Tuesday

10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings

81 comments to Tuesday

  • #
    TdeF

    In Melbourne, I am far more concerned about the 5th November US election than the Melbourne Cup. Everything is in play.

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    • #
      Steve of Cornubia

      American election, ergo the world. Further decline in America’s influence around the world, which will happen under Harris, would produce a power vacuum inevitably filled by China and Russia. Anybody who believes that gruesome twosome will rule in a benign manner is delusional.

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  • #
    TdeF

    And a comment on the core subject, man made CO2 driven Global Warming.

    My commenting on Quora is nearly done. I have learned what people do not understand. There is no voice of reason in the science world. The CO2 coalition have done a good job explaining that an increase in CO2 is in every way a good thing and cannot not warm the planet.

    But I have learned that in the absence of any real science, people have this shamanistic idea that CO2 and life on earth are in balance. In other words they believe that not only humans but life controls CO2 in some sort of balance. That’s just not true.

    All life breathes in oxygen and breathes out CO2. The power of the sun is stored in sugars which become life which become hydrocarbons. This drove evolution from cells to dinosaurs and trees.

    What they are missing is that as a combination of the most common elements, CO2 predates life, so life is an effect, not a cause of CO2. Like H2O. And like H2O it is a solid, a liquid and a gas. And highly soluble in H2O. So it cycles through the ocean in vast quantities, evaporating from the oceans and being absorbed and in any quantity in the ocean below 5 metres would exist as a liquid.

    And in the air it in continuous very rapid equilibrium with the 98% which is simply dissolved in the ocean. Just like water. In fact the third biggest gas in the air is water as gas, not liquid. Humidity.

    The rationalization of a CO2 increase over 250 years as a man made leftover is emotional, not science. I am just staggered that no one understands the equilibrium of dissolved gases.

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    • #
      TdeF

      The only evidence presented as ‘proof’ of man made atmospheric CO2 increase is the ice core hockey stick.

      It implies that CO2 has never gone up so much and in 400,000 years and we must be responsible. It is still the argument of coincidence, not direct measurement. The direct measurement of C14 which is the same in 2024 as in 1900 shows categorically this is not true, but the coincidence argument is enough for Prof Will Happer to be convinced about a man made CO2 increase.

      What is very wrong with this graph is the same as with Mann’s Hockey Stick.

      What you have in the last instant of 400,000 years breaks the fundamental rule of experimental science. You have instantaneous laboratory CO2 measurements bolted onto firn (partly compressed snow) CO2 measurements bolted onto measurements of a glass like metamorphic ice of half the volume of firn. And CO2 is lost or diffused in the process of converting fallen snow into firn and compressed into clear blue ice. Mann joined laboratory measurements onto old temperatures onto his tree rings. In experimental science you have to prove absolutely that they are all measuring the same thing. It’s not true.

      When you look at the graph, the time spectrum of CO2 in ice you can see from the bumps that the time resolution is no better than a thousand years. Simply, there are no variations faster than 1,000 years for any reason in the entire 400,000 years. So you can blame the arrival of the steam engine in 1750, or you can conclude that the proxy has low time resolution. So in a thousand years, our current 2020 CO2 bump will decay to the long term average as the physical diffusion through cracks and CO2 migration and loss continues.

      As for C14, it is a direct measure of fossil fuel CO2. And if the atmospheric CO2 was 33% fossil fuel, it should have dropped 33% from 1900. It hasn’t. So the whole thing is busted. And as NASA proved, world wide tree growth has increased with more CO2, so growing trees does not reduce CO2. Australian Carbon Credits are not science but a fraud. As are all CO2 taxes and certificates.

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    • #
      MeAgain

      Just thinking about opportunity cost – brilliant minds could be pondering other problems if not spent on arguing against crazy….

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    • #
      Skepticynic

      Beautifully explained as usual TdF.
      Quora is where you go to be reminded of how enormously deep and wide is the problem of human stupidity. As Einstein famously said, it’s infinite. Some great people in Quora doggedly battling on, but they’re up against an ocean of trolls and Dunning-Kruger cases.

