Open Thread – Weekend 29 April 2023
1,509 responses to “Open Thread – Weekend 29 April 2023”
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Not allowed to protest Satan.
The annual SatanCon festival arrived in town on Friday to celebrate the organization’s 10-year anniversary, kicking off with a bizarre opening ceremony that saw speakers tear up the bible and perform ‘un-baptisms’.
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‘Hail Satan!’ screamed one of the speakers, Chalice Blythe, who repeated the chant as she tore up a bible and a ‘thin blue line’ police-advocacy flag during the opening ceremony.Funny how they never do that to a Koran. And those “white supremacists” just about glow in the dark, they’re so obviously Feds. I may be wrong, but smearing Christians is just the sort of thing alphabet agencies like doing lately.
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On January 30, the Cochrane organization published its report entitled “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.”
Cochrane carried out the review using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). 12 of the 78 total included were comparing individuals wearing no facemasks to those with surgical/medical masks on.
The result was that the masks did little to reduce the spread of respiratory diseases. The report itself reviewed at least 78 studies involving at least 610,000 participants. Of all the studies, only six involved the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Cochrane review results also indicate uncertainty about whether wearing P2/N95 respirators reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. The review further indicates that hand hygiene programs slow the spread of respiratory infections.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/effectiveness-of-mask-mandates-62a323bd
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“Alamak!says:
April 29, 2023 at 11:47 pm
Biden is senile and has nuclear launch codes.Same same for trump, a loose canon if there ever was one. And both are surrounded by more capable, rational peoples who’d like to keep living … so I’d say that point is a draw.”
NO. Donald Trump is many things, ‘senile’ is not one of them. You’re entitled to your opinion of Donald Trump but to imply he is “senile” is both absurd and preposterous. Joe Biden is in cognitive decline and that is an indisputable fact, a fact that is turning off many, many Democrat voters, which probably explains why Robert Kennedy’s political star is rising as I type these words. Now whilst I understand why people don’t like Donald Trump’s character, his coarseness and vulgarity being two character traits he possesses in spades, his legacy as president, energy independence, robust economy, capping illegal immigration, supreme court nominees, brokering Middle Eastern diplomatic ties between Israel and three Arab nations, surpasses anything the old Sniffer Biden has done or will accomplish. America under Biden is crumbling before our eyes. Another indisputable fact is that the world is a much more dangerous place under Biden than it was under Trump.
I don’t mind legitimate criticism of Trump, as a human being there’s much to criticise, but that applies to every human being. What I dislike is the constant, petty and vindictive TDS. Not that they are unlike personally in any way, but it is the same here with Tony Abbott derangement syndrome. The left will stop at nothing to smear, ridicule, denigrate, sneer, and delegitimise anyone on the right of centre. And if DeSantis wins the nomination next year, they will do the same to him. Actually, they’ve tried doing it to DeSantis.
Oh and Alamak….anything to say about the Biden family and corruption? Or perhaps you think that’s just “Wussian misinformation and disinformation”? LOL.
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It’s about time we started thinking the unthinkable – that our elites want us gone and replaced by a more malleable voteherd and that they are working toward this.
Unintended consequence will be they themselves will be replaced as well. I am waiting for the rise of ethnic based political parties, parts of Sydney already have advertising billboards all in Chinese script which means they certainly have the mass in certain areas.
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Piers Akerman:
Vandals closed the Liddell Power Station on Friday, pushing NSW closer toward a future in which energy costs will rise and blackouts will inevitably ensue.
Those responsible for the closure were the former NSW energy and climate change minister Matt Kean and the current Energy and Climate Change Minister Penny Sharpe, along with AGL shareholder activist Mike Cannon-Brookes, one of the woke Atlassian billionaires.
Liddell is not only being closed senselessly; the 50-year-old plant is to be demolished.
In Germany, once the greenest of European nations, Berlin’s oldest power station, Moabit, built in 1900 and regularly updated, is still operating using coal and biomass in a co-combustion process with a fluidised bed combustion system.
Interestingly, the idle Redbank power station in the Hunter Valley has the same combustion system and used coal tailings to generate power between 2001 and 2014, when it was mothballed. The current owner, Verdant, estimates it could bring it back online within four to eight months if it could get anyone in government interested in cutting through the red tape that hobbles the bureaucratic process.
CEO Richard Poole has been driving efforts for the past four years to have the plant reopened using biomass, which would generate renewable power and transmit it through the existing network 24/7, but has so far been unsuccessful.
According to Poole, his company would also grow mallee – a great absorber of CO2. The job creation possibilities are staggering and Poole estimates that similar plants to Redbank using low-grade fuels and biomass could provide 25 per cent of Australia’s needs.
He points to Finland, which has the highest per capita electricity consumption in the EU, and relies on renewables for 40-45 per cent of its energy. Of that, 80 per cent comes from biomass (usually peat) and the rest is hydro, with more baseload coming from nuclear.
Nuclear has already been raised as a substitute for Liddell and for Eraring, which is due to close in the next two years.
Local federal National MP David Gillespie has long been a strong supporter of installing small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) on the sites of existing coal-fired plants.
“These plants are national assets and should never be destroyed,” he told me. He points out that the government-issued certificates don’t actually provide power but they do drive prices up as they are worth more than the energy they produce.
“We don’t have an energy market, we have an energy racket,” he said.
Labor, State and federal, doesn’t get it. Like the teals and their dopey supporters, they seem to think that batteries produce electricity when they are no more than storage facilities and capable of providing minimal power for a few hours max.
Every government in Australia bleats about energy security but no one is doing anything about it.
If we are to have a defence industry, we need reliable energy.
If we are to have any manufacturing industry, we need reliable power.
If we are to keep the lights on, we need reliable power.
The policy of selling our coal to China so they can manufacture the components for wind and solar generators we can then install across food-producing agricultural land so teals and Greens and Labor and the Matt Keans of the Liberal Party can feel virtuous – is just so dumb.
Our contribution to global warming, over-hyped by the ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology, is so minuscule that all this virtue signalling does nothing more than destroy our nation.
Be it clean coal, gas, biomass or nuclear, fire it up and put the nation back on its feet.
