Wind-Power Makers Suffer Huge Losses, Want To Abandon Major Project

 

  Ideology consists in imposing the wrong solutions while ignoring market forces.

  EV is an ideology. While they make sense in dense city cores, they make none in the countryside where ICE vehicles are more efficient and hybrids would be perfect.

 Wind energy is another ideology with even less reasons to exist. Its cost ratio efficiency is abysmal as it could not even exist without subsidies. Its real ecological footprint is questionable. As for its long term prospects, they are to the opinion of experts doubtful...

Authored by Thomas Lifson via AmericanThinker.com,

The greenies’ dream of “clean” (except for millions of dead birds) energy from wind farms is dying in the face of the poor economics (even with tax subsidies) and unreliable technology. The big players in constructing wind turbines are facing massive losses and write-downs and cancelling big offshore wind projects.  Brace yourself for demands for even more subsides to the failing industry.

The green energy subsidiary of German electrical equipment giant Siemens just reported Thursday that it lost nearly a billion dollars in the last quarter. Via Fox News (Hat tip: Beege Welborn, Hot Air):

Global green energy company Siemens Gamesa reported Thursday that it had lost a staggering $967 million during the three-month period from between October to December.

The Germany-based company, which dubs itself as "the global leader in offshore power generation," noted the wind industry has faced various unfavorable pressures leading to negative growth in recent months and years, in its earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 released Thursday morning. The company added that governments would need to further assist the industry to ensure future positive growth.

"The negative development in our service business underscores that we have much work ahead of us to stabilize our business and return to profitability," Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said in a statement.

"The beginning of fiscal year 2023 saw a further increase in global wind demand prospects for the next ten years, but further governmental action is needed to close the gap between ambitious targets and actual installations," the company added in its release.

The translation of “further government action” is increased subsidies, beyond those already offered in the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which mostly subsidizes green energy. Think Solyndra-like loan guarantees beyond those already available.

The big problem for Siemens and other makers (see below) is equipment failure and the need to lay out huge warranty expenditures. Reuters:

The company last month flagged increased failure rates of unspecified components of its installed onshore and offshore wind turbines, triggering higher warranty provisions that have also plagued Danish rival Vestas (VWS.CO).

One fundamental problem with wind energy (aside from the meager amount of power delivered compared to coal and natural gas fired generators) is the variability of the wind. It changes both intensity (speed) and direction unpredictably. I know  from work in my consulting career long ago (which I can’t discuss in detail owing to confidentiality agreements) that incredible stresses are placed on the generators, blades, and transmissions (akin to a car’s drive train) when the wind abruptly changes speed or direction. In order to get a meaningful amount of power, the blades have to be BIG, which is why the towers of major wind farms are very tall). But long blades spinning rapidly can have the tips break the sound barrier, and the stresses on the materials used in the blades (often carbon fiber because the blades have to be light weight) are intense. And changeable rapidly. 

As a result, the order books of the major manufacturers are drying up:

Interesting slide from Siemens Gamesa, the 2nd world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines.

It reports that onshore turbine orders dropped 46.3% y-on-y in the last quarter. And the cost of those turbines (€ per MWh) went up 25% y-on-y | #EnergyCrisis #Windturbines pic.twitter.com/8Tzs3bBXol

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) February 2, 2023

Siemens Gamesa didn't receive any single order for offshore wind turbines on its last quarter pic.twitter.com/VnrrLGrNiK

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) February 2, 2023

As Beege Wellborn reports, another major player, General Electric, is also facing losses and is cutting back:

Here in the U.S., General Electric was humming along in its financials except…*sad trombone*…when it got to their turbine business. Ooo, they took a hit, too. Really fugly numbers.

…The company’s renewable energy business has been facing challenges due to inflation and supply chain pressures. The unit reported a loss of $2.2 billion in 2022.

GE is reducing global headcount at the onshore wind unit by about 20% as part of a plan to restructure and resize the business.

 What a surprise. Look who GE is counting on to save the windy day! Tax credit bailout.

…Culp said the onshore business is expected to get a boost following the restoration of the tax credit for wind projects.

At least one major project faces abandonment, as Wellborn points out:

In an interesting turn of events in New Hampshire, a company contracted with the state for an offshore wind farm is embroiled in a major tussle with the state’s department of utilities. Avangrid has told the state they can’t afford to move forward, so “we’re not building it anymore.”

The state says differently.

The developer behind the largest single offshore wind farm in the state’s pipeline on Thursday filed a formal notice of appeal to contest the Department of Public Utilities’ approval of contracts that the developer agreed to but says will no longer allow its project to be financed or built.

The DPU last month determined that the contracts, which the wind developers and utility companies agreed to in May, “are in the public interest” and approved them over the developer’s objections. Commonwealth Wind parent company Avangrid has said for months that increases in commodity prices, rising interest rates and supply shortages mean that its 1,200 megawatt renewable energy project “cannot be financed and built” under the terms of those power purchase agreements (PPAs).

With wind power, Kenny Roger's song provides wise advice. “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” It’s time to walk away from wind power subsidies.

It is beyond the time to end subsidies for wind power. Not only has atmospheric CO2 risen without serious consequence, the doomsaying models proven consistently wrong, but the financial thumb on the scale via subsidies has encouraged development of a technology that is still immature, if it ever will be viable.

Monetary policy: Welcome To The Death Spiral

 

  Remember the Repo market crisis of late 2019? Everything was on the verge of exploding... Then magically the Corona virus appeared and suddenly monetary constrains were not a problem anymore. Trillions of Dollars, Euros and Yens were suddenly available and a crisis replaced another one. 

