To End Climate Lunacy, Stop Treating Warming & C02 Hysterically

 We MUST indeed end this CO2 madness. The planet has been much warmer in the past than it is today, MANY times and it was beneficial, not negative.

 Likewise, the models on which the hysteria is based are wrong! They have proved themselves wrong over the last 20 years and the sudden increase in temperatures expected "anytime" now are absurd. Ice should be gone at the North Pole by now. It is actually increasing and nobody knows why. The Winter 2022-2023 is just starting but temperatures are actually colder than they have been for decades in this early December and again, nobody knows why. Our models are simply approximate and inaccurate but they are being used to push a non democratic agenda and THAT is the true menace. 

 

Authored by David Simon via RealClearMarkets.com,

Those who oppose economically destructive “climate” policies – like those promoted by the Biden administration and at the recent United Nations COP27 conference – will continue to fail to stop the advance of these policies so long as they continue to accept the false claim that warming of the planet and carbon dioxide emissions are harmful.

They are not. On balance, global warming and CO2 emission are beneficial.

Before getting to why that is, however, it is crucial to understand why accepting the false climate claim is so harmful.

When the destructiveness of climate policies is shown, the response is that the policies nevertheless are necessary to address what President Biden refers to as the “existential threat” of global warming and increased CO2 emissions.

When it is noted that these climate policies will at most microscopically and insignificantly reduce temperatures and CO2 emissions, climate policy mandarins push for even more draconian policies.

The result has been that since the 1990s, climate policies have become increasingly destructive and wasteful. Even worse, their continued intensification appears unlikely to be stopped until the public and policymakers are persuaded that global warming and CO2 emissions are not harmful. As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

To win this argument, it is necessary to focus on the scientific facts.

• A warming planet saves lives. Analyses of millions of deaths in recent decades in numerous countries, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, show that cooler temperatures killed nine times (July 2021 study) to seventeen times (In May 2015 study) more people than warmer temperatures. The planet’s recent modest warming (by 1.00 degree Celsius on average since 1880, as calculated by NASA) thus has been saving millions of lives.

• CO2 emissions do not pollute and instead are environmentally beneficial. In 2017, over 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, signed a statement that made this point: “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.” Every one of us, indeed, also exhales carbon dioxide with every breath.

• Since 1920, deaths each year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent. And this happened, data from EM-DAT - The International Disaster Database presented by The University of Oxford show, not only as the planet has warmed, but as world population has quadrupled.

• Global warming has not increased hurricanes. A NOAA report, updated on November 28, 2022, states that “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.”

• The same report sums it up in bold: “We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”

• Global warming also does not increase land burned by fires. As environmental statistician Bjorn Lomberg has shown using data from the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Earth’s Future, the percentage of global land burned per year in 1905-2021 has been declining.

• Sea levels are rising – but only by a small fraction of an inch each year. An EPA report updated on August 1, 2022, states: “When averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” including a slightly increased rate since 1993 of “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.”

• The UN climate models that President Biden, John Kerry, and other climate doomsters use to predict future global temperatures are so speculative and unreliable that they have been unable even to reproduce the 20th century’s temperature changes. This is a key point in the must-read book by Obama Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Steven Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

These kinds of facts should persuade the public and policymakers to stop accepting the false claim that global warming and CO2 emissions are harmful.

When this false claim is no longer widely accepted, policymakers will stop imposing climate policies that particularly impoverish the world’s poor.

They will stop holding international boondoggles like COP27 and that demand vast climate-related foreign aid programs.

They will stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic climate sinkholes.

And they will stop using purported “social cost of carbon” factors (even though the true social cost of carbon is zero) to regulatorily restrict domestic fossil fuel production, transportation, and use.

Ukraine - The Goldilocks War

  A very different way of looking at the war in Ukraine, unlike what we read in the West. But where is the truth? Most probably in-between the rosy propaganda from the Ukraine government and this likewise rosy perspective from Russia. What is certain is that we are slowly trudging along a road to hell with no opportunity to turn back and a nuclear menace over the horizon. Will anyone responsible come to their sense before it's too late?

 

Authored by Dmitry Orlov,

Are you happy with the way the war in the former Ukraine is going? Most people aren’t - for one reason or another. Some people hate the fact that there is a war there at all, while others love it but hate the fact that it hasn’t been won yet, by one side or the other. Bounteous quantities of both of these kinds of haters are found on both sides of the new Iron Curtain that is hastily being built across Eurasia between the collective West and the collective East. This seems reasonable; after all, hating war is standard procedure for most people (war is hell, don’t you know!) and by extension a small war is better than a big one and a short war is better than a long one. And also such reasoning is banal, trite, platitudinous, vapid, predictable, unimaginative and… bromidic (according to the English Thesaurus).

Seldom is to be found a war-watcher who is happy with the progress and the duration of the war. Luckily, Russian state television shows a very significant one these almost daily. It is Russia’s president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Having paid attention to him for over twenty years now, I can confidently state that never has he been so imbued with calm, self-assured serenity leavened with droll humor. This is not the demeanor of someone who feels at any risk of losing a war. The brass at the Ministry of Defense appear dour and glum on camera—a demeanor befitting men who send other men to fight and possibly to be wounded or to die; but off-camera they flash each other quick Mona Lisa smiles. (Russian men don’t give stupid American-style fish-eyed toothy grins, rarely show their teeth when smiling, and never in the presence of wolves or bears).

Given that Putin’s approval rating stands firm at around 80% (a number beyond reach of any Western politician), it is reasonable to assume that he is just the visible tip of a gigantic, 100-million-strong iceberg of Russians who calmly await the successful conclusion of the special military operation to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (so please don’t even call it a war). These 100 million Russians are seldom heard from, and when they do make noise, it is to protest against bureaucratic dawdling and foot-dragging or to raise private funds with which to remedy a shortage of some specialty equipment requested by the troops: night vision goggles, quadrocopters, optical sights, and all sorts of fancy tactical gear.

A great deal more noise is being made by the one or two percent whose entire business plan has been wrecked by the sudden appearance of the New Iron Curtain. The silliest of these thought that fleeing west, or south (to Turkey, Kazakhstan or Georgia) would somehow magically fix their problem; it hasn’t, and it won’t. The people we would expect to scream the loudest are the LGBTQ+ activists, who thought that they were going to use Western grant money to build East Sodom and East Gomorrah. They’ve been hobbled and muzzled by new Russian laws that label them as foreign agents and prohibit their sort of propaganda. In fact, the very term LGBTQ+ is now illegal, and so, I suppose, they will have to use PPPPP+ instead (“P” is for “pídor”, which is the generic Russian term for any sort of sexual pervert, degenerate or deviant). But I digress.

It can be observed rather readily that those who are the least happy with the course of the Russian campaign are also the least likely to be Russian. Least happy of all are the good folks at the Center for Informational and Political Operations of the Ukrainian Security Service who are charged with creating and maintaining the Phantom of Ukrainian Victory. These are followed by people in and around Washington, who are quite infuriated by Russian dawdling and foot-dragging. They have also been hard-pressed to show that the Ukrainians are winning while the Russians are losing; to this end, they have portrayed every Russian tactical repositioning or tactical withdrawal as a huge, humiliating defeat personally for Putin and every relentless, suicidal Ukrainian attack on Russian positions as a great heroic victory. But this PR tactic has lost effectiveness over time and now the Ukraine has become a toxic topic in the US that most American politicians would prefer to forget about, or at least keep out of the news.

