Wiled Fires and Dry ICE Machines.

 As wildfires in Australia, Argentina, and Chile, in Spain, Portugal, and Siberia, all burn with increasing intensity, duration and frequency, the Corponations look on with envy at the level of destruction they wreak. Thus have they used their wiles to conjure vehicles capable of igniting fires so hot and explosively virulent, they cannot be put out. Thus are we privy to the ship in the middle of Atlantic being left to burn with more than 400 millions of dollars worth of luxury vehicles onboard.

Yahoo lists this article in its "Entertainment" section.

The crew was helpless to battle this wiled fire because, of course, they were unaware of the explosive cargo their Argo was carrying, so had neither the training nor the equipment to battle an electric fire's  ferocity.

Such is the future we are building for our children. Where floods of sufficient magnitude to hurl EV's at high speed against any obstacle in its path, smashing its battery and engulfing the vehicles and whatever they hit in unquenchable flames, is simply one more thing that, "Nobody could have seen coming."

This has become the cry of the New Millennium. A cry that the Bush administration raised to the level of plausible deniability, as the repercussions of the actions of his own father resulted in the attack on the American homeland that brought down two of New York's most iconic skyscrapers, and cratered the Pentagon, but was tacitly denied by making this moronic claim. It said the same of the Iraq insurgency and then of the financial meltdown. 

But Blowback was not only predicted, but was anticipated long before anyone was reading goat stories to children.  

But the blowback of GW Bush's other policies were also known, and those warnings either ignored of denied, although they are still there for anybody to read. 

The increase in the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico from fertilizer runoff increased to gargantuan proportions by planting millions of acres of pristine prairie with corn to burn into fuel to burn was also predictable, but "Nobody could have seen it coming" is the mantra we all echo mindlessly as one disaster after another is visited upon us, not simply because of climate derangement, but, more immediately, thanks to our "installed base" of ill-conceived measures of desperation concatenating one on top of the other. For let's not forget that in addition to the two Wars precipitated by the Bush junta, the fracturing of the landscape in every state that isn't an ethanol state (and some that are, such as Kansas), is stirring methane into the mix of increased CO2 and VOC's that burning ethanol results in, to the other Freedom Molecules of excess gas already floating in our air. 

But somehow the obvious fact that every single project, every single one, that the Corponations have foisted onto the polity to mitigate the effects of climate change have had, not surprisingly, considering the source, the exact opposite effect, that of paying forward climate change, bringing to our children the gift of destroyed homes, lives and ecosystems that they had hoped would be their gift to their own progeny. Not to worry. The disaster called Capitalism will continue to destroy every vestige of livable land, every field of arable soil, every acre of living forests still standing.

Even as I type this, forests in the American Southeast have been signed over to the EU for destruction. The biota from one land being ravaged and transported over the seas to be incinerated, leaving the soils they grew in bereft of the nutrients and matter necessary to regrow. But what would be the point anyway? They would either burn in wildfires or in the Corponationals' wiled fires: either way they are doomed. 

In an article posted on energysceptic.com from 2012, the authors stated that "Oil is used in 500,000 products. Thus do many scientists feel it’s crazy to be burning this precious substance to hurl 3,000 pound vehicles to the nearest fast food joint" (the newest EV's weigh in at a ton more than twice that weight: 8000 pounds ... in a decade during which COPout conferences were held regularly, yet not once was this fact mentioned at any of them) . 

Note the weight of the vehicle is stated to be 3000 pounds. A mere ten years later, that weight has doubled to 6000 pounds, and that in no vehicles more than in EV's. Thus do all the advantages a switch to an all EV fleet get thrown aside to make a vehicle American consumers will be happier to buy. After all, the juice propelling it will be Green, renewable, zero-emission. What does it matter how much it actually weighs? (except for the fact a that the price of all that free electricity will be so onerous, the buyers will be driving their dry ICE machines far more often than their spanking new wiled firestarters.