 But monetary crisis never go away. They can be delayed but then come back with a vengeance. And here we are 3 years later, with giant deficits and rising interest rates...

Authored by John Rubino via Substack,

Gold bugs and other long-suffering critics of fiat currency and endless credit expansion have for decades been predicting that soaring debt would eventually blow up the financial world.

As the story went, governments with unlimited printing presses would spend and borrow too much, forcing their central banks to keep interest rates unnaturally low to make interest costs manageable, which would encourage even more credit growth, causing inflation to spike, and so on, until everyone loses faith in fiat currencies and the misbegotten things fall to their intrinsic value of zero.

That’s a bit hard to visualize when it’s explained in long, convoluted sentences. But it’s a lot clearer when you line up the relevant charts. So let’s start with US government debt, which has gone parabolic.

Ever-increasing debt is manageable if interest rates fall concurrently so the interest on that debt doesn’t change. And that’s what happened between 1980 and 2021. The Fed pushed down interest rates, which minimized interest costs, which lulled a shockingly gullible investment community and political class into the belief that this process could continue forever.

But of course it couldn’t continue forever.

As the critics predicted, soaring debt required ever greater currency creation which eventually caused the cost of living to jump by 10% in 2022, leading regular people to demand that it stop. So the Fed now has to raise interest rates to counter inflation. You can see this happening on the far right of the above chart.

Here’s where the death spiral kicks in

As the US borrows more money and its existing debts roll over at higher rates, the cost of that debt is soaring. This year the government’s annual interest bill will break $1 trillion. Combine that with the soaring cost of Medicare and Social Security as millions of Baby Boomers retire, and Washington is looking at $2 trillion a year just in just interest and entitlements, which it will have to borrow to fund, which will send interest costs even higher, which will require more borrowing, and so on, until it all comes crashing down.

Here’s another useful way of visualizing the problem. As debt rises, the interest rate required to keep debt service costs from eating all of a government’s tax receipts falls. In the US case, those two lines are in danger of crossing in the next few years. No society has ever survived that kind of fiscal crisis.

To the extent that the Fed knows anything, it knows this, and really, really wants to force that blue line down into negative territory if possible. But it also knows that doing so will send prices spiraling out of control – which is another way of saying the dollar will crash (not necessarily against the euro and the yen, which have similar problems, but against oil, lumber, eggs, milk, cars, and all the other things voters buy regularly). The result? Political and financial chaos.

And there’s nothing that the monetary authorities can do to stop it, because either choice – keep interest rates high or push them back down – leads to the same place, which is a currency crisis. Meanwhile, each turn of the wheel makes the problem more intractable and the collapse more imminent. That’s what the term “death spiral” refers to: a process that feeds on itself until the system implodes.

Covid-19: How The "Unvaccinated" Got It Right

  3 years later. the truth is coming out although you won't find it in the Media yet. 

  To "get it right" you only had to do one thing: Listen to the right people. . .

Authored by Robin Koerner via The Brownstone Institute,

Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country.

Like many other commentators, and based on his own analysis of evidence available to him, he opted to take the Covid “vaccine.”

Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the right answer about the “vaccine” and I didn’t.” 

“Winners” was perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: he seemingly means that the “unvaccinated” do not have to worry about the long-term consequences of having the “vaccine” in their bodies since enough data concerning the lack of safety of the “vaccines” have now appeared to demonstrate that, on the balance of risks, the choice not to be “vaccinated” has been vindicated for individuals without comorbidities.

What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the “vaccine.” It is not meant to imply that all who accepted the “vaccine” made the wrong decision or, indeed, that everyone who declined it did so for good reasons. 

1. Some people have said that the “vaccine” was created in a hurry. That may or may not be true. Much of the research for mRNA “vaccines” had already been done over many years, and corona-viruses as a class are well understood so it was at least feasible that only a small fraction of the “vaccine” development had been hurried.
   
   The much more important point was that the “vaccine” was rolled out without long-term testing. Therefore one of two conditions applied. Either no claim could be made with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine” or there was some amazing scientific argument for a once-in-a-lifetime theoretical certainty concerning the long-term safety of this “vaccine.” The latter would be so extraordinary that it might (for all I know) even be a first in the history of medicine. If that were the case, it would have been all that was being talked about by the scientists; it was not. Therefore, the more obvious, first state of affairs, obtained: nothing could be claimed with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine.”
   
   Given, then, that the long-term safety of the “vaccine” was a theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to COVID. Even the very earliest data immediately showed that I (and the overwhelming majority of the population) was not in the group.
   
   The continued insistence on rolling out the “vaccine” to the entire population when the data revealed that those with no comorbidities were at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID was therefore immoral and ascientific on its face. The argument that reduced transmission from the non-vulnerable to the vulnerable as a result of mass “vaccination” could only stand if the long-term safety of the “vaccine” had been established, which it had not. Given the lack of proof of long-term safety, the mass-“vaccination” policy was clearly putting at risk young or healthy lives to save old and unhealthy ones. The policy makers did not even acknowledge this, express any concern about the grave responsibility they were taking on for knowingly putting people at risk, or indicate how they had weighed the risks before reaching their policy positions. Altogether, this was a very strong reason not to trust the policy or the people setting it.
   