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The result was that the masks did little to reduce the spread of respiratory diseases. The report itself reviewed at least 78 studies involving at least 610,000 participants. Of all the studies, only six involved the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Cochrane review results also indicate uncertainty about whether wearing P2/N95 respirators reduces the spread of respiratory diseases. The review further indicates that hand hygiene programs slow the spread of respiratory infections.
This is something else I expected to see during the early COVID time, an avalanche of studies into every aspect of the disease and its treatments. That there was nothing or even a prevention of studies was a huge alarm bell that didn’t seem to interest the media.
When I was undergoing chemo eleven years ago the medical people looking after me were very keen to impress on me the need for hand hygiene and not touching my face and eyes if at all possible. Masks were not even mentioned. Masks are just virtue signally theatre, they belong in the operating theatres where they do have a role.
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If you get this joke, I automatically have more respect for you!
https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-644bd8e262d09.jpg
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Herald Sun has two articles, with sub headings reading as:
Victorians could be slugged with a new property tax to help fund the Andrews government’s social and affordable housing agenda.
And:
Friends and family members looking to team up to buy their first home will be among millions more Australians eligible to tap into government housing cash under a major expansion of three grant schemes. SEE IF YOU QUALIFY
So if I read this correctly, the Federal Government can give you a grant to get a house yet Andrews will contemplate a tax?
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That there was nothing or even a prevention of studies was a huge alarm bell that didn’t seem to interest the media.
Relevant essay today:
In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job candidates may well be evaluated more by their record of supporting “social justice” than by their scientific achievements.
RTWT. The original is behind a paywall, but this Insta post has a large chunk.
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Andrews article first:
Victorians could be slugged with new property taxes in a bid to help fund the state government’s social and affordable housing agenda.
The Sunday Herald Sun can reveal the state government has started work to establish new developer contributions in a bid to boost the state’s coffers.
The discussions, which also include planning reforms and improving housing supply, are not part of the upcoming state budget.
It comes a year after the government was forced to scrap its $800m social housing tax that would have funded up to 1700 new social homes each year.
The government backflip came less than two weeks after the tax was announced and would have also included key reforms to fast-track building and planning approvals.
But the property and construction industry slammed the proposed 1.75 per cent social housing levy, which was set to add an extra $20,000 on the median price of a new house.
Now sources say work is underway to recoup funds that would have been raised under the social housing tax.
Advanced industry consultation is expected to get underway later this year in an effort to avoid a similar damaging public campaign as the one threatened last year.
Sources familiar with the government work said various options were likely to be canvassed.
They would include a mandatory inclusionary zoning which would either impose levies or designate a portion of new builds to social housing.
An inclusionary zoning model was close to being introduced in 2019 following a successful pilot program.
Government sources said Victoria had been closely monitoring significant planning changes in South Australia and Queensland.
Since 2020 South Australia has operated under a single rule book replacing the 68 council development plans which regulated planning rules.
In Queensland priority development areas are unlocking thousands of parcels of lands for social and affordable housing.
Daniel Andrews last week confirmed the government was considering a suite of planning reforms.
It could see councils stripped of planning powers over major developments.
Property Council of Australia Victorian executive director, Cath Evans, said any reform needed to be well considered and involve a wide range of stakeholders.
“The Property Council has made our position clear – the Victorian taxation system is in need of a review to fully examine the impact that taxes are having on both the supply and affordability of housing,” she said.
“Any change to the State’s tax settings needs to be aimed at driving economic growth and delivering new housing supply to an increasingly stressed market.
“While we haven’t been engaged on specific proposals for reform, we remain committed to constructive collaboration with the Government to address this and other challenges facing the State.”
Opposition housing affordability spokeswoman Jess Wilson said Victorians couldn’t afford new taxes while there was a cost and living crisis.
“This would be the latest among 44 new and increased taxes, charges and levies under this tired government,” she said.
“The Andrews Government have an impossible task in explaining how yet another property tax hike will solve the housing affordability crisis.”
“Victoria already lags the other states on new dwelling starts and this approach will only make it harder again for Victorians to own their own home.”
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Big_Nambas says:
April 30, 2023 at 9:26 am
If you get this joke, I automatically have more respect for you!https://media.notthebee.com/articles/article-644bd8e262d09.jpg
I had a good laugh. How many crows are needed to qualify?
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flyingduksays:
April 30, 2023 at 9:16 am
It’s about time we started thinking the unthinkable – that our elites want us gone and replaced by a more malleable voteherd and that they are working toward this.This is not ‘unthinkable’, its ‘undeniable’ once you realise our government does not represent us, it rules us.
Been that way since Howard at least. The degree of immigration, with largely incompatible cultures, has been an unspoken war on Australians for at least that long.
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Federal grant article:
Friends and family members looking to team up to buy their first home will be among millions more Australians eligible to tap into government housing cash under a major expansion of three grant schemes.
The criteria for the first home guarantee, its regional equivalent and the family home guarantee will be significantly expanded from July 1 in a bid to get more people into homes.
Under the schemes the federal government acts as guarantor on up to 15 per cent of a loan for prospective home buyers, allowing them to buy a house with a deposit as low as 5 per cent and avoid paying lender’s mortgage insurance.
The changes include the definition of a “couple” as only married or de facto relationships to now becoming “any two eligible individuals” — opening up the scheme to sibling pairs, a parent and child, or two friends.
The family home guarantee is currently open to single parents with at least one dependent child but will be expanded to including single legal guardians of children alongside Australian permanent residents.
This means single legal guardians of children like aunts, uncles and grandparents would also become eligible beyond single birth or adoptive parents with dependants.
The scheme will also open to people who haven’t owned a home in ten years, which the government signalled would help those who had fallen out of homeownership often due to financial crisis or a relationship breakdown.
Australian permanent residents would also be eligible to apply, instead of just citizens.
Housing Minister Julie Collins said households had changed and the federal government needed to move to “meet the times”.
“We know friends and family members are already teaming up to secure their own place to call home,” she said.
“Our actions will allow them to access vital assistance, just as couples have been able to previously.
“These are sensible changes that will help ensure more families have a safe and secure place to call home.”
In total, 35,000 first homebuyer spots are available each year, with 10,000 more for the regional first homebuyer guarantee and 5000 for the family home guarantee.
Data from the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) shows the First Home Guarantee and Family Home Guarantee schemes were 99 per cent and 58 per cent subscribed in the 2021/22 financial year, with the unused spots rolling over to the next year. Two thirds of the Regional First Home Buyer scheme, introduced at the end of 2022, had been taken up six months into the program according to the latest figures.
