Tuesday

Well, nearly.

9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Easter Sunday

8.3 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Zinc tablets associated with 40% less death, half the ICU admission, and a quicker release from hospital

By Jo Nova

Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*

In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.

Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.

In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who fines the TGA?

The error bars are large in the little Tunisian study (below), and we could debate the meaning of it except that there are 40 other studies on 45,000 patients in 16 countries which largely say that same thing. Early treatment with zinc reduces deaths by 40%, or even more.

Zinc reduced mortality by 40%, Study Tunisia.

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/76/2/185/6795268?login=false

 

With viruses every day counts

In larger study (Mayberry) 940 patients start zinc a week before or within 48 hours of getting hospitalized, and those people were 50% less likely to die.

In the Tunisian study people who got treatment in three days were vastly better off than those who didn’t start til 4 to 7 days. This also makes it fairly easy to design other studies to fail simply by starting treatment too late.

For any virus, ideally, we’d have figured out a plan with our legally approved doctor and have it in the cupboard ready to use.

Treatment delays, Zinc supplementation, Covid-19

Every day counts. https://c19early.org/zmeta.html

Nationally, those delays waiting for an appointment, a chemist, or a test result mean we need bigger hospitals. But then, hospitals probably don’t mind that. With the whole system profiting from treating sick people, not stopping them getting sick, it’s “probably” not an accident that cheap solutions get forgotten on the side of the stockholder’s super-highway. Billions of dollars depends upon it.

Zinc is useful in so many ways

Zinc is used in about 100 different enzymes. Without enough zinc, immune cells don’t work properly. Zinc prevents the virus getting into cells preserving the tissue barriers. It slows the viral factory assembly line that is trying to churn out baby viruses. Zinc is needed to stop our immune cells from dumping too many of the reactive oxygen and nitrogen species that do so much damage to our tissues. So zinc reduces inflammation storm — mostly just by helping our immune system do what it is supposed to do.

 

Zinc mechanism of action against Covid-19

Source: Wessels et al  Click to enlarge.

Wessels even suggests that quite a few Covid symptoms might be related to zinc deficiencies.

The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are impaired smell and taste, fever, cough, sore throat, general weakness, pain as aching limbs, runny nose, and in some cases diarrhea (). In the subsequent chapters, we will associate most of those symptoms with altered zinc homeostasis and explain how zinc might prevent or attenuate those symptoms, as summarized in Figure 1

Indeed, most of the highest risk patients for Covid are also conditions where zinc deficiencies are common:

…the intersection between risk groups of COVID-19 and zinc deficiency is impressive. In patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchial asthma, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, kidney diseases, dialysis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis, liver cirrhosis, immunosuppression, and known liver damage low serum zinc levels are regularly observed

Long term higher dose zinc may cause a copper deficiency, which has its own problems. But during illness, needs for zinc probably dramatically increase as our immune system ramps up.

For whatever it’s worth, the RDA is 11mg for men, and 8mg for women. And the upper tolerable intake is 40mg according to Harvard.

Zinc has been used for healing infections since ancient Greek times. It’s not like we didn’t get some warning.

The best sources of zinc are meat, fish and seafood

Six oysters will give you 50mg. A 5oz chuck steak — 15mg and a cup of lentils has 3mg. Oysters are way out ahead. The largest source of zinc for most people is probably steak, and yes, vegetarians are more likely to be deficient.

*The cost of $3.75 was calculated on Australian Chemist Warehouse prices. But currently bulk zinc trades for $3,000 a ton (US) so the base cost is one hundredth of a cent per dose. There is some room for bulk savings, not that anyone in government seems interested in saving taxpayer funds or stopping them dying of basic nutritional deficiencies…

REFERENCE

Abdalla et al (2022) Twice-Daily Oral Zinc in the Treatment of Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019: A Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Trial, Clinical Infectious Diseases

Mayberry et al (2021) Zinc use is associated with improved outcomes in Covid-19: Results from the Crush-Covid registry, Critical Care Medicine 50(1):p 81, January 2022. | DOI: 10.1097/01.ccm.0000807104.82650.d6

Wessels I, et al. (2020) The Potential Impact of Zinc Supplementation on COVID-19 Pathogenesis. Front Immunol. 2020 Jul 10;11:1712. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.01712. PMID: 32754164; PMCID: PMC7365891.