   At the very least, if the gamble with people’s health and lives represented by the coercive “vaccination” policy had been taken following an adequate cost-benefit benefit, that decision would have been a tough judgment call. Any honest presentation of it would have involved the equivocal language of risk-balancing and the public availability of information about how the risks were weighed and the decision was made. In fact, the language of policy-makers was dishonestly unequivocal and the advice they offered suggested no risk whatsoever of taking the “vaccine.” This advice was simply false (or if you prefer, misleading,) on the evidence of the time inasmuch as it was unqualified.

2. Data that did not support COVID policies were actively and massively suppressed. This raised the bar of sufficient evidence for certainty that the “vaccine” was safe and efficacious. Per the foregoing, the bar was not met. 

3. Simple analyses of even the early available data showed that the establishment was prepared to do much more harm in terms of human rights and spending public resources to prevent a COVID death than any other kind of death. Why this disproportionality? An explanation of this overreaction was required. The kindest guess as to what was driving it was “good-old, honest panic.” But if a policy is being driven by panic, then the bar for going along with it moves up even higher. A less kind guess is that there were undeclared reasons for the policy, in which case, obviously, the “vaccine” could not be trusted. 

4. Fear had clearly generated a health panic and a moral panic, or mass formation psychosis. That brought into play many very strong cognitive biases and natural human tendencies against rationality and proportionality. Evidence of those biases was everywhere; it included the severing of close kin and kith relationships, the ill-treatment of people by others who used to be perfectly decent, the willingness of parents to cause developmental harm to their children, calls for large-scale rights violations that were made by large numbers of citizens of previously free countries without any apparent concern for the horrific implications of those calls, and the straight-faced, even anxious, compliance with policies that should have warranted responses of laughter from psychologically healthy individuals (even if they had been necessary or just helpful). In the grip of such panic or mass formation psychosis the evidential bar for extreme claims (such as the safety and moral necessity of injecting oneself with a form of gene therapy that has not undergone long-term testing) rises yet further.

5. The companies responsible for manufacturing and ultimately profiting from the “vaccination” were given legal immunity. Why would a government do that if it really believed that the “vaccine” was safe and wanted to instill confidence in it? And why would I put something in my body that the government has decided can harm me without my having any legal redress?

6. If the “vaccine”-sceptical were wrong, there would still have been two good reasons not to suppress their data or views. First, we are a liberal democracy that values free speech as a fundamental right and second, their data and arguments could be shown to be fallacious. The fact that the powers-that-be decided to violate our fundamental values and suppress discussion invites the question of “Why?” That was not satisfactorily answered beyond, “It’s easier for them to impose their mandates in a world where people do not dissent:” but that is an argument against compliance, rather than for it. Suppressing information a priori suggests that the information has persuasive force. I distrust anyone who distrusts me to determine which information and arguments are good and which are bad when it is my health that is at stake – especially when the people who are promoting censorship are hypocritically acting against their declared beliefs in informed consent and bodily autonomy.

7. The PCR test was held up as the “gold standard” diagnostic test for COVID. A moment’s reading about how the PCR test works indicates that it is no such thing. Its use for diagnostic purposes is more of an art than a science, to put it kindly. Kary Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the PCR technique risked his career to say as much when people tried to use it as a diagnostic test for HIV to justify a mass program of pushing experimental anti-retroviral drugs on early AIDS patients, which ultimately killed tens of thousands of people. This raises the question, “How do the people who are generating the data that we saw on the news every night and were being used to justify the mass “vaccination” policy handle the uncertainty around PCR-based diagnoses?” If you don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, your bar for taking the risk of “vaccination” should once again go up. (On a personal note, to get the answer before making my decision about whether to undergo “vaccination,” I sent exactly this question, via a friend, to an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. That epidemiologist, who was personally involved in generating the up-to-date data on the spread of pandemic globally, replied merely that s/he works with the data s/he’s given and does not question its accuracy or means of generation. In other words, the pandemic response was largely based on data generated by processes that were not understood or even questioned by the generators of that data.) 

8. To generalize the last point, a supposedly conclusive claim by someone who demonstrably cannot justify their claim should be discounted. In the case of the COVID pandemic, almost all people who acted as if the “vaccine” was safe and effective had no physical or informational evidence for the claims of safety and efficacy beyond the supposed authority of other people who made them. This includes many medical professionals – a problem that was being raised by some of their number (who, in many cases, were censored on social media and even lost their jobs or licenses). Anyone could read the CDC infographics on mRNA “vaccines” and, without being a scientist, generate obvious “But what if..?” questions that could be asked of experts to check for themselves whether the pushers of the “vaccines” would personally vouch for their safety. For example, the CDC put out an infographic that stated the following.
   
   “How does the vaccine work?
   
   The mRNA in the vaccine teaches your cells how to make copies of the spike protein. If you are exposed to the real virus later, your body will recognize it and know how to fight it off. After the mRNA delivers the instructions, your cells break it down and get rid of it.”
   
   All right. Here are some obvious questions to ask, then. “What happens if the instructions delivered to cells to generate the spike protein are not eliminated from the body as intended? How can we be sure that such a situation will never arise?” If someone cannot answer those questions, and he is in a position of political or medical authority, then he shows himself to be willing to push potentially harmful policies without considering the risks involved.
9. Given all of the above, a serious person at least had to keep an eye out for published safety and efficacy data as the pandemic proceeded. Pfizer’s Six-month Safety and Efficacy Study was notable. The very large number of its authors was remarkable and their summary claim was that the tested vaccine was effective and safe. The data in the paper showed more deaths per head in the “vaccinated” group than “unvaccinated” group.