The announcement comes just as housing ministers are due to meet, where the decisions made by national cabinet to “strengthen renters’ rights” is set to be high on the agenda.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after the meeting, announced $2bn in additional funding for the federal government’s housing finance arm to support longer term and lower cost loans for community housing providers to increase supply.
Build to rent investors, mainly large overseas trusts, are set to benefit from a reduction in the withholding tax rate from funds to foreign residents on income on newly constructed properties from mid-July 2024.
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University of Queensland forced to apologise over ‘white privilege’ medical assignment
The University of Queensland has been forced to apologise and scrap the results of a controversial “white privilege” medical assignment after students feared they could be expelled for failing. SEE
COURIERMAIL.COM.AU
The University of Queensland has been forced to apologise and scrap the results of a controversial “white privilege” medical assignment after students feared they could be expelled for failing.
First year UQ medical students had been asked to write about their own “white privilege” and institutional racism in a two-part assignment.
The Sunday Mail understands when students received their grades last week the majority of the cohort received a fail mark.
One medical student told The Sunday Mail, on the condition of anonymity, they believed the ones who had passed had effectively lied about admitting to being racist.
“The people who did well have frankly lied, they played into the notion that they’re racist, even if they’re not,” they said.
Following backlash from the medical cohort, the prestigious university has been forced to apologise and remove the results of the assignment from end-of-year grades.
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Courier Mail has article about Uni Qld medical students having to write about white privilege to pass an exam.
Majority failed. One student said those who passed would have done so by lying. Problem is it would have meant some A student’s might have got a B and affected final grades and future employment.
UQ have backflipped.
Heard 4BC host commenting briefly on it and say all white males had white privilege.
I see Chris Kenny article on the Voice got 1800 comments. Must be tough for him as every such article he writes 90% of readers are opposite to his views.
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Alamak!says:
April 29, 2023 at 11:47 pm
Biden is senile and has nuclear launch codes.Same same for trump, a loose canon if there ever was one. And both are surrounded by more capable, rational peoples who’d like to keep living … so I’d say that point is a draw.
The only draw is between your empty ears.
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Our contribution to global warming, over-hyped by the ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology, is so minuscule that all this virtue signalling does nothing more than destroy our nation.
The climate scam is all about destroying pesky western democracies.
It’s not about fixing the climate.
It’s hyped by many more than ABC and BoM. -
He points to Finland, which has the highest per capita electricity consumption in the EU, and relies on renewables for 40-45 per cent of its energy. Of that, 80 per cent comes from biomass (usually peat) and the rest is hydro, with more baseload coming from nuclear.
If peat is ‘renewable’, then so too are coal and oil, just on a longer timescale.
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It became that [an energy racket]as soon as power stations were sold to private enterprise. Before that they were a racket for the unions.
There is nothing intrinsic to private ownership of generating assets responsible for the current state of the electricity market. What you have is huge government created regulatory risk. Sure, there was scope to game whatever “market” mechanism was in place but nothing on this scale. Agree the unions did well under the previous regime. AGL isn’t really the problem. They are stuck trying to play by whatever rules are in place from time to time.
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Masks are just virtue signally theatre, they belong in the operating theatres where they do have a role.
Actually, masks in operating theatres are ‘theatre’ also. Somewhat surprisingly, we have known since at least the 1980s that, even when worn by surgeons working over open wounds, they *increase* rather than decrease wound infection rates. And what did we do when we found that out?… we kept wearing them, no one dared acknowledge the finding. The original paper (a good quality RCT which daily randomised whether surgeons wore a mask or not in the OR, for 6 months) presented data showing a *doubling* of wound infections when masks were worn, but then rather weakly concluded there was ‘no evidence of benefit’.
I cant lay my hands on the original paper, but this one from 1991 also showed a marked increase in wound infections when masks were worn.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/#:~:text=It%20has%20never%20been%20shown,using%20face%20masks%20or%20not.
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And for those of you interested in other myths …. contrary to popular belief, Christmas and Easter are *not* high risk times on the roads, but are actually slightly safer!
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I cant lay my hands on the original paper, but this one from 1991 also showed a marked increase in wound infections when masks were worn.
We can’t have the truth getting in the way of profit from PPE sales…
Also, I’m sure masks are the last things on anyone’s mind when patching up people on the battlefield.
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Black Ball at 9:24 am
He [Verdant’s Richard Poole] points to Finland, which has the highest per capita electricity consumption in the EU, and relies on renewables for 40-45 per cent of its energy. Of that, 80 per cent comes from biomass (usually peat) and the rest is hydro, with more baseload coming from nuclear.
Technical Notes: Peat is young coal and only renewable if you say it quickly with your fingers crossed.
Verdant is snuffling through the renewables undergrowth looking for truffles:
Verdant is driven by its ambition to facilitate the supply and uptake of green hydrogen to make the realities of a green hydrogen economy possible.
The awesome power of trays of OPM, laid out by Arts/Law graduates hoping to attract a NetZero.
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I’m not planning on doing a Razey any time soon. The Australian Federal model certainly doesn’t allow US California to Florida type tax arbitrage. I would expect Victorian tax, water charges, land tax, stamp duty and the like to be greater than either their WA or Qld equivalent over the foreseeable period.
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Any evidence that Biden is encouraging his fans to mob up and take over Congress any time soon? Any solid evidence that the election was not won by Democrats?
Whoa. Someone has been drinking at the MSM trough and comes in here with a bad case of belly ache.
Jan 6 was an MSM beat up, as recent video shows, and ‘fortifying’ elections and tampering with votes, both proven beyond doubt for 2020, is certainly ‘taking over’ Congress. Put down that bong, Bozo.
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Following backlash from the medical cohort, the prestigious university has been forced to apologise and remove the results of the assignment from end-of-year grades.
Right. Apology is good, acknowledges offense, fault, and harm.
Now lets do who got fired for abusing their position by having that woke and abusive assignment forced on the students in the first place. Anyone?
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Watched Baris’s latest yesterday and he is noting that the polling is showing the gap between DeSantis and Trump is only growing, at around 40 pts. He is also saying that he is winning all demos apart from 200K and over, incl. 4 years over college. He’s saying a lot of this has to do with disgust with the indictment and the like.
