JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Statistics
Here is a fun one. They want to build an enormous lithium battery storage facility just outside of Boston. This article, which I advised on, says that is a very bad plan because these things spontaneously explode or burn and cannot be extinguished.
https://www.massfiscal.org/hazard_warning_for_everett_s_lithium_battery_park
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Delusionists pushing lithium b.s. into people’s lives and neighbourhoods need to be prescribed lithium to calm their manic erratic episodes (MEE) – the grandeur is all in their heads, as is the boiling and the melting and the runaway tipping points…
Besides, are there any witches left in Boston in 2025?
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CO2 is the new witch.
The parallels are amazing.
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If/when there is a fire, there’ll have to be mass evacuations , the emissions from a lithium battery fire are very toxic.
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Xi Jinping’s energy plan for China: Everything, everywhere, all at once
WILL GLASGOW
Solar projects as big as Singapore. Eleven nuclear power stations signed off in a single meeting.
A fleet of more than 1000 thermal coal-fired power stations … and still growing.
As Australia heads to a federal election that pitches nuclear power against a ramp up of renewables, China is taking an everything, everywhere, all at once approach to its electricity mix.
To travel around China is to witness a rollout of renewables on a scale beyond anywhere else in the world. You can see it from the window of every domestic flight or fast train trip.
Yet all this new solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power is still not enough to meet the growing electricity demands of China’s 1.4 billion people and its economy that remains for so many products the “factory of the world”.
New thermal coal-fired power stations continue to make up the difference.
“Forget about kicking thermal [coal] out of the mix,” David Fishman, a Shanghai-based energy consultant, says. “China is just trying to cover its demand growth with renewables.”
Chinese energy experts call it the country’s “ ‘two-way’ growth trend”, a simultaneous rollout of renewables and coal. Privately, many are aware it is becoming increasingly conspicuous.
Unlike in Australia or the rest of the rich world, China’s gargantuan electricity demand is still growing — even as the Chinese economy slows. This year it has risen by some 7 per cent, a rate that has surprised many long-term analysts of China’s energy market.
The sums in China are staggering. Just the growth in Chinese electricity usage this year was around three times Australia’s entire electricity consumption.
For all the hype about its raft of “world’s biggest” renewable projects, China is transitioning its electricity network at a far slower rate than Australia.
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Desire to dominate
Xi Jinping outlined his approach in a major speech in 2022 at a twice-a-decade party congress. “We will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way,” he told senior comrades.
Xi said China would follow “the principle of building the new before discarding the old”.
As is Australia, China is blessed with huge coal reserves. Unlike Australia, Beijing is unapologetic about making the most of them and the same with its gas reserves.
“Coal will be used in a cleaner and more efficient way, and greater efforts will be made to explore and develop petroleum and natural gas, discover more untapped reserves, and increase production,” said Xi in that same keynote speech.
It’s not as catchy as Donald Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” catchphrase but it’s the same idea.
Beijing has set a renewables target of 40 per cent for 2030, a modest increase from the just over 35 per cent it now derives from hydro, wind, solar and nuclear.
The Albanese government has set a target of 82 per cent by 2030, twice the current level.
China is changing its energy mix but the world’s mightiest one-party state is doing it on its terms.
There are no university students or former government ministers in kayaks blockading its coal ports.
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NICK CATER
Cold, hard energy lessons for Australia in UK’s grim winter’s tale
Britain’s last coal-fired power station closed at the end of September, throwing households to the mercy of the weather.
Sadly, Britain’s green activists have no plans to follow coal into retirement. The curse, or joy, of being a fighter for progressive causes is that your work is never done.
“The priority now is to move away from gas as well,” Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth told the Guardian. Friends of the Earth, like every other international green activist group, also opposes nuclear power.
This begs the question:
How will Britain keep the lights on without the three sources capable of providing baseload power?
Bosworth’s clownish answer is posted on FoE’s website. “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says.
“They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Last week, an Arctic front hit with a vengeance, reducing temperatures to as low as minus-20 and burying parts of England in snow.
The diminishing number of Brits who could afford to do so turned up the heating.
[SNIP]
150
OldOzzie,
This bit was interestingly worded:
They say this like it’s the most natural thing in the world that our electricity demand isn’t growing. Australia’s electricity demand would skyrocket if prices came back down to 15c/kWh.
If they came down to 5c/kWh we might even get some industry back. But forget industry, we’ve become a service economy (which apparently means we get worse service than ever before).