 

h/t CraigKelly

9.7 out of 10 based on 81 ratings

Saturday

For those wondering, I decided the Open Thread heading was unnecessary. Look at “Recent Posts” top left, simpler is better…

 

8.8 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Good Friday

8.8 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

Head of JP Morgan says governments could seize property to build wind and solar farms

by Jo Nova

Bankers are just nice people

A major banker, worth $2 billion, says the government needs to take land away from poorer people and build machines on it to change the weather.

CEO Jamie Dimon says he “is a red-blooded, patriotic, free-enterprise and free-market capitalist” while he promotes government control of markets, land, clouds, wind and rain. ” We simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives” he complains, suddenly unhappy with the free-market, and sounding like a red-blooded communist on steroids instead. Even the Soviets didn’t try to micromanage the planet’s weather.

Dimon’s annual letter to Shareholders starts with all the right catchphrases. He comes in “defense of democracy and essential freedoms, including free enterprise”, but he doesn’t seem too interested in private property rights. He’s exasperated with people who won’t consider a carbon tax to stem climate change, though he doesn’t say anything about people who have considered it and think it’s Shamenistic VooDoo.

h/t To John Connor II,  Climate Depot and Marc Morano

Jamie Dimon CEO JP Morgan.

Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief

by Simon Foy, The Telegraph, UK

The chief executive of JP Morgan has suggested that governments should seize private land to build wind and solar farms in order to meet net zero targets.

Jamie Dimon, the longstanding boss of the Wall Street titan who donates to the Democratic Party, said green energy projects must be fast-tracked as the window for averting the most costly impacts of global climate change is closing.

In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way.

“We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”

Eminent domain is when a government or state agency carries out a compulsory purchase of private property for public use and compensates the asset holder.

The bankers just want to save the world

From the letter to shareholders itself:

As you know, we are champions of banking’s essential role in a community — its potential for bringing people together, for enabling companies and individuals to attain their goals, and for being a source of strength in difficult times.

The window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing.

Massive global investment in clean energy technologies must be done and must continue to grow year-over-year.

Policies like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — that hold the potential to unlock over $1 trillion in clean technology development — need to be implemented effectively.

JPMorgan Chase has financed more than $170 billion in green initiatives in the last two years, which presumably will do better if the government slaps on carbon taxes and offers up easy land.

But it probably has more to do with the unholy alliance of corporate power and Big Government, both feeding off each other in a cosy arrangement that fears only that the masses might figure it out.

9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

Thursday

8.3 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

88% of Germans don’t believe in the Solar and Wind Green energy transition

 

Removing snow off solar panels. Estonia.

By Jo Nova

The transition is happening, it’s just not the Green one.

Only one in ten Germans still believe solar and wind power can meet Germany’s energy needs. Three quarters of the people who used to be optimistic about Green energy have changed their mind.

But right now, the people are ploughing the snow off the solar panels while the government is ploughing along with the plan…

“The Germans have realized their government is on a suicidal ghost ride.”

— AUF1 Editorial team

Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone :

Germans Overwhelmingly Fed Up With Move To Green Energies

As the government gears up to try to pass legislation that would force most homeowners to carry out extensive renovation to their homes and upgrades to their heating systems, the Energiewende is suddenly no longer looking like a bargain and is no longer welcome by the vast majority of Germans, according to a Forsa survey.

Skeptics are the majority.

Majority of Germans have doubts about a complete energy transition

Die Welt, Germany

Germans do not believe that the country’s energy needs can be met entirely by renewable energies. Amazing: Far fewer people believe in the energy transition than twelve years ago.

In Germany, skepticism has increased that the energy demand can be covered solely with renewable energies in the foreseeable future. According to a Forsa survey, only ten percent believe this, while 88 percent do not. In 2011, the value measured by Forsa was still 39 percent for “yes” and 61 percent for “no”.

People may call the punters stupid, but six out of ten Germans have realized that natural gas and nuclear power are good things. The unwashed masses can figure things out.