To be fair, the Russian tactical cat-and-mouse games in this conflict has been nothing short of infuriating. The Russians spent some time rolling around Kiev to draw Ukrainian troops away from the Donbass and prevent a Ukrainian attack on it; once that was done, they withdrew. Great Ukrainian victory! They also spent some time tooling around the Black Sea coastline near Odessa, threatening a sea invasion, to draw off Ukrainian forces in that direction, but never invaded. Another Ukrainian victory! The Russians occupied a large chunk of Kharkov region that the Ukrainians left largely undefended, then, when the Ukrainians finally paid attention to it, partially withdrew behind a river to conserve resources. Yet another Ukrainian victory! The Russians occupied/liberated the regional capital of Kherson, evacuated all the people who wanted to be evacuated, then withdrew to a defensible position behind a river. Victory again! With all these Ukrainian victories, it is truly a wonder that the Russians have managed to gain around 100km2 of the former Ukraine’s most valuable real estate, over 6 million in population, secured a land route to Crimea and opened up a vital canal that supplies irrigation water to it and which the Ukrainians had blocked some years ago. That doesn’t seem like s defeat at all; that looks like an excellent result from a single, limited summer campaign.

Russia has achieved several of its strategic objectives already; the rest can wait. How long should they wait? To answer this question, we need to look outside the limited scope of Russia’s special operation in the Ukraine. Russia has bigger fish to fry, and frying fish takes time because eating undercooked fish can give you nasty parasites such as tapeworm and liver fluke. And so, I would like to invite you to Mother Russia’s secret kitchen, to see what’s on the cutting board and to estimate how much thermal processing will be required to turn it all into a safe and nutritious meal.

Mixing our food metaphors, allow me to introduce Goldilocks with her three bears and her porridge not to hot and not too cold.

What Russia seems to be doing is keeping their special military operation moving along at a steady pace - not to fast and not too slow.

Going too fast would not allow enough time to cook the various fish; going too fast would also increase the cost of the campaign in casualties and resources.

Going too slow would give the Ukrainians and NATO time to regroup and rearm and prevent the proper thermal processing of the various fish.

In an effort to find the optimal pace for the conflict, Russia initially committed only a tenth of its professional active-duty soldiers, then worked hard to minimize the casualty rate. It opted to start turning off the lights all over the former Ukraine only after the Kiev regime tried to blow up the Kerch Strait bridge that linked Crimea with the Russian mainland. Finally, it called up just 1% of reservists to relieve the pressure from the frontline troops and potentially prepare for the next stage, which is a winter campaign—for which the Russians are famous.

With this background information laid out, we can now enumerate and describe the various ancillary objectives which Russia plans to achieve over the course of this Goldilocks War.

The first and perhaps most important set of problems that Russia has to solve in the course of the Goldilocks War is internal.

The goal is to rearrange Russian society, economy and financial system so as to prepare it for a de-Westernized future. Since the collapse of the USSR, various Western agents, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, various Soros-owned foundations and a wide assortment of Western grants and exchange programs have made serious inroads into Russia. The overall goal was to weaken and eventually dismember and destroy Russia, turning it into a compliant servant of Western governments and transnational corporations that would supply them with cheap labor and raw materials. To help this process along, these Western organizations did whatever they could to drive the Russian people toward eventual biological extinction and replace them with a more docile and less adventurous race.

Starting well over 30 years ago, Western NGOs set to corrupting the minds of Russia’s young. No effort was spared to denigrate the value of Russian culture, to falsify Russian history and to replace them both with Western pop culture and propaganda narratives. These initiatives achieved limited success, and the USSR, and Soviet-era culture, has remained ever-popular even among those who were too young to have experienced life in the USSR firsthand. Where the damage has been most severe is in education. Excellent Soviet-era textbooks that taught students how to think independently were destroyed and replaced with imports. These were at best useful for training experts in narrowly defined fields who can follow previously defined procedures and recipes but can’t explain how these procedures and recipes were arrived at or to create new ones. Russian teachers, who saw their job not just in educating but in bringing up their students to be good Russians who love and cherish their country, were replaced by Western-trained educationalists who saw their mission as providing a competitive, market-based service in bringing up qualified, competent… consumers! Who are these people? Well, luckily, the Internet remembers everything, and there are plenty of other jobs for these people such as shoveling snow and stoking furnaces. But identifying and replacing them takes time, as does finding, updating and reproducing the older, excellent textbooks.

But what of the young people left behind by this wave of destruction? Luckily, not all is lost. The special military operation is providing them with some very valuable lessons that their ignorant educationalists left out: that Russia—a unique, miraculous agglomeration of many different nations, languages and religions—has been preserved and expanded over the centuries through the efforts of heroes whose names are not just remembered but venerated. What’s more, some of them are alive today, fighting and working in the Donbass. It is one thing to visit museums, read old books and hear stories about the great deeds of one’s grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War; it is quite another to watch history unfold through the eyes of your own father or brother. Give it another year or two, and Russia’s young people will learn to look with disdain on the products of Russia’s Western-oriented culture-mongers. Their elders do already: opinion polls show that a large majority of Russians see Western cultural influence as a negative.

And what of these Russian culture-mongers who have been worshiping all things Western for as long as they can remember? Here, a most curious thing happened. When the special military operation was first announced, they spoke out against it and in favor of the Ukrainian Nazis—a stupid thing to do, but they thought it good and proper to keep their political opinions harmonized with those of their Western patrons and idols so as to stay in their good graces. Some of them protested against the war (ignoring the fact that it had been going on for eight long years already). And then quite a few of them fled the country in unseemly haste.

Keep in mind that these are neither brain surgeons nor rocket scientists: these are people who prance around on stage while making noises with their hands and mouths; or they are people who sit there while makeup artists do things to their faces and hair, then endlessly repeat lines written for them by someone else. These are not people who have the capacity to analyze a tricky political situation and make the right choice. In an earlier, saner age their opinions would be steadfastly ignored, but such is the effect of the Internet, social media and all the rest, that any hysterical nincompoop can shoot a little video and millions of people, having nothing better to do with their time, will watch it on their phones and make comments.

The fact that these people are voluntarily cleansing the Russian media space of their presence is a positive development, but it takes time. If the special military operation were to end tomorrow, there is no doubt that they would attempt to come back and pretend that none of this ever happened. And then Russian popular culture would remain a Western-styled cesspool full of vacuous personae who seek to glorify every single deadly sin for the sake of personal notoriety and gain. Russia has plenty of talented people eager to take their place—if only they would keep out long enough for everyone to forget about them!

Particularly damaging to Russia’s future has been the emergence and preeminence of pro-Western economic and financial elites. Ever since the haphazard and in many cases criminal privatization of state resources in the 1990s, there was brought up an entire cohort of powerful economic agents who does not have Russia’s interests in mind. Instead, these are purely selfish economic actors who until quite recently thought that their ill-gotten gains would allow them to enter into posh Western society. These people usually have more than one passport, they try to keep their families in some wealthy enclave outside of Russia, they send their children to schools and universities in the West, and their only use for Russia is as a territory they can exploit in creating their wealth extraction schemes.