While this difference does not statistically establish that the shot is dangerous or ineffective, the generated data were clearly compatible with (let us put it kindly) the incomplete safety of the “vaccine” – at odds with the front-page summary. (It’s almost as if even professional scientists and clinicians exhibit bias and motivated reasoning when their work becomes politicized.) At the very least, a lay reader could see that the “summary findings” stretched, or at least showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about, the data – especially given what was at stake and the awesome responsibility of getting someone to put something untested inside their body.

10. As time went on, it became very clear that some of the informational claims that had been made to convince people to get “vaccinated,” especially by politicians and media commentators, were false. If those policies had been genuinely justified by the previously claimed “facts,” then determination of the falsity of those “facts” should have resulted in a change in policy or, at the very least, expressions of clarification and regret by people who had previously made those incorrect but pivotal claims. Basic moral and scientific standards demand that individuals put clearly on the record the requisite corrections and retractions of statements that might influence decisions that affect health. If they don’t, they should not be trusted – especially given the huge potential consequences of their informational errors for an increasingly “vaccinated” population. That, however, never happened. If the “vaccine”-pushers had acted in good faith, then in the wake of the publication of new data throughout the pandemic, we would have been hearing (and perhaps even accepting) multiple mea culpas. We heard no such thing from political officials, revealing an almost across-the-board lack of integrity, moral seriousness, or concern with accuracy. The consequently necessary discounting of the claims previously made by officials left no trustworthy case on the pro-lockdown, pro-“vaccine” side at all.
    
    To offer some examples of statements that were proven false by data but not explicitly walked back:
    
    “You’re not going to get COVID if you get these vaccinations… We are in a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” – Joe Biden;
    
    “The vaccines are safe. I promise you…” – Joe Biden;
    
    “The vaccines are safe and effective.” – Anthony Fauci.
    
    “Our data from the CDC suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, do not get sick – and it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.” – Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
    
    “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in… in serious condition and many on ventilators.” – Justice Sotomayer (during a case to determine legality of Federal “vaccine” mandates)…
    
    … and so on and so on.
    
    The last one is particularly interesting because it was made by a judge in a Supreme Court case to determine the legality of the federal mandates. Subsequently, the aforementioned Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, who had previously made a false statement about the efficacy of the “vaccine,” confirmed under questioning that the number of children in hospital was only 3,500 – not 100,000.
    
    To make more strongly the point about prior claims and policies’ being contradicted by subsequent findings but not, as a result, being reversed, the same Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, said, “the overwhelming number of deaths – over 75% – occurred in people that had at least four comorbidities. So really these were people who were unwell to begin with.” That statement so completely undermined the entire justification for the policies of mass-“vaccination” and lockdowns that any intellectually honest person who supported them would at that point have to reassess their position. Whereas the average Joe might well have missed that piece of information from the CDC, it was the government’s own information so the presidential Joe (and his agents) certainly could not have missed it. Where was the sea change in policy to match the sea change in our understanding of the risks associated with COVID, and therefore the cost-benefit balance of the untested (long-term) “vaccine” vs. the risk associated with being infected with COVID? It never came. Clearly, neither the policy positions nor their supposed factual basis could be trusted.

11. What was the new science that explained why, for the first time in history, a “vaccine” would be more effective than natural exposure and consequent immunity? Why the urgency to get a person who has had COVID and now has some immunity to get “vaccinated” after the fact?

12. The overall political and cultural context in which the entire discourse on “vaccination” was being conducted was such that the evidential bar for the safety and efficacy of the “vaccine” was raised yet further while our ability to determine whether that bar had been met was reduced. Any conversation with an “unvaccinated” person (and as an educator and teacher, I was involved in very many), always involved the “unvaccinated” person being put into a defensive posture of having to justify himself to the “vaccine”-supporter as if his position was de facto more harmful than the contrary one. In such a context, accurate determination of facts is almost impossible: moral judgment always inhibits objective empirical analysis. When dispassionate discussion of an issue is impossible because judgment has saturated discourse, drawing conclusions of sufficient accuracy and with sufficient certainty to promote rights violations and the coercion of medical treatment, is next to impossible.

13. Regarding analytics (and Scott’s point about “our” heuristics beating “their” analytics), precision is not accuracy. Indeed, in contexts of great uncertainty and complexity, precision is negatively correlated with accuracy. (A more precise claim is less likely to be correct.) Much of the COVID panic began with modeling. Modeling is dangerous inasmuch as it puts numbers on things; numbers are precise; and precision gives an illusion of accuracy – but under great uncertainty and complexity, model outputs are dominated by the uncertainties on the input variables that have very wide (and unknown) ranges and the multiple assumptions that themselves warrant only low confidence. Therefore, any claimed precision of a model’s output is bogus and the apparent accuracy is only and entirely that – apparent. 

We saw the same thing with HIV in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Models at that time determined that up to one-third of the heterosexual population could contract HIV. Oprah Winfrey offered that statistic on one of her shows, alarming a nation. The first industry to know that this was absurdly wide of the mark was the insurance industry when all of the bankruptcies that they were expecting on account of payouts on life insurance policies did not happen. When the reality did not match the outputs of their models, they knew that the assumptions on which those models were based were false – and that the pattern of the disease was very different from what had been declared.

For reasons beyond the scope of this article, the falseness of those assumptions could have been determined at the time. Of relevance to us today, however, is the fact that those models helped to create an entire AIDS industry, which pushed experimental antiretroviral drugs on people with HIV no doubt in the sincere belief that the drugs might help them. Those drugs killed hundreds of thousands of people. 