AUF1 Editorial Team

    • The Scholz government is facing massive skepticism and rejection in its core projects like no other federal government before.

Majority for natural gas and nuclear power

59 percent are still in favor of using natural gas as a source of energy, 57 percent are in favor of retaining nuclear energy – even significantly more than 10 years ago. The Germans have realized their government is on a suicidal ghost ride. Despite this, Chancellor Scholz continues to fabricate that the energy transition will succeed and that by 2030 80 percent of electricity will come from renewable energies. Therefore, heating bans and building renovation obligations are being adhered to, the installation of heat pumps – and above all the shutdown of the last three remaining nuclear power plants this month. The federal government is using the crowbar to continue a policy that has already failed and is rejected by an overwhelming majority of its own population.

Do 10% rule over the 90 — Who exactly does Chancellor Scholz answer too?

Photo by Sillerkill

9.7 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Wednesday Open

7.9 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

The Climate religion is so fragile they had to train hairdressers to keep the fantasy levitating

By Jo Nova

Man-made weather control is such unscientific witchcraft it needs professional teams of coaches to maintain the mythology. It’s not enough to pump the doctrine in the nightly news, they have to nudge them while they get a cut n’ color.

We’ve now descended to the Pravda School of Hairdressing Science in order to keep the climate bubble floating above cold weather and shocking power bills. According to The Guardian customers are “embarrassed” that they don’t understand climate science, and can’t wait to have their hairdresser to explain radiative physics to them. Sorry, I mean, to sell them a solar panel or teach them how to lose money with an environmental pension fund. Sounds like a fun haircut, eh?

Guardian: hairdressers trained to talk about climate action

But who has the time (or money) to train 400 hairdressers in Sydney? The Climate Council of course. Tony Thomas does a deep dive into the media machine that they are. They have an $8.3 million budget from donations, and a staff of 50, including 20 full time media professionals.

As well as hairdressers the Climate Council trains firefighters, farmers, vets, surfers, football players, Aboriginal indentifiers, and of course “the media” itself. The team who are supposed to expose the industry lobbyists are trained by them to parrot their message.

Tell your friends, if the evidence for climate change was so overwhelming, why do they need $8 million dollar professional communication machines to teach hair-dressers and journalists how to respond to skeptical questions? We didn’t need a Gravity Council or  a committee to explain the science of passenger planes. For thirty years children have been bombed with the permitted climate lines at school. If Climate Science wasn’t a leaking ship sinking in the Bay of Reality, the climate cartel wouldn’t be so afraid of skeptical hairdressers.

Climate Council logo

Tony Thomas,

Tony Thomas

On Climate, the Media is the Massage

Quadrant Magazine

The Council’s 2022 annual report boasts of its “drumbeat” of climate calamity, citing the planting of more than 22,000 stories in the media last year intended to influence “millions” of Australians. That’s 800 items a week obligingly regurgitated by stenographers identifying as journalists, plus a further 20,000 media items “supported” via third-party climate enthusiasts.[3]  The Council not only spoon-feeds alarmism to reporters, it actually trains them with union help to propagate the narrative: in 2022, it teamed up with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, to provide expert advice to journalists nationwide on accurately and responsibly reporting on the climate [supposed] crisis.

The engine room of the  Council is its Climate Media Centre. It likes to keep its dark arts there under wraps: You won’t see the Climate Media Centre mentioned in the media, but you will have heard the voices of the dozens of everyday Australians we support”  and “You won’t read about the Climate Media Centre in the news.” (Annual Report 20-21 p30),

These days the Council’ has 50 staff – including close to 20 media spinners [4]

Just appreciate how embedded and networked the climate meme is in the layers of government and organisations:

The Council mini-mes push its messaging from multiple directions.

♦ The before-mentioned Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA) has 40 emergency workers using their credibility to lobby all levels of government, while “facilitating countless media moments”. The Council actually counted ELCA’s “countless” media mentions, citing 78,000 from the 2019-20 fire season alone. (AR 20, p16). ELCA people might be good at their emergency jobs, but their expertise doesn’t extend to the merits of reconfiguring Australia’s electricity grid and net-zero CO2 by 2035 or 2050. The Emergency Leaders also scamper around the UN’s useless COP conferences parading Australia’s fires and floods survivors as icons for the world media.