280
Eleven nuclear power stations signed off in a single meeting. A fleet of more than 1000 thermal coal-fired power stations … and still growing.
From the Comments – The Idiocy of The Australian Labor Party/Greens/TEALs Writ Large – led by Labor PM ElbowEasy, Blackout Bowen & Disaster Economics Chalmers
“None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See”
Backed by Loony Warringah TEAL – Zali Steggall told Sky News this week that base load power is “an antiquated idea”. “Our grid is evolving and changing,”
“The old-fashioned concept of base load power is proving to be more and more a thing of the past.”
Steggall may or may not be surprised to learn that at 5.15 am on Friday, 92 per cent of NSW’s electricity was provided by antiquated base load generators. What’s more, they were burning what she calls fossil fuel and the rest of us call coal.
70
Someone should ask Zali Zealot whether the people of Broken Hill think the idea of base load power is “antiquated” after transmission lines damaged in late October saw them left without power for 10 days. $650 million worth of renewables and a 50MW battery were useless without a supply of good old-fashioned electricity.
10
So which coal fired plant is going to charge the battery?
Hasn’t anyone in government joined the dots yet? Batteries don’t make energy. At best they just absorb some for later consumption, (after losses).
Batteries for the grid are like a 20,000 litre tank placed in a desert for the purposes of providing drinking water for a town with a population of a 10,000.
The tank can meet the drinking water demand for the people for a couple of hours but after that they soon realise that the tank is empty. There is nothing to fill it. And the people are wondering why it cost $20B.
And now the government want to install more batteries.
150
We are living in an age where spending real money for imaginary benefits and real risks is seen as a virtue.
390
Fire officials say that homeless camp wildfires doubled from 2020 to 2023 to 13,909. There were 24 “homeless related” fires in LA County responded to every day of 2021. https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/01/08/what-started-las-firestorm-we-have-some-ideas-n4935774
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Something that you get with a ‘Sanctuary City’, demorat idiocy knows no bounds.
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The likely arsonist of the 2021 Palisades fire was one homeless Ramon Santos Rodriguez, 48.
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ABPI figures in fact indicate that between 2020 and 2023 the RCGP received more than £500k from Pfizer.
Having failed to disclose that it had a financial relationship with Pfizer, @rcgp gave unequivocal, supposedly independent, advice and encouragement for the CMOs to deploy Pfizer’s product to children across the UK: “The Royal College of General Practitioners have consulted widely across GPs, and there is a strong consensus in favour of vaccinating 12-15s”
https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/our-institutions-are-hollowed-out-1cd
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https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/waste-is-great-food-waste-is-better
Consider that in our battle against waste (or more specifically, litter) we have outlawed disposable plastic straws.
Now, we get paper straws that are packaged in plastic to protect them during distribution to get perfectly preserved paper straws that don’t even perform the function that we value.
Surely this is more wasteful, economically and in terms of what we value, than a straw that does work, regardless of the material it is made from.
270
The purpose of banning plastic packaging and convenience products in Australia was not to stop an imaginary litter problem but part of the Left’s strategy of lowering our standard of living by the removal of convenience products (apart from many other strategies).
Leftists claim that plastic in oceans comes from Western countries like Australia and therefore convenience products should be banned. Anybody who has ever been to a Third World country knows exactly where plastic in oceans comes from. Littering and throwing rubbish in rivers is a behavioural problem in Third World countries. That’s the true problem that needs to be addressed.
And in Australia where container deposits schemes operate, that has meant that all products sold in a plastic or glass container have increased in price and continue to do so because of the rising cost of the scheme. And most people continue to put their containers in the recycling bin as they did before because it is not worth the effort to collect and store (using a large amount of space) a large enough number of containers to take them to a deposit centre. So they lose their “deposit” anyway. Who actually does get it anyway?
And the Left also told numerous lies in their campaign to ban supermarket plastic bags. For a start they were biodegradable anyway. Secondly they lied (as the Left do whenever they open their mouths) by calling them “single use”. Everyone I know had a multitude of uses for three bags such as small garbage bin liners and many other uses.
There is no demonstrable problem in Australia that banning these plastic convenience products have actually solved. We just get daily reminders of how the Left destroy EVERYTHING they touch.
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Of course the biggest worry is that your plastic straws will end up polluting the beaches of Bali, and the rest of the Orient, where nobody gives a damn about pollution or helping to prevent pollution .
