From Censorship To Criminalizing Dissent

  This is about the end of free speech in France but make no mistake it's coming to yours likewise if you live in the West. As we let big corporations take over our democratic systems, the next stage will be force. Wasn't it all predictable?

 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

History does seem to be on fast forward, doesn’t it?

A major battle is brewing throughout the Western world over the basic principle of free speech. Is it going to be protected by law? It’s not entirely clear what the outcome will be. We seem to be on the precipice of a potential calamity if the courts don’t decide the right way. Even if we squeak out a victory, the question is already in play. Our free speech rights have never been more fragile.

Turn your attention to France right now. In the dead of night, a new law slipped through the General Assembly that would make it a crime to criticize mRNA shots. Critics call it the Pfizer law. It calls for fines up to 45,000 euros and possibly three years in prison for debunking an approved medical treatment.

A general view of the French National Assembly (Assemblee Nationale) is seen in Paris on July 17, 2023. (Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)

Like all Western nations, criticism of the mRNA platform has already been subjected to vast social-media censorship. Even given this, there has been a major and global consumer turn against these shots. People are not convinced that they are necessary, safe, or effective. Still, government imposed mandates for everyone, billions of people worldwide. This was a form of conscription that has driven a deep divide between the rulers and the ruled.

Rather than back down, however, governments, which have been captured by pharmaceutical interests, are going to bat for the companies and the technology to threaten imprisonment of anyone who speaks out openly against them.

Here is where censorship becomes severely weaponized. It’s the next logical step. First you deploy every power to keep the distribution channels of information free of dissent. When that doesn’t entirely work, simply because people find alternative means of getting the word out, you have to intensify matters and institute outright controls.

It stands to reason that this would happen. After all, the whole point of censorship is to curate the public mind to put down opposition to regime priorities. When mainstream corporate media is falling apart and new media is rising, the next stage is to go the full way to flat-out criminalize opinion, like any totalitarian government.

We are very close to that stage. If it can happen in France, it can happen throughout Europe, then the Commonwealth, and then the United States. We know this much about politics today. It is global. The elites that have seized control of our governments coordinate across borders. This is why it is hugely important to pay attention to what’s going on across the pond.

As a second item, I’m alarmed to read the lead piece in the New York Times opinion section that celebrates a defamation case about which I had not previously heard. It is by Michael Mann, professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He had sued a writer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute for taking issue with Mann’s climate change model, and the so-called hockey stick in particular.

This is not my area of specialization at all but I have no doubt that mainstream climate science should be subject to vigorous criticism. If the COVID era has taught us anything, it is that the “scientific consensus” can be outrageously wrong and needs a check that comes in the form of writing, some of it zippy and cutting.

Scientist Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO Documentary "How to Let Go of the World and All The Things Climate Can't Change" in New York on June 21, 2016. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for HBO)

Dr. Mann filed a defamation lawsuit. Defamation is a very high bar: it means to deliberately lie about something with the intention to harm. One might not suppose that many things could qualify as that, certainly not criticism of a climate model. Indeed, most defamation lawsuits are dismissed outright simply because this country generally values free speech.

This one, however, was accepted by the judge in Washington, D.C. court. After a full decade in litigation, and a full hearing, the jury ended up deciding in favor of the plaintiffs. One defendant, Rand Simberg, has been told to pay $1K and the other, Mark Steyn, $1M. Simberg says he will appeal and stands by every word that he wrote. Steyn agrees and is ready to appeal.

Essentially this verdict is criminalizing hyperbole, said the defense attorney.

The op-ed writer, however, says this is justice. “Our recent trial victory may have wider implications,” he says. “It has drawn a line in the sand. Scientists now know that they can respond to attacks by suing for defamation.” He mentions in particular people who have disagreed with the COVID consensus—disagreeing with Anthony Fauci—or otherwise make “false claims about adverse health effects from wind turbines.”

Can you imagine? Criticize a wind turbine or pandemic lockdowns and find yourself hauled in front of a judge!

Will this case have a chilling effect on criticism of government? Absolutely! Indeed, it is terrifying to think what it implies. And the writer leaves nothing to the imagination. He sees this case as a wedge to make scientific criticism of any area of life—from vaccines to climate change to the conversion to EVs—essentially illegal. In any case, if not that, it comes close by erecting so many landmines that critics essentially shut up for fear of having their whole lives ruined.

This case went on for ten years. The article in question was published 12 years ago. How is it possible that litigants pushed a case for that long? It was to establish a serious precedent. That precedent is now clearly established. The definition of defamation is so malleable that juries can decide anything. Just the prospect of being hauled before a judge over ten years is enough to deter speaking out.

We can hope that this appeal reverses the decision. But let’s face it: free speech should not rest on such a thin foundation of jury-created law and arbitrary judicial edict. This is all extremely dangerous and flies in the face of the First Amendment.

Essentially, every critic of the “scientific consensus” in every area has been put on notice. They are already fair game. That’s the world toward which we are moving.

Here’s the issue. Censorship works when government can control all the distribution channels of information. What happens when that no longer works? The powers that be have to use more direct methods, even when they fly in the face of the First Amendment. Those who say that this cannot happen here need to pay closer attention to the reality of what’s happening.

Many people are excited to see the breakup of old media. Certainly I am but consider how the censors will respond. They are getting hardcore, relying more on law rather than capture, and hoping the courts can act to shut up the critics permanently. That’s the future we are looking at. It is extremely dangerous. Under this trajectory, free speech will be no more. The First Amendment will be a dead letter.

Terrifying. This Changes EVERYTHING! (Video)

  Amazing video as food for thoughts.

  This should still be science fiction although it's almost reality now.

  I truly changes everything. Think about it.

 

"This Is A Date With Disaster": Net-Zero Is Pulling The Plug on America’s Electrical 'Life Support System,' New Documentary Says

  Will people realize soon enough what a catastrophe Net Zero really is?

  I doubt is but hopefully I am wrong. 

  The case against an early awakening from this horrible mistake is that usually went people are wrong, instead of backing up from their mistake, they double down. "The reason Net Zero is not working is not because it is the wrong policy but because we are not trying hard enough!" Countless civilizations have failed based on this principle. 

  

 Conversely, the case for a sharp wake-up call is the model of Germany rushing ahead and crashing its economy to the ground. It will of course be the fault of Russia, China, you name it. But other countries may learn from the experience. Hopefully? 

 

 Here's the example of the US below: 

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Electricity is among the most essential sources of America’s unparalleled prosperity and productivity; it is also the greatest vulnerability.

Giant wind turbines are powered by strong winds in front of solar panels in Palm Springs, Calif., on March 27, 2013. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The United States has become so utterly dependent upon an uninterrupted supply of affordable electricity that, as our grid becomes ever more fragile American society has become fragile along with it.

Former CIA director James Woolsey testified before the U.S. Senate in 2015 that, if America’s electric grid were to go down for an extended period, such as one year, “there are essentially two estimates on how many people would die from hunger, from starvation, from lack of water, and from social disruption.

“One estimate is that within a year or so, two-thirds of the United States population would die,” Mr. Woolsey said. “The other estimate is that within a year or so, 90 percent of the U.S. population would die.”

Chris Keefer, president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy, concurred.