While solar panels are destroyed by hail the size of tennis balls, and windmills blow over in locations where there are no hurricanes, ships carrying the vehicles of the future incinerate their contents to molten metal and melted glass in an inextinguishable blaze caused by their own batteries.

This is the future, well, no, actually ... this is the present. And who wants to look a gift horse in the mouth? In The future we are in the process of building back better, unlike that the Bush family cursed us with, is promising not to wait the generation it took for the worse of their problems to manifest themselves: they have been more immediate, and yet, the investment in them already having been made, there is no stopping their trajectory any more than there is any stopping, or even the will to try, the climate nightmare the Bush family bequeathed to us.

And each these federally-funded endeavors, most of them instigated by the party that was simultaneously deriding the phrase, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," had no problem helping themselves to the federal largesse, nor the GUARANTEED profits flowing into their bank accounts from these ecologically disastrous enterprises.

Thus have the Democrats climbed on the bandwagon of government-guarantees to start a money train of their own by baking in billionaires' profits for another generation while the polity they pretend they represent languishes in Covid-infested workplaces, toiling long hours at meager wages, cosseted in a straitjacket of unpayable debt, elevated insurance costs, and escalating energy bills. The less lucky ones are or at home in beds the hospitals need no longer supply, as long Covid becomes permanent disability, saving the hospital system while the citizens suffer theconsequences.

Nothing we can do, the Covid pandemic has shown us, will alter the future that Capitalism is building. One in which  humans will be tied to the mast of their own making as the ship they have set out in burns to a smoking hulk. But unlike the crew on board the Felicity Ace, we have no place to flee to for a safe haven, no rescue ship, no firefighting boats, just the certainty that our fate will be the same as that of the other creatures we share this lovely planet with. Koala bears in Australia, cattle in Kenya, sheep in Greece, corals and manatees off the coast of Florida, or Herefords in Argentina, they are left to the merciless scorching of the sun, isolated in burning llanos where there is nary a drop of water for hundreds of miles. Their dried up carcasses, no longer of any use to the machine that created them and placed them here, are left to rot in the relentless heat of Chile (or Argentina, ... or, ___ ) or burn to death in the raging fires of Australia, or die of thirst in the parched prairies of Utah, even as Utah injects more and more poison into the water supply for fracking so they can make the dirtiest fuel in the world from their own tar sands, all while they scratch their heads wondering what's happened.

We happened.

And it looks as though not only is their no will to stop us, every indication shows we are chomping at the bit to bring it up a notch:

Car Carbon footprint the size of 370 Football Fields.

 

This is a pic of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. It is supposedly one of the world’s most advanced automotive plants, with 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space on 370 acres of land. Drenched in the California sun, robofacturing EV's at at frantic pace, observe how there is not a single spot in their parking lot for their own workers to charge their automobiles. Instead of solar-powered arrays lining the lot, made available for its employees to get to and from their giggle factory, their is this ginormous expanse of unused geography left to languish in the sun, their cars heating up in the broiling heat. And this is Tesla's vision of the future, wherein employees still eat the cost of commuting while all that free solar radiation is allowed to roast their vehicles, forcing thousands of them to consume gas to power their A/C to cool the oven-hot interior.

That is just one example of how a business infrastructure that has been hijacked by the Keptocracy is spending billions and billions of federally-guaranteed loans to pay dividend to their insider friends while labor, well, labors.  We are given as a fact that globalization has to hurt less-educated workers, as opposed to this outcome being a policy choice by the people who crafted trade agreements over the last four decades or government-granted patent monopolies on "green" tech that has turned out to be anything but. 

These government-granted monopolies are part of a government policy to promote innovation, even while those granted the monopolies profess ardent belief in letting "the Market." rule us all. Neoliberals picking our pockets while we pick our noses: Build Back Booger it's not.

Today's Star Links: Red Hotlinks, OPM, and Thomas Hartmann, Thomas Hartmann.

 

Happy Valentine's Day.

SpaceX launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites to a low-earth orbit on Thursday, February 3. 