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/worst-trash-wave-huge-amounts-of-rubbish-washes-ashore-at-balis-jimbaran-beach-as-locals-clean-up-the-mess/news-story/1ec9037f87a6e49aedb877273ded9d0c
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Here is a very good video from Craig Kelly talking about the Australian federal government’s fuel economy tax which will dramatically increase the cost of larger vehicles and also reduce the range available in Australia.
What a disgraceful tax.
Have the fake conservative Liberal Party said they’ll remove it if they get elected?
https://youtu.be/9j7MgPahA2w
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I’d vote for Elmer Fudd in preference to either Labor or Liberal.
Both parties have us on the path to net zero wealth.
The only difference appears to be which party will get to that goal first.
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The disconnect from reality, scientific and engineering knowledge, and basic human decency of 99% our politicians is staggering.
190
99% of our politicians are just that ….professional politicians. !
…rather than normal, people with some useful life experience and the ability of logical thought to consider what is best for the population and the Country.
30
More good news from the US.
More fightback against the Left.
Victims of childhood “gender transitions” are now suing the doctors who mutilated and sterilised them.
https://youtu.be/THjQz045H4k
And TRUMP has said he’ll ban transgendering of children.
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Here is a video by a person who describes himself as a MAGA supporting LGB comedian.
He’s talking about the outbreak of free speech in the US due to the TRUMP Revolution and how ultimately nothing bad will come from it.
He makes a lot of sense despite his unconventional looks with a lot of facial tattoos and piercings.
https://youtu.be/3ECLowaNfsY
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Lionel Nation talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/m1u1w1FR_7Y
Matt Walsh talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/7gKqeKLx_HU
Clinton Jaws talks about the DEI disaster and the LA Fire Department.
https://youtu.be/pFFjiCcc1Qc
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In the US companies who are responsible to their shareholders and also for safety reasons are rapidly dropping their skin colour and gender based employment policies, otherwise known as DEI.
But in one of the wokest countries on the planet, Australia, we continue with a vengeance.
I have a friend who was in a major Australian Government department who, upon being offered a redundancy package, was advised to take it because as a white male there was virtually no chance of promotion. In a section meeting it was also stated that they were aiming for a staff mix of 40% male, 40% female and 20% “other”.
In the same department my friend worked for, a head of division was appointed who was in her late 20’s and had an impossibly long list of scientific publications for that age, supposedly authored by her. Rather than personal authorship, it’s likely that as she was being groomed and promoted through the ranks as the DEI star, she would have demanded her name be put on any publications produced by her staff, regardless of her not being personally involved in the work or even understanding it.
210
‘Promotion, I don’t want no promotion, I just want to stick around and annoy the idiot DEI faction.’
20
FWIW
News for “ElBowen”
“Europe Dominates Global Nuclear Energy Investment”
“The vast energy potential and clean nature of generating power through nuclear reactions have caused a surge in global demand, with nearly every region increasing nuclear energy investment by at least 50% over the last five years.”
More at
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europe-dominates-global-nuclear-energy-investment
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This is the stuff Albo and Bowen think doesnt work and is unaffordable. They need to send the rest of the world a memo. Wont anybody say “oh noes! We are falling behind” on this one?
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europe-dominates-global-nuclear-energy-investment
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Australia is notably absent.
Australia with about 28% of the world’s uranium has zero percent of the world’s nuclear power.
Don’t forget it was the fake conservative Liberals that banned nuclear power twice. First they stopped a nuclear power reactor already under construction in 1971. Then Howard banned nuclear power in law in 1998.
The cluelessness of our Uniparty politicians is staggering.
230
They probably never imagined that anyone would be stupid enough to be shutting coal fired power plants.
But here we are.
70
FWIW – more covid scene
“The Appalling Treatment of Covid Vaccine Whistleblower Dr. Byram Bridle”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/01/11/the-appalling-treatment-of-covid-vaccine-whistleblower-dr-byram-bridle/
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From a balcony above St Peter’s Square an old man mumbles “Suffer the little children” – oops wrong quote, that was Joe Biden – from the Vatican Il Papa said “I am close to the people of Los Angeles … I pray for all of you”, via Reuters/RNZ.
How ‘close’ he is could be taken many ways: he has friends in high places (webcams as well?), he respects all lifestyles, he loves Moses and rainbows too, and he admonishes sinners to ‘save the planet’ from a fiery end by becoming action heroes for Mother Earth…
Yeah but there’s no water in the hydrants.
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But that’s not important.
The important thing was that they were painted with woke rainbows.