“The energy grid is a civilizational life support system, and without it, modern society collapses very quickly,” he said.

Mr. Keefer is one of the experts featured in energy analyst, author, and documentarian Robert Bryce’s new film, “Juice: Power, Politics and the Grid.” This five-part docuseries looks at how and why America is now “fragilizing” and destabilizing the engineering marvel that is the central pillar of our society.

“We are seeing the grid’s reliability, resilience, and affordability all declining,” Mr. Bryce told The Epoch Times. “We wanted to get people and policy makers to understand that our most important energy network is being fragilized, and we ignore this danger at our peril,” Mr. Bryce said.

He has been fixated on America’s electric grid for decades and authored the 2020 book, “A Question of Power,” one of the more comprehensive studies of how electricity grids work and why they may not work as well in the coming years.

Steven Pinker, author and Harvard psychology professor, wrote in a review of the book that “energy is our primary defense against poverty, disorder, hunger, and death.”

And yet, many nations in the West have engaged in a game of Russian roulette with their power grids, in an attempt to reduce global temperatures.

A ‘Dire Warning’

The warnings don’t just come from the analysts featured in the documentary; electricity regulators are becoming more vocal in sounding the alarm as well.

In a May 2023 report, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), charged with overseeing grid reliability, stated that a majority of America’s grid is now at heightened risk levels for outages.

“This report is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson stated.

It was the near-collapse of Texas’s power grid during winter storm Yuri in 2021 that compelled Mr. Bryce to make the documentary. He partnered with film director Tyson Culver, who along with Mr. Bryce, experienced the crisis first-hand while living in Austin.

“I didn’t plan to make another documentary after we made our first film that we released in 2019,” he said. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this; it costs too much and takes too long.’

“But then we learned that the [Texas] grid nearly failed, and if it had failed, tens of thousands of people would have died,” he said. “And we realized, if this could happen in Texas, the energy capital of the world, then the electric grid is really being undermined.”

The North American electric grid is rapidly being transitioned from one in which coal had once dominated to one that is seeing an ever increasing share of wind, solar, and natural gas. In the process, America’s electric grid is changing from something that was once so reliable that consumers rarely thought about it, to one that increasingly features rolling blackouts and may, one day soon, be on the brink of long-term failure.

The Fatal Trifecta

The destabilization of the power grid is the result of what analyst and author Meredith Angwin deems the “fatal trifecta.”

“The Texas grid almost collapsed because of what I call the fatal trifecta,” Ms. Angwin states. “The first part of the fatal trifecta is over reliance on renewables, which go on and off when they want to.

“The second part is over reliance on natural gas, which is delivered just in time and can be interrupted just in time,” she says. “And the third part is relying on a neighbor to help.”

All of these factors came into play during Texas winter storm Yuri in 2021. Wind and solar facilities were unable to deliver in freezing weather, and supplies of natural gas were interrupted by freezing temperatures as well, just as people needed electricity to heat their homes.

According to a Texas comptroller’s report, natural gas supplied 51 percent of Texas’ electricity; wind 25 percent; and coal 13 percent. As these sources went offline, utilities frantically enacted blackouts to cut demand, fearing that a mismatch of supply and demand that lasted more than several minutes would cause long-term damage to the grid’s hardware.

While Texas missed having a months-long outage of its electric grid by only a matter of minutes, the damage from short-term outages was severe.

“Rolling blackouts were intended to take stress off the power grid but turned into outages that—in some parts of the state—lasted several days,” the report stated. In that short time, at least 210 deaths were attributed to the outage, which also caused an estimated $195 billion in economic damage.

The third leg of the “fatal trifecta” is the ability of regions of the grid to support each other.

For all its fragmented sources, utilities, and regulations, the North American power grid is interconnected in a way that allows one region to shift electricity to another region if one has an excess and the other a shortfall. Utilities routinely rely on this to balance supply and demand at any given moment.

Increasingly, however, with excess reserves dwindling as coal plants are aggressively shut down across the United States, this ability to “phone a friend” is going away.

Following Europe and California

In many ways, Texas followed the lead of Europe and California in transitioning their grid to wind and solar energy, retiring coal plants and sometimes nuclear plants as well, to halt global warming and please anti-nuclear activists. Because wind and solar are weather-dependent, a dispatchable backup source is needed, and that source is typically natural gas.

As Europe, California, and Texas have learned, this transition creates vulnerability compared to coal and nuclear plants, where fuel can be stored on-site. It has also led to sharply increasing prices for electricity, as dual systems of power generation need to be built, along with additional transmission infrastructure.

According to a 2021 Princeton Study, relying on wind and solar to achieve net zero by 2050 would require America’s high-voltage transmission network to triple in size, at a cost of $2.4 trillion.

In what appears to be a surrender, or at least a retreat, from the net-zero transition, some European countries, like Germany, are restarting their coal plants as wind and solar fail to meet demand, even at inflated prices.

“What we see in Europe from this misguided infatuation with renewables is a stark warning, and I think we can see the same thing in California—skyrocketing electricity prices and no significant reduction in CO2 to speak of,” Mr. Bryce said.

At the same time, the drive to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions has led to political and corporate campaigns to shift ever more products onto the electric grid. This includes such essentials as home heating, transportation, and cooking.

Laws and regulations in Europe and the United States have sought to ban or phase out oil and gas heating in homes, along with gasoline-powered cars, trucks, and buses. The effect of this will be to make people more dependent on electricity while pushing up demand to levels that many say the grid cannot meet.

“The grid is already cracking under existing demand,” Mr. Bryce said. “We’re seeing the grid’s reliability, resilience, and affordability all declining, while these pressure groups are trying to put yet more demand on it.

“This is a date with disaster.”

Wind and Solar Devour Open Spaces

Added to this is the insatiable hunger of the wind and solar industry for the consumption of land.

According to a May report by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), reaching the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 would consume more than 250,000 square miles, or 160 million acres, of land.

“With current siting practices, an area the size of Texas is required to accommodate the wind and solar infrastructure we need to reach nationwide net-zero emissions by 2050,” stated Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at TNC, a renewable energy advocate.

Many energy experts and environmentalists are coming to the conclusion that nuclear energy is the best choice to generate reliable, affordable energy, while cutting CO2 emissions. Despite headline nuclear catastrophes at plants in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, many countries are building new plants or delaying closures of existing nuclear plants, considering it the cleanest and least environmentally harmful source of electricity.

According to a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, wind farms require up to 360 times as much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear energy facility, and solar facilities require up to 75 times the land area. Compared to coal and natural gas plants, wind and solar consume at least 10 times as much land, according to the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

In addition to a smaller footprint, nuclear power stations also typically do not require the construction of thousands of miles of new transmission lines to reach remote locations, where wind and solar facilities are typically built.

With nuclear, Mr. Bryce said, “we don’t need to expand the grid; we can use the grid we have.”

Climate Activists Embrace Nuclear

Even ardent supporters of green-new-deal initiatives are starting to accept that nuclear must be at least part of the plan.

“What we’re seeing out of Congress, and to some extent out of this White House, is more accommodation for nuclear energy,” Mr. Bryce said.

A 2022 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports that “France, the EU’s leading atomic state with nuclear weapons and fifty-six power reactors, is poised to launch a major reinvestment in nuclear power.”

Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Poland are also preparing to build new nuclear reactors, the report states, while other European nations—Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Portugal—remain opposed to nuclear power.

California regulators, meanwhile, opted in December 2023 to keep the state’s nuclear facility at Diablo Canyon open through at least 2030, having previously ordered its closure in 2025. This is a retreat for a state that has been plagued with rolling blackouts as it jumped headlong into a wind and solar future.

“If we are going to agree that climate change is an issue, with more [weather] extremes for longer, it’s total insanity to make our most important energy network dependent on the weather,” Mr. Bryce said. “We need weather-resilient, weather-resistant generation, not weather-dependent generation.”

“With the Inflation Reduction Act and the investment tax credits, production tax credits, all of the financial incentives in the power-gen sector are to build more wind and solar,” he said. “To me, that is just absolute crazy town.”

The documentary is available to watch for free on YouTube or at juicetheseries.com.

Mann Behind The 'Hockey Stick' Begins To Question Climate Alarmism

  Amazing article which helped me see the light and realize that I was a "New Denialist"! What an amazing concept which applies to scientists (mostly I suppose) who believe (quite rightly) that the Earth is warming (very slightly and moderately as 0.7C in 100 years would indicate) starting from a very low base in 1880 and that mankind has very little to do with it. (As many scientists in many fields, glaciology, geology, oceanography and others also believe.) 

  The problem with Global Warming is not scientific. There is a debate. Some people argue for one side, others against. This is normal and the truth should emerge, slowly but eventually from this debate. 

  Politics doesn't work like that. The decisions being taken imply trillions of dollars and must therefore be based on certainties. And therefore the debate must be stifled less a doubt remains and policies cannot be implemented, including, in the emergency "packages", solutions which have nothing to do with climate and everything to do with control...

Authored by Graham Young via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Could Michael Mann, the inventor of the so-called Hockey Stick graph, be a covert “New Denialist”? Or is there a split happening in the pro-climate change camp?

Martin Leonhard, a team member of the East Greenland Ice-Core Project (EastGRIP), clears snow using a snow blower from the entrance to the drill and science trench at EastGRIP camp on Aug. 15, 2022. (Lukasz Larsson Warzecha/Getty Images)

That’s two readings of Mr. Mann’s latest book “Our Fragile Moment.”

Either being true would be a good thing, and both are even better.

The “new denialists” is a new term coined to describe people who believe that while climate change is real, it is an open question of how much is manmade, and what the policy response should be.

Mr. Mann is not someone whom you would normally associate with such a position.

He has been famous in climate circles since 1998 when, as a newly-minted doctor in geology and geophysics, he was the principal author of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes 1998 (MBH98), also known as the Hockey Stick graph, a paleoclimate reconstruction of 1,000 years of earth’s temperature which showed unprecedented warming in the late 20th century.

It undermined the consensus view which was that temperature fluctuates quite significantly over centuries, and it was probably cooler now than it had been during the Roman climatic optimum and the Medieval warm period.

You may have seen its star role in Al Gore’s agitprop “An Inconvenient Truth” (“agitprop” because the film was ruled by a British court to be unsuitable for showing to school students without accompanying corrections because it contained “nine scientific errors”).

Mr. Gore had the graph on a large backdrop and emphasised the steepness of the blade, and thus the urgent need to stop CO2 emissions, by rising up beside it in a scissor lift while holding a large pointer in his hand.

Very dramatic.

Scientist Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO Documentary "How To Let Go Of The World And All The Things Climate Can't Change" in New York on on June 21, 2016. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for HBO)

Some Issues With How the Hockey Stick Came About

That graph and successor hockey sticks are the standard bearers (if you’ll forgive me for mixing metaphors) of climate change catastrophism, and they’ve been used to hit (metaphor again) “climate deniers” over the head.

I’ve never had any regard for the hockey stick.

Not only did it purport to erase the consensus on the basis of one reconstruction, but its statistical techniques were shown to produce hockey sticks out of any random data. So it seemed unlikely to be correct.

But on top of that, Mr. Mann did something that is completely impermissible in statistical analysis.

When the proxy data that he was using came into the modern era they clashed with thermometer records. They showed cooling but the thermometers showed warming.

In this photo illustration a thermometer is seen on the banks of the Swan River in Perth, Australia, on Jan. 22, 2022. (Paul Kane/Getty Images)

Mr. Mann “fixed” this by abandoning the proxies and splicing actual temperature records in, without revealing the reason.

This is why I call him “Piltdown Mann.”

The one “n” Piltdown Man is a scandal where an amateur paleoanthropologist claimed to have found the “missing link” between man and ape but it was a forgery where a modern human cranium had been combined with an orangutang jaw and teeth.

Mr. Mann’s technique is similarly defective and deceptive.

If the proxies don’t measure real temperature now, how could they be supposed to be measuring real temperature in the past? The whole proxy exercise had obviously failed and should have been abandoned.

If you want a further, very succinct reference on the Hockey Stick, I can only refer you to the judge in the case of Mann v. Simberg and Steyn, currently running in court 132 in the District of Columbia Superior Court. Mr. Mann is suing the two defendants for some very caustic comments about his hockey stick.

Presiding Justice Irving said:

“As to Mr. Steyn, his statements about the bogus, fraudulent nature of the Hockey Stick graph in his mind were substantially and entirely true.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Mann won, and the matter is likely to go on appeal, but the case deserves an essay all of its own, so I will leave that there for the moment.

Not the End of the World?

So I approached the opportunity to review Mr. Mann’s latest book with caution. A man who will mislead his scientific colleagues is likely to be even less reliable with the general public.

I was not disappointed, and at the same time, I was.

On the one hand, some propositions are surely false, while on the other there were insights that are most probably true. And then the final twist, where Mr. Mann showed himself to be relaxed about the near-term prospects for the world, unlike, say, prophets of doom like Greta Thunberg.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg takes part in a demonstration for the climate at Place de la Republique on the sidelines of the New Global Financial Pact Summit, in Paris, on June 23, 2023. (Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images)

This is where he joins the ranks of what is being termed the “new denialists,” which seems to be a term to cover anyone who takes a “Don’t Panic” approach to changes in the climate.

The book is an example of the seductiveness of capitulating to expert opinion. Mr. Mann has a theory of everything, and that is that CO2 is the thermostat that controls Earth’s temperature. Except he occasionally allows for the sun to have a role at times through Milankovitch cycles.

Unlike most climate scientists, he understands geology and has a long-term view of the world, which means there are a lot of weeds for the amateur to get lost in.

My advice is to read the book, and then go and search out some contrary views.

The future might be all speculation, but once you get further back than yesterday’s dinner, the past can be just as speculative.

Maybe CO2 is a genuine thermostat, but then how do you explain this graph where the earth can be quite cold with high concentrations of CO2 and warm with low concentrations?

Mr. Mann deals with some of this by the concept of Earth System Sensitivity, which is the idea that there is a certain amount of inertia in the earth system and it may take quite a time for changes to manifest.

He posits that sensitivity may be higher in interglacials, and lower during glacials, partly a result of the fact that ice sheets, which dominate glacials, reflect a lot of sunlight and therefore act to keep temperature low, despite changes in CO2 pushing temperature in the other direction.