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Now lets do who got fired for abusing their position by having that woke and abusive assignment forced on the students in the first place. Anyone?
Being UQ, first year med, the odds are whoever it is is on a fixed term contract.
I’d be surprised if they’re extended, not because of any principle but because of the bad publicity.
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Buying our industrial capacity, i.e. our ‘renewable’ energy infrastructure, directly from China, is probably the most stupid piece of military planning any country ever engaged in (although German reliance on Russian gas is a pretty close second). The main thing about ‘renewables’ is that the infrastructure for them, CO2 heavy in its manufacture, requires constant replacement (renewing), and currently it all comes directly from China made with our coal.
Piers Ackerman nails it, above.
Historians of the future will have to blink twice when they read about this. Especially as the world is likely to be in a cooling phase by that time. Unbelievable.
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Just a thought. What sort of connecting wires do solar panel farms have? Would a rat or mouse plague make a meal of these? Keeping them clean from dirt and insects might also become troublesome. And a hailstorm such as Sydney periodically has could do great damage. Proud owners of rooftop installations seem to have a blind spot about hail damage.
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Seems Newsmax have made an offer to Tucker that includes him being able to choose the line up.
I hope Tucker does his own thing like Rogan and then builds around it to compete with Fox in the evening.
I remember the scene in one of the shows about Roger Aisles (Russell Crowe) where he makes the pitch to Rupert Murdock. Says just needed to target right side of politics and let all the other channels fight it out for the other 50% of the market.
I think Tucker could take a big chunk off Fox and hope he does.
This is also why Elon buying Twitter has been so important and why the left hate him so much. You don’t have to agree with him but Craig Kelly’s Twitter would be 90% censored if he posted similar on YouTube or Facebook. Likewise many of the Dr’s who spoke out and were silenced can now post freely.
Twitter is good as so many constantly posting well researched information and reminding people about how much misinformation we were given in past few years.
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Article on hailstorm damage with some pics here.
Also google for further pics of massive hail damage in Sydney.
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Watched Baris’s latest yesterday and he is noting that the polling is showing the gap between DeSantis and Trump is only growing
As an aside polling is really sick right now. Steven Hayward had a graph this week which is shocking, especially when you pencil in the shy righty demo. Who would finger themselves to the alphabet agencies that easily? At least hide and make ’em work for it. But the data quality seems only one step up from webpolls these days.
The Daily Chart: The Challenge of Polls | Power Line (26 Apr)
On the other hand you have to say that elections these days aren’t much better!
My feel though from comments on righty sites is that the Republican base voters want Trump since he fights against both the left and the GOP elites. They’re less sure DeSantis will fight the latter with quite as much vigour, even though they like what he does in the culture wars.
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Whoever was the Qld civil servant who came up with the Wagner deal so no longer be in their job. However pretty sure Wagner would employ them !
Exactly but I think the rot probably goes deeper. Lets see if the opposition has a set to have an inquiry or set the CCC on to it. Talking about it in opposition when it is news is one thing and actually following through with it is another…
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What I dislike is the constant, petty and vindictive TDS.
What I loathe most is the whole LYING industry that has gone into turbo mode since Trump became POTUS. That industry not only houses the media- but every single organ of state – LYING and misrepresenting the truth and facts, censoring and spying on citizens to further the aims of Marxism and authoritarianism. Creating punishments and intrusions on daily private lives.
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They’re less sure DeSantis will fight the latter with quite as much vigour, even though they like what he does in the culture wars.
Maybe. My realpolitik suggests though that DeSantis is more likely to get voted in. ‘Fortification’ would perhaps have less effect on him than on Trump as there has to be a level of willingness to accept it, which was there with Trump but less so in the general mood with DeSantis, especially vs Biden. And better to have someone good in the White House than leave the field to the Demonrats any longer.
Hairy’s a dedicated Only Trump man though, so this house is split.
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Under what circumstances does anyone think Australia would stop exporting coal to China?
We never did even during the so called ban. Like what is happening to Russian oil as an end run round sanctions via India our coal was being onsold as “Indonesian coal.”
I suppose business is business and shrewd people will find end runs around obstacles.
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Clear felling forests for biomass would be renewable in a shorter timeframe than peat. Keep it under your hat though.
Appalling lo-trouser climate offender.
The energy content of the entire planet’s forest biomass is the equivalent of 10 years of the world’s primary energy production. Apparently.
Where would the canaries live?
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The original paper (a good quality RCT which daily randomised whether surgeons wore a mask or not in the OR, for 6 months) presented data showing a *doubling* of wound infections when masks were worn
Duk – Maybe it would be better to go back to Joseph Lister’s approach of spraying the theatre with a fog of antiseptic. That would mean the theatre team would have to use PPE to protect against the antiseptic, but it would do pretty well knocking off viruses and MRSA. Especially the latter.
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Bruce O’Nuke:
“Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam has taken to Twitter to share his frustration in an 11-point thread after he was served carrots and a handful of potatoes for dinner as the ‘vegan option’ in hospital.”
Poor petal. Carrots and spuds for tea.
I’d have left you where you fell rather than contaminate your ideological purity with a petrol guzzling ambulance, you self entitled prat.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/climate/i-would-block-ambulance-with-dying-patient-onboard-says-xr-founder-roger-hallam-b2185727.html -
Over The Target news:
This may have been referred to earlier on this august journal of record, but anyway (the Courier-Mail):
An eminent Queensland jurist has invoked the spirit of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in warning of the unforeseen impacts of a yes vote in the Voice referendum.
“It is an irony that so many of the proponents of the Voice, well-intentioned and highly regarded as they are, should be echoing the language so often and infamously used by the late Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen to reporters seeking information about government: don’t you worry about that,” Ian Callinan said.
On the money.
A High Court judge for more than nine years, he added: “All of the indications are that the Voice will be made up of a hand-picked Canberra cadre.
“In short, it is probable that the representations will not be made by a truly representative body.”
Duh. Duuuh.
It comes as prominent Victorian lawyer Stuart Wood says barristers supporting a yes vote for the Indigenous voice to Parliament are commercially motivated and will reap a financial windfall for doing so.
Duuuh. DUUUUH-UUUUUUHHHHHH.