Then, as the NOAA predicted:  An eruption of plasma from the sun sent charged particles streaming into Earth’s atmosphere, sending the planet’s magnetic field haywire and increasing the density of its atmosphere. That increase in density meant there were more particles to push against satellites in Earth’s orbit. This phenomenon, known as atmospheric drag, can, and did, pull them out of their orbital paths.  

Thus are we treated to a firsthand example of irony (one that's not the Alanis Morissette version) as "SpaceX" demonstrates the peril of naming both your company and its most ballyhooed project with names from Fantasyland. 

First, the SpaceX name: low earth orbit is not "space".  The fact that the satellites crashed and burned, specifically by ignoring the warnings from an atmospheric agency (had NASA, the space agency, issued the warning, would they have listened? NOPE ... they're scheduled to launch another load of satellites to burn up tomorrow, 2/15/2022. Hubris such as this listens to no one). It is precisely because these satellites are not in space that they burned their precious metals and all the hi-tech, high-carbon- footprint materiel not a week after launch: atmospheric drag. The atmosphere, lest you are unaware, is part of the earth; it is basically an ocean of gas held tightly bound to our planet because gas, despite denial from the supernaturalists, who only believe in invisible things that don't exist, is matter, and like satellites launched into a solar storm, subject to the laws of gravity. Hence, creative destruction ensued by ignoring those laws. The financial cost of the botched launch is estimated to be as much as $100 million. But SpaceX literally has piles of investors' and taxpayers' money to burn (alright, alright, it should say "figuratively," but no one seems to know what that means anymore), so "Let 'er Rip!"

Secondly, note that they are called "Starlink satellites". But they have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the infinitesimal number of stars in the universe ... well, except one star. The star we refer to as the Sun. Yet this star, the only star we are actually linked to, knocks those "Starlink" satellites out of orbit in a trice, this despite the full knowledge of the entity that launched them that they were being launched into the full force of a geomagnetic storm barreling through what actually is space, toward earth. What kind of a hot link is that? Their performance fell somewhat short of what anybody would refer to as Stellar. In one stroke they have demonstrated their colossal ignorance of not only Space, but of the only Star in all of Space that actually matters, the only star they really need to concern themselves with, and about which we have enough detailed knowledge to make accurate predictions:  The freakin' SUN.

A more apt name for this boondoggle of a project would be Gamedboy, as these satellites, planned to number in the tens of thousands, are for nothing more grandiose than to give faster broadband speed to rural internet users, an endeavor which, during the 90's, you could have gotten away with using such a second-grade-mentality name, it fit in well with all the "connecting the world" paradisiacal bluster. But here in the second fifth of the 21'st century, when we know the main import of the internet is to guide armed drones to destinations around the globe for the sole purpose of assassinating people, plan terrorist attacks using airplanes as guided missiles, goggle at cute kitties, play on-line games with strangers, have your most intimate and important data hacked, propagate the maniacal ravings of demented ex-presidents and their ilk, and binge-watch second-rate TV series, it needs a more futuristic, as in meaningless, yet "sciency", moniker. So Starlink, although having nothing to do with anything that SpaceX has, or will ever, launch, was decided on. And we've seen the results:

Easily avoided, Catastrophic failure.

Next link:

Coronavirus can destroy the placenta and lead to stillbirths Associated Press

In other words, the policies supported and advocated by an Evangelical chorus of parasitical pastors has set their bleating sheep vehemently against vaccines and/or a strip of cloth in front of the face, and that has resulted in more fetal deaths than have occurred in any of the states that allow abortions. But as with AIPAC, that never saw a foreign US War that they didn't like and abjectly support, leaving the rest of the Nation to bear both the cost and the opprobrium for their militaristic arrogance, Evangelicals will never need accept responsibility for the deaths of the unborn their actions have resulted in. Only governments need face the music for the damage they inflict. Religions' bailiwick is pain and suffering, so it is in their interest to inflict as much of it as possible on the masses, take cover behind absurd dogma, and then beat their breasts in mock sorrow during their Masses. 