Ice sheets therefore melt very slowly causing temperature to also warm very slowly.

Part of the glacial ice sheet that covers about 80 percent of the Glacial Ice Sheet, Greenland, is seen on July 17, 2013. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

That brake on temperature change doesn’t exist when most of the ice sheets have melted, as they have today, so warming can be more instantaneous.

Perhaps.

I think it needs a lot more research but do please delve into the book—it has a wealth of detail which is hard to convey accurately, or at all, in a short review.

And definitely read the last chapter where I will let Mr. Mann speak for himself:

“But breathless claims of imminent climate-driven ‘human extinction’ and ‘runaway warming’ are both scientifically unsupportable and unhelpful.”

Let’s Do This Properly

I’ve always been a “new denialist,” or if not always, since somewhere in the 90s.

Manmade climate change is a fact, to the extent that emissions of CO2 created by us have some effect on the climate. But to what extent is an open question, as is what to do about it.

What is certain is that the cost to human life of precipitately stopping the use of fossil fuels is immeasurably higher than any benefit.

We rely on them not just for electricity and transport, but for steel, plastics, glass, explosives, and fertilisers, without which it would be impossible to sustain the 10 billion or so humans who will live on this earth by the end of this century.

If we stopped all that tomorrow, how many humans could the earth support? 500 million? Take that figure from 10 billion, and that’s how many billions you would kill.

It would be wise to transition away from fossil fuels, and also wise to understand that any transition will be in the order of centuries, not decades.

After all, the first steam engine was developed in 1712, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that it became dominant in sailing technology. Internal combustion engines have been around since 1860, but they are still developing.

Why should the decarbonised economy take only a matter of decades?

But to have a rational debate it requires rational premises all around, and this book is a good contribution to it.

And hopefully, it reflects a broader recognition amongst realists on the more climate-catastrophic end of the debate that if everything is a crisis, people will become so worn out that eventually, nothing is a crisis, because what’s the point, we can’t do anything about it?

Crisis overload.

If Mr. Mann can help to cool the debate, then I’m happy to have his support, even if his science might be less than rigorous.

“Our Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis” is published by Scribe and retails for AU$35.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Medicine Has Been Fully Militarized

  For most people, the Covid crisis is behind. A bad experience for sure but mostly something belonging to the past. This cannot be further from the truth.

  Not only our medical system, but our whole society has been transformed for the worse. We are no less bankrupt than four years ago although the dollar is quickly losing its preponderant position. Our society has become far more autocratic with what in Europe has become a legal control of information. But more ominously, no lesson whatsoever has been learned from the Covid medical fiasco and consequently we, as a society, are ready for a replay. 

  Most people I talk to believe that it is impossible. "People won't fall twice for the same old tricks." They are wrong! Change the paradigm slightly, increase the shrill and the pressure, limit the reach of divergent opinions and we're on for another round. 

  This is why it is so important to reflect on what Really happened during the Covid crisis as the article below skillfully does.

Authored by Clayton Baker via The Brownstone Institute,

I am thinking of a certain industry. See if you can guess what it is...

This industry is huge, constituting a large portion of the nation’s GDP. Millions of people earn their living through it, directly or indirectly. The people at the top of this industry (who operate mostly behind the scenes, of course) are among the super-rich. This industry’s corporations lobby the nation’s government relentlessly, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, both to secure lucrative contracts and to influence national policy in their favor. This investment pays off richly, sometimes reaching trillions of dollars.

The corporations supplying this industry with its materiel conduct advanced, highly technical research that is far beyond the understanding of the average citizen. The citizens fund this research, however, through tax dollars. Unbeknownst to them, many of the profits gained from the products developed using tax dollars are kept by the corporations’ executives and investors.

This industry addresses fundamental, life-or-death issues facing the nation. As such, it relentlessly promotes itself as a global force for good, claiming to protect and save countless lives. However, it kills a lot of people too, and the balance is not always a favorable one.

The operational side of this industry is emphatically top-down in its structure and function. Those who work at the ground level must undergo rigorous training that standardizes their attitudes and behavior. They must follow strict codes of practice, and they are subject to harsh professional discipline if they deviate from accepted policies and procedures, or even if they publicly question them.

Finally, these ground-level personnel are handled in a peculiar manner. Publicly, they are frequently lauded as heroes, particularly under declared periods of crisis. Privately, they are kept completely in the dark regarding high-level industry decisions, and they are often lied to outright by those at higher levels of command. The “grunts” even significantly forfeit some fundamental civil liberties for the privilege of working in the industry.

What industry am I describing?

If you answered, “the military,” of course you would be correct.

However, if you answered “the medical industry,” you would be every bit as right.

In President Eisenhower’s farewell speech of Jan. 17, 1961, he stated that “... in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-three years on, many Americans understand what he was referring to.

They see the endless cycle of undeclared wars and decades-long foreign occupations that are undertaken on nebulous or even outright false pretenses. They see the ever-hungry mega-industry that produces super-expensive, high-tech killing devices of every imaginable form, as well as the steady stream of traumatized soldiers that it spits out. War (or, if you prefer its Orwellian nickname, “defense”) is big business. And as Eisenhower warned, as long as those profiting from it drive the policy and the money stream, it will not only continue, it will continue to grow.

Other mega-industries - the medical industry in particular - have generally fared better in public perception than the military-industrial complex. Then came COVID.

Among its many harsh lessons, COVID has taught us this: if you substitute Pfizer and Moderna for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and swap the NIH and CDC for the Pentagon, you get the same result. The “medical-industrial complex” is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart, and it is every bit as real a problem.

As a physician, I am embarrassed to admit that until COVID, I possessed only an inkling that this was so—or more accurately, I knew it, but didn’t realize how bad it was, and I didn’t worry about it too much. Sure (I thought), Pharma engaged in dishonest practices, but we’d known that for decades, and after all, they do make some effective drugs. Yes, physicians were increasingly becoming employees, and protocols were dictating care more and more, but the profession still seemed manageable. True, healthcare was far too expensive (gobbling up a reported 18.3 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2021), but healthcare is inherently expensive. And after all, we’re saving lives.

Until we weren’t.

By early-to-mid 2020, it became obvious to those paying attention that the COVID “response,” while promoted as a medical initiative, was in fact a military operation. Martial law had effectively been declared approximately on the Ides of March 2020, after President Trump was mysteriously convinced to cede the COVID response (and practically speaking, control of the nation) to the National Security Council. Civil liberties—freedom of assembly, worship, the right to travel, to earn one’s living, to pursue one’s education, to obtain legal relief—were rendered null and void.

Top-down diktats on how to manage COVID patients were handed down to physicians from high above, and these were enforced with a militaristic rigidity unseen in doctors’ professional lifetimes. The mandated protocols made no sense. They ignored fundamental tenets of both sound medical practice and medical ethics. They shamelessly lied about well-known, tried-and-true medicines that were known to be safe and appeared to work. The protocols killed people.