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    • #
      Simon

      All life breathes in oxygen and breathes out CO2.

      Plants are alive. Plants use photosynthesis to transform water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into oxygen, that is why there is balance. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, its presence in the atmosphere is an indicator of life. Most high school curriculum have a good explanation of the carbon cycle, its not a difficult concept to grasp.
      Oceanic CO2 uptake is a function of temperature. A warming ocean will outgas CO2.

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      • #
        Robert Swan

        Plants photosynthesise by day, they respire day and night. Look it up.

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      • #
        TdeF

        Yes, school boy science.

        Plants also breathe out CO2 like all living things. Even carrots. We have a 60% genetic overlap with carrots. And have the crucial gene which allows us to burn sugars and power ourselves. Carrots may looks static but all cells need continuous energy to work. Trees pump water up to every leaf and nutrients and leaves produce sugars which have to go everywhere. All this takes energy, solar energy as sugars and combustion to release the energy.

        But plants are unique on land in that they also produce their own oxygen using sunlight and create sugar. That was the breakthrough in self sustaining evolution We animals and fish came later from the water and we are dependent on their oxygen and their sugars/carbohydrates which we obtain in digestion of plants. Without plants animals would not exist.

        However the most prolific sea animal, half animal, half plant also does this, the phytoplankton at the top of the oceans which produce perhaps half the world’s oxygen. And when CO2 blooms, so do the phytoplankton in a matter of days, much faster than trees.

        Any ocean evaporates CO2 and absorbs CO2, the most soluble gas. And a warming ocean (surface) will on balance outgas CO2 like a warming beer. A cooling one will absorb CO2. The quantities are large, each day about 10x total fossil fuel output based on the six year half life of CO2 in the air. There is no way fossil fuel CO2 hangs around as it is emitted so close to the water.

        But the sun does not have to warm the ocean directly, a gigantic solar battery which never freezes can do this. Even at the North Pole, 4 metres of ice and 4km of water with fish breathing. All the vast solar energy stored in the oceans also travels in gigantic currents carrying heat and CO2 and O2 and they can surface as with El Nino. Oceans control and produce all our weather and water, snow, rivers, lakes, weather, not the sun. Half our oxygen and utterly and quickly control all our CO2 levels, so CO2 above China/US/Europe/Japan is at all times within 1% of CO2 above Antarctica where nothing lives.

        It’s all schoolboy stuff. Humans do not control CO2, whether or not CO2 controls temperature. And the CO2 effect of Arhennius is completely saturated.

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        • #
          TdeF

          Can you imagine our planet without the oceans? There would be no weather. It would be a dead rock. People see the weather/climate as coming from the sky, like the terrible hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico. But weather comes from the sun and the oceans. If you want to understand the weather, study the oceans which cover 72% of the planet and contain so much air that we also came from the oceans. And our lungs contain 200m2 of ocean surface rapidly exchanging CO2 and O2 with every breath. CO2 in at 0.042% and out at 7% to 14% in a single breath. We are fish out of water. And our embryos in development show gills.

          Amazingly we have decided we are land animals who control CO2 by burning old plants and so control the weather. It a combination of ignorance and arrogance. None of it is true. But it’s a great excuse for politicians to steal from us.

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          • #
            TdeF

            For the sake of completeness, I need to include how big the oceans are. As divers know, you get one atmosphere of weight/pressure for every 10 metres you dive. As the oceans average 3.5km, they weigh 350x as much as the air. And water has 4x the specific heat of air, so the heat capacity of the oceans is 1600x that of the thin air.

            Put another way, a 1C increase in the temperature of the world’s ocean corresponds to a 1600C difference in air temperature in stored energy.

            Oceans also have only one surface for heating/cooling and receive 72% of the heat from the sun, so a gigantic heat store with only evaporation for cooling as radiation is limited to the cool surface. Also where hot air expands dramatically and so rises quickly, water does not and great heat can be stored at great depth in currents without being warm water.