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a story about dealing with bullies
yep.
nothing like being forced to collude in a cartel arrangement with an American ‘powerhouse’ who reckon your Competition and Consumer Act is irrelevant
I told the bloke that even having a discussion with him exposes us criminally
and that basically, I thought his behaviour was a form of extortionknowing that there was a proverbial stick somewhere even though he didn’t bring it to the meeting, I subsequently made sure we had an alternate supply line.
then wrote a piece of software that parses the DB backup file their machinery keeps.
the software turns their backup into ready built and runnable ‘station’ that our new equipment would integrate
I wrote that software in a hotel in Phuket … 10 days of F-you powered by fish-cakes and Mai Tais so that we could condense weeks of their work into minutes of ours for evermoreAppear weak when you are strong — Fun Tsu
sure enough a few months later I got a terse phone phone call cutting us off
I gave an equally terse reply, “no probs, but you do know that this means the gloves are off”We spent a decade removing their rubbish equipment and integrating with ours
every single opportunity that arose, we exploited it.
and it was very profitableultimately the ‘powerhouse’ bought the competitor and so now ironically, we buy from them again.
this time they’ve tried to bind us to their software/hardware by using custom licensed componentsthey don’t know it yet but we have already found an alternate supply that have better equipment and yes, written another parser to strip the files of their proprietary junk
We already deploy this and the ‘powerhouse’ is wondering why our sales have fallen off lately.Every battle is won before it is ever fought
— Stun TsuTo cut and to slash are two different things.
Cutting, whatever form of cutting it is, is decisive, with a resolute spirit.
Slashing is nothing more than touching the enemy.
Even if you slash strongly, and even if the enemy dies instantly, it is slashing.
When you cut, your spirit is resolved.
You must appreciate this.
If you first slash the enemy’s hands or legs, you must then cut strongly.
Slashing is in spirit the same as touching.
When you realize this, they become indistinguishable.
Learn this well.
— Musashi -
Jorge:
After watching the Lindsay speech and sharing it with my daughter I’m left pondering what can be done.”
Cassie of Sydney:
Indeed. Instead of silence, instead of running for cover, instead of cowering in the corner, we need to stand up and tell the truth.
Be not afraid but endure! Those that take pride in their evil hate the Church. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
On the Feast of the Corpus Christi (Sunday, June 11), many Australian Capital Cities are planning their Annual Eucharistic processions throughout the streets of their respective CBDs. For example, Sydney is planning their Walk with Christ and likewise Brisbane, the Corpus Christi Procession. Check other Australian capital cities for theirs.
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My realpolitik suggests though that DeSantis is more likely to get voted in.
No Republican can get voted in Lizzie. You know that. The US is nearly at Venezuela level now, election-wise.
My Socialist Hell: Venezuelans Await Maduro Sham Elections, ‘Opposition’ Primaries with Apathy (28 Apr)
At the moment it seems our elections are real, but I can’t see that continuing too many more years. The Left everywhere have the bit between their teeth and are refusing to take ballot box rejection for an answer.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Progressive American Critique of Pandemicism: A Review of ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
EUGYPPIUSRobert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1510766808.
No single work has influenced the American alt-Covid discussion as much as Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, an extended attack on the medical-industrial complex and its purported kingpin, recently-retired National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci. Across 450 pages of narrow margins and densely-set type, Kennedy argues that the entire Covid pandemic unfolded as a second act to the AIDS scare from the 1980s and 1990s. In Kennedy’s view, Fauci played a key role managing both pandemics, to steer massive profits into the coffers of corrupt pharmaceutical companies by pushing harmful proprietary drugs over vastly less profitable but more effective remedies, leading in both cases to untold unnecessary mortality.
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Kennedy’s discussion of Covid is split between the opening and the concluding sections of his long book. Chapter 1 on “Mismanaging a Pandemic” – at 100 pages, a small monograph unto itself – argues that most if not all of American Covid mortality arises from Fauci’s cynical suppression of early treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. The final two chapters expand the narrow focus of this opening barrage, by tracing the history of “phony epidemics” like the 2009 Swine Flu that have occurred under Fauci’s watch (Chapter 11), as well as the strange tradition of pandemic wargaming, from Dark Winter to Event 201 (Chapter 12).
The middle chapters are wholly different. They draw on long-standing progressive critiques of Fauci’s role in the AIDS pandemic, particularly his promotion of expensive and dangerous antiviral drugs like AZT over much cheaper and more readily available treatments (Chapters 2-4); his alleged role in cementing the scientific orthodoxy of HIV as the cause of AIDS over the views of “heretics” like Peter Duesberg (Chapters 5–6); ethical scandals surrounding AIDS drug trials (Chapter 7); and the campaign to reduce the maternal transmission of AIDS in Africa with Nevirapine, which culminated in the firing of key AIDS Division policy director Jonathan M. Fishbein (Chapter 8). Thereafter the focus shifts to the “Philanthrocapitalism” of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Africa (Chapter 9) and the questionable success of and controversies plaguing Gates-supported vaccination initiatives there (Chapter 10).
There’s a reason this review has been much announced and much delayed: While Kennedy’s book is highly readable, it covers a great deal of ground, and presents a complex series of arguments that it’s taken me two readings to understand fully. This has been worthwhile, insofar as it’s improved my perspective on the broader Covid debate in America, and the leading dissident voices there. A recurring thesis of the plague chronicle, is that Europe – and specifically Italy – is ground zero for Corona in the West. The American response happened somewhat later and from its earliest moments was much more deeply politicised, and this has inevitably left its mark on TRAF, in ways that are sometimes salutary, but sometimes also limiting.
Because much of what follows will be devoted to exploring my disagreements with Kennedy’s thesis, I will open with words of praise:
Above all, the focus that Kennedy brings to bureaucratic actors like Fauci is absolutely correct and vitally important. All of our countries spent years subject to the tyranny of an arbitrary gaggle of Corona tsars, unelected and very often unofficial advisors who became the public face of pandemic policies and the incarnation of The Science for hysterical journalists and terrified television-bound Covidians sheltering at home. This phenomenon arises from the fact that the pandemic represented in almost all of our countries a kind of bureaucratic coup, as the institutional apparatus seized the initiative from the political arm of the state. While this isn’t exactly the argument that Kennedy makes, his focus is in exactly the right place, and TRAF includes excellent discussion of the dynamics at work, alongside good, detailed and heavily-cited accounts of how bureaucratic actors like Fauci amassed their power in the first place.