Those physicians and other professionals who spoke out were effectively court-martialed. State medical boards, specialty certification boards, and large healthcare system employers virtually tripped over each other in the rush to delicense, decertify, and fire dissenters. Genuine, courageous physicians who actually treat patients, such as Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Scott Jensen, Simone Gold, and others, were persecuted, while non-practicing bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci were hailed with false titles like “America’s Top Doctor.” The propaganda was as nauseating as it was blatant. And then came the jabs.

How did this happen to medicine?

It all seemed so sudden, but in fact it has been in the works for years.

COVID taught us (by the way, COVID has been such a harsh tutor, but haven’t we learned so much from her!) that the medical-industrial complex and military-industrial complex are deeply connected. They are not just twins, or even identical twins. They are conjoined twins, and so-called “Public Health” is the tissue shared between them.

The SARS CoV-2 virus, after all, is a bioweapon, developed over a period of years, funded by U.S. tax dollars in a joint effort between Fauci’s NIH and the Department of Defense to genetically manipulate the transmissibility and virulence of coronaviruses (all done in the name of “Public Health,” of course).

Once the bioweapon was out of the lab and into the population, the race was on within the medical-industrial complex to develop and market the supremely profitable antidote to the bioweapon. Cue the full-on military takeover of medicine: the martial law lockdowns, the suppression of cheap and effective treatments, the persecution of dissidents, the ceaseless propaganda and anti-science, and the unabashed whoring of most hospital systems for CARES Act money.

We know the rest. The ill-conceived, toxic, gene-therapy antidote, falsely billed as a “vaccine,” was foisted upon the population by blackmail (“the vaccine is how we end the pandemic”), the effective bribery of medical authorities and politicians, as well as other Deep-State directed psyops designed to divide the population and scapegoat dissenters (“pandemic of the unvaccinated”).

The end result even sounds like the aftermath of a gigantic military operation. Millions are dead, many millions more are psychologically traumatized, economies are in tatters, and a few warmongers are fantastically rich. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel (who, incidentally, oversaw the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology years ago) is a freshly minted billionaire. And not one of those who caused all the mischief are in prison.

At this writing, virtually all the major healthcare systems, specialty regulatory boards, specialty associations, and medical schools are standing at attention, still in lockstep with the received—and by now, clearly false—narrative. Their funding, after all, be it from Pharma or the Government, depends upon their obedience. Barring dramatic change, they will respond in the same fashion when orders come down from above in the future. Medicine has been fully militarized.

In his farewell address, Eisenhower said something else that I believe is most prescient here.

He described that a military-industrial complex fostered “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

Enter Disease X.

Why this top AI guru thinks we might be in extinction level trouble (Video - 27mn)

  Many interesting comments about AI by this brilliant expert. 

  unlike him, I do not believe we can control AI once it becomes AGI. You simply cannot control something which is more intelligent than you are. Worse, AGI cannot be a little more intelligent than we are. As soon as it reaches a level were it can improve itself significantly, and we may be frighteningly close to this point, that's it. As Ray Kurzweil explained, almost instantly, you have an intelligence singularity. Because the machine will, (it already does) think a million times faster than we do! 

  I like his analogy of fighting a chess game with a grand champion. It feels OK for a while, you may even think that you are doing rather well, and suddenly you've lost! Although it will be different. Our society is already too complex for anybody to fully understand all it's technical, social and psychological aspects. Slowly, we will have to delegate more and more control to AI, simply because it will get better results than anybody can. Until the AI controls everything? Or just some critical aspects? Could it be that super-intelligence is just the AI doing things we do not fully understand? And in this case, how do we know it's not already there? 

 Already in the chess and go games, AI can do amazing moves. Moves which are surprising but are eventually winning ones. Can everything be seen as a gigantic game of go by AI? One question remains: If the AI is just player the "games" we ask it to play, then all should be fine. But if the AI starts playing for itself. what happens? 

 Do you need consciousness to do that? Probably not. You just need one human to ask the AI the right questions: to optimize it's chances of survival for example. The question has probably already been asked...

 Finally creating an AI from scratch is complicated but once you have found the solutions, the right configurations, the right networks, replicating an AI may be relatively simple... That question is not discussed in the interview below although I believe it's the most potent one. So many questions. So little time! 

 

It's Happening. (by Russell brand - 20mn)

  By interviewing Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson is making history. Will it change the world? I don't know. But one thing that is being transformed is journalism. The mainstream medias have already almost completely lost their legitimacy but with Tucker Carlson it becomes obvious and painful to see. 

 Now what?

 

American Big Tech Has Enslaved Us by Yanis Varoufakis

  A brilliant description of the current economic system with a dark prophecy about where we are going. Almost a one hour interview but well worth your time.

 

The Great Reset Is Dead, Long Live The Great Reset

  I am usually pessimistic on the chances to fight back against the Davos crowds when I see the general apathy. But maybe I am wrong. Other people, quite a few in fact, think almost exactly as I do. They also listen to Tucker Carlson and Russell brand. Enough to make a different? We'll see.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

“The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace.

It failed.”

– Susan Ivanova, Season 3 Opening Sequence, Babylon 5

When the World Economic Forum rolled out their advertising campaign for The Great Reset it was supposed to be the victory lap for Globalism.

Coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent global financial crisis unleashed a flood of government funny money that was supposed to buy our way to their perpetual prosperity.

It failed.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of one of the chief architects of the Great Reset, Klaus von Commie Schnitzel’s right hand man, Yuval Noah Harari.

Spoken like the true authoritarian that he is, Harari can only see violence and chaos. He’s not wrong. The violence and chaos coming, however, have their roots in his attempts (or complicity) in trying to force, through violence, a global order on humanity which humanity doesn’t want.

This push towards violence, however, can stop tomorrow. All that has to happen is for cretins like Harari, Soros, Schwab, Gates, and all the people behind them, to truly accept the fact that they have failed and cut a deal with us.

If they do that we can minimize the violence on the horizon. But that’s not going to happen because they’ve already told us over and over that the abuse will continue until morale improves.

The impending chaos and violence is coming precisely because of Isaac Newton’s 3rd law, popularly summarized as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

It’s not coming because we ‘don’t have any answers.’ We have plenty of answers, Harari and his ilk simply don’t like them.

For decades we met their violence with a kind of silent resignation as the cost of upsetting this system far outweighed the benefit of being the first 2nd lieutenant out of the foxhole in No Man’s Land. But the costs for so many today for going along to get along far outweigh the benefits accruing to them.

And that’s why the protests all across the West are intensifying.

The Great Reset project came at us too fast and we quickly saw it for what it was. While it was being rolled out through COVID most went along to be good neighbors. As I’ve argued in the past, acquiescence to the insane lockdown rules didn’t come from most people being sheep willingly herded into concentration happy camps. It came from a sense of wanting to be seen as cautious members of a community during a public crisis.

Of course there were some whose latent psychosis was triggered into being (*cough* Nassim Taleb *cough*), but the majority of people simply had their basic humanity weaponized against them.

Once the first wave of COVID ran its course and we saw how far they moved heaven and earth to silence actual cures for the virus, the Great Reset began morphing into the Great Awakening.

And the evidence of people standing firm against any further degradation of our society for this nonsense grows daily.

The Great Diffusion?

Years ago I wrote about Everett Rogers’ Theory of Diffusion as it pertains to politics in general and the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in specific.

Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory is applicable to politics as well as products.  The idea being that it takes around 16% adoption for a new technology, ideology, etc. to have the potential to become something bigger.   This was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Tipping Point.

This is the curve I was implicitly invoking in my recent article about humans being more wolf than sheep.

We went from comfortable wolves in a pack we thought protected us from the dangers of the world to anxious, nervous wolves wondering which one of us would stand up to the psychotic alpha leading us towards an abyss.

The alpha continues towards that abyss thinking it’s a giant game of chicken and that we will stay under his rule out of fear.

Many of us are in either a state of shock and/or denial about what’s been going on. But, as history has shown us, we don’t need a majority of people to fundamentally change the course of history.

But at the heart of my observation is the following: Who will you really become when you have nothing left to lose? Or better yet, where’s your loss threshold before the real you bares your canines?

Because that’s literally all I was saying. We all have a limit. And the idea that because your limit isn’t as low as mine or some rando on the intarwebz makes you a sheeple is exactly the type of condescending and unearned sense of entitlement that drives the very ghouls that are convening at Davos this week to force us to rebuild our trust in them.

Looking around social media and the headlines of protests around the world by the working class, which the managerial class of over-educated midwits despise to the core of their being, you can see we’re very close to if not past the 16% tipping point.

This is why Davos has put on the full court press to accelerate the decline and fall of western civilization. We can all feel it. We’re a little over a month into 2024 and a year’s worth of geopolitics has occurred in that time.

They can feel the whole project slipping away and this has to be nipped in the bud before it spreads into what Rogers called the ‘Early Majority.’ To that end this is why they were so hard on “vaccine hesitancy,” and launched the wars on Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.

It’s why now anyone to the right of Karl Marx himself is a “Fascist!” and is a member of the “hard right.” This is to dissuade people from identifying with outgroups and shame them into qualifying all of their dissension from their norm with, “I’m not a racist but…” or “I don’t agree with everything they say but… “

The Gap into Conflict

But also embedded in that article was Geoffrey Moore’s refinement of Rogers’ Curve to include the “Chasm.” Getting to 16% adoption isn’t enough. The new thing can get to 16% easily by simply opposing that which is dominant. This is what Harari was implying, that we are just ab-reacting to the opposite of them, by saying that we only reject the liberal order but have nothing to replace it with.

This is why the new idea or product has to then rebrand itself into something more universal. It’s not enough to be against globalism or the WEF, we have to also be for something better.

That becomes a decision point for a lot of people. It’s the moment when the established idea, brand, etc. wakes up to the threat and fights back. This is what the 16% chasm represents, that gulf between opposition and affirmation.

This is also what Davos and their ilk are truly exceptional at managing. They keep the Overton Window framed over irrelevant side issues to ensure that a new majority doesn’t “cross the 16% chasm,” by uniting over that better solution that doesn’t include them.

I’m calling this group they are afraid of, “The Radical Center.”

This is why AfD got to 16% in 2018 as the anti-Merkel party, but was easily neutralized when they didn’t become the true “Alternative for Germany” party. Once they did that and the current Scholz-led government failed to protect the German middle class during and since COVID, they’ve become a real threat.

A mixture of this rebranding and entrenched arrogance of the German political establishment is what led to AfD’s rise to the mid-20s in German polling. And it’s why despite a hastily-organized hit on them for an unconfirmed secret meeting in Postdam over deportation, they are still polling above 16%.

They are now the kind of threat that requires more drastic action, like banning them as a political party. That the German political establishment is even contemplating this tells you that they are fighting a rear-guard action against a movement that has grown far bigger than just AfD itself.

Gerrmany has crossed ‘The Chasm’ and a kind of Radical Center is forming.

The ideas this embodies, a Germany for Germans that rejects globalism, inflation, endless taxation and war, in favor of localism, community and cohesion is far more immune to crude attack.

So, the response is to send Chancellor Scholz to Kiev to sign a mutual security pact with Ukraine later this month to bypass the political revolution happening at home.

By the same token I’ve exhorted the libertarian movement in the US to become the movement of solutions; practical achievable solutions that speak to a true majority of Americans. And from there lead them to more localized solutions over time.

But because they have refused to do this, getting bogged down in being anti-Fed, anti-this, and anti-that, it leaves them still a fringe political group, easily neutralized by a simple meme:

This is why I’ve become disillusioned with where the libertarian movement has wound up. This is the essence of what Pete Quinones and I discussed in the recent podcast we did. It doesn’t mean I reject the philosophy or even the use of many libertarian critiques of central planning as useful filters, it means the philosophy isn’t enough to move the Overton Window in any practical political sense.

It’s why I voted for Trump twice, despite his many limitations, and will vote for him again if Davos can’t stop him from being on the Florida ballot. Even then, out of spite, I, like many, will simply write his name in.

And, guess what? He’ll still beat the LP candidate.

Accelerated Decrepitude

So, the Great Awakening has morphed, from Davos’ perspective, into a kind of Great Acceleration, where they feel the threat of our coming together across the false dyad of the Left/Right division to reject them outright.

This is why they will accelerate their plans to squelch all of those who leak away from their control. It’s why they hate Elon Musk so thoroughly for taking Twitter away from them. It’s why Bill Kristol believes it’s right to bar Tucker Carlson from coming back into the US after his visit to Russia.

That squelching was done to anger us into running to alternative internet ghettos like Gab and Mastodon and all the others.

It’s why they purposefully ruined Twitter under the previous management to drive us away and take away our voices through de-platforming Alex Jones and everyone else. How many people still refuse to go back to Twitter because of what happened in 2017? How many still make the “perfect be the enemy of the good” argument vis a vis Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter? *Cough* David Icke *Cough*

Sure the Rachel Maddow set is still enthralled every night, all 200,000 of them, but now they are the ones clutching their pearls in the real media ghettos.

It was easy to go after Jones in 2017. It was easy to go after Gab later on. It was easy to see the alternative platforms like Rumble and Substack spin up to try and become antipodes to YouTube and WordPress, Locals for Patreon… etc.

I have nothing against these platforms, and have even tried some of them in the past, but I also recognize that they were allowed to become real to siphon people off into smaller tribes and build easily-ignored echo chambers. All to prevent us from crossing the chasm together to form the Radical Center.

And if one of these platforms gets too powerful? Well, I hope everyone has an archive of their Substacks. I also hope my fears on this are fully unfounded. But I’ve seen this movie before and I didn’t like it the first time I watched it.

Because, when voices capable of speaking across the false political divide of Left v Right get big enough, they have to be brought low. It’s fine for those on “the right” to be dismissed as kooks, dead-enders, isolationists, conspiracy theorists, MAGAtards, Nahtsees, etc.

Russell’s Re-Branding

It’s quite another when someone from “the Left” comes to the same conclusions. That’s why they came down so hard on Russell Brand last year. And it was disturbing how quickly the “Nuts and Sluts” campaign against Brand occurred.

Because Brand was un-personed first before the outrage machine went into overdrive against him. They just accused him and took him out.

And just to remind everyone what I’m talking about, I wrote about this in relation to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation “process” back in 2018:

“Nuts and Sluts” is easy to understand. Simply accuse the person you want to destroy of being either crazy (the definition of which shifts with whatever is the political trigger issue of the day) or a sexual deviant.