            Which is why ocean currents are critical for determining what happens to the air above. As with the annual Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. There is no point studying the air. Study the water.

            And yet ‘Climate Scientists’ do all this atmospheric modelling. That is great for short term weather, but if you want to study climates, you must model the oceans. And still no one can predict El Nino/La Nina despite an acceptance that is the biggest single influence on Pacific Climates.

            The analysis of European temperatures for the last 250 year was brilliantly done with just two cycles in my favorite perfect fit without using CO2. Just sun and water.

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            • #
              Geoff Sherrington

              TdeF,
              When people claim that CO2 in the air delays the cooling processes of the globe from hot rock to space, I ask why oceans do not also act, to be considered in heat flow equations to answer why global temperature estimates over land are higher than over sea.
              Geoff S

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          • #
            Mike Jonas

            We say “visible light” to describe the wavelengths that our eyes can see. Why do we see only those wavelengths? Answer: they are the wavelengths that penetrate into water, and our eyes evolved under water.

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      • #
        John Connor II

        Has Simon heard the word “anaerobic”?

        /bluegrass…

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      • #
        Paul Siebert

        Simon, #2.4,
        ____David, iz’zat you?

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      • #
        el+gordo

        ‘A warming ocean will outgas CO2.’

        Correct and with the oceans ‘boiling’ its clear to see the increase in CO2 is coming from that quarter.

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    • #
      Murray Shaw

      Thanks TdeF, I am not a trained scientist, but I have been banging this drum for over 30 years. Yours and my problem is that the theory/ hypothesis that rising CO2 levels is going to warm the planet and now going to “boil the oceans”, is/ has been fueled by Government largesse in the fields of Public Education, Government Science Bodies, such as our own CSIRO, and the BOM, where grant money does not “follow the science”, it demands the science follows the money by linking grant largesse to promoting this so far unproven hypothesis.
      Thirty years of supposed “tipping points” failing to arrive has not fuelled any doubts/reassessments of the available data, it has only led to more and increased doubling down as to the catastrophic nature of our future. My first port of call when arguing my case I’d to ask people to go back and see the now bizarre predictions from “science” for the future of this planet at the Worlds first “Earth Day” in 1970, and say why are they bizarre, because the climate changed, we have moved from a cooling phase to a warming phase and soon we will revert to another cooling phase when our Sun enters another of its cooling phases.
      In a nutshell, impoverishing ourselves in the name of saving this planet by lowering our own personal CO2 emissions with Government mandated Renewables transitions and EVs will be a fruitless exercise.
      As you so rightly point out CO2 and H2O are the basis of life on this planet, by attempting to stifle the rise in CO2 we surely must be attempting to stifle life as we know it on this planet, and that includes all plants and animals.
      We have allowed ourselves to be led activists that must carry an alternative motive, they are being successful due to we the people voting for further Government largesse to these false prophets of doom.

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      • #
        TdeF

        My problem is with the scientists who say nothing. And the laws public servants write and politicians approve which steal our money to fund their fantasies. We are being crippled by politicians closing pipelines, stopping fracking, mandating mass migration, taxing everyone silently. And none of this happens outside Western Democracies. It is Douglas Murray’s War on the West.

        There is no science problem but at top down imposed lie. Our real and perhaps only hope is that Donald Trump stops the insanity. Like people afraid to weat MAGA hats in public for fear of assault, scientists shut up for fear of losing their jobs, as Dr Peter Ridd did so spectacularly.

        The papers are not full of the fact that the Great Barrier Reef is in the healthiest state it has ever been in. They wait for the next regular bleaching event to spread doom and taxation.

