

1) The polar cold wave occurred earlier than meteorologically expected, with low temperatures for France.

2) Due to delays for new rules by the corona management, 13 nuclear power plants are currently not on the grid.

3) Despite fierce EDF warnings, the Macron government (German influence, Merkel/Greens) shut down the 2 Fessenheim units (both fully operational, i.e. almost 2 GW thus additionally missing).

4) CONSEQUENCE: Therefore, beginning Thursday, power had to be imported massively at very high prices,
a) with continental high pressure situation, there is no wind (and this in whole Europe),
b) with an installed capacity of 57 GW wind energy, the available capacity was less than 1000 MW (as is well known, there is little sun even in January / ignored by politics).

5) So on January 8, the RTE called on the French population to switch off electrical devices, heaters and charging units, but that, however, was not continuously adhered to.

6) Therefore the only remaining possibility was to intervene using area-wide shutdowns or by lowering the mains voltage by approx. 5% (there has been no comparable situation in France in 60 years).

7) Germany was unable to offer any assistance, that was the trigger for a separation of the European grids by ENTSO for stability reasons.

8) It then took a good hour to stabilize the frequency again.

9) Southern Germany. Bavaria and Austria could be kept stable, thanks to the Czech Republic grid (the Temelin and Dukovany nuclear power plants were in full operation).

Note:

1) February 2021 is still to come, with even lower temperatures.
2) Also interesting is that Poland has requested Germany to restart the nuclear power plants immediately , otherwise electricity power supply would be massively at risk.

A similar incident occurred in November, 2006 when ten million households in Western Europe had to be disconnected from the power grid.

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NTZ Note:

On Saturday we posted on how wind and solar energies have been mostly AWOL over the past weeks in Germany. For the period from January 6 to 9, we see that Germany's massive 110 GW of installed wind and solar capacity were delivering near nothing, thus straining the grid in these times of cold weather.