This technique works because it triggers most people’s Disgust Circuit…

… The disgust circuit is also easy to understand.

It is the limit at which behavior in others triggers our gut-level outrage and we recoil with disgust.

The reason “Nuts and Sluts” works so well on conservative candidates and voters is because, on average, conservatives have a much stronger disgust circuit than liberals and/or libertarians.

What I wrote about in that article then has come to pass today. Back then I predicted that as Davos encouraged “The Left” to further normalize deviance the less effective “Nuts and Sluts” would become. The more we would see the attacks for the crude attempts at maintaining the Overton Window that they were.

But, here’s the problem.  As liberals and cultural Marxists break down the societal order, as they win skirmish after skirmish in the Culture War, and desensitize us to normalize ever more deviant behavior, the circumstances of a “Nuts and Sluts” accusation have to rise accordingly.

It’s behavioral heroin.  And the more tolerance we build up to it the more likely people are to see right through the lie.

It’s why Gary Hart simply had to be accused of having an affair in the 1980’s to scuttle his presidential aspirations but today Trump has to piss on a hooker.

For Russell Brand, however, they had to go all the way to the end game… being a sexual predator of younger women. Amidst all the clamor about Epstein Island etc., tying Brand to the talk of pedophilia by inference was meant to be the knockout blow against someone who has become one of the most effective and irrepressible dissident voices in the post-COVID environment.

There are few people in the current zeitgeist who were becoming more capable of radicalizing the Left side of the center than Russell Brand.

But, most importantly, it was meant demoralize us to not put faith in anyone else, to have no sources of comfort or people to trust. Brand’s overnight demonetization was the beginning of what I’m now calling the Great Demoralization campaign.

The goal of that campaign is to stop the emergence of that Radical Center; a loose coalition of normal people who are willing to put aside that which they disagree on in service of that which they do agree on. And eating bugz, living in pods under constant surveillance, and the threat of being un-personed is something we can all agree sucks.

To his credit Brand got right out in front of the accusation by taking complete responsibility for his past behavior, and throwing himself, rightfully, onto the altar of public opinion. He showed us his own disgust circuit for the person he used to be, not the person he is aspiring to be.

And that’s why his interview with Tucker Carlson recently was such a galvanizing thing. Carlson, smartly, practiced exactly what he preaches… a little Christian charity. By giving Brand the platform to tell his story, he finds another fellow traveler on the path to breaking this illusion of control Davos and their kept media outlets have laid over us.

These two guys aren’t supposed to agree on these things. Tucker’s a right-wing Fascist. Brand is a left-wing Lunatic. And yet, they share something very powerful in common, they both were cast out of the temple for speaking truth to power.

And Brand doesn’t disappoint in his performance. It’s one of his best, and I’ve seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

He’s spot on, noting himself at one point that the goal of everything we see in the media was “demoralization.” In fact, this entire post was inspired originally by that one statement during the 45 minutes he spoke with Tucker. That was the ‘money shot,’ as it were, of this interview.

It told me that not only does Russell Brand get it, but he knows exactly what his role now is.

As I write this speculation has gone wild that Tucker is meeting with the vilified Vladdie Putler. If he does pull that off it won’t quite break the internet, but if there is any event in 2024 outside of Davos’ control which could it will be that.

Because what happens when Carlson and Putin discuss the lies of foreign policy, of the nature of the conflict in Ukraine, the grievances between Russia and the West and find out they have more in common than they are supposed to?

Carlson didn’t break the internet with his interview of Russell Brand, nor with Alex Jones, but he is taking what’s left of the comfortable lie that the media is anything other than court stenographers putting it in a paper bag, dropping it on our doorsteps, and lighting it on fire. It’s been so long since we saw anyone do journalism that we barely understand what it looks like when we see it.

Carlson, like Brand, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Jerome Powell, Jamie Dimon, or any of the others I give credit to in this blog, aren’t perfect men.

We killed that guy over two thousand years ago.

We don’t need them to be perfect men. If you need that, I suggest you seek professional help.

What we need is for them lead where they can when they can. They just need to give us the tools needed to cross the chasm and find common ground. Let us then build a public square that looks nothing like the one that we’ve been allowed to protest in up until now.

THAT is a Great Reset I can look forward to.

The True Costs Of Net-Zero Are Becoming Impossible To Hide

  Net Zero is fanaticism. But worse than that, it is based on a complete ignorance of energy and markets. It is both unrealistic and will bankrupt us long before any positive results can be demonstrated. 

 The failure will be due to climate, unbelievers, lack of investment by big companies, Putin? Everybody except ignorant politicians who will insist that the reason their policies do not work is because we haven't done enough! More is needed! 

 A modern energy policy is in fact very complex. You need to invest 30 years ahead, have a vision and make as few mistakes as possible. Renewables are by definition marginal energies that will never, under no circumstances, become base load for an economy. It is simply not possible. More than everything else, except maybe a nuclear war, the results of this monumental mistake may incur the downfall of our society. 

 Currently, the canary in the coal mine is Germany where the green fanatics are in power and ahead of everybody else. Their economy is already in recession with the potential to fall further into depression in the coming months. Without coal, oil, gas from Russia and nuclear energy, there is simply no exit for their economy. 

What a disaster!

Authored by Mike Shedlock via mishtalk.com,

Our net zero lesson of the day is from the U.K. but it applies universally. It’s increasingly difficult for Biden and the EU to hide the true costs of net zero mandates.

Britain Boiler Tax Scandal

In the latest green fiasco, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a quota system that would require manufacturers to sell more heat pumps to households.

Instead of meekly complying with the regulation as happens with Biden administration EPA announcements, manufacturers let consumers know they would have to pay up whether they installed the heat pumps or not.

Manufacturers correctly dubbed the scheme a “boiler tax” and consumer outrage killed the regulation.

Britain Dumps Another Net-Zero Gimmick

The Wall Street Journal reports Britain Dumps Another Net-Zero Gimmick

Most English households use natural gas to fuel the cabinet-sized boilers that provide central heating and hot water, and forcing them to adopt electric heat pumps (ultimately powered by renewable energy) is part of the government’s net-zero agenda.

An earlier proposal to ban gas-boiler sales after 2035 proved politically toxic as households balked at the cost of replacing their reliable natural-gas boilers with more expensive, untested heat pumps. So politicians resorted to subterfuge, imposing a sales quota on manufacturers. Starting in April, heat pumps would have to replace 4% of annual boiler sales or companies would pay a £3,000 fine for each “excess” natural-gas boiler they sold.

Worcester Bosch, Britain’s leading manufacturer, warned last year that the proposed quota would add up to £300 ($376) to the cost of natural-gas boilers, which retail for £1,000 and up.

A novelty is that industry fought back against the mandate. Manufacturers were transparent about passing the cost of the heat-pump fines to consumers, calling it a “boiler tax.” Mr. Sunak’s government tried to blame the companies for anticompetitive behavior. But when voters realized they’d be stuck paying for heat pumps even if they didn’t buy them, it was game over for the rule.

Biden’s Wind Tax

In the US, manufacturers have yet to stand up to idiotic Biden regulations, mostly because they have received tax incentives that hide the true costs.