Only a “MAGA supporting redneck far right uneducated racist” (/sarc) would expect water in fire hydrants and not rainbows painted on them.
https://x.com/ryancduff/status/1877026575117361307
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Colourful but totally useless, now who does that remind me of.
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I was “triggered” with that clever meme of the lg+bt+etc painted hydrant with (LA?) fires raging in the background into immediately thinking how DEI, oops sorry, D U M B it would be to paint them that way. Given that when walking your pooch in USofA fire hydrants are the very popular alternative to trees (which Aussie pooches love) to stop, sniff and cock a leg at all those photo opportunities to use as a statement surely must number in the trillions. Particularly if people did the likes of a Tik Tok survey (challenge?) to take a pic of what color of the rainbow the dog found it’s greatest level of relief. Might also be an indicator of whether your dog was trans, gay bi etc etc.
While the search provided the fact check that the LA hydrant one was “satire” and all the other results rambled on about how popular hydrants were to dogs etc there was not a one of a rainbow watering.
Oh and to reinforce even more as to who has the power typing the letters l g b t in smalls gets it underlined in red until you type it in capitals. lol.
00
Yes, and that they can say, is that it is all God’s Will. Wot’ a load of rubbish. So wot’ is this will of God? Please explain.
20
Don’t forget “Inshallah”
00
40
Labor’s UK Ambassador Stephen Smith, appointed by Labor PM Tennis Albo, going into Bat for Australia
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Just like the KRudd going in to bat at number 10 in a Cricket Match in Washington DC. Wot’ a Plonker.
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Just Like Prince Harry at KC??? Coronation Street show Rudd will be parked out of sight behind a lady wearing a big hat!
20
Everyone needs to relax. The World is still going on and spinning around our Life saving Giving Sun. The centre of of our Solar System is not Planet Earth. It is the SUN.
Copernicus knew it in the 1500s. Smart Man. And the Catholic Church who were the worst Astronomers ever got it WRONG. It has taken so long for the Vatican to having so many worldly treasures to get it right. How about selling all of that wealth into a World Trust Fund where the income helps the POOR? How about that?
The Church like the Climate Alarmists now don’t want to know any facts. LOL. Or help the Poor.
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I have lived in the Philippines and have seen the Catholic Church at work.
All of the Priests eat at the best eating places and drive the latest model cars. The Churches are very well looked after. And the poor people who are so poor and who are so brain washed into the Religion, they still give money to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church gives peanuts back to the Poor and sends a load of money to the Vatican.
The Vatican has massive wealth. Do they need it. Would God and Jesus want them to have it? LOL. It is a Racket just like the Mafia.
What a load of Rollocks……………..And you know what I mean. The letter B for an R
80
Did anyone notice that the poorest countries are usually the most Catholic, are they Catholic because they are poor or are they poor because they are Catholic.
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Well, we all know the answer to that one. I think. Maybe not Simon or other Left Wing Nut Jobs. LOL
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What if I had said Right Wing Nut Jobs?
11
J.R.
Parts of South America look like that too.
IIRC there is a Pope on record with something like this –
“Let us enjoy the splendors of this fable of Christ”
00
SMH running another hit piece on Musk, this time by some woman who was running campaigns for the Greens in Germany and the Libs here. Her company is called “Agenda C”.
“Having, in his own estimation, rescued American democracy, his disrupter instincts are searching for opportunities elsewhere….We don’t need him to disrupt the stinking little hypocrisies in our politics – we know what they are. We can and should be doing it ourselves, without the pitfalls of misinformation that come from relying mainly on X for information.”
Her overall picture is that he is given too much credence by ordinary people when he disrupts politics, while she would rather the politicians handled it all themselves and continued to pay her millions of dollars for their campaigns. Musk might look too hard at what she does!
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/meddling-musk-should-discover-his-limitations-he-s-not-the-messiah-20250110-p5l3fg.html
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Shouldn’t be too hard for NSW Police to round up the usual suspects in Newtown Syn@gogue attack
Here’s the CCTV from police. It appears to be a magnified image from very early in the video.
If you can lift a better image, please do. pic.twitter.com/P6cL1mA5PN
— Dr David Adler (@DrDavidAdler1) January 12, 2025
Anyone else think the smaller person in the Video is a Female?
33
Shouldn’t be too hard for NSW Police to round up the usual suspects in Newtown Syn@gogue attack
Surely the Question should be why isn’t NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns putting this Image enlarged out to all media – Newspapers/TV etc?