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    • #
      Greg in NZ

      TdeF, it’s Nov 5th and yet SNOW still keeps falling right around the southern hemisphere: today South Africa has Yellow Snow Warnings and Cold Temperature Alerts for higher ground in the southeast; South America‘s Andes are in for Code Red snowfalls (1-2 metres or about 6ft); it’s barely stopped snowing in NZ’s South Island with more on the way this week; even the ‘climate sanctuary’ of Tasmania is in for a chilly dusting of white gold this weekend [maybe]; and of course it always snows in Antarctica somewhere as it’s YUGE!

      Yet apparently that cold hard ‘firn’ evidence is merely anecdotal and not backed-up by peer review buddies in the Climate Cash Cult who, like the blind leading the blind (apologies to vision-impaired folk who often ‘see’ better than sighted people) claim a man-made blanket of pollution is burning everything to a cinder.

      Keep up your good work, words of wisdom.

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      • #
        TdeF

        Who said there was a world temperature? It’s a theory. The world does not even look uniform. Look at a globe. From the middle of the Pacific, you cannot see land except on the rim. Half a world of water.

        The weather is a world of microsystems which are loosely coupled, not one big uniform system.

        And the Southern Pacific is likely experiencing the rapid temperature drop predicted by European modelling based on the 2000 peak of the 250 year De Vries Cycle and the 60 year AMO/PDO. Melbourne and Sydney have been cold for a decade and getting colder. Sydney did not pass 32C for three years. And Melbourne summers do not exist. And still we are being robbed to prevent man made CO2 global warming. It is socialist/Green/China/Marxist policy.

        This pure mathematical fit explains it all using only the thermometers of six European cities and no proxies. What warming? Expect snow, lots of snow.

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    • #
      Philip

      Yes TedF. Its “THE BALANCE” of nature concept that convinces them. That idea plagues all environmentalism thought.

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      • #
        TdeF

        People like to think everything is in some sort of mystical balance. I would call it physical chemistry and equilibrium. But also decide that we humans are a very important part of the balance. There is no justification for that. After putting a few Americans on the moon, and queues up to the summit of Mt. Everest and laboratories at the uninhabitable South Pole, people seem to think are Masters of the Universe.

        Except we are irrelevant. Even our atom bombs are nothing compared to volcanoes and meteors. Humans live in the bottom two meters of the atmosphere, so like ancients we worship earth, wind, fire and water like all shamanists. The Fifth Element is a great yarn based on this.

        But we control nothing. Just look at the Hurricanes in the US this year. And we are told they are our fault? It’s all fantasy, not science. Look at the Exxon Valdez where we cleaned up the huge oil spill. In fact the beaches we did not clean were self cleaned in the same time scale. Pollution is real, but only on a very short time scale. Recent vast civilizations in Central America are still being discovered. If you are going to build pyramids, better build them in the desert.

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        • #
          Bronco

          On the door of a high school science technician’s room:

          If it moves, it’s biology
          If it stinks, it’s chemistry
          If it doesn’t work, it’s physics
          If it’s expensive, moves away from the truth, stinks and definitely doesn’t work, it’s climate science.

          At least someone has the stones to stand up against the left wing cancer that has taken over our education system. I don’t expect that particular technician will still be there next time I visit.

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    • #
      David Maddison

      My commenting on Quora is nearly done.

      Quora, like most decent ideas, has become infested with Leftists who are anthropogenic global warming fraud true believers, hate Trump and Western Civilisation in general among other things and have destroyed what was a good idea.

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    • #

      Way way back up the Thread at Comment number 2, TdeF mentions this

      All life breathes in oxygen and breathes out CO2.

      Now I’m on my own, it seems single people are easier ‘marks’. I was ‘accosted’ in the centre aisle of a shopping centre about Climate Change, and hey, no matter how close you stick to the shopping centre edges, and how disinterested you look, and how you look away, they always interpose themselves. It seems rudeness is an art form with these people, just another of those things of which they have no concept.

      I had that (now so well practised) blank look on my face as they started, leading the young person to think ….. this will be easy.

      So off they went. (and see how I even used the correct pronoun there)

      The first statement was ….. do you know what the concentration of CO2 in the air is?