When in response to the start of Russia’s special military operation the West mounted a speculative attack on the ruble, forcing Russia’s central bank to impose strict currency controls, these members of the Russian elite were forced to start thinking about making a momentous choice. They could stay in Russia, but then they would have to cut their ties to the West; or they could move to the West and live off their savings, but then they would be cut off from the source of their wealth. Their choice was made easier by Western governments which worked hard to confiscate the property of rich Russian nationals, freeze their bank accounts and subject them to various other indignities and inconveniences.

Still, it’s a hard choice for them to make—realizing that, in spite of their sometimes fabulous wealth, for the collective West they are just some Russians that can be robbed. Many of them are mentally unprepared to throw in their lot with their own people, whom they have been taught to despise and to exploit for personal gain. A quick victory in Russia’s special military operation would allow them to think that their troubles were temporary in nature. Given enough time some of them will run away for good while others will decide to stay and work for the common good in Russia.

Next in line are various members of the Russian government who, having been schooled in Western economics, are incapable of understanding the economic transformation that is occurring in Russia, never mind helping it along. Most of what passes for economic thought in the West is just an elaborate smokescreen over this fundamental dictum: “The rich must be allowed to get richer, the poor must be kept poor and the government shouldn’t try to help them (much).” This worked while the West had colonies to exploit, be it through good old-fashioned imperial conquest, plunder and rapine, or through financial neocolonialism of Perkins’s “economic hit men,” or, as has recently been grudgingly admitted by several top EU officials, by taking advantage of cheap Russian energy.

That doesn’t work any more—not in the West, not in Russia or any place else, and mindsets have to adjust. There is a great deal of inertia in appointments to government positions, where there are many vested interests vying for power and influence. It takes time for such basic ideas to percolate through the system as the fact that the US Federal Reserve no longer has a planet-wide monopoly on printing money. Therefore, it is no longer necessary for Russia’s central bank to have dollars in reserve to cover their ruble emissions to defend it against speculative attack since it is no longer necessary for Russia’s central bank to allow foreign currency speculators to run rampant and stage speculative attacks.

But some results have already been achieved, and they are nothing short of spectacular: over the past few months, just a few well-chosen departures from Western economic orthodoxy have made the ruble the world’s strongest currency, have allowed Russia to earn more export revenue by exporting less oil, gas and coal, and have allowed it to drive inflation down to almost zero. Since the start of the special military operation, Russia has been able to reduce its national debt by a large amount and increase government revenues. A swift end to Russia’s special military operation may spell the end of such miracles and a most unwelcome return to the untenable status quo ante.

Beyond the intangible world of finance, equally significant changes have been occurring throughout the physical Russian economy. Previously, many economic sectors, including car sales, construction and home improvement, software development and many others, were foreign-owned and the profits from these activities left the country. And then a decision was made to block the expatriation of dividends. In response, foreign companies sold off their Russian assets, taking a huge loss and depriving themselves of access to the Russian market. The change has been quite stunning. For example, at the beginning of 2022, Western car companies owned a large share of the Russian auto market. Many of the cars that were sold had been assembled within Russia at foreign-owned plants and the profits from these sales were expatriated. Now, less than a year later, European and American automakers are pretty much gone from Russia, replaced by a swiftly reborn domestic auto industry. Chinese automakers have immediately grabbed a large market share for themselves, while South Korea continued to trade with Russia and has held on to its market share.

Equally stunning have been changes in the aircraft industry. Previously, Russian airlines were flying Airbuses and Boeings, most of them leased. After the start of the special operation Western politicians demanded that these leases be rescinded and the aircraft returned to their owners, neglecting to take into account the fact that this would be ruinous financially (glutting the market for used aircraft for years to come and destroying demand for new aircraft) and, furthermore, physically impossible, given that there was no way to effect the transfer of the aircraft. In response, the Russian airlines nationalized the aircraft registry, stopped flying to hostile destinations where their aircraft might be arrested, and started making lease payments in rubles to special accounts at the Russian central bank.

Then came the news that Aeroflot is panning to buy over 300 new passenger jets, all Russian МС-21s, SSJ-100s and Tu-214s, all before 2030, with the first deliveries slated for 2023. There has been a scramble to replace almost all Western-sourced components, such as composites for the carbon fiber wing of the MC-21 and jet engines, avionics and much else for all of the above. Over this period many of the previously leased Boeings and Airbuses will be phased out, but these companies’ market share in the largest country on Earth will be gone forever. Damage to Western aircraft manufacturers will be matched by the damage to Western airlines. At the outset of hostilities, the collective West closed its airspace to Russia, and Russia reciprocated. The problem is that Europe is small and easy to fly around while Russia is huge and flying around it takes a whole day. European airlines suddenly found that theу can’t compete on routes to Japan, China or Korea.

Following the closing of the airspace came other sanctions, from both the European Union and from the United States, all of them illegal, since the UN Security Council is the only body empowered to impose sanctions. Right now the European Union is working on the ninth packet of sanctions, all of which have been dubbed “sanctions from hell”. Speaking of hell, Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” there are nine circles of hell, so perhaps the sanctions juggernaut is about to run its course.

These sanctions were supposed to have swiftly destroyed the Russian economy and have caused so much social upheaval and suffering that the people would gather on Red Square and overthrow the dread dictator Putin (or so thought Western foreign policy experts). Clearly, nothing of the sort has happened and Putin’s approval rating is as high as ever. On the other hand, the good people of the European Union are indeed starting to suffer. They can no longer afford to heat their homes or to take regular hot showers, food has become outrageously expensive for them, and so much else is going wrong that huge crowds of protestors have been gathering all across Europe and demanding, among other things, an end to anti-Russian sanctions, normalization of relations with Russia and a return to business as usual. Their demands are unlikely to be met, since this would mean a major loss of face for the European leaders.

But there is a more important reason why the sanctions will stay: a return to business as usual would mean that Russia would once again provide energy and raw materials to Europe cheaply while allowing European companies to profit from the labor of Russians. This is quite unappealing and is therefore unlikely to happen. Russia is using the sanctions as an opportunity to rebuild its domestic industry and reorient its trade away from hostile nations and toward friendly nations that are fair and sympathetic in their dealings with Russia. It is also working hard to phase out the use of currencies that Dmitry Medvedev called “toxic”; namely, the US dollar and the euro.

Add to this list a wonderful new Russian innovation called “parallel import.” If some company, in complying with anti-Russian sanctions, refuses to sell its products to Russia or to service or upgrade its products in Russia, then Russia will buy these products and upgrades from a third or fourth or fifth party without permission from the US, the EU or the manufacturer. If a certain brand-name product becomes unavailable, the Russians simply rename the brand and make the same product themselves, or have the Chinese or another trade partner do it for them. And if the West refuses to license its intellectual property to Russia, then that intellectual property becomes free in Russia.

This works particularly well with software: free copies of brand-name software are just as good as the paid-for copies, and if tech support, training or other associated services become unavailable from the West, the Russians simply organize their own. Intellectual property of various sorts makes up a large portion Western notional wealth, and Western sanctions are having the effect of letting Russia make use of it free of charge. Thanks to modern digital technology, it works rather well with hardware too. Instead of painstakingly reverse-engineering products, now the same effect can be achieved by buying the 3D models on a thumb drive and 3D-printing them or automatically generating the mill and drill paths to create them on an NC mill. Putin likes to use the expression “tsap-tsarap” to describe this process. It is hard to translate directly but pertains to the act of a cat snatching its prey with its claws. The short of it is, what Russia previously had to pay for is now, thanks to sanctions, free to it.