US nuclear power plants contain dangerous counterfeit parts, report finds. The Verge 

Considering that nuclear reactors produce tons of fissile material that no one has any idea, after more than a half a century of operating them, what to do with, it hardly seems that counterfeit parts will have time to do their mischief. The entire industry is a clear and present, as well as future, danger. Keep  your radio active for future updates.

Finally: pundits are going Postal over a 16-year bet Republicans laid down in 2006 to block Postal EVs, as DeJoy announces he’s going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead of electric.

There seems to be a misunderstanding being propagated by our own little selves. Like it or not, ALL vehicles, EV or ICE machines, are fossil-fuel vehicles. Without the combustion of mass quantities of fossil fuels, there would BE no EV's any more than there would be ICE machines. Nor would there be any roads for those vehicles to travel over, well, except ATV's which are all internally-burning their fossil fuels, and cause rampant environmental destruction wherever their owners' wheels can carry them. In Colorado, such bone-head mayhem is considered a sport! ATV'ng is actually a verb.

"A great way to explore Colorado's wilderness areas is to rent an ATV and head off paved roads". 

"Wilderness areas!?" Well, not anymore, they're not. The ad should read, 

"A great way to destroy Colorado's wilderness areas is to rent an ATV and head off paved roads."

Let's change them all to E-ATV's and pretend the damage they do is Green. 

But they are all fossil-fuel vehicles. There needs to be another dash: fossil-fuel-burning vehicles, of which there are now two types: internal fossil-fuel-burning vehicles and external fossil-fuel-burning vehicles. As stated already, but ignored by the greenies, both types of vehicles are fossil-fuel vehicles, and both burn fossil fuels: the difference being that EV's do it off-site, which is good for urbanites' air quality (the  major reason most urbanites fall in line with the industry's propaganda ... but moving the unpalatable pollution far from the source of where it's being used has never caused the deleterious effects of your activities to decline. On the contrary, it, completely predictably, allows them to grow worse, as those bearing the brunt of the impact of the activity are often clueless as to why they are suffering. Which doesn't even address the fact that the non-driving public is now burdened with paying a sizeable chunk of the purchase price, as it already does to the already-rich owners of Tesla's EV's. Tesla, a company recalling 340,000 of its vehicles for yet another bug associated with accelerated production that cared more about number of units rolling off its assembly lines (and the revenue flow they were desperate to generate therefrom) than the quality of said product. 

This is a problem inherent in the computer industry's mindset. Having used "crash and burn" as their favorite phrase when a program functions incorrectly, they have forgotten that in the real world, things actually DO crash and burn, and the mess is a lot harder to clean up than a program gone awry in a test environment. Instead WE are the test environment. WE have all the risk shoved down our throat. WE pay for the damages. But it is the Owners, that is the shareholders, who assume none of the risk yet reap all the rewards. Tesla, unlike Ford or GM, is allowed to let the public bear the brunt of the disasters built in to their products, after which it will then "iron them out". Thus, Tesla is allowed to prematurely release hazardous products of automobile robofactory onto the same streets with other drivers who have no hand nor voice in allowing dangerous vehicles to share the roads with them, as though doing so were no less perilous than pressing a dress shirt. Then, to add insult to injury, a sizeable subsidy is paid to purchasers of electric fossil-fuel vehicles. This translates into a tax: Taxation without Representation is levied on people who will never be able to afford the very item they are being taxed to allow other people to purchase. And the reason they will never be ale to afford one? They have had their pockets picked to pay for OPM (Other People's Machines). 

At the end of the article, the author opined:

"Like so many other weirdnesses in American politics, when you pull back the veil you find the hands of a fossil fuel industry that values profits and right wing ideology over the future of our children, our nation and the planet."

But Thomas Hartmann, Thomas Hartmann, You could say the exact same thing about any robofactured motorized personal transport module. 