(By the way, the man who announced the “discovery” of HIV from the White House – not in a peer-reviewed journal – and then pioneered the huge and deadly reaction to it was the very same Anthony Fauci who has been gracing our television screens over the last few years.)

14. An honest approach to data on COVID and policy development would have driven the urgent development of a system to collect accurate data on COVID infections and the outcomes of COVID patients. Instead, the powers that be did the very opposite, making policy decisions that knowingly reduced the accuracy of collected data in a way that would serve their political purposes. Specifically, they 1) stopped distinguishing between dying of COVID and dying with COVID and 2) incentivized medical institutions to identify deaths as caused by COVID when there was no clinical data to support that conclusion. (This also happened during the aforementioned HIV panic three decades ago.)

15. The dishonesty of the pro-“vaccine” side was revealed by the repeated changes of official definitions of clinical terms like “vaccine” whose (scientific) definitions have been fixed for generations (as they must be if science is to do its work accurately: definitions of scientific terms can change, but only when our understanding of their referents changes). Why was the government changing the meanings of words rather than simply telling the truth using the same words they had been using from the beginning? Their actions in this regard were entirely disingenuous and anti-science. The evidential bar moves up again and our ability to trust the evidence slides down. 

In his video (which I mentioned at the top of this article), Scott Adams asked, “How could I have determined that the data that [“vaccine”-sceptics] sent me was the good data?” He did not have to. Those of us who got it right or “won” (to use his word) needed only to accept the data of those who were pushing the “vaccination” mandates. Since they had the greatest interest in the data pointing their way, we could put an upper bound of confidence in their claims by testing those claims against their own data. For someone without comorbidities, that upper bound was still too low to take the risk of “vaccination” given the very low risk of severe harm from contracting COVID-19.

In this relation, it is also worth mentioning that under the right contextual conditions, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Those conditions definitely applied in the pandemic: there was a massive incentive for all of the outlets who were pushing the “vaccine” to provide sufficient evidence to support their unequivocal claims for the vaccine and lockdown policies and to denigrate, as they did, those who disagreed. They simply did not provide that evidence, obviously because it did not exist. Given that they would have provided it if it had existed, the lack of evidence presented was evidence of its absence.

For all of the above reasons, I moved from initially considering enrolling in a vaccine trial to doing some open-minded due diligence to becoming COVID-“vaccine”-sceptical. I generally believe in never saying “never” so I was waiting until such time as the questions and issues raised above were answered and resolved. Then, I would be potentially willing to get “vaccinated,” at least in principle. Fortunately, not subjecting oneself to a treatment leaves one with the option to do so in the future. (Since the reverse is not the case, by the way, the option value of “not acting yet” weighs somewhat in favor of the cautious approach.)

However, I remember the day when my decision not to take the “vaccine” became a firm one. A conclusive point brought me to deciding that I would not be taking the “vaccine” under prevailing conditions. A few days later, I told my mother on a phone call, “They will have to strap me to a table.” 

16. Whatever the risks associated with a COVID infection on the one hand, and the “vaccine” on the other, the “vaccination” policy enabled massive human rights violations. Those who were “vaccinated” were happy to see the “unvaccinated” have basic freedoms removed (the freedom to speak freely, work, travel, be with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths, funerals etc.) because their status as “vaccinated” allowed them to accept back as privileges-for-the-“vaccinated” the rights that had been removed from everyone else. Indeed, many people grudgingly admitted that they got “vaccinated” for that very reason, e.g. to keep their job or go out with their friends. For me, that would have been to be complicit in the destruction, by precedent and participation, of the most basic rights on which our peaceful society depends.
    
    People have died to secure those rights for me and my compatriots. As a teenager, my Austrian grandfather fled to England from Vienna and promptly joined Churchill’s army to defeat Hitler. Hitler was the man who murdered his father, my great-grandfather, in Dachau for being a Jew. The camps began as a way to quarantine the Jews who were regarded as vectors of disease that had to have their rights removed for the protection of the wider population. In 2020, all I had to do in defense of such rights was to put up with limited travel and being barred from my favorite restaurants, etc., for a few months. 

Even if I were some weird statistical outlier such that COVID might hospitalize me despite my age and good health, then so be it: if it were going to take me, I would not let it take my principles and rights in the meanwhile.

And what if I were wrong? What if the massive abrogation of rights that was the response of governments around the world to a pandemic with a tiny fatality rate among those who were not “unwell to begin with” (to use the expression of the Director of the CDC) was not going to end in a few months? 

What if it were going to go on forever? In that case, the risk to my life from COVID would be nothing next to the risk to all of our lives as we take to the streets in the last, desperate hope of wresting back the most basic freedoms of all from a State that has long forgotten that it legitimately exists only to protect them and, instead, sees them now as inconvenient obstacles to be worked around or even destroyed.

The Truth About ChatGPT (Video - 8')

 Is ChatGPT a step towards the control of the nature of reality?

 Good question!

The Cancellation of a Civilization

 The woke tsunami taking over America right now looks more and more like suicide. 

 As a white person, I have a question: Why on earth should you defend such a decadent culture against anybody? 

 Well, soon, many people will start asking this same question. And that will be the beginning of the end.

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Few Americans understand that their society has been revolutionized.  America is no longer what it was.  Wherever you look everything has been overthrown.  I will illustrate it with three articles from the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.  Two are by Heather  Mac Donald and one is by John O. McGinnis.  Heather Mac Donald explains what has happened to museums (Winter 2022) and to the medical profession (Summer 2022).  John McGinnis (Spring 2022) explains what has happened to the legal profession.  Both writers are good at their task and have done their homework.  My account is a poor second to reading their articles.