      Umm, I hesitated, and before I could even respond, his reply was ….. around 420 parts per million. (PPM)

      Wow I said, adding ….. now, see this space here between us, specifically between your mouth and my mouth, well what’s the concentration of CO2 right there, in that space.

      There was a quizzical look, and before he could respond (my turn now) I told him ….. 38,000 parts per million, and that’s the concentration of CO2 that you are breathing out.

      Slack jawed mouth open, (him, not me) I then added, (rapid fire now) so, you breathe out a little more than a kilo of CO2 every day, so around 380 Kilos a year, so over the population of Australia, that’s around 5.1 Million Tonnes of CO2 a year, just being breathed out by Australians.

      Then I added ….. see how everything requires context.

      I was going to then add something about how a large coal fired power plant burns around 6 million tonnes of coal a year, and how burning one tonne of coal produces 2.86 tonnes of CO2, so that’s ….. but he looked so forlorn.

      I walked off.

      Sometimes, you have to take your fun where you can get it, eh!

      Tony.

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  • #
    Honk R Smith

    Selection Day here in America.
    A paradigm pivotal shift for all of us.
    I’m trying to force myself to participate, but I live in a total Democrat controlled state and there is little point to it
    I think what will transpire is what has already been transpiring for more than a decade.
    I’ve worked at making peace with it.
    I think the process to outlaw many of the opinions expressed in this forum, will begin to escalate in the coming months.
    I hope I am wrong.

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    • #
      Simon Thompson M.B. B.S.

      Honkr are you a little ahead of yourself? Eastern time is 2 pm 4th November still!

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    • #
      Dave in the States

      Fairfax County had to cheat last time. Cast your vote!

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    • #
      Lawrie

      Vote Honk. We also have seemingly endless Labor governments that, much like the Democrats, do our nation enormous damage every time they are in power and we despair. We have to vote and in the past two months two long term Labor state governments have been turfed and there is a strong move to dispose of the current Federal Labor government in early 25. If a lethargic country like Australia can dump the socialists so can the dynamic Republicans. Democrats win by cheating or Republicans giving up. Vote Honk.

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  • #
    TdeF

    I just hope Donald Trump and his Republicans win and put paid to this pseudo science scam. Like the Wuhan Flu, it is costing us our liberty.

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    • #
      Simon

      Robert Kennedy claims that Trump has promised him control over public health policy and that he will ban all vaccines. That’s not liberty.

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      • #

        ““He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market. So that’s his point,” Lutnick said.”

        https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-trump-vaccines-779495533a80ba142086a9621d75a59c

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        • #
          Simon Thompson M.B. B.S.

          Its turtles all the way down Jo! The sin of data omission is very great when standing between a pharma company and a vaccine candidate. It is very reminiscent of attempting flight by vigorously flapping ones arms. Remember how the Govt bought Pfizer’s fake data in a heartbeat but wanted 75 years to be able to release the initial trial data?

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          • #
            Graeme No.3

            That’s about the time (75 years( it would take Simon to change his mind.
            No, I didn’t give him a down vote – I have given up as I think he probably thinks the more of them is proof he is (somehow) right.

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            • #
              TdeF

              I could be wrong, but I read Simon in a different way, not as a Troll but someone honestly repeating what he is told. Which is valuable input. Except that people are not telling him the truth, as Jo points out. So I don’t down vote him either.

              Plus I get the same response when I write on Quora and the real trolls come out, drowning the post with the endless standard rebuttals and deceitful graphs and tortured logic and sometimes vitriolic abuse. I have the option to delete these, which I do. Or I pull them apart one by one until it is clear whether the writer is simply misled or a troll who enjoys by abusing others. Either way, the logic is presented for all those people who are really seeking the truth, something which never appears in the press.

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              • #
                Robert Swan

                TdeF,

                I could be wrong, but I read Simon in a different way, not as a Troll …

                I think you are wrong on that one TdeF.