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Whether ATV's, SUV's, EV's, ICE machines, Pick-ups, you name it ... the whole raft of heavily government-subsidized, climate-changing technology that is eviscerating the web of life, when you pull back the veil from their high-minded rhetoric, you find the oil-stained hands of petroleurs who value motorized high-speed, techno-cocoons of metal, plastic, and glass to carry their useless carcarses (sic) over assphalt roads of poisonous bitumen to the future of their children, our nation and the the ability of the planet to sustain complex organic life" (the PLANET, my sentimental friend, exists whether or not life exists on its surface. It is LIFE itself, not the Planet, that is being jeopardized by the self-described machine of destruction called capitalism engineered by the Marauding Ape called Man).

This entire "rift" between EV's and ICE machines, like that over Covid, uses science as though it were just another mindless religion. Never will you hear them admit that it was science that gave us the ability to create this completely man-made state of affairs, wherein our pitiful existence imperils all the other creatures who share this planet with us, in the first place. And it is precisely because science gives us the ability to ignore the rights of all the other creatures who share this planet with us that we could  simply care less (anyone wanna go ATVing?).  After all ... we're Having FUN!

 

The Double Cross.

 

La Vie en Rose-colored Glasses.

A newsroom is like a dream, a truly aspiritual room, where the stagnant atmosphere is deliberately tinted with red white and blue. 

Here the soul takes a bath in black ink, scented with the  debilitating aromatic perfumes of desire and regret. There is something Twilight of the Gods about it; bluish shot through with rose; a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.

Every piece of furniture holds a slouching rounded form, languid and prostrate yet somehow simultaneously attentive and engaged. They seem to be dreaming, their outward movements a manifestation of what it is they dream of; endowed, you could say, with a somnambular existence that resembles that of minerals and vegetables.  The Corporate posters speak the advertisers' language of propagandized vacuity, making of flowers, skies and setting suns little more than balms to lull the senses into accepting as true that which they know to be false.

You will find no artistic abominations on these walls. Definite, positive art is blasphemy compared to dreamy, unanalyzed impressions. Here all is bathed in harmony's own adequate and delicious obscurity.

An infinitesimal scent of the most exquisite choosing, mingled with the merest breath of humidity, floats through this atmosphere where hot-house sensations cradle the drowsy spirit. 

Glowing plastic masses of flatscreens reign over the drawn shades of yesterday's army of Selectric typewriters and cobwebbed fax machines; even at reduced volume the constant hum is like a drone hovering in the air menacing groupthink refugees with imminent dismissal. The News is now the Views, accepted lies having usurped any search for truth, which lies on a bed, the sovereign queen laid to rest, her magic power to excite given over for the quick rush of adrenaline delivered by the unending quest for disaster, quenching the insatiable thirst of polarizing pundits for sensation now superseding the once-hailed plaudit of speaking truth to power, succoring the poor to sucker-punch the comfortable.

At times I see the flames in the queen's eyes quicken, piercing the gloam; those subtle and terrible eyes that I recognize by their dread mockery. They attract, they subjugate, they devour the imprudent gaze. In silent contemplation I have studied them - black eyes compelling curiosity and wonder.

To what demon from hell are we to attribute this all-encompassing atmosphere of collusion, silence, mystery and corruption? What we are wont to call Life has nothing to do with this supreme lie machine which we are now all experiencing, and which sucks more of our sustenance away minute by minute, second by second. Until there are no more minutes. There are no more seconds. Time has disappeared; it is eternity that reigns; an eternity of night where the tattered remnants of surviving tribes wander the earth in search of sustenance, their futures no longer tied to the dictates of the ECB, which is long dead, its leaders guillotined in the dead of winter to avenge the dead of winter. 

A knock is heard on the vault door, an awful, resounding knock that reverberates from the very pit of hell; a  pitchfork being thrust into the sated stomachs of the overweening, ruling class of the Keptocracy.  

Not bothering to await a response from the butler,, a Specter enters. It is a bailiff come to torture the elites in the name of the Law; it is a consumer of mass quantities coming to complain and thereby add the trivialities of her life to the sorrows of their own; it is a messenger boy from a newspaper editor clamoring for the last installment of the final COPout minutes. 