Since the Goldilocks War is, after all, a sort of war, we need to briefly discuss its military aspects. Here, too, a steady-as-she-goes approach seems to be the most copacetic. The stated goal is to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukraine, and to some extent this has already been achieved: most of the armor and artillery that the Ukraine had inherited from the USSR has already been destroyed; most of the diehard Nazi battalions are either dead or a shadow of their former selves. Gone too are most of the volunteers that once fought on the Ukrainian side. After over 100000 Ukrainian soldiers “have been killed” since February 2022 (as forthrightly stated, then sheepishly denied, by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen), and after perhaps as many as half a million casualties, scores of service-age men bribing their way out of the country and several rounds of the draft, it is slim pickings. With well over a hundred Ukrainian casualties a day the pickings are bound to get even slimmer over time. Foreign mercenaries have been used to fill the gap—Anglos, Poles, Romanians—but there is a major problem with them: as Julius Caesar pointed out, lots of people are willing to kill for money but nobody wants to die for money—except an idiot, I would add. And on NATO’s Russian front an idiot and his life are soon parted. Up-to-date information on Russian casualties is a state secret and the only number divulged by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in late September 2022 was 5937 killed since the start of the campaign. Casualty rates are said to have been significantly lower since then.

At present, there is still no shortage of idiots on the Ukrainian side—yet—and neither is there a shortage of donated Western weaponry. First came used Soviet-era tanks and other weapons systems donated from all over Eastern Europe; then came actual Western weapons systems. And now throughout NATO one hears plaintive cries that they have nothing left that they can give to the Ukrainians: the cupboard is empty. Nor can they manufacture more weapons in a hurry. To start churning out weapons at the same rate as Russia is doing, these NATO members would first need to reindustrialize, and there are neither the human resources, nor the money to do so. And so the Russian army grinds away, demilitarizing the Ukraine, and the rest of NATO with it. In the process, it is perfecting the art of fighting a land war against NATO—not that a single NATO country would even entertain such an idea.

Perhaps this is mission creep, or perhaps this has been the plan all along, but what Russia is doing at this point is destroying NATO. You may recall that a year ago Russia demanded that the US honor certain security guarantees it made as a condition for allowing the peaceful reunification of Germany; namely, that NATO would not expand eastward. “Not an inch to the east” was how the official record of the meeting reads. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze failed to get this deal on paper and signed, but a verbal deal is a deal. A year ago Russia’s offer was quite moderate: that NATO withdraw to its pre-1997 borders, when it expanded to Eastern Europe.

But, as usually happens when negotiating with the Russians, their initial offer is usually the best. For all we know, based on how things are going in the Ukraine, Russia’s best and final offer may require NATO to disband altogether. After all, the Warsaw Pact disbanded 31 years ago but NATO is still around and bigger than ever; what for? To fight Russia? Well, then, what are they waiting for? Come and get it! This may not even take the form of a negotiation. For example, Russia could say, take a quick whack at Latvia (it richly deserves a whack or two for abusing its large native Russian population Nazi-style) and then stand back and say, “Come on, NATO, come and die heroically on our doorstep for poor little Latvia!” At this, NATO officials will stand united but very quiet, thoughtfully examining their own and each others’ shoes. Once it becomes clear that there will be no offers to launch World War III to avenge Latvia, NATO will quietly dry up and blow away.

Finally, we come to what is perhaps the least important reason for the Goldilocks War: the former Ukraine itself. In view of Russia’s other strategic goals, it seems more of the nature of a sacrificial piece in a chess gambit. Given what Russia has already achieved over the past nine months—four new Russian regions, six million new Russian citizens, a land bridge to Crimea, irrigation water supply to Crimea—there isn’t much left for Russia to achieve militarily before its military campaign reaches the stage of diminishing returns. The addition of Nikolaev and Odessa regions and full control of the Black Sea coastline would, of course, be most valuable; control of Kharkov and Kiev somewhat less so. Control of the entire Dniepr hydroelectric cascade is a definite nice-to-have. As for the rest, it could be left to languish for ages as a deindustrialized, depopulated wasteland, labeled “Mostly harmless.”

Let me divulge a personal detail or two. Two of my grandparents were from Zhitomir, my father was born in Kiev, my first romantic interest was a girl from Odessa, and over the years I’ve had as many friends from Odessa, Kharkov, Lvov, Kiev, Donetsk, Vinnitsa and elsewhere as anywhere else in Russia. Russia? You read that right: there is no way to convince me that so-called “Ukrainian territory” somehow isn’t Russia or that the people who live there somehow aren’t Russian—regardless of what some of them have been recently brainwashed to think. What’s more, none of these people I have known over the years ever thought of themselves as the least bit Ukrainian and they would probably view the very idea of a Ukrainian nationalist identity as symptomatic of a mental condition. The label “Ukrainian” was to them some Bolshevik nonse; since then, Ukrainianness has been turned into a Western method for exploiting minor ethnic variations in order to make one group of Russians fight another group of Russians.

In case you are doubtful, let’s apply the good old duck test: Do the people there walk, quack and look like Russians? All of that territory, with one minor exception in the far west, was part of Russia for anywhere between ten and three centuries; most of the people there, and virtually the entire urban population, speaks Russian as their native language; their religion is predominantly Russian Orthodox; they are genetically indistinguishable from the rest of the Russian population. So, what happened to them?

Unfortunately, a small piece of this Russian land spent three centuries in captivity to the Austro-Hungarian Empire or as part of Greater Poland, and this poisoned their minds with foreign ideas such as Catholicism and ethnic nationalism. Unlike Russia, which is a multinational, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse monolith, the West is a mosaic of ethnic nationalisms, and where there are nationalists there may be Nazis, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

As one drop of poison infects the whole tun of wine, these Western Ukrainians, with lots of help and funds from the German Nazis, then the Americans and the Canadians, managed to infect a large part of the formerly Ukrainian territory with a fake nationalism based on a forged history and a haphazardly concocted culture. Official bans on the teaching and, eventually, the use of Russian have brought up a generation of young people who are essentially illiterate in their native Russian. They are taught in Ukrainian, but Ukrainian literacy is close to an oxymoron, since nothing of any great consequence has ever been written or published in that language and the vast majority of Ukrainian literary works are, you guessed it, in Russian.

The Russian special military operation that’s been ongoing since February 2022 has polarized the entire population. Those who had decided to be with Russia back in 2014 were, obviously, overjoyed to finally get some help from Russia. The now Russian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson gladly voted to join Russia. But as far as the rest of the former Ukrainian territory, the polarization is mostly in the opposite direction. Those who wanted to be with Russia mostly voted with their feet and are now living somewhere in Russia.

This is something that time alone can fix. Eventually the population of the former Ukraine will be forced to make a choice: they can be Russian, or they can be refugees somewhere in Europe, or they can die fighting Russians at the front. Note that even Donetsk and Lugansk didn’t make this choice right away, the way Crimea did. At that time, only some 70% of their population was in favor of leaving the Ukraine and rejoining Russia. It took eight years of relentless Ukrainian bombing to convince them to make this choice.

Over these intervening years, the diehard “Ukrainians” filtered out, leaving behind a population that was close to 100% pro-Russian. It was only then that the Kremlin granted them official recognition, sent in troops to defend them from imminent invasion and, soon after, accepted them into the Russian Federation. And now the same sort of sorting operation has to take place throughout the rest of the former Ukraine. How long will it take? Only time will tell, but it is already clear that, as far as Russia is concerned, there is no compelling reason to rush.