Second, Kennedy is absolutely right to point out that pandemic policies involved an enormous amount of dishonesty, scientific fraud, and misrepresentation, none of it redounding to the health or well-being of anybody. While I differ on the details and the purpose of this massive exercise in deception and medical malpractice, one of the most vital things to understand about the pandemic (and pandemicism in general) is that it’s not about human health. It’s a bunch of antisocial, fundamentally unhealthy, illogical and insane policies that never had any hope of suppressing a virus. These policies were defended and implemented via the authority of avatars for The Science like Fauci, who “encouraged his own canonization and the disturbing inquisition against his blasphemous critics,” and at one point even famously declared that “‘Attacks on me … quite frankly, are attacks on the science’” (xvii).
Third and finally, TRAF is best seen as an attempt to revive an older, increasingly forgotten progressive tradition of regime-critical activism and thought. It is one massive reminder, page after page, that many of the very same left-leaning Americans currently worshipping at the altar of St. Fauci were, not that long ago, openly opposed to the machinations of public health bureaucrats and deeply sceptical of heavily promoted proprietary pharmaceuticals. They were some of the first to complain about things like regulatory capture and exorbitant pharma profits. The entire Western world has undergone a massive political since 2020, one which has conveniently aligned compromised regulators, powerful corporations, and their erstwhile leftist critics, and Kennedy is one of very few left-leaning progressives to have taken notice.
But this is also where my praise must end, because I think there are important limitations to Kennedy’s perspective here, and that this is a strength that also entails some substantial weaknesses.TRAF was not the book I expected. On first reading, I was surprised to find that key pandemic policies such as lockdowns and mask mandates play such a small part in his account, as do the misuse of propagandised disease statistics to terrorise the populace, gain-of-function research and the origins of SARS-2, the failed predictions of virus modellers, the overuse of ventilators and many other themes in this vein. To be sure, Kennedy condemns all of this, but the bulk of his analysis is focused elsewhere. I was also surprised to find that such a well-known vaccine sceptic should have so little to say about the Covid vaccines, confined mostly to a brief discussion of pathogenic priming.
In many ways, those chapters that Kennedy devotes to Corona are his least impressive and original. His argument here is heavily indebted to American critics of pandemic policy like Pierre Kory, Ryan Cole and especially Peter McCullough, who are quoted in extenso to make the case for early treatment and the dire consequences of its suppression. Kennedy is at his strongest in the middle sections of TRAF, on Fauci’s role in the AIDS crisis. Here citations to contemporary reporting abound, and while he covers controversial ground – like Duesberg’s thesis that HIV is not the cause of AIDS – his approach is entertaining and also in many ways careful and sensitive to a broad range of possibilities.
Kennedy shares the view of many gay activists that much early AIDS mortality is to be laid at the feat of public health managers like Fauci, who were more interested in promoting expensive proprietary antivirals than saving lives, leaving the gay community to fend for itself (149f.):
[B]ustling networks of community-based AIDS doctors mushrooming in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas [became] specialists in treating the symptoms of AIDS. As Dr. Fauci swung for the fences – the miraculous new antiviral ‘cure’ for AIDS – these community doctors were achieving promising results with off-label therapeutic drugs that seemed effective against the constellation of symptoms that actually killed and tormented people with AIDS. These included off-the-shelf remedies like ribavirin, alpha interferon, DHPG, Peptide D, and Foscarnet for retinal herpes; and Bactrim, Septra and aerosol pentamidine for AIDS-related pneumonias.
The toxic Fauci-promoted antiviral azidothymidine, or AZT – which HIV sceptics like Duesberg invoke to explain early AIDS mortality – becomes in Kennedy’s telling a direct precedent for the failed and toxic antiviral Remdesivir, which Fauci and others promoted as a Covid treatment according to the very same “worn rabbit-eared playbook” (67) from the AIDS era. In this analysis, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are cast accordingly as the 21st-century counterparts to the off-the-shelf drugs procured for informal AIDS treatment by the buyers’ clubs of activist legend.
This brings me to the most serious disagreement I have with my many American readers. Just as I’m very sceptical that the Covid vaccines were any kind of success, I am also unconvinced that early treatments could have significantly ameliorated or stopped the pandemic. This doesn’t mean I’m happy with their suppression; doctors should be given wide latitude to treat diseases as they see fit. But, I don’t believe that this is the central knot in the pandemic tapestry, and I cannot bring myself to believe, like many of Kennedy’s informants, that any of these proposed treatments are likely to be “miraculous.”¹ Kennedy is surely right in suspecting that attacks on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were related in part to the heedless promotion of Remdesivir, but I also can’t buy the related argument that this was mere regulatory wrangling to pave the way for an emergency use authorisation for the vaccines. The pandemicists violated all kinds of laws and rules in their eccentric three-year crusade, and fudging the requirements for an emergency use authorisation would rank among their lesser offences. I’d also suggest that respiratory viruses like SARS-2 and influenza are an old, pervasive phenomenon, which also afflict livestock and against which we don’t have any very effective remedies despite a century of obsessive research. I know there are studies that show the opposite, but there are also studies that show the vaccines are safe and effective. Because Covid isn’t actually that dangerous and wasn’t even that transmissible before Omicron, a lot of remedies, from masks to lockdowns, will at times seem to work, and I have no trouble believing that doctors who eschewed first-wave over-ventilation of patients saw substantially better results for that reason alone.