Their paradisiac atmosphere and the slovenly idol, the sovereign of their dreams, their languid lives of languaged lies, the entire enchantment woven so meticulously into a worldwide web of gossamer threads of bright green lies, has vanished at the Specter's brutal knock.  

Pandemic! Who could have seen it coming?  Paradise Lost has thrown mankind into this filthy hole of its own creation, this abode of eternal boredom, this lithium mine. Look at their stupid, dilapidated, dusty abodes; hearths without fire, power plants without fuel, homes without heat, their inhabitants frozen in their beds like Arctic oysters; the sad windows where rain so torrential it has traced furrows through the brick; books stacked on shelves encased in ice, never to be perused again, the spring thaw will turn them to pulp, food for molds; a calendar is the lone wall hanging, it has dates circled that designate appointments that never will be met.

Whence the perfumed propaganda of that lost world which in our state of exquisite boredom we found so intoxicating? Alas ... another odor has taken its place, one of stale tobacco mixed with the nauseating vapor of stale beer and fresh vomit. The rancid smell of desolation now permeates everything.

In this, our brave new narrow world, there is plenty of room for disgust, and it leaves but one object to distract our minds from the knowledge that we lazily left it to corrupt leaders to engineer the machine that is hell-bent on our destruction; that object is the hypodermic needle, its phial of morphine engendering an old and dreadful love; and like all mistresses, it is prolific in empty caresses and rife with incipient betrayals.

C'est-à-dire, Time has reappeared; Time is sovereign ruler again, and with that hideous old man the entire retinue of memories, regrets, spasms, fears, agonies, nightmares, nerves, and rage have all returned.

Each second is now strongly accented, they rush out of the clock screaming, "I am Life: unbearable and implacable Life!"

There is but one second left on the Doomsday Clock in which to bring good news, the good news that causes every one such inexplicable terror.

Yes Time reigns once more; he has resumed his brutal tyranny. And he slashing us with his studded whip as if prodding an exhausted horse. "Hey mule! Wake up Frankenstein! Sweat slave!" Humanity is damned to survive in a world where machines of your own design have destroyed every thing of beauty, shredded every instance of harmony, so creatively.

 

Accuweather.com stops Reporting on Covid-19. "Sorry, Dave. This Machine is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."

 

The number of deaths from Covid-19 have never been higher, nor has the number of daily new infections. It is at this point that Accuweather decided nobody was interested any longer in their reportage on the pandemic, and so has stopped reporting on it. "Covid doesn't do it for me," the vast majority of their readers have apparently decided.

Oh, the irony! Why? Well, as the title suggests, it is my observation that here on Spaceship Earth, we have given priority to machines over people; so 2001's Space Oddity was that no one realized the space ship was earth and the people of earth were Dave. Their needs, in 2001, was indeed handed over to the machines, as vast precious acreage of a once-pristine prairie, across more than ten of the United States' States, was churned over by the plow for the production of food crops in order to fuel the ever-growing thirst of the Machine. Which continues to this day to draining irreplaceable resources to create "renewable" fuels via enormous federal outlays, at the heart of which were plans to triple the number of coal-fired power plants in the USA by the time the GW administration left office. But that's not the part that's ironic. What's ironic is that the only reason I ever read Accuweather at all is that IBM (the company from which the acronym HAL is derived) bought the web-site, wunderground.com, which was my go-to site for climate change articles; but since its purchase by IBM, it has become a graveyard for old news. Imagine, a weather site that has "news stories" pertaining to weather, today, on Groundhog's day, dated January 5'th! Gone are the insightful (too inciteful for a Corponational, perhaps?) articles by Chris Dolce and Bob Henson; instead we are treated with weather news a month old and the ominous, "If we continue on our current path, these trends are expected to accelerate," as its final word on Climate Derangement.

Let's apply that to COVID-19, shall we?