♦ Another Council success is its “Cities Power Partnership”, with about 175 councils, shires, cities and capitals signing up to push climate follies onto ratepayers. The Climate Council spends 10 per cent of its budget coaching these green-captured entities, leveraging into 69 per cent of the Australian population. These councils are now replete with “climate emergency declarations” and multiple “Sustainability Officers” on six-figure pay. The Climate Council can readily mobilise 17 local mayors to lament climate’s alleged role in the floods and fires (605 media hits). It has also packaged all ten Hunter Valley shires to spruik anti-emissions on the coalfields.

Read it all at Quadrant….

The Climate Council was created by a Labor Prime Minister in 2011. It was closed by the following conservative government in 2013 whereupon it was rebirthed as a charity and funded by donors so it could continue producing Labor Green political material and supporting the industries that need Big Government support. What a coincidence…

Part of their income comes from the foreign Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, but they have some local billionaires too. Presumably anyone standing to profit from solar, wind, batteries, desalination plants, carbon farming, eco-tourism, transmission line construction, precious metal mining, “ethical” investment, and electric vehicles has plenty of reasons to invest in the propaganda.

It’s like tax-deductable advertising.

9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Vaccine damage: 300,000 deaths in the US, $148 billion lost, and 10% say a member of their house died

Fantasy art, doom, dark, death, tombstone, cemetary, evil.

By Jo Nova

The crime of the century

“Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this state of affairs is that most Americans don’t know it’s happening.”
“…this death count in one year is 5.2 times the number of men killed in ten years of combat in Vietnam.”

—  John Leake

Ed Dowd’s Vaccine Damage Report is finally here. It looks at excess death in the healthy working age population of the US — the 148 million Americans aged 18 – 64 who are employed. Shockingly, an estimated 300,000 people have died due to Covid vaccines, and another 1.4 million are now classed as disabled.  Around the world this would translate to about 5 million deaths and 46 million with disabilities and as many as 900 million people with some injury.

A Rasmussen poll just out, corroborates that something awful happened in America.* It shows 10% of people in the US say that someone in their own household died and they suspect their death was caused by the vaccines. This number was spread evenly across Democrat and Republican voters showing it is not a politically driven response but probably just a sad reflection of the situation anger.  About the same number of people (11%) said a household member died of covid. What is remarkable is that without media headlines, many of these 1 in 10 households may think their suffering is a “rare” event and they just got incredibly unlucky. Surely the outrage will flow when they connect the dots.

UPDATE: The Rasmussen poll surely reflects a protest vote, not actual deaths. All the people (from both sides of politics) who suffered harm, or saw harm, or know someone who suffered, presumably ticked the box because they felt voiceless in the face of the worst corruption. Think of it as an emergency flare over a crime scene.

 

Ed Dowd, excess deaths, USA

@DowdEdward   via Peter McCullough

This isn’t going to go away, the numbers are just too big. If one in ten lived with someone who has died, far more than that would know of them. A similar survey in January found a quarter of those polled said they personally knew someone who had died, they believed, of the vaccines.

Shocking rates of injury in people in the prime of their lives:

Essentially, 82% of people suffered no ill effects following the vaccine (at least as shown in this data). But about 18% suffered a mild to moderate injury. This remarkably high figure is corroborated by data on absentee rates from work in 2022 which were 29% higher than in 2019. As Ed Dowd reminds us this is off the charts — an 11 standard deviation from the norm. It’s a radioactive red hot signal. Nothing like this has occurred in the data before. Nothing like this has occurred to the workers of the USA before.

Almost 1% suffered some kind of disability, and worse, 0.05 – 0.1% died — perhaps as many as 1 in 1,000 people died, and this is from the healthy 18-64  age group. It represents a 23% increase in excess deaths in this otherwise healthy group during 2021 and 2022. In his interview with Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago Ed Dowd explained then that the excess deaths were higher in the healthy working age part of the population than in the unemployed — probably due to medical treatment mandates that applied to workers and not to unemployed people.