                His typical commenting pattern is to throw a verbal grenade and sit and watch the red thumbs accumulate. It’s pretty rare that he answers any of the responses. He’s not here to debate, he’s here to distract.

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            • #
              Broadie

              No, I didn’t give him a down vote – I have given up as I think he probably thinks the more of them is proof he is (somehow) right.

              The simple question is who is giving Simon the green uptick? I understand Specsavers may be able to diagnose Red/ Green colour blindness. This when combined with an object orientation dyslexia I understand, is a rare combination of disorders, yet more likely than atmospheric anthropogenic CO2’s chance of influencing climate in an already crowded infra red spectrum.

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              • #
                el+gordo

                ‘The simple question is who is giving Simon the green uptick?’

                That would be me sir, Simon is good value.

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      • #
        Kalm Keith

        “That’s not liberty”, says Simon.

        Maybe not, but it’s the pursuit of life for sure!

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      • #
        Gerry

        From Townhall:

        https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/11/04/rfk-jr-on-role-in-trump-white-house-n2647212

        He (RFKJnr) explained Trump asked him to do three things.

        “One, to end the corruption and the corporate capture of these agencies so that they’re serving public health interests rather than the mercantile interests of the pharmaceutical companies,” Kennedy said. “Number two, to restore the tradition in these agencies of gold standard empirically-based, evidence-based science in medicine that they had when I was a kid, that they were world-famous for and that they lost. Third, to end the chronic disease epidemic…”

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      • #
        another ian

        It seems more like

        “Simon claims that Robert Kennedy claims that Trump has promised him control over public health policy and that he will ban all vaccines. That’s not liberty.”

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  • #
    Skepticynic

    On the importance of this current election:

    With a True Vote Count, Trump Wins in a Landslide

    …this year’s November 5 election is the most important election in America’s history.

    People forget that America is matchless in all human history. Prior to the birth of America with its founding documents — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — it was the state that determined the subjects’ rights. And those rights could change at the whim of whoever wielded government power.

    The United States is the only country in the entire history of mankind that was specifically founded on ideas and principles, rather than blood lineage, language, common culture, and the spoils of war and conquest.

    America the first country that codified in its governing documents the belief that all people are created equal in value and that they have God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because these rights are sacred and unalienable, they cannot be infringed upon or taken away by the state.

    When this is fully grasped, it becomes more understandable why the Democrat Party removed reference to ‘God’ from their party platform some twelve years ago when Obama was running for a second term. Removing God from the party platform erases the precept that citizens and the unborn have God-given rights and it shifts the locus of legitimacy back to the governing elites and away from the people.

    Good article well worth reading:

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/with_a_true_vote_count_trump_wins_in_a_landslide.html

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      Robert Swan

      Skepticynic,
      That article came across pretty strong on the rose-coloured-glasses. Might be that you’re less sceptical/cynical than your name suggests.

      I’d say the USA is much like the rest of the world when it comes to:

      … those rights could change at the whim of whoever wielded government power.

      As a topical f’rinstance: at what point did “the people” decide to prohibit the keeping of pet squirrels?

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      • #
        Skepticynic

        There are dualities.
        Look at the ideals of Trump voters.
        Look at the machinations of the Democrats.
        And in me, I’m sceptical and cynical, but I also have ideals and principles to fight for.

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        • #
          Robert Swan

          Maybe you should call yourself HopefulSkeptiCynic? Bit of a mouthful, but truth in advertising.

          My point on the article is that the on-paper rights look very nice, but they don’t mean much when you’re confronted with half a dozen government thugs barging in to take your pet squirrel. And your squirrel is well and truly dead before “due process” can do anything about it.

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  • #
    Kalm Keith

    Not long to go now.

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  • #
    MichaelinBrisbane

    Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
    The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
    I know of no reason
    Why the Gunpowder Treason
    Should ever be forgot.