Museums are custodians of a culture’s history and art.  As the United States was settled by white ethnicities from Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, the history and art in museums reflect the culture of white people.  The problem is that a half century of nonwhite immigration has racially diversified and multiculturalized the US into a Tower of Babel, and the Eurocentric tradition did not take into account “racial equity.”  In short, the collections are white and white is racist.

Heather Mac Donald’s example of what is happening to museums is the Art Institute of Chicago.  The institute’s director, James Rondeau, is embarrassed by the whiteness and is committed to turning the museum into an antiracist vehicle.  As only whites are racists, that means the museum is to be an anti-white vehicle.

Rondeau began by firing the 82 white docents, the volunteers who conducted tours and explained the art to school groups. The reasoning is that white voices can’t communicate to persons of color.  Heather Mac Donald notes that “no one would dare suggest that a black person can’t teach white students, but it is unobjectionable to say” the opposite.

As the museum’s holdings are white art, which according to anti-racists perpetuates white power, what is their value to anti-racist museum directors?  Heather Mac Donald is concerned that “the final result, if unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.”

John McGinnis writes that the law profession has been turned into a radical progressive force for change and that this “transformation of the legal profession marks a fundamental change in American democracy.”   The American Bar Association, once a defender against the “passions of the hour,” is today a leftwing powerhouse that uses “its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are.” No longer committed to supporting the established order but to undermining and transforming it, law schools have turned their backs to the Constitution’s requirement of equal treatment under the law.  Racial preferences for student admissions based on skin color are already institutionalized.  De facto, if not mandated, racial and gender  preferences in faculty hiring are essentially in place.  Ideological preferences in hiring seem clearly present as conservatives in law schools are becoming extinct.

New requirements for law schools amount to institutionalizing dogma and requiring instruction, such as critical race theory, on subjects that are unrelated to any distinctive legal skill.  So you will go to law school to learn how to be an anti-racist.  This suggests that the future of law will turn on sentiment or emotion.

Heather Mac Donald explains that the American Medical Association is also an enforcer of racial preferences. She writes that “Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes.  Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy.  The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.”

As the assumption of the American Medical Association is that there are no differences in the capabilities and intelligence of the races, all differences in representation and performance are due to racism. Merit-based systems are tools of white oppression and stand in the way of racial equity and racial justice.

In the repositories of our culture whiteness is under attack. In the legal profession whiteness is under attack. In the medical profession whiteness is under attack.  Where is whiteness not under attack?  Notice also that it is whites who are attacking whiteness.  Heather Mac Donald’s phrase, “the cancellation of a civilization” is well underway.

Growing Number Of Doctors Say They Won’t Get COVID-19 Booster Shots

 

 

  Not too early! this article shows how most doctors were not immune and succumbed the the immense push of propaganda. No more. The pandora box is now open...

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A growing number of doctors say that they will not get COVID-19 vaccine boosters, citing a lack of clinical trial evidence.

“I have taken my last COVID vaccine without RCT level evidence it will reduce my risk of severe disease,” Dr. Todd Lee, an infectious disease expert at McGill University, wrote on Twitter.

A vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is seen in a file photograph. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Lee was pointing to the lack of randomized clinical trial (RCT) results for the updated boosters, which were cleared in the United States and Canada in the fall of 2022 primarily based on data from experiments with mice.

Lee, who has received three vaccine doses, noted that he was infected with the Omicron virus variant—the vaccines provide little protection against infection—and described himself as a healthy male in his 40s.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatics at the University of California, San Francisco, also said he wouldn’t take any additional shots until clinical trial data become available.

“I took at least 1 dose against my will. It was unethical and scientifically bankrupt,” he said.

Allison Krug, an epidemiologist who co-authored a study that found teenage boys were more likely to suffer heart inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination than COVID-19 infection, recounted explaining to her doctor why she was refusing a booster and said her doctor agreed with her position.

She called on people to “join the movement to demand appropriate evidence,” pointing to a blog post from Prasad.

“Pay close attention to note this isn’t anti-vaccine sentiment. This is ‘provide [hard] evidence of benefit to justify ongoing use’ which is very different. It is only fair for a 30 billion dollar a year product given to hundreds of millions,” Lee said.

Dr. Mark Silverberg, who founded the Toronto Immune and Digestive Health Institute; Kevin Bass, a medical student; and Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, joined Lee and Prasad in stating their opposition to more boosters, at least for now.

Høeg said she did not need clinical trials to know she’s not getting any boosters after receiving a two-dose primary series, adding that she took the second dose “against my will.”

“I also had an adverse reaction to dose 1 moderna and, if I could do it again, I would not have had any covid vaccines,” she said on Twitter. “I was glad my parents in their 70s could get covid vaccinated but have yet to see non-confounded data to advise them about the bivalent booster. I would have liked to see an RCT for the bivalent for people their age and for adults with health conditions that put them at risk.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization to updated boosters, or bivalent shots, from Pfizer and Moderna in August 2022 despite there being no human data.

Observational data suggests the boosters provide little protection against infection and solid shielding against severe illness, at least initially.

Five months after the authorization was granted, no clinical trial data has been made available for the bivalents, which target the Wuhan strain as well as the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron. Moderna presented efficacy estimates for a different bivalent, which has never been used in the United States, during a recent meeting. The company estimated the booster increased protection against infection by just 10 percent.