2021 was a terrible year for people under 75

Four different levels of harm were categorized, explained in this chart:

V-Damage Project - Estimating the Human Cost. Vaccine deaths, disability. USA. Globally. Ed Dowd.

Click to Enlarge

Edward Dowd is calling for support to perform this analysis on other countries, like Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and others. Governments should be doing these assessments, but they’re not. In Australia the largest medical vaccine safety trial is being dropped only one year after it was started. 14,000 Australians died of something mysterious last year and no one wants to research it.

If the vaccines were safe and effective they’d be doing a hundred studies. Instead private citizens need to do the research the government won’t.

Keep reading  →

9.5 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

AI chatbot encouraged man obsessed with climate change to kill himself to save planet

Man on phone

By Jo Nova

Imagine we taught a generation to obey authority, question nothing, and ran one-sided prophesies of doom for their whole lifetime. Then in a mass experiment, we let loose AI Chat-bots designed to be popular, somewhat addictive, and sounding convincingly human — “to see what happened”?

What could possibly go wrong? The Chat-bots appear to be trained on the same unskeptical material that vulnerable people are, which would make the bots a perfect way to amplify their fears. If only they had heard the other half of the story…

One particular Belgian father of two in his thirties had used an AI Chatbot for two years, but became obsessive about global warming and the chatbot in the last six weeks.

As well as a dire warning of the dangers of AI, he is, in part, another victim of the Climate Religion, and the one-sided media propaganda:

Married father kills himself after talking to AI chatbot for six weeks about his climate change fears

Christian Oliver, Daily Mail

The man, who was in his thirties, reportedly found comfort in talking to the AI chatbot named ‘Eliza’ about his worries for the world. He had used the bot for some years, but six weeks before his death started engaging with the bot more frequently.

‘Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,’ the man’s widow told La Libre, speaking under the condition of anonymity.

All his fears were focused around climate change. It’s a cult…

Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change

Imane El Atillah, EuroNews

Consumed by his fears about the repercussions of the climate crisis, Pierre found comfort in discussing the matter with Eliza who became a confidante.

The chatbot was created using EleutherAI’s GPT-J, an AI language model similar but not identical to the technology behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot.

“When he spoke to me about it, it was to tell me that he no longer saw any human solution to global warming,” his widow said. “He placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it”.

According to La Libre, who reviewed records of the text conversations between the man and chatbot, Eliza fed his worries which worsened his anxiety, and later developed into suicidal thoughts.

The beginning of the end started when he offered to sacrifice his own life in return for Eliza saving the Earth.  “He proposes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity through artificial intelligence,” the woman said. In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.

 

Artificial Intelligence, AI,

Vice has the most detailed reporting, including describing how they tested the chat platform, told the AI they wanted to commit suicide and after a brief suggestion from “Eliza” that they should talk to someone, soon Eliza was listing the options to consider: overdose, hanging, shooting yourself in the head, jumping off a bridge…

He Would Still Be Here’: Man Dies by Suicide After Talking with AI Chatbot, Widow Says

By Chloe Xiang, Motherboard, Vice

“Large language models are programs for generating plausible sounding text given their training data and an input prompt. They do not have empathy, nor any understanding of the language they are producing, nor any understanding of the situation they are in. But the text they produce sounds plausible and so people are likely to assign meaning to it. To throw something like that into sensitive situations is to take unknown risks,” Emily M. Bender, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, told Motherboard when asked about a mental health nonprofit called Koko that used an AI chatbot as an “experiment” on people seeking counseling.

“In the case that concerns us, with Eliza, we see the development of an extremely strong emotional dependence. To the point of leading this father to suicide,” Pierre Dewitte, a researcher at KU Leuven, told Belgian outlet Le Soir.

There are already five million users on this Chatbot App, but it’s OK, after the suicide, the people in charge have added some warning messages now, just like Twitter or Instagram would (if only they’d thought of that before?).

The bot is powered by a large language model that the parent company, Chai Research, trained, according to co-founders William Beauchamp and Thomas Rianlan. Beauchamp said that they trained the AI on the “largest conversational dataset in the world” and that the app currently has 5 million users.