Elimination of CO2 is a suicide pact – Professor William Happer on climate change misconceptions (Video)

 There is NO climate urgency, most serious scientists understand that. But as Professor Happer explains we are long past the political point of no return as the mix of ignorance and religious fanaticism guaranty that we will do all kind of nonsense before we are finally back to reason. Don't hold your breath... 

The Suicide of Europe! (Video - 12')

 The suicide of Europe is ongoing as explained by "redacted". 

 Insane! And most people do not understand what is going on! When they do, it will be too late!

 

 

The G7 Cap On Russian Oil Is A Subsidy To China

 The long term under-investment in fossil fuels will be extremely costly from a social point of view in the West. Likewise, the nonsense policy of renewables only will become obvious in the next couple of years as they prove utterly unable to replace fossil fuels but then what? "Nuclear" may be a solution but you need 10 years to build a reactor. As explained below, it will be hard to avoid increased reliance on Russia for Europe in the medium term. All this for so little results? Expect major upheavals in Europe soon!

 

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

There are many mistakes in the G7 agreement to put a cap on Russian oil.

The first one is that it does not hurt Russia at all. The agreed cap, at $60 a barrel, is higher than the current Urals price, above the five-year average of the quoted price and higher than Rosneft’s average netback price.

According to Reuters, “the G7 price cap will allow non-EU countries to continue importing seaborne Russian crude oil, but it will prohibit shipping, insurance, and re-insurance companies from handling cargoes of Russian crude around the globe, unless it is sold for less than the price cap”. This means that China will be able to purchase more Russian oil at a large discount while the Russian state-owned oil giant will continue to make a very healthy 16% return on average capital employed (ROACE) and more than 8.8 billion roubles in revenues, which means an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) that more than doubles its capex requirements.

This misguided cap is not only a subsidy to China and a price that still makes Rosneft enormously profitable and able to pay billions to the Russian state in taxes.

It is a big mistake if we want to see lower oil prices.

With this cap the G7 have created an unnecessary and artificial bottom to old prices. The G7 did not want to understand why oil prices have roundtripped in 2022: Competition and demand reaction. By putting a $60 a barrel cap, which is a bottom price, the G7 have almost made it impossible for prices to reach a true bottom if a demand crisis arrives. On the one hand, the G7 has taken 4.5 million barrels a day, the estimated Russian oil exports for 2023, out of the supply picture with a minimum -and maximum- price, but additionally has made OPEC keener on cutting supply and raising their exports’ average realized oil price higher.

China must be exceedingly happy. The Asian giant will secure a long-term supply at al attractive price from Russia and sell refined products globally at higher margins. Sinopec and Petrochina will find enough opportunities in the global market to secure better margins for their refined products while guaranteeing affordable supply in a challenging economic situation.

When I read this news about “price caps” I wonder if bureaucrats have ever worked in a global competitive industry. They may have not, but they certainly employ thousands of “experts” that may have told them that this is a clever idea. It is rubbish.

If the G7 really wanted to hurt Russia’s finances and exports the way to do it is to encourage higher investment in alternative and more competitive sources. However, what is happening is the opposite. G7 governments continue to impose barriers to investment in energy as well as place regulatory and wrongly called environmental burdens that make it even more difficult to guarantee diversification and security of supply.

What killed the oil crisis of the seventies was the phenomenal rise of investment in other productive areas. What has allowed oil prices to do an almost 180-degree year-to-date move is higher supply, non-OPEC competition and demand response.

The energy sector already suffers from concerning levels of underinvestment. According to Morgan Stanley, oil and gas underinvestment has reached $600 billion per annum. With this so-called price cap, the incentive for producers to sell what they can and invest as little as possible is even higher, and this may imply much higher oil prices in the future. China and Russia also know that renewables and other alternatives are nowhere close to being a widely available alternative and that, anyhow, this would require trillions of dollars of investment in mining of coper, cobalt, and rare earths.

By adding a so-called cap on Russian oil prices to the increasing barriers to develop domestic resources the G7 may be planting the seeds of a commodity super-cycle where dependence on OPEC and Russia increases, instead of decreasing.

I repeat what I have been saying for months. The developed economies’ governments are taking their countries from a modest dependence on Russia to a massive dependence on China and Russia.

Wuhan Whistleblower: Former EcoHealth VP Says Covid "Man Made", Escaped From Lab

  We actually knew right from the beginning that Covid-19 was man-made as we have documented on this blog over the last 2 years. You only had to listen to the right scientists although their work was systematically censored. Worse, we know how it was done and by who. For what purpose and the reasons for the censorship.

 It is unlikely that anyone responsible will be sanctioned in Western countries as the rabbit hole of responsibilities is too deep: Doing forbidden research in order to make a virulent virus more deadly AND more virulent has very few non military justifications. If you add technologies to erase the imprint of genetic manipulations, the criminality of such work becomes obvious... as it was denounced from the beginning by great virologists and epidemiologists. There is simply no excuses.

 

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Just hours after we find out that the Hunter Biden laptop not only wasn't "Russian disinformation", but rather was being actively covered up by social media, another "conspiracy theory" that wound up costing tons of honest truth seekers their social media accounts (including Zero Hedge, who was first to talk about the lab leak all the way back in February 2020), is inching closer toward being validated as reality.

That's because a scientist who formerly worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has now gone on record and has said that COVID was "man-made" and leaked from the lab.

The claims are according to the Post, who cited The Sun, who was provided a copy of the scientist’s forthcoming book.

The gravity of the allegations, which I have written about at length over the last year, would make the global Covid-19 pandemic cover up among the most stunning lies ever perpetrated on modern humanity.

The whistleblower, epidemiologist Andrew Huff, called the lab leak the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11". He detailed his allegations in his book “The Truth About Wuhan".

Huff is the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, which studied coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He worked for the company from 2014 to 2016 and, per the Post:

...said that the non-profit helped the Wuhan lab put together the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species” for many years.

Meanwhile, EcoHealth Alliance has been awarded millions to continue their work as recently as this year: Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Was Just Awarded Another NIH Grant To Study Bat Coronaviruses

“Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he wrote in his book.

Huff wrote: “China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent. The US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.

“I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”

Fringe Finance has been covering the idea of a lab leak since the blog’s inception and we have long maintained that a leak from the lab was the most obvious explanation for Covid.

Now the question becomes: who will be held accountable…not only for the leak but for the campaign against those who asked honest questions about the lab for the last 3 years?

Global Warming? Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover At 56-Year High

  The problem with models is that they are just that: "Models". They give us an indication of what we think may happen based on what we know and can infer from the data... but new data can change radically the outcome in a typical Bayesian fit. 

  The reality is that we are not sure how the earth atmosphere really works. Too many factors, too much complexity. Just as an example, the atmosphere is simplified as 1 point by 500m cube frames in space. This represents already a huge improvement on the previous 1km cubes and a significant increase in calculation while remaining full of... holes. 

 My guess is that although mankind may have a limited although maybe not insignificant impact on the atmosphere, natural phenomenons are still driving, mostly, the current warming trend. This means that a slightly less intense Sun or a large volcanic eruption can easily reverse all the warming we have seen in the last few years... and more!

 

 It is consequently absurd in invest extravagant sums of money in uncertain so-called green energies. The money would be far better used in helping move from wood or coal to gas and other "developing" technologies, having in the long term more impact on our well being. Heavy metals, plastics in the sea, deforestation, soil and aquifer loss are all pressing and important issues which the obsession with CO2 prevents us from tackling seriously.    