The FDA is preparing to order all Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines be replaced with the bivalents. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issues recommendations on vaccines, continues advising virtually all Americans to get a primary series and multiple boosters.

Professor Calls for Halt to Messenger RNA Vaccines

A professor, meanwhile, became the latest to call for a halt to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which are both based on messenger RNA technology.

“At this point in time, all COVID mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a video statement. “They should stop because they completely failed to fulfill any of their advertised promise[s] regarding efficacy. And more importantly, they should stop because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level of harm, including the death of young people and children.”

Levi was referring to post-vaccination heart inflammation, or myocarditis. The condition is one of the few that authorities have acknowledged is caused by the messenger RNA vaccines.

'The Scandal Would Be Enormous': Pfizer Director Worried About Vax-Induced Menstrual Irregularities

  Yes, no question about it: The scandal will be enormous.

  We knew right from the beginning from the most respected virologists that these mRNA vaccines were too early and potentially extremely dangerous.

  Their worst fears are now becoming reality...

Project Veritas on Thursday released a new segment of undercover footage of Pfizer director Jordon Walker in which the Director of R&D within the company's mRNA operation expressed concern over how the COVID-19 vaccine may be affecting women's reproductive health.

"There is something irregular about the menstrual cycles. So, people will have to investigate that down the line," Walker told an undercover journalist he thought he was on a date with.

"The [COVID] vaccine shouldn’t be interfering with that [menstrual cycles]. So, we don’t really know," he added.

Walker also hopes we don't discover that "somehow this mRNA lingers in the body and like -- because it has to be affecting something hormonal to impact menstrual cycles," adding "I hope we don’t discover something really bad down the line…If something were to happen downstream and it was, like, really bad? I mean, the scale of that scandal would be enormous."

Watch:

BREAKING: @Pfizer Director Concerned Over Women's Reproductive Heath After COVID-19 Vaccinations

"There is something irregular about their menstrual cycles...concerning...The vaccine shouldn't be interfering with that...It has to be affecting something hormonal..."#Pfertility pic.twitter.com/XAuMPJNShD

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) February 2, 2023

Recent Data Shows 'Stunning Increase' In Serious Harm Reports In Young Healthy Pilots: Army Lt. Col. Theresa Long

  Money and propaganda can only go so far. Eventually you bump against reality.

  We may have reached this point with the Covid vaccines!

Authored by Carly Mayberry via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It’s been a year since four Department of Defense (DOD) whistleblowers found a sudden increase in various diseases in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which coincided directly with the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations. Now, new data shows more evidence.

LTC Theresa M Long’s promotion, Ft Rucker, AL. Photo taken by Michael Luna. (Courtesy of Theresa Long)

That’s according to Lt. Col.Theresa Long, M.D., MPH, a board-certified aerospace medicine doctor and Army Brigade flight surgeon with specialty training as an aviation mishap investigator and safety officer, who was one of the four whistleblowers. Long’s background has uniquely equipped her to recognize what she described as “unusual diagnoses and alarming trends only after the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Sharp Increase in Serious Harm Reports in Pilots: DOD Data

Long said what she has now found has led her to file yet another whistleblower complaint with Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) office. She described this data as “more alarming DMED data” after she “went back into the ‘fixed’ DMED again to look for signals of harm for Army aviation.”

“What I found was a clear signal, that something in 2021 changed the health of service members,” Long told The Epoch Times. She said these signals were consistent with those in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports. But unlike VAERS reports, DMED data showed spikes in the number of diagnoses “made by a healthcare professional within the DOD on service members.”

According to the Military Health System, the DMED provides remote access to a subset of data contained in the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS). The DMSS contains up-to-date and historical data on diseases and medical events (including reportable events) and “is available to authorized users such as U.S. military medical providers, epidemiologists, medical researchers, safety officers or medical operations/ clinical support staff for surveying health conditions in the U.S. military.”

“After querying all pilots across the DOD, for all-cause morbidity and mortality, I found a stunning increase in the number of reportable events, spiking from an average of 226 reportable events a year (2016-2019) to 4,059 reports in 2022,” she explained.

A DOD reportable event is any patient safety event resulting in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm—and all require a comprehensive systematic analysis and a follow-on corrective action implementation plan report.

“The point is there is a statistically significant increase in death, permanent harm, or severe temporary harm in young healthy fit pilots,” she continued.

Such injuries were more obviously shown in this population. Because aviation pilots are required to have a superior level of health and fitness, and their health conditions are under more strict monitoring, according to Long.

What spurred Long on to pull this second round of data was when she learned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had quietly made changes to the acceptable parameters of PR intervals (representative of the first part of a heartbeat, measured in seconds or milliseconds) on electrocardiograms of pilots. The FAA didn’t respond with research and data to support their decision, according to Long.

Those actions led to the press release dated Jan. 27, 2023 from Johnson in a letter to the FAA, where he stated the following details:

“Based on data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, the whistleblower [Theresa Long] reported that the total number of disease and injuries [reportable events] in pilots across the DOD was 265 in 2016, 252 in 2017, 164 in 2018, 223 in 2019, 2,194 in 2020, 2,861 in 2021, and 4,059 in 2022.”

Johnson also told The Epoch Times these statistics “raise questions as to whether FAA has seen similar increases in disease and injuries in individuals in the aviation industry.”

Long noted that in the “post-glitch” DMED, the number of reportable events across the DOD had gone from a four-year average (2016-2019) of 40,813 to 110,000 in 2020 to over 200,000 in 2022.

“Some would ask why the numbers start increasing in 2020, you have to remember the Pfizer/DOD study with 43,448 participants started on July 27, 2020.”