 "If we continue on our current path, these trends are expected to accelerate:" 

There were 22 million new infections last week, and here in the US, where the average number of daily deaths from COVID-19 has climbed to over 2,600, according to the New York Times tracker, it is now higher than the peak surge in the fall, when the deadlier delta variant was dominant, are close to the peak of last winter, when there were no vaccines available. But who needs to know that, right?

We're just so over this pandemic that Deaths up 36% from two weeks ago is just so boring; and the fact they show no sign of plateauing is a mere data point of no interest to the "Let me back on the Cruise Ship called the Globaloney economy" crowd, who have become the "New Normal." 

"If current death rates persists, the U.S. may see 900,000 fatalities from COVID by mid-February."

(YAWN).

"Cases, now that the highly infectious omicron variant is dominant, are coming down from their January peak and averaging 424,077 a day, down 44% from two weeks ago."

That "down" figure, sitting as it does, at more than twice the number of daily new cases as were reported during last July's peak, may in fact be down 44% from two weeks ago, but the death toll is still rising. 

But that's not news any more. It's just background noise. 

 Dr. Monica Ghandi….Yes, that Dr. Gandhi. The ID TV expert promising all for weeks that California was bulletproof for hospitalizations and deaths from COVID. The vaccine rate was just too high and there was no way it was going to happen. Monica Gandhi has been one of the most reliable predictors of what was going to happen all throughout this pandemic: an almost 100% success rate if you simply  assume the opposite of whatever it is she's saying.

Fun fact – I was witness to another expert being asked a question today – “Are these deaths from omicron or delta?” “Is anyone testing these strains?”

His answer – “Why would you need to do that? It is obvious from the data that Omicron is not lethal.”

These are world experts.

“Alabama infectious disease director: ‘The rate of cases is like a rocket ship.'” 

While the Delta strain was still the predominant strain, the CDC was telling Americans that the milder Omicron strain was responsible for upward of 93% of new infections. Then, once their travel plans had been made, and Christmas Eve was at hand, on Dec 23, 2021, they informed us that that was a miscalculation: only ~ 22% of those infections were omicron. So the people on those jets you were sitting next to, if infected, were carrying the more deadly delta strain, but, test them?  "Why would you need to do that? It is obvious from the data that Omicron is not lethal.” First of all, no it isn't. But secondly, it is anything but obvious that what they were contracting (and spreading) was in fact the omicron, and not the Delta, variant.

So, taking the two "if's" postulated by the Corponationals, we have our climate change solution:  

 "If we continue on our current path, these trends are expected to accelerate." 

"If current death rates persists, the U.S. may see 900,000 fatalities from COVID by mid-February."

If energy usage is to be cut, the human population of the wealthiest nations must plummet, as they are  by far the largest emitters of CO2, no mater what geo-economic games you play to transfer their CO2 footprint to China and other enslaved populations around the globe. Weekend after weekend during 2019, the Free peoples around the globe, taking their cue from the Gilets Jaunes of France, were up in arms about the escalating cost of energy; and those costs were minimal, far less than the cost the current rise in oil prices is imposing on them, but that's without the taxes that the French were so hysterical about not having imposed (in other words, they have no problem paying more so long as their money goes straight to the Corponationals' bottom lines and from there into the bank accounts of their shareholders, yet not a nickel will now go toward the road repair and other infrastructure maintenance that the comparatively slight raise in taxes would have provided).

In other words, both  of the above "ifs" should be "since, or then."

Since we will continue on our current path, the current US death rate will persist, and we consider the million dead by this summer in the same way we consider a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea:

A Good Start.