But, the empirical question, of what we can reasonably hope that any specific drug will achieve, is for me almost a side issue. Far graver is the framing that the entire discourse on early treatments assumes. The advocates whom Kennedy quotes and people like Fauci appear to be in agreement not only that Covid presented a serious danger, but that it was a problem to solve. They differ merely on the solutions, with public health technocrats on the side of lockdowns, masks, vaccines and remdesivir; and early treatment advocates on the side of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. This has uncomfortable consequences, as when Kennedy uncritically cites Covid mortality statistics to demonstrate Fauci’s failure in pandemic management, or when he attributes falling mortality to things like the authorisation of hydroxychloroquine. This is exactly how pandemic managers themselves argued, and I submit this entire ideological system around viruses as a thing to prevent and manage – whether via ivermectin or masks or anything else – is the root of all evil. This is a natural blindspot for progressive critics of pandemic policy like Kennedy, who generally support the mission of modern bureaucratised liberal democracies; it’s why he laments the “global war on … public health” in his subtitle. After the hell of the past three years, I think there are few things we ought to welcome more enthusiastically than a war on public health, which is no longer by or for the public and no longer about health.As I said above, TRAF includes some excellent discussions of the malign public health bureaucracy that rules us. The managers who dominate our institutions are manifestly not selected for their vision, their compassion or their scientific knowledge, but rather for their abilities to ascend byzantine bureaucratic hierarchies and defend their positions in them. Thus we read (p. 132) that
[Fauci’s] gifts were his aptitude for bureaucratic infighting; a fiery temper; an inclination for flattering and soft-soaping powerful superiors; a vindictive and domineering nature towards subordinates and rivals who dissented; his ravenous appetite for the spotlight; and finally, his silver tongue and skilled tailor.
Kennedy also provides a wealth of apposite remarks on what he calls the “medical cartel,” namely the complex and intertwined system of “pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, HMOs and insurers, the medical journals, and public health regulators” (135), along with a detailed and well-cited analyses of how this system works (120):
Dr. Fauci’s drug development enterprise is rife with …corrupting conflicts. Most Americans would be surprised to learn, for example, that pharmaceutical companies routinely pay extravagant royalties to Dr. Fauci and his employees and to NIAID itself. Here’s how the royalty system works: Instead of researching the causes of the mushrooming epidemics of allergic and autoimmune diseases … Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs. He often begins the process of funding initial mechanistic studies of promising molecules in NIAID’s own laboratories before farming the clinical trials out to an old boys’ network of some 1,300 academic “principle investigators” … who conduct human trials at university affiliated research centers and training hospitals, as well as foreign research sites. After these NIAID-funded researchers develop a potential new drug, NIAID transfers some or all of its share of the intellectual property to private pharmaceutical companies, through HHS’s Office of Technology Transfer. The University and its PIs can also claim their share of patent and royalty rights, cementing the loyalty of academic medicine to Dr. Fauci.
He also rehearses standard and useful left-leaning critiques of major philanthropists like Bill Gates, with an equal awareness of the broader system in which they participate and the dividends their apparently charitable activity pays them (291):
Gates strategically targets [the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s] charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions. Following such tactics, the Gates Foundation has given away some $54.8 billion since 1994, but instead of depleting his wealth, those strategic gifts have magnified it. Strategic philanthropizing increased the Gates Foundation’s capital corpus to $49.8 billion by 2019. Moreover, Gates’s personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to 133.6 billion today. Gates’s wealth expanded by $23 billion just during the 2020 lockdowns that he and Dr. Fauci played key roles in orchestrating. …
In 2017, the Huffington Post observed that the Gates Foundation blurs “the boundaries between philanthropy, business and nonprofits” and cautions that calling Gates’s investment strategy “philanthropy” was causing “the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term.
These are, again, attacks from a forthrightly progressive perspective, which is fine and in view of Kennedy’s audience maybe even a strength, but I see these matters in broader terms.
What we have before us are not so much hierarchies, with managers like Fauci at the top commanding an army of loyal principal investigators in the trenches, as they are complex densely interconnected networks of personal and institutional relationships and loyalties, which extend beyond the institutional confines of government agencies to embrace broad swathes of academia, NGOs, pharmaceuticals, and philanthropists. When money flows in one direction across a given node, power very often flows in the other direction. NIAID grants are a way of extending the institutional influence of the public health institutions to academia, while academics and pharmaceuticals are in turn increasingly important in often informal and difficult-to-assess roles in formulating policy. This is one instance of a pervasive phenomenon I have returned to many times, namely the diffusion of political power downwards, out of the bureaucratic institutions and into an ever wider range of corporate, university and media actors.
It is a complicated system, not a fiefdom managed by any single person, and while I accept that there may rhetorical or advantages in focusing critique on a single actor like Fauci, there is also a cost in a tendency to overstate his importance. The “quarantine of the healthy” which “would kill far more people than COVID” can’t be laid entirely or even primarily at Fauci’s feet; nor was he alone responsible for “obliterat[ing] the economy, plung[ing] millions into poverty …. and grievously wound[ing] constitutional democracy globally” (xviii). Fauci is one face of a widely distributed bureaucratic consensus, and his personal significance, while surely substantial, is also often obscure.
To take one of many possible examples, it wasn’t Fauci who “dispatched the handpicked elite of virology’s officer corps to draft and sign the consequential editorials published in Nature and The Lancet … assuring the world that the lab leak hypothesis was a ‘crackpot’ conspiracy” (p. 297). As later emails leaks (not available to Kennedy at the time of writing) seem to suggest, he was merely one participant in a broader discussion involving Jeremy Farrar and key virologists, and far from the most active contributor. From the partial view that we have, it seems that Christian Drosten, not Fauci, was the most strident voice in favour of natural origins early on. Relatedly and in another connection, I find the oft-repeated thesis – hardly original to Kennedy – that “Gates controls the WHO” (p. 300) or that he exercises “dictatorial authority” (p. 302) over the global vaccinator cabal known as GAVI far too limited. Gates’s agenda with respect to third-world medical interventions and vaccines is not even all that original. This is an agenda he supports to transform some of his wealth into social and cultural regard. Gates is a follower even more than he is a leader.