 

 

The COP27 climate change conference wrapped up last month. World leaders flew in private jets to Egypt to discuss how fossil fuels were quickly heating the planet to the point of no return, as humanity was doomed if crucial climate change policies weren't implemented. But while the climate alarmist leaders met in the desert, November's snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere was running at rates exceeding a half-a-century average. 

NOAA and Rutgers University released new data that showed snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere reached the highest level since measurements began in 1967 and are currently above the 56-year mean. 

Here's the Rutgers Global Snow Lab snow coverage map across the Northern Hemisphere. 

And another from NOAA with more resolution. 

"Extensive snow extent early in the season is an indicator of persistent cold as we head into winter proper," weather blog Severe Weather Europe said. 

Most mainstream media outlets overlooked this data because it is an inconvenient truth for the climate change narrative they're pushing. 

A severe winter for the Northern Hemisphere might complicate power grids for western countries that are hellbent on disrupting energy flows by sanctioning Russia, forcing the world into the worst energy crisis in a generation. Since the US and Europe's natural gas storage facilities have flipped into withdrawal season, the clock starts as storage levels could quickly wind down if temperatures stay below average, which would continue to boost energy prices.

Banking Elites Are Using Crypto Bloodbath And FTX Fraud To Justify CBDCs

 Is China the future of the West?

 Digital money to control your expenses and social credit to control your every move... Since social credit will be hard to introduce immediately, it will be vaccine certificate first. It looks more and more that agenda 2030 and the global reset will come early. 

 The only obstacle left are the dreams of a multi-polar world from the BRICS and a nasty recession on it's way for 2023...

Banking Elites Are Using Crypto Bloodbath And FTX Fraud To Justify CBDCs

Central bankers and international corporate financiers have long been pretending to hate the very concept of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Etherium while at the same time investing heavily in blockchain technologies and infrastructure.  The purpose of the ruse is not clear, but more than likely it was an attempt at mass reverse psychology - “We don't like crypto and digital currencies because we supposedly have no control over them; free market proponents should embrace them blindly because that is how you will beat us.”

In the meantime, while major banking firms are investing billions into various blockchain products, central banks and global institutions like the BIS and IMF have been developing their own systems.  In fact, the BIS notes with enthusiasm that around 90% of central banks around the world are already in the process of adopting CBDCs. 

But why would anyone want to use government and establishment bank controlled cryptocurrencies when they have access to Bitcoin and dozens of other coins that are supposedly independent?  Why trade freedom for more centralization?

First, existing cryptocurrencies are not as free as many people believe, with ample government tracking of blockchain transactions in place for years, the notion of the completely anonymous crypto user is a bit of a fantasy, and the idea that a product such as Bitcoin is going to “bring down” the central banks is becoming less realistic by the year. 

Second, the crypto market is highly unstable in part because it is still very limited.  While crypto use in America is higher than most other countries with around 12% of people using it as an investment (not as a currency), the rest of the world is mostly uninterested with an estimated global footprint of around 4%.  Of that 4% only a handful of people actually own the majority of the market; these people are known as “whales” and they have the ability to tip the market up or down with little effort.  

This happens in many other trade commodities and paper currencies also.  The point is, crypto is not immune to manipulation.   

Third, crypto is enticing to people because of the quick profits that can be had, but massive losses are also a danger.  The overall crypto market has plunged by $2 trillion in the past year alone – Over 60% of its value.  The implosion of huge trading companies like FTX also undermines the stability of the market and usually it's the average investor that ends up suffering the consequences.            

All of these factors and more can be used by banking elites as a rationale for the implementation of CBDCs and global regulation of crypto trading.  And, if the bloodbath in existing coins continues, people may even welcome CBDCs as a “safe” investment or currency system.

The investment losses in blockchain products along with the scandals in exchanges is a rather convenient opportunity for the banking establishment to promote their own currencies as a replacement.  In the wake of the FTX event, multiple international banks including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have called for government regulation and a shift over to CBDCs. 

The US House has scheduled hearings on FTX with an emphasis on regulation.  In Europe, globalist Christine Lagarde and the ECB are calling for global cooperation on monitoring and controlling cryptocurrencies.  Lagarde wants a “digital Euro” to take the place of existing coins and blames FTX and the larger market losses on lack of oversight.    

Numerous crypto analysts are also demanding regulation, calling crypto “broken and useless” until governments step in to mediate (control) trade.  This is the exact opposite of what crypto activists originally intended over a decade ago when Bitcoin was in its infancy, and digital trade back then was sold as some kind of revolution against the banking oligarchy.  However, it's easy to see where this is all going.

It means even more pervasive centralization.  With paper currencies at least there is true anonymity, but with CBDCs the existence of the blockchain ledger precludes any and all privacy in trade.  Not only that, but the institutional ability to cut off people from their wealth and economic access is going to be profound.  If you think corporate and government led cancel culture is bad now, just wait until they can freeze your digital accounts at a moment's notice because of something you said on social media.  And, in a cashless society there are few alternatives beyond some kind of black market.

CBDCs mean the total death of any economic freedom the public has left, and central banks are exploiting disasters like FTX to make that death happen even faster.

Dramatic Recovery in Global Sea Ice Confounds the Net Zero Catastrophists

  Are we fighting the wrong enemy?

  Here are a few questions about climate you are not allowed to ponder anymore:

  In the long term, the correlation between the Earth orbit and glaciation is very high. It explains accurately the cyclical pastern of recent ice ages. Is human activity such an overwhelming factor as to render this link ineffective? 

 Conversely, the link between CO2 and "warming" is not so obvious. There seems to be more CO2 in the atmosphere when the weather is warmer but the rise in CO2 seems to be following, not preceding warming periods. Is CO2 really the cause of the current warming trend?   

 Human activities is supposed to be responsible for about 25% of the current warming but its effect being cumulative, it is slowly be relentlessly creating a desequilibrium which eventually will overwhelm the atmosphere and create a runaway effect. But is it really the case?

 There was a long pause in global warming is the early 2000s that nobody could explain accurately. Likewise as the article below makes clear, polar ice is not shrinking anymore. Why? Nobody knows.

 We are led toward an unbelievably expensive fight against global warming based on the precautionary principle as the price of doing nothing is too high to contemplate. But is it really true? 

 To believe this, your trust rely on models which are anything but accurate. Change a few variables and the results are completely different. So why is it heretical to ask difficult questions when reality does not square with the models? 

 Conversely, it seems that some warming is actually a good thing as most civilizations have prospered in the past during warm periods, some much warmer than today, while they shriveled during colder times. 

 The late 19C was actually a rather cold interval although this period is the start of accurate data on which our models are based. Could is be that almost all the warming we have seen over the last 50 years is due to the "starting point" effect? 

 Also although the models show a runaway rise in temperatures in the near future, current data is ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. So here's the data:

Via The Daily Sceptic

It’s a mystery. Why has Arctic sea ice cover roared back so quickly over the last few years? Nobody knows – not one scientist on the planet can tell you, writes Willis Eschenbach in a short essay on the climate site Watts Up With That? It might be noted, of course, that there was no shortage of explanations when there was a cyclical downturn, mostly to do with humans having something to do with it. Ice melting at the Poles is still one of the crucial supports for the entire command-and-control Net Zero political agenda.