But the actual costs are difficult to hide now that subsidies won’t hide the true cost. So Biden’s schemes are unraveling.

Bloomberg reports a 48% Surge in Costs Wrecks Biden’s Much-Lauded Wind-Power Plans

When President Joe Biden in 2021 laid out a target of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity during the next nine years, the plan was deemed bold and ambitious. Best of all, many saw it as within reach.

Two years later, the industry has another word for it: impossible.

After a cascading series of setbacks, from sobering cost revisions to billions in possible impairment charges, the US offshore wind industry’s 2030 generation goal now looks further away than ever.

Cancelled in New Jersey

Offshore wind is stumbling over costs. EnergyWire asks Can Biden Save the Industry?

The Biden administration is facing increasing pressure to take action to bolster the offshore wind industry after a major project was canceled in New Jersey on Tuesday, although options appear limited to ease financial hurdles facing developers.

Developers are taking billion-dollar losses due to the industry’s exploding costs and the dropping value of assets. Two companies in Massachusetts walked away from deals that they said did not cover costs. New York regulators rebuffed attempts to renegotiate contracts with wind companies for higher prices, casting uncertainty over the future of several wind farms off the state’s coast. Meanwhile, the supply chain of businesses to support offshore wind construction has expanded too slowly to meet the needs of proposals.

But the starkest sign of a troubled sector came Tuesday, when Ørsted, the largest offshore wind developer in the U.S. market, said it will abandon its Ocean Wind project. The two-phased wind array off the Jersey coast was one of just five major offshore wind projects approved in the U.S. — all by the Biden administration. Along with creating more uncertainty for the industry, the cancellation is raising speculation over whether other projects will follow.

Defending the administration’s record, White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa said Biden has “used every available tool to advance the growing American offshore wind industry.”

Outright Lies Are Biden’s Biggest Tool

Without a doubt, Biden has “used every available tool to advance the growing American offshore wind industry.”

His biggest tool is a pack of lies starting with a claim that these projects are cheaper and will pay for themselves.

Downgrades and Write Offs

• Fitch Ratings downgraded Eversource Energy and its NSTAR Electric utility subsidiary from stable to negative, partly on the grounds that the company may struggle to unload three offshore wind projects it had wanted to sell.

• Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, BP’s head of gas and low-carbon energy, told attendees at a London conference that the U.S. offshore wind sector was “fundamentally broken” and in need of a reset.

• BP has taken a pretax impairment charge — a devaluing of an asset — of $540 million due to its New York offshore wind projects.

• Norwegian oil and gas giant Equinor said last month it was taking a $300 million impairment in its U.S. offshore wind portfolio. Ørsted could take a $5 billion hit.

Even with massive subsidies, these projects are not economical. All they do is replace one form of energy with another at increasing costs that must be born by someone.

Let’s accurately label this fiasco for what it really is: A mandate to use wind, then a wind tax to support it.

Biden Backs Off Gas Stove Crackdown

Fox News reports Biden Backs Off Gas Stove Crackdown After Widespread Pushback

On Feb. 1, 2023, the DOE issued its original proposal which was set to take effect in 2027 and impact a staggering 50% of current gas stove models. The DOE argued it is required to put forth such regulations under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act which mandates energy efficiency rules while not harming consumer choice.

In response, Republicans and consumer advocacy organizations blasted the Biden administration for curbing consumer choice and pushing a regulatory regime that would lead to higher prices. They also criticized the DOE for attempting to force Americans to electrify their homes in an effort to reduce emissions and fight global warming.

“President Biden is committed to using all the tools at the Administration’s disposal to lower costs for American families and deliver healthier communities — including energy efficiency measures like the one announced today,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement [after the administration backed off the proposal].

Gas Stove Tax

Let’s label the Biden administration proposal for what it really is, a tax on gas stoves.

Biden then had the audacity to brag about lowering costs when he backed off the proposal.

Tax This, Tax That, Tax Everything

Up and down the line, we need to label the green regulations and mandates from this administration for what they really are: Across the board tax hikes.

And since these these taxes apply to everyone, not just the wealthy, they are very regressive in nature.

We have wind taxes, heat pump taxes, gasoline taxes, stove taxes, air conditioner taxes, internal combustion engine taxes, etc., all of which are mislabeled in ways to sound like they are positive things.

Cap-and-trade is nothing but a giant tax scheme in which manufacturers have to pass on the costs.

Industry is fighting back in the UK and farmers are fighting back in the EU. Republicans need to carry the regressive tax hike message into the upcoming US election.

Inflation Pressures Everywhere

Please note that all of these mandates purposely increase costs. They are all inflationary.

Nearly everything this administration does is inflationary. The same applies to every regulation in California.

Minimum Wage Hikes

On February 4, I noted Cost of Running a McDonalds Jumps $250,000 in CA Due to Minimum Wage Hikes

Impact on Joe’s Grill and Susie’s Diner

Don’t think for one second that these wage hike only hit wealthy franchise owners. For starters, many franchise owners are deep in debt to buy that franchise.

In addition, how are Joe and Susie going to get help at $16 when McDonalds is paying $20?

The answer is they won’t. Effectively, $20 is the new minimum wage in California, and not just restaurants.

Big Explosion of Government and Social Assistance Jobs

President Biden is bragging about job growth in 2023. But he doesn’t say where those jobs are.

Data from the BLS, chart and calculations by Mish.

Data from the BLS, chart and calculations by Mish.

On February 5, I noted a Big Explosion of Government and Social Assistance Jobs in 2023 to Help Migrants

A surge in immigration led to a surge in need for government and social assistance jobs at taxpayer expense. City and local governments are under financial strain.

Under Bidenomics policy, we have created hundreds of thousands of jobs that are of net negative benefit to US taxpayers. That’s what Biden is really bragging about.

Fed Chairman Tells 60 Minutes US Fiscal Path is Unsustainable

Fed Chair Jerome Powell tells 60 Minutes that it’s “urgent” the US address its “Unsustainable Fiscal Path”

Please consider Fed Chairman Tells 60 Minutes US Fiscal Path is Unsustainable

The Fed normally does not comment on fiscal policy, but Powell did. “Debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable. … You could say that it was urgent,” said Powell.

I list 15 key takeaways from the interview. Click on the above link for discussion.

It’s not just Democrats causing this problem. Republicans are in on the fiscal madness. For example, please see 169 Republicans Vote to Expand Welfare, Bill Heads to Senate

Inflationary Tariffs

Also consider Help for the Heartland? Trump Tariffs Failed the Mission

Since tariffs are a tax on consumers, Trump is proposing a huge tax hike. Biden is on fully on board.

China will retaliate and so will Europe. Costs will soar across the board. More inflation is on deck. Irony abounds. How can tariffs help both candidates?

Is Inflation Transitory?

Biden is bragging inflation is coming down. Economists have fully embraced the softest of softy landing. And Powell told 60 Minutes he thinks inflation is transitory.

I keep asking: Is inflation transitory or is this recent decline in the rate of inflation what’s transitory?

To help decide, please check out some of the links above.

Then factor in Biden’s regulations, the end of just in time manufacturing, a surge in immigration, and trade wars with China no matter who wins the election.

Here’s my concern: How Much Inflation Is Baked in the Cake?