Not-so-Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Denmark, have all dropped any Covid restrictions, considering the mowing down of the most vulnerable of their populations to be a boon to their own well-being and economies.  Other than Japan, (which is the most homogeneous population in the OECD "community", one similar to North Korea), every one of the End of History liberal democracies is letting the virus that causes Covid run amok among their populations (even, as previously stated, going to the extreme of assuring them, so as to not jeopardize their Christmas profits, that a far milder version of it was the dominant variant  when, clearly, they knew it was not), because, like Accuweather, they are, like, so over this pandemic. But, of course, it isn't through with us ...not by a long shot. But, of course, that's the point. There are too many of "us"; but we, as in those in the OECD countries, think of that "us" as "them," ie the global South. But as much as we like to deny it there is also a "they", and the they, largely comprised of mega-billionaires and Corponational CEO's, can plainly see that their future lies not with the energy-hungry OECD nations, but with the billions of willing slaves in the "developing" (as in never to attain the per capita energy consumption of the "West") countries who have not the  slightest interest in global warming, nor pollution control, nor anything else so cerebral. Living a hand-to-mouth existence, they will, as both India and China have so dramatically shown, tolerate any level of poisoned air, water and land, so long as it brings even the promise of Western style living ... or dying. 

These billions, the product of the Green Revolution that ushered in a fossil-fueled, unsustainable burst in agricultural production that doubled the human population in less than a generation, is now to be eclipsed by yet another Green Evolution, toward zero-emission energy production, hailed by people who "listen to the science", even though basic physics would inform them that there is no such thing as either net-zero or zero-emission energy. And that that is never more obvious than when you have a population that is the most coddled in human history still clamoring to be even more cosseted in their effortless existence by even more energy slaves. There is, in other words, no one on the face of the earth who doesn't want more for less, and doesn't crave something for nothing; and the West is determined to re-educate anyone who thinks there should be any "Limits to Growth", as ... "Freedom" ...  in the way the west interprets it: "Live Free or Die" (as in, for me to Live Free, you must Die"), or I will run you down, crush you like a bug under the tires of my 4-ton SUV-EV because the energy I use is Clean and Free. It's from the sun .... it's just the wind ... it comes from hydro. The fact that the scale of creative destruction embodied by each of those Green energy technologies is never reflected by a subsequent reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, and are all responsible for the increase in methane in the GHG atmospheric mix, need never be addressed, never mind actually measured. 

It is no coincidence that the Biden administration, that is pushing the fantasy of Green Machines onto a "Please lie to me" constituency, is the same administration that last May informed the public that vaccinated individuals could congregate indoors sans masks, flying in the face of its own CDC, in order to let the vaccinated feel rewarded for getting vaccinated, yet knowing that vaccination had little to do with asymptomatic spread of the then-exploding, and deadlier, delta variant of the virus.

So, whether you ever thought of it as a "Plandemic", it should be obvious by now, that, after more than two years, there is in fact a plan, but it is one which we have been left bereft of details. 

Just as COPout26 had nothing to do with the actual plans to rid the atmosphere of CO2, it is equally apparent, if the rhetoric is to be believed, ie if you listen to the science, that there are highly-placed people who have different ideas than the ones to which we've been made privy. And the fact that the two largest economies in the world stand in such stark contrast to each other in their handling of a deadly pandemic should be a grim demonstration of what the individualistic West actually thinks about the sanctity of the individual they pretend to be so concerned about. For when the individual's survival comes at even the slightest endangerment to the Machine's Profits (not to the Machine itself, mind you, but simply to the level of profits it produces), the individual's life must be forfeited to grease the wheels. Like the famous fish eating the smaller fish, the SUV drivers callously crushing anything in their way under their wheels, are themselves now being crushed under the wheels of the all-consuming Machine ... "Sorry, Dave"), simply to pay dividends to shareholders who already, by virtue of their even owning shares, are far better off than those dying. 

While the Red Party of the, "This will Never Be A Socialist Country," throws its own citizens under the Bus, while its Black and Blue Party beats itself silly, the Totalitarian Communist Red Party puts its own citizens' lives ahead of its own Doom Machine that it has copied from the West. That is not happenstance. The Communist country of China has pulled off Lenin's trick and not only sold, but devised, the Rope with which Capitalism is using its Freedom to hang itself. That's why it is indeed a plandemic. And the plan, which they make no secret of, is to, the science be damned, do as Bore-us, "We don't heed no stinkin' Virus", Johnson suggested in the first place, and decree it endemic. Lenin would be so Proud.