The above graph shows changes in Arctic sea ice cover during the satellite era. Values are anomalies from the 1991-2020 average. Eschenbach notes that since around 1990, people have been talking about how human-emitted carbon dioxide is reducing the amount of Arctic sea ice. When it started dropping very fast, there was talk we’d passed a ‘tipping’ point from which the ice would never recover. Over this time, noted Eschenbach, predictions of an ice-free Arctic ocean abounded.

Old habits die hard. Despite the impressive recent ice recovery, talk of these tipping points – mostly an invention of so-called ‘attribution’ computer models – are ubiquitous. In his recent Frozen Planet II agitprop series for the BBC, Sir David Attenborough made a number of model-produced references to the Arctic being free of summer sea ice by 2035.

According to Eschenbach, there are more mysteries down in Antarctica.

Here Eschenbach poses the question – why did the Antarctic ice pack, unlike the Arctic pack, start increasing quite rapidly around 2008? Nobody knows, he says. Why did it differ from the Arctic by plateauing from 2010 to 2015, but then mirror the Arctic by dropping rapidly, and then turn around and start rebounding? You guessed it – nobody knows.

Finally the global situation.

Why has global sea ice followed this pattern, while CO₂ continues to rise in the atmosphere, he asks. The politically-motivated alarmists constantly tell us the ice will soon all disappear. According to Eschenbach, not one climate scientist on the planet predicted these large changes in sea ice.

The author concludes:

Here’s the strangest part. Despite the failure of the many predictions of an ‘ice-free Arctic’, despite the falsified claims that we’ve passed a ‘tipping point’, despite the fact that the reasons for the curious and unexpected changes in the polar sea ice cannot be explained by anyone and the changes weren’t predicted by anyone – climate change scientists still insist that they can tell us what the global temperature will be like in the year 2100.

Of course, there are many sceptical scientists who seek answers to the cyclical nature of global ice outside the restrictive confines of ‘settled’ climate science. As the Daily Sceptic has often reported, short-term movements of ice are affected by often incalculable atmospheric heat exchanges, ocean currents and many other natural climatic variations.

The geologist Professor Ian Plimer recently noted in an essay published by Quadrant, there have been six major ice ages and each started when there was far more CO₂ in the atmosphere than now. Taking the longer view, Plimer said that we are currently in an ice age initiated 34 million years ago, the current interglacial started 14,400 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere, and we were at the peak of this interglacial 4,000-7,000 years ago in the Holocene Optimum.

Two American geologists recently found that over half of the Arctic’s glaciers and ice caps that exist today did not exist or were smaller 3,400 to 10,000 years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO₂ ranged between 260 to 270 parts per million, compared to the current 410 ppm. At the peak of this interglacial Arctic warming, temperatures were noted to be several degrees warmer than today. Change in the size of glaciers and ice caps over the last few centuries “is but a partial return to a former period of much greater warmth”, the geologists suggest.

Political tactics designed to scare entire populations into following an anti-growth Net Zero future pay little attention to such trends. Global warming ran out of steam a couple of decades ago, and the latest satellite data for November is almost certain to extend the current eight year, one month pause. Instead a ‘highway to hell’ message is broadcast, based almost solely on invented stories attributing bad or ‘extreme’ weather to the activities of humans. Despite the overwhelming evidence from the past that global temperatures can rise and fall rapidly, an entire climate industry, backed by almost unlimited transfers of wealth from often poor to rich people, has sprung up forecasting Armageddon if there is a rise of a few parts of a degree centigrade.

It’s definitely all a bit of a mystery.

 

Was the Pandemic Orchestrated as a Trial Run for Responding to a Biological Attack?

 Why did the Corona Virus became Covid and how? Beyond the lab leak accident, there was timing and an opportunity. Once launched, the reaction to the virus was unstoppable although the virus quickly proved far less dangerous than expected. 

 Here's the inside story.

Guest Post from the Burning Platform by Will Jones

The evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab is now compelling, as is the evidence that the virus was spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019, with one blood sample from Lombardy on September 12th 2019 found to be positive for both viral RNA and antibodies.

One crucial outstanding question is who knew what and when. In particular, what did the U.S. know about the virus before January 2020 and what did the Chinese Government know?

Here I will argue that both the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew that an engineered virus was circulating from mid-November 2019, and that while the CCP was initially not worried about the virus, the U.S. biodefence network was much more concerned. The pandemic emergency was therefore largely created by the U.S. biodefence network, which used it as an opportunity to put into practice all the emergency protocols it had been preparing for two decades to respond to a biological attack or pandemic. While the virus quickly turned out to be mild, the emergency response continued largely because the train had already started running and the opportunity was too good to miss.

If the U.S. and its allies did know anything covertly before 2020, the most likely people who would know it are members of the intelligence and security networks. What can we surmise about what they knew from what they were saying and doing in autumn and winter 2019-20 and from later reports?

Consider Dr. Michael Callahan, an ex-CIA agent who now runs the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was the U.S. Government’s only confirmed point of contact in Wuhan in January 2020. Out of the blue, Dr. Callahan contacted mRNA vaccine expert Dr. Robert Malone on January 4th 2020 to tell him that (to quote Dr. Malone): “There was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get ‘my team’ engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent.”

Bear in mind that at this point nobody else was spreading alarm about the new virus, which according to the public record had only been sequenced and confirmed to be a novel SARS-like virus by the private Chinese company Vision Medicals on December 27th. Certainly the CCP was not spreading alarm. Prior to the Wuhan lockdown on January 23rd 2020 it was playing down the threat from the virus, suppressing news of it and not making any concerted response.

The videos supposedly showing people collapsing in the streets with the virus that went round social media at the time were promoted not by the CCP but by organisations opposed to the CCP and aiming to expose its cover-up of the virus. Most people in the West, too, were not treating the virus as a significant threat and it was barely registering on government agendas. Recall that in early January there were officially just a few people in hospital in Wuhan and no recorded deaths, so any notion that this virus was a major threat to global public health was purely hypothetical – or based on information not in the public domain.

However, Dr. Callahan was not alone in his early alarmism. Others from the U.S. biodefence network were conspicuously alarmist and actively trying to raise alarm in those around them right from the start of January.

In the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger was stoking up the terror from the beginning of January. As Michael Senger notes: “Throughout January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called White House meetings unbeknownst to those in attendance and breached protocol to ratchet up alarm about the new coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism.”

It was Pottinger who brought in fellow alarmist Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator at the end of February 2020; Birx was instrumental in pushing the alarmist agenda and bringing lockdowns to America.

The leaked ‘Red Dawn’ emails among U.S. Government officials and others in early 2020 show long-time lockdown proponent Dr. Carter Mecher of the Department of Veterans Affairs also pushing for strong responses from very early on.

Dr. Mecher is an associate of Dr. Richard Hatchett, formerly of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and now CEO of the Gates-funded pandemic vaccine organisation CEPI, with whom he wrote a paper in 2007 purporting to use the lessons of the 1918 pandemic to promote social distancing. A sister paper, also funded by the NIH, was produced at the same time by Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director (then and now) Dr. Anthony Fauci commented in 2007 that the two studies underline that “a primary lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic is that it is critical to intervene early… Nonpharmaceutical interventions may buy valuable time at the beginning of a pandemic while a targeted vaccine is being produced”.