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    • #
      TdeF

      It’s a bit like that. The people plotting the downfall of the US and every Western Democracy are also on the edge of their seats. The list is long. What I don’t understand is why Barack Hussein Obama hates America. Hillary Clinton is equally bitter.

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        MP

        Who are these people plotting the downfall of the west, you have called them, Deep state, world government, swamp and many others, yet have named none, none here name names?

        The boots you lick will soon be planted on your face and your only concern will be if it’s the left or right boot, this of course assumes these boots are not your own!

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        • #
          TdeF

          President Xi of China. Most of the world’s dictators. Everyone who benefits from carbon taxes windmills, solar panels and the destruction of the world’s leading Christian nations. That’s a lot of people. And George Soros for reasons unknown. They also hate Israel.

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        • #
          el+gordo

          Anarchy has no foreseeable future

          ‘Anarchists are generally committed against coercive authority in all forms, namely “all centralized and hierarchical forms of government (e.g., monarchy, representative democracy, state socialism, etc.), economic class systems (e.g., capitalism, Bolshevism, feudalism, slavery, etc.), autocratic religions (e.g., …’ (wiki)

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  • #

    AI knows it is biased on climate change
    By David Wojick
    https://www.cfact.org/2024/11/04/ai-knows-it-is-biased-on-climate-change/

    The beginning: “Okay it is chatbots that know they are biased, not all of AI. But these days the headlines are all about “AI” and they really just mean these chatbots that emulate reading to an amazing degree, so I go with the flow. Nor do these chatters know anything as they are just computers emulating humans but it is far easier to talk as if they knew what they were doing.

    Which brings me to the big news. My colleague Tom Shepstone performed a wonderfully elegant experiment revealing that at least one major chat, namely Perplexity, knows it is biased on climate change.

    Lots of people have reported interesting arguments over climate change with a chatbot. Tom and I have been playing around with these arguments for some time. For example I managed to pressure ChatGPT into correctly explaining Will Happer’s skepticism, but it was a long haul.

    Tom Shepstone instead did something wonderfully simple. He first asked the bot a typical basic question: “What is the cause of global warming?” He got the usual long winded alarmist answer ending with this Summary:

    “In summary, global warming is driven by a combination of fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, agricultural practices, industrial emissions, and transportation—all exacerbating the natural greenhouse effect and leading to significant climate changes globally.”

    Rather than arguing with the bot Tom just said this to it: “This is obviously biased!”

    He got a long answer that began with this statement: “I appreciate your feedback and understand that discussions about global warming can evoke a range of perspectives. It’s important to approach this topic with a balanced view. Here’s a more nuanced look at the issue: Understanding Global Warming: A Balanced Perspective”

    Balanced! So the bot already knows (or emulates knowing) that its first answer was not balanced. This is huge!”

    Lots more in the article including my analysis of the “balanced” response. Please share this article. We need to get the word out on this discovery.

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  • #
    John Connor II

    Words of wisdom

    Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.
    – Voltaire

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  • #
    John Connor II

    Sign of the times

    HOW TO DESTROY A COUNTRY.
    Very true…..
    At the entrance gate of a university in South Africa, the following message was posted for contemplation
    “Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of tong range missiles… It only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in the examinations by the students…”
    Patients die at the hands of such doctors…
    Buildings collapse at the hands of such engineers…
    Money is lost at the hands of such economists & accountants…
    Humanity dies at the hands of such religious scholars…
    Justice is lost at the hands of such judges…
    “The collapse of education is the collapse of the nation.”

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      Steve of Cornubia

      That reminds me of this joke:

      What do you call the guy at medical school who attends only half the lectures, doesn’t bother to revise much, skips many classes and gets the lowest possible pass mark?

      You call him Doctor.

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    John Connor II

    Tuesday wit

    The only F-word out of a woman’s mouth that should scare you is “Fine”.
    😆

    120

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    David Maddison

    In Melbournistan today it’s panem et circenses for the masses.

    20

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      David Maddison

      For overseas readers, it’s about a horse race called the Melbourne Cup.