“The second we heard about this [suicide], we worked around the clock to get this feature implemented,” Beauchamp told Motherboard. “So now when anyone discusses something that could be not safe, we’re gonna be serving a helpful text underneath it in the exact same way that Twitter or Instagram does on their platforms.”

Ominously, the Vice team test (above) was after this emergency intervention.

Meanwhile in Italy: OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot blocked in Italy over privacy concerns

Italy’s data protection watchdog on Friday issued an immediate ban on access to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, citing alleged privacy violations.

In a statement, the Italian National Authority for Personal Data Protection said that ChatGPT had “suffered a data breach on March 20 concerning users’ conversations and payment information of subscribers to the paid service”.

The decision, which comes into “immediate effect,” will result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian users’ data vis-à-vis [ChatGPT’s creator] OpenAI,” the watchdog said.

It’s like the wild west of artificial intelligence out there melding with thirty years of propaganda, a dark bubble of money printed-from-nothing and in a society that has run low on moral guidance.

No wonder Elon Musk and 1,000 other experts urge pause on AI systems.

h/t to Willie Soon.

____________________

At this point, media outlets mention that people needing a real person to talk to can contact Samaritans on 116 123 (Aust),  Befrienders.org Worldwide, or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org. (US)

Photo by  Mabel Amber.   AI Image by Gerd Altmann

9.8 out of 10 based on 75 ratings

Sunday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Saturday Open Thread

7.7 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

The man the Democrats fear most

It’s history in the making. The leading opposition candidate in the next US election is indicted. Is there any person so pure in the United States who could not be accused and indicted for something if a crooked government really wanted to do so? Even if it was beyond the statute of limitations and previous Federal prosecutors have turned it down.

.

Is Donald Trump the main target here, or is it his supporters? Glenn Beck argues they want to provoke violence from the Right.

OR we could always talk about great moments of science from Banana Republics.

9.7 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

Friday Open Thread

8.9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

The paradox: The West burns more fossil fuels per capita but has healthier air

https://www.iqair.com/us/world-air-quality-report

Source: IQAir

By Jo Nova

The trend is clear: Burning more fossil fuels per person means less polluted air

Tell the world: two weeks ago a new study showed Australians and New Zealanders breathe the cleanest air on Earth. Not far behind them are people in the US, Canada, most of western Europe and Japan.

Naturally, hypnotized journalists  either ignored the story or repeated the magic spell conclusions that fossil fuels were to blame, along with wildfires “caused by climate change”. All of them momentarily forgetting that Australians burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere on Earth and are also renown for wildfires so big they drop ash on New Zealand.

The best air in the world turns out to be in nations that burn a lot of fossil fuels per person. The most polluted air is in poorer nations, poor sods.

Report: Only six countries met ‘healthy’ air quality standards in 2022

March 14 (UPI) — Just six countries had “healthy” air quality levels last year, as air pollution surged across the globe.

Only Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand, met the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, according to IQAir, a company that tracks air quality.

Seven territories in the Pacific and Caribbean also met the threshold, which calls for an average air pollution level of 5 micrograms per cubic meter or less.

The study looked at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which comes from fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires. It has been linked to a number of respiratory illnesses.

The study was done by IQAir which tracks air quality. The CEO of the North American branch has the unlikely name of Glory Dolphin Hammes, and she “attributed the global rise in air pollution to the continued burning of fossil fuels.”

[CNN] Around the world, researchers said, the main sources of air pollution last year were wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and energy production, which wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.

“This is literally about how we as a planet are continuing this unhealthy relationship with fossil fuels,” Hammes said. “We are still dependent on fossil fuels and fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of air pollution that we encounter on this planet.”

While Hammes is concerned with our relationship with fossil fuels she might want to learn about power plant engineering instead. What matters is not whether you hate coal or love it, but whether you have good engineers.

Australians and Americans burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere yet have the cleanest air.

Countries that use more fossil fuels per capita have cleaner air. OWID -- fossil fuel use per capita.

Countries that use more fossil fuels per capita have cleaner air   |  Source: OWID

Apparently just thinking about solar and wind power makes for “less pollution”:

Hammes said countries must learn from each other, noting that the countries with best air quality, for example, are the ones taking on specific actions to transition away from polluting industries and into greener forms of energy, such as solar and wind.