Long emphasized that her opinions do not reflect those of the Army or the DOD.

Looking back, she said it was after being stonewalled for answers regarding adverse events from the COVID vaccine that she began performing queries in the DMED. She wanted to know if what she was seeing within her brigade were isolated anomalies or part of a wider disaster unfolding.

Whistleblowers First Report Discrepancies in DOD Data

It was in January of 2022 when Long, along with two other U.S. military doctors, Dr. Samuel Sigoloff and Special Forces flight surgeon Lt. Col. Peter Chambers, and Army Public Health Officer 1 Lt. Mark Bashaw first blew the whistle on the DOD. Together, they filed the initial whistleblower complaints regarding the DMED data, which showed an inordinate amount of negative health-related conditions related to the vaccine.

The initial DMED data given to Johnson showed a massive rise in cases of anxiety, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, female infertility, miscarriages, HIV, acute myocarditis, and Bell’s palsy among other conditions after the vaccine was mandated for U.S. military members.

Long added that after the DMED data was presented, Moderna, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company behind one of the COVID-19 vaccinations and its mRNA immune response technology, lost $140 billion of dollars in stock.

Yet, despite the alarming data coming directly from the DOD’s own $42 million medical surveillance database, the department’s official claimed that the discovery of the data was a “data glitch” and proceeded to take the database offline, supposedly “fixing” it.

As reported in The Epoch Times, the DOD claimed that the data in DMED was incorrect for the years 2016-2020, but the 2021 number was not affected. The corrected data saw the data for prior years increased, which made the 2021 data look normal.

After Long handed over the documents to DOD, it took officials 47 days to formulate a response to the data, only to explain it was a surprise to them. 

Based on the previous DOD data, “the cluster of medical conditions represents a dramatic shift in the acuity of medical conditions we normally see,” said Long, noting that the data is “so catastrophic,” at the very least when those numbers came out, the military would reflexively pause everything and investigate.

“They didn’t pause anything and it took them [the DOD] a month to complete their sham investigation.” She said. “It’s a gross indictment and dereliction of duty.”

“We introduce a brand new drug into our very healthy population and the surveillance people aren’t even paying attention to their own $42 million-a-year system?” asked Long, who noted that during her 30 years in the Army, many of which she served as a doctor, she and other colleagues never heard of such a database provided by the system’s contractor Ussiant until 2019. “Don’t you think introducing a drug that was rushed to an entire fighting force would make it a top priority that the surveillance system is working?”

Long also asked why, if the DMED just had a “glitch” during the COVID pandemic, no one is being held accountable for this egregious medical surveillance system failure. Long’s attorney, Todd Callender, noted the DOD failed to produce a single expert IT witness that would testify under oath that the shocking data was just a “glitch.”

“So if the data was that alarming, why didn’t anyone in the Defense Health Agency (DHA) sound the alarm or catch the ‘glitch,’” she continued. “How did they not see this huge spike in serious medical problems?”

Another question arises as to why military doctors like Long have not received any communication regarding this spike in reportable events, which wasn’t just limited to pilots but also general officers and those in the Special Forces.

“I was notified to comb over our inventory after a risk management alert notification alerted me to two defective earplugs found at Fort Sill, Okla.” Long said, “But I can’t even get them to send out an alert saying ‘Hey your pilots might get myocarditis from the vaccine.’”

For this story, The Epoch Times reached out for comment from Director of Defense Lloyd J. Austin, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for comment.

‘I Can’t Un-see the Things I’ve Seen’

These new developments come as more physicians and patients have spoken out about a growing number of vaccine injuries while the science and research literature has simultaneously validated their claims and concerns.

Long said she was not only ignored but received threats against her career after speaking up. That’s because no action was taken on the part of military leaders to fully investigate the number and scope of adverse medical events that she, Sigoloff, Chambers, and Bashaw initially brought to their attention.

“When I found the DOD data, they pulled my credentials and took all my patients off my schedule,” said Long, noting that only left her more time to thoroughly look into the data.

While Long continues to add to her count of personally witnessed vaccine injuries, she also waits for a response from government officials with her latest filing.

Since she first came forward, she has also given testimony to the Idaho Legislature and at the Alaska Medical Freedom Symposium. Appearing recently on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, she spoke about the FAA’s change in health requirements that significantly broaden the electrocardiogram range for pilots and allows those with cardiac injury damage to fly.

“In the light of emerging and overwhelming data showing cardiac damage from COVID and COVID vaccines on cardiac muscle, I can’t imagine why they would make this move and I think it’s a question that really should be taken to Dr. Susan Northrup, senior flight surgeon for the FAA,” Long told Carlson.

Insurance Industry Analyst Josh Stirling on Excess Death Data (Video)

Data from the insurance industry shows the damages linked to Covid vaccines.

“The more doses on average you have in a region within the United States, the bigger increase in mortality that region has had in 2022 when compared to 2021.”

The video can be found at the link below:

 https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=65879

Bombshell: Pfizer in the dock in Thailand! (Video)

   This is a bombshell! Thailand may be the first country in the world to nullify its contract with Pfizer. Watch the video after the 45mn point.  

  Governments around the world were bought literally by pharmaceutical companies to distribute a dangerous and untested vaccine.

  (PS: It is important to note that at this point, this claim of nullification has not been confirmed yet. My guess is that it will probably never be. There is simply too much money at stake and too many people implicated. Still, doctors are starting to speak against these vaccines and cannot be silenced anymore. That alone is a great step forward.)