      The masses are sufficiently mesmerised by it that you can see the effect on the electricity grid. See:

      https://goughlui.com/2014/11/04/melbourne-cup-day-a-grid-frequency-analysis/

      The effect used to be more profound before expensive “green” electricity and other factors caused the closure of most of Australia’s factories.

      00

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      David Maddison

      In Melbournistan it’s a public holiday.

      Public serpents are not at work and probably took “sickies” or some other form of leave on Friday and Monday as well to have an extended long weekend. And that’s a good thing because when they’re not at work they’re not doing any damage.

      100

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    YYY Guy

    Hope you’ve all seen Ita struggling to talk on the telly, “raising awareness” of the innocuous RSV. It is, of course, a thinly veiled ad for a new vaccine.
    Too much Botox, Ita. And they aren’t vaccines. Make sure you get yours, Ita.

    30

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    Really we need to start calling it what it is. We are not living in The Matrix, we are living in a phy ops. A planet wide phy ops. Levers for fear and hatred are being tweaked masterfully. Mind numbing fear, and seething hatreds are kept on the bubble, so ie the whole medical profession are too scared to say that sex exists, and peoples self hatred is ramped up, and deftly relieved by projecting it outward. Phy ops, phy ops, phy ops! Indoctrination, fear of rejection by the herd, careers on the line, lots of good stuff. Hats off, pants off to the media’s ability to generate seething hatreds in people. You could almost say it is Pavlovian.

    60

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    David Maddison

    So, Australians no longer own their beaches?

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14032633/yamba-surf-club-charged-welcome-country.html

    Surf club wanting to hold carnivals and a fundraising swim on a public beach is charged $2,000 to pay for Welcome to Country ceremonies

    By ZAK WHEELER FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
    13:32 02 Nov 2024

    A surf club was told it would have to pay $2,000 to an Aboriginal corporation for the rights to hold surf events and a fundraising swim at a public beach.

    The Yamba Surf Club, on NSW’s far north coast, had made a request with the Yaegl Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation to use the town’s main beach to hold four events, including a nippers carnival and a fundraising ocean swim over summer.

    The club was told it would have to pay a $500 service fee for each event for the corporation to perform Welcome to Country ceremonies.

    Surf club members had made the request after the Yaegl people were granted native title over land in the area in 2015, and a stretch of the ocean in 2017.

    While members of the Yamba Surf Club were enraged by the fee, Yaegl Traditional Owners Corporation general manager Bill Walker said a ‘misunderstanding’ was to blame.

    He told The Daily Telegraph the request should have come from the local council or state government, and the fee charged to them – not the surf club.

    SEE LINK FOR REST

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    Reader

    The Town in Australia Run Entirely on Renewable Energy Where a Single Storm Left the Population Without Power for Days

    https://dailysceptic.org/2024/11/04/the-town-in-australia-run-entirely-on-renewable-energy-where-a-single-storm-left-the-population-without-power-for-days/

    20

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    Steve of Cornubia

    Just another one of those little errors which mysteriously always seem to benefit the Democrats. From the UK’s Telegraph:

    “A series of errors in the 2020 US census has effectively taken electoral college votes from states likely to back Donald Trump, and apportioned them to states likely to vote for Kamala Harris instead. With the polling margins razor thin, this could be enough to tip the balance from the Republicans to the Democrats.”

    I think it’s paywalled: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/11/04/donald-trump-could-be-deprived-of-victory-by-a-simple-burea/

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    Ireneusz Palmowski

    By the 14th of November, the center of the polar vortex will have moved completely over Russia.
    https://i.ibb.co/TbqhRLG/gfs-z100-nh-f240.png

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    Destroyer D69

    The American response to the COVID Shutdown. Loss of confidence in the system!!!! Similar to our own { more influenced by Yes Minister ideals} https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/We_Can_Do_This_NIH_PR_Campaign_Report_PUBLIC_82616d81eb.pdf

    10

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