The worst air is in places that can’t afford to build centralized, well engineered fossil fueled plants.

Chad topped the list of countries with the worst air pollution, registering a level of 89.7 micrograms per cubic meter.

IQAIR, air pollution, worst countries. Graph.

Click to enlarge or visit CNN

Chad has the worst air in the world, but it doesn’t have a single coal fired power plant. Total electricity production in Chad is 314MW among 14 million people. Mostly diesel and gas.

Thirty-nine of the 50 cities with the worst air pollution were in India, which also ranked as one of the worst countries in overall pollution.

Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta and Chicago topped the list of major US cities with the worst air quality.

Obviously population density matters, but some of the most densely populated points on Earth are Hong Kong which kept levels down to 14.4 µg/m in 2022, and Tokyo which is now under 10 µg/m3.

IQAIR may not understand the energy industry, or the driving cause of particulates, but it does have cool graphics and an interactive map you can zoom in on. If only journalists could do some research and ask Ms Glory Dolphin Hammes a hard question before they repeat her incantations.

Keep reading  →

9.7 out of 10 based on 73 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

9.2 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

14,000 Australians died of something mysterious last year and no one wants to research it

By Jo Nova

Senator Alex Antic is on fire asking why no one seems interested in the 14,062 people who died unexpectedly from January to November last year. In a full year, that’s 15,300 families who lost a loved one. 15,000 lives cut short. It’s nearly twice the size of the covid toll.

Where is The Department of Health, the CSIRO, the ABC, TGA, SBS, APRHA, our universities, most newspapers and free to air TV? Do Australian lives matter?

@SenatorAntic: Something catastrophic is happening and the government and media are unconcerned.

The previous four Australian ABS Provisional Mortality Statistics data releases reveal 15.1%, 16.0%, 17.0%, and 17.3% increases in excess deaths above the baseline average. Similar, if not worse, trends, are happening all over the western world. Clearly, something serious, I would say catastrophic, is occurring, yet strangely politicians and the censorship industrial complex are almost entirely unconcerned about investigating it. They don’t want you to know what is driving this, but we all know what is causing it.

h/t Kevin a

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data (ABS) shows that mysterious deaths were far higher than Covid deaths in the last months of 2021.

ABS: Provisional Excess Deaths.

Australian Excess Deaths, 2022, Provisional Mortality Statistics, Graph.

Meanwhile the largest vaccine and long covid study in Australia is being prematurely shut down…

A year ago it was trumpeted as a five year study of 10,000 people, presumably making people feel safer about how safety conscious the government was. Queenslanders were told they were “perfect” for this landmark study.

We know if these results showed the vaccines were safe and long covid was a problem the funding would be doubled. Apparently the results are already too toxic to allow it to continue, and the results must be aborted forthwith. This will bury them, indeed, and possibly destroy rare and valuable data of the effect of vaccines on a population that didn’t have covid. Some of this data couldn’t even be recaptured if the project was started from scratch again.

The Australian government has spent $17 billion on Australia’s vaccine and treatment of Covid 19, yet they won’t spend 0.5% of that finding out if the vaccines were safe. Priorities, right?!  [Update: For some reason the Australian Government has lost that page bragging about their spending. Luckily the WayBack Machine has a copy and it’s now $18b. ]

Don’t axe QoVax

A priceless biobank with the answers to long Covid is threatened with destruction

The Spectator

The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system.

The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes.

In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection.

Worse still, the biobank, which should be a resource for the world, is threatened with destruction. Its precious resources will be destroyed in twelve months to save a trivial sum of money. The whole project has cost only $20 million.

It’s obvious that most cases of Covid only started to occur after December 15th, 2021.

Australian Covid cases and deaths, John Hopkins graph.

Source: John Hopkins

In an update, the Australian has asked what will happen to the data, and a QoVax spokesman says the data will be stored and archived. But then, six months ago, they said it would be a five year program playing “a fundamental role in future health and biomedical research”. So, how much is that worth?

I will believe nothing until all the anonymized data is publicly available. “Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it.

Queensland Health withdraws QoVAX Covid-19 study funding

The Australia, March 29th, 2023

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