Richard Hatchett was attending the World Economic Forum when China locked down Wuhan on January 23rd. The following day he gave a press conference with Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and a board member of CEPI, and Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel, backing China’s draconian response and making clear it was straight out of his own playbook.

One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.

There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in U.S. cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.

The ‘we’ of course refers to Neil Ferguson and Carter Mecher, as per the above.

Further possible evidence of the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community and biodefence network is that the messages of the ‘whistleblower’ doctor Li Wenliang in Wuhan were initially promoted in English by an organisation funded by the U.S. Government. The flooding of social media with messages promoting lockdown in 2020 was also seen in 2014 with Ebola in Sierra Leone, where it was clearly the work of outside agents. It is also of significance that the same New York Times reporter, Donald McNeil, wrote almost identical articles praising the extreme interventions in both 2014 and 2020.

Anywhere you look in early 2020, amidst the sea of general calm, any source of alarm will invariably be found connected with someone associated with the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies – people such as Michael Callahan, Matt Pottinger, Deborah Birx, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher and Neil Ferguson.

It comes as no surprise then to learn that in the U.S. the virus was treated, not as a matter of public health but of national security. This approach, already evident in the high level of activity from the biodefence network, was made official in March 2020 when the responsibility for policy in the pandemic was given not to the public health bodies but to the National Security Council and its agencies. The policy document that the ensuing policy decisions were based on has never been published.

Why would a virus that has as yet done very little be a national security matter? The most likely explanation is because it was known or suspected to be a non-natural, engineered agent. This likely conclusion is supported by other evidence, in particular, by what intelligence reports suggest both the U.S. and CCP knew about the virus in November 2019.

A recent report from the U.S. Senate showed that the CCP made a major safety intervention at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on November 12th 2019 to address the “complex and grave situation facing [bio]security work”. The Senate report also implied that around the same time the WIV must have begun work on a vaccine for the new coronavirus – deduced from the fact that Yusen Zhou (who mysteriously died shortly afterwards) applied for a vaccine patent on February 24th 2020. These facts indicate that the CCP became aware that a leaked virus was circulating in mid-November, presumably because it noticed people falling ill and, via testing, traced it back to the WIV (while there is no direct evidence of this, U.S. intelligence reports have noted WIV workers falling ill with a Covid-like illness in November).

The CCP’s response to discovering this appears to have been to address safety issues at the WIV and to begin working on a vaccine, but otherwise to suppress information about the virus and not treat it as a major threat. The CCP does not appear to have alerted its health services during November or December as medics in Wuhan had to discover it for themselves.

This play-it-down and suppress policy continued even once doctors in Wuhan spotted the novel virus in their patients and obtained the near-complete sequence from a private lab on December 27th. The CCP then continued to insist for weeks that the virus wasn’t spreading between humans, aggressively suppressed any suggestion it came from a lab and pushed from the start the scarcely plausible theory that it had jumped from animals in the wet market.

The sharing of the full virus sequence on January 11th only happened because a Chinese scientist breached protocol to do so, and was disciplined for it. Even once the CCP abandoned its play-it-down policy and initiated aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions on January 23rd it continued to frustrate efforts to investigate the WIV and its virus database. It’s clear then, that up to January 23rd the CCP showed no sign of being worried about the virus, but every sign of worrying its origins would be discovered.

Separately, the U.S. intelligence community has let it be known that it was aware of a new virus circulating in China from mid-November. As an Israeli news website reported: “In the second week of November, U.S. intelligence recognised that a disease with new characteristics was developing in Wuhan, China. They followed its spread, when at that stage this classified information was not known to the media and did not come out of the Chinese regime either.”

This intelligence is said to have come “in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities”. The U.S. military “then alerted NATO and the [Israeli] IDF of the outbreak precisely at the end of November”.

So we know the U.S. had intelligence on the virus circulating in mid-November. I think we have to assume this intel was linked to the CCP safety intervention at the WIV via intercepted communications, and thus that like the CCP, U.S. intelligence knew or suspected it was lab-engineered from that point. If so, no one appears to have told Dr. Fauci and his associates, as Fauci’s FOI emails reveal him and his colleagues to be figuring out that it was likely engineered (and that they funded it) at the end of January.

On February 1st, Fauci initiated an urgent cover-up operation, designed to discredit the idea of a lab leak as a baseless conspiracy theory, telling his associates: “You will have tasks today that must be done.” It is not clear whether Fauci orchestrated this cover-up on his own initiative or, more likely, after being instructed or pre-primed to do so by people in the biodefence network. The motive in any case was the same: to point the finger away from the U.S.’s funding of the implicated virus research and to avoid discrediting the field.

It thus appears that from November 2019, both the CCP and the intelligence community of the U.S. and its allies were watching the leaked outbreak to see what would happen and whether, as they hoped, it would fizzle out. Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP were keen to ignore it and suppress any alarm, as well as any hint of a lab leak. The biodefence network, on the other hand, appears to have been much more nervous about the new virus. As soon as word began to get out it amplified the news, spread alarm, pressed for strong interventions and activated biosecurity protocols, putting its members in charge wherever possible.

Despite this alarmist mode, however, members of the biodefence network consistently backed the natural origins and wet market theory and suppressed the lab leak theory. This is very telling, as there is no way they could have known at that point it was not of lab origin, and as we know there was plenty of evidence to suggest it was, not least what we presume they knew about the Chinese intervention at the WIV. If we assume for a moment they did not suspect it was lab-engineered it is very hard to account for their high degree of alarm about the new virus, or their activation of biodefence protocols and treating it as a national security matter, at a time when officially it had not yet killed anyone and there were few hospital patients.

Furthermore, publicly endorsing the lab leak theory or at least keeping it in play would clearly have been helpful to them as it would have added to the cause for alarm, reinforced their narrative of exposing the CCP’s virus cover-up and unambiguously made it a national security matter. The choice instead to back the CCP’s implausible version of events and suppress the lab leak theory thus betrays that it must have been seriously inconvenient for them in another way, namely that it implicated them and risked discrediting their research.

It is also telling in this regard that when some in the U.S. Government did start pushing the lab leak theory, the Chinese responded not by denying it but by trying to blame the U.S. for the leak. This feels like a warning shot: don’t expose us on this or we’ll expose you.

As is well known, the CCP’s play-it-down strategy came to an abrupt end on January 23rd 2020, when it caved in to the alarmist calls for lockdowns and NPIs (which actually have a long history in China). Thereafter the country embraced its new policy with zeal, turning itself into a showcase for the extreme pandemic response measures, joining in the promotion of them around the world and really making them their own.

Thus we find that the pandemic was largely a creation of the U.S. biodefence network, with China joining in after January 23rd. U.S. intelligence officers had been following the virus (which they, like the CCP, knew was lab-engineered) from mid-November, and the biodefence network made sure news of the virus got out once doctors noticed it, spreading alarm before there was anything really to be alarmed about and treating it immediately as a biosecurity threat.

I believe they did this initially, in part, out of genuine concern about the engineered virus, but also partly because they were itching to try out all the biosecurity protocols they’d been preparing for decades – not least the warp speed rollout of an mRNA vaccine. This latter motive also helps explain why it all carried on once it was obvious the virus was not a major threat to human life and the extreme responses were not justified. It was, in other words, a kind of trial run for a biological attack orchestrated by the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies.

If true, this certainly helps to make sense of it all. But it is hardly a comforting thought, because it reinforces that they’re not done with us yet, but are just getting ready to do it again, and who can stop them?