One cost of this focus, is the fact it sidelines a lot of key actors whose motivations to this day await adequate explanation. This is especially the case with Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, who is cast in his all-too-brief cameo here as a mere agent of Farrar and Bill Gates (361f.). Ferguson’s role in promoting virus panic over decades is a crucial one, and that it’s probably not a good idea to discount him as the mere agent of other, bigger men.Summing up, I would say there’s a narrowness in the approach that TRAF takes to the pandemic, which is easy to miss because Kennedy’s scope is so broad in other respects. The final chapters on “Hyping Phony Epidemics” and “Germ Games” read like efforts to include topics otherwise excluded by the internal logic of Kennedy’s argument. It’s absolutely right and necessary to draw attention to the failed panic mongering of the pandemic establishment, and there’s a particularly valuable account here of the overhyped 1976 Swine flu panic, which all too many (including myself) have neglected. Far more important for understanding Corona, however, are very real outbreaks like SARS-1 in Asia from 2003/4 and Ebola in West Africa from 2014. These events drew vast funding and attention to the pandemicist programme and made their virus apocalypse scenarios much more credible in the eyes of the public. The most proper precedents and parallels to the 2020 Covid response lie here, rather than with the AIDS crisis that first brought Fauci to prominence
In Kennedy’s final chapter, meanwhile, Fauci all but disappears in favour of new personalities like Peter Daszak and Robert Kadlec. Here, the civilian bureaucrat responsible for organising the catastrophic pandemic response is displaced by much different theses about the biosecurity aspects of pandemic wargaming and Covid as “a military project” (from 433). I find that the book is at its weakest in these pages. Particularly the discussion of pandemic wargaming is too superficial; as I’ve said many times, what’s significant about these exercises is not that they planned mass containment policies in advance, but precisely that overtly coercive virus suppression is missing from them. They often toy with the prospect of authoritarian measures, it is true, but a sensitive reading shows that they do so largely to provoke handwringing histrionic discussions about the importance of civil liberties. Mass containment was not Fauci’s invention, but an insanely repressive and largely theatrical exercise in virus suppression that originated in China, to which Fauci was a relatively late convert.
Because these matters are fairly far from Kennedy’s most central concerns, I don’t want to press too hard here; and to those readers who are irritated, I’ll extend at the end of this review the concession that has been implicit throughout: Kennedy is a long-time political activist, and it’s probably true that his approach has important tactical advantages. My concerns are much more empirical. I want to understand the pandemic response, how it arose and how it persisted for so long. It’s up to other people to find the most effect ways to discredit pandemic policies before the voting public.
There is one point that I won’t concede, though, and that the plague chronicle will insist upon so long as there are still bits flowing through the internet. This is that the overgrown overcomplicated self-serving bureaucracies of Western states must be kept, in future, as far as possible from preventing or mitigating virus outbreaks. The problem is not that they alighted upon the wrong solution in this case; it is that they assumed the project of solving pervasive seasonal respiratory viruses in the first place. Even if ivermectin worked as well as its advocates argue, the technocratic leviathan would hardly be satisfied with that, and the reason is not merely pharmaceutical profits. It’s the predilection of our institutions for intractable problems and highly complicated solutions via which they justify their own existence and ensure their propagation and the expansion of their jurisdiction. Once they get ahold of something like a virus, which spreads via social contact, you will seeing nothing but the proliferation and brutal enforcement of anti-social anti-human policies again and again.
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The assertion occurs repeatedly in the first chapter, where I wish the argument were much more moderate. See p. 8, where Pierre Kory claims that “The efficacy of some of these drugs as prophylaxis is almost miraculous”; p. 17, where we hear that “McCullough used his own money … to teach doctors the miraculous benefits of early treatment with HCQ and other remedies”; p. 18, for Ryan Cole on the “miraculously effective medicines to treat this virus”; p. 24 for “miraculous results following early treatment with HCQ”; p. 39 on the “miraculous efficacy” of ivermectin; p. 46 about Andrew Hill’s research supporting “IVM as a miraculous cure for COVID”; p. 52, where Tess Lawrie is found “endorsing the miraculous efficacy of IVM”; p. 56, where a “dying woman miraculously began to recover” following the administration of ivermectin; p. 62, for McCullough once more on ivermectin as “a molecule that is miraculously effective against parasites and viral infections along multiple pathways and mechanisms of action.”© 2023 eugyppius
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The implications of the approaching US Debt Cieling, or potential default.
It could very well be different this time, with high prevailing interest rates, sticky inflation combined with stratospheric Debt =Turbulence.
Lyn Alden’s latest newsletter for those interested;
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“No free ice cream for Chinese”? BMW evaporated €2.26B/Tesla learns a lesson/Decouple from China?
China Insights
The 10-day Shanghai International Auto Show opened on April 18th, 2023. Tesla, America’s largest electric car company, didn’t attend. As it turns out, it was a smart move by Tesla. It learned its lesson from the 2021 Auto Show. This time, it’s BMW’s turn to be unlucky.
The CCP is no longer able to give Germany a larger market. It basically has no more cards to pull Germany’s strings. And the political and security differences between the two countries are becoming increasingly obvious. In addition, for a long time, the CCP has used patriotism to make the public form a xenophobic mindset and sentiment.
This has led to the emergence of more war wolves, large and small, who have brought about the chaos that is beyond the control of the CCP. -
Makkasays:
April 30, 2023 at 11:23 amA nice comfortable shed, where to can switch all this shit off and spend quality time with your interests and hobbies, while doing the best to forewarn/forearm you family.
I’ll sell you a rundown old pub and throw in a matching serving wench for free. Cheep at fifty thousand.
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the language so often and infamously used by the late Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen to reporters seeking information about government: don’t you worry about that,” Ian Callinan said
Callinan’s whole piece is excellent advice to the unwary and he is certainly in a position to know.
His views should form part of the NO vote advice. Certainly should be there in the advertising.
It points to what is likely, especially the fact that the Voice will be hand-picked by Labor and in there for all time. -
As Roger points out Tucker is still under contract to Fox. Just read good Breitbart article via top of Powerline blog about Tucker and Bongino.
Plenty of comments coming out that Fox will want Tucker out of the picture due to fear of competition and preferably not being able to have an impact on 2024 election. The remaining $’s from his contract is going to be tens of millions and hard for Tucker to give up.
Easy for me to say but if he walked away without a pay out and did a Rogan (ie. Subscription) I think he would come out ahead in 2-3 years.
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This is how Govt’s fight inflation. They make policies that jack up energy prices that provide windfalls for maaates.
Russian Oil Still Powering Europe’s Cars With Help of India
India is importing record amounts of Russian crude oil
Nation has simultaneously become Europe’s top fuel supplier– Bloomie.
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No Republican can get voted in Lizzie. You know that. The US is nearly at Venezuela level now, election-wise.
Preparing to give it one last try, Bruce, with removal of the Trump factor. If that fails, then I think an insurrection or breakaway of some sort around Trump will be inevitable if the Dems continue on the same path as currently. You obviously don’t think Trump will win against a 2024 steal. I think DeSantis might. Or do you still hold out hope for a last redoubt under Trump?
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