Chris Minns says ‘an accelerant’ possibly used during Newtown Syn@gogue attack amid ‘massive escalation’ of antis@mitism
James Harrison Business Reporter
Authorities are concerned an accelerant was possibly used in an attack on a Sydney syn@gogue as the NSW Premier lamented a “massive rise” in antis@mitism.
“Obviously this is an escalation in antis@mitic crime,” Mr Minns said.
“Police and the government remain very concerned that an accelerant may have been used in Newtown on Saturday morning.
“This would lead everyone to believe that this escalation is very concerning not just for the J@wish community but for the wider community.”
Mr Minns said if these attacks were to continue there would be additional government support for security at J@wish institutions and highlighted “comprehensive criminal investigation” examining these antis@mitic attacks, which included Counter-Terrorism Command, State Crime and local resources.
“This is obviously a fraught time in the city’s history, but we need to stick together,” Mr Minns told reporters.
When questioned on claims from pro-Palestine groups the government was giving disproportionate attention to the rise in antis@mitism compared to isl@mophobia, the Premier noted the intense rise in bigotry against J@wish people since late 2023.
“I want to make it clear however that the information that we’ve been provided by security agencies is that there’s been a massive escalation in antis@mitic hate crime in Australia since the 9th October two years ago,” Mr Minns said.
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Mr Dutton also promised to lead a national crackdown on youth crime and ensure foreign criminals or terrorist sympathisers do not come to Australia.
Mr Dutton said he would go back to basics on the school curriculum and Indigenous affairs, accusing Labor of being beholden to “activist-driven agendas”.
He also committed to calling Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “in the first days of a Coalition government” to mend Australia’s relationship with the J@wish state, accusing Mr Albanese of being partly responsible for the 700 per cent rise in reports of anti-S@mitism.
“Every incident of anti-Semitism can be traced back to the Prime Minister’s dereliction of leadership in response to the sordid events on the steps of the Sydney Opera House,”
Mr Dutton said. “Anti-S@mitism should have been stopped there and then. This government is so morally confused it treats our ally, Israel, like an adversary.
“Moreover, its push for Palestinian statehood at this time would reward Hamas’s use of terrorism to achieve political ends.”
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Are we sure it wasn’t communion wine?
10
As I posted yesterday, most fires are caused by arsonists.
https://saltbushclub.com/2025/01/10/wildfires-climate-or-criminal/#more-2917
Check it out…………
Just a few days into January 2025, the season has already started, with a major fire in Los Angeles; typically, the usual “catastrophic” fire season begins around May. Seven fires, including on the iconic Sunset Boulevard, have created significant damage, with tens of thousands evacuated, and only two under control (am 9/01). The city, with a population of 4 million has a massive urban sprawl, resulting in an area 50% bigger than New York.
The cause is yet to be evaluated, with temperatures as low as 3 degrees it is difficult to relate it to excess heat, no doubt some will try; strong winds are exacerbating the damage, with already (Day 2) a thousand homes lost. The timing of onset of fires, and their multiple inner-city sites, are all strongly suggestive of arson.
The Northern Hemisphere summer bushfire outbreak in 2024, had begun in Portugal, the Government declaring a state of emergency, and the massive scale needing help from outside countries. The Government believed many fires were started by accident or intent, Reuters reported 14 arrested, with 125,000 hectares, burned.
Major bushfires in Greece threatened Athens in August 2024, and again, led to requests for help from other countries; the inevitable cry of “global warming” ensued. The previous year’s summer fire-storm in Greece, in 2023, had led to 140 arrests, officials had blamed negligence or arson for the majority of the blazes. Estimates are that 60% of fires in the Italian summer of 2023 were also intentionally lit, with 22 arrests. Spain’s Asturias region was hit by 90 fires that year, most believed to be lit by arsonists, labelled “fire terrorists”.
Of over 6000 fires in 2023 in Canada, were blamed on climate change, half were believed to result from human accidents, some shown to have been caused by arson. Interestingly, a Canadian man, who claimed fires were deliberately started by government agencies, was, in January 2024, himself convicted of starting 14 fires the previous year. The all-time record holder, inevitably from the US, is John Orr, believed to have lit over 2000 fires between 1984 and 1991.
There were no lightning strikes in September 2023, when a series of small fires in the East of Australia joined up into a mega event, most were man-made. In the New Year, before the rains came, an outbreak in North Adelaide was a suspicious event, and an arrest made, several fires near Geelong in January 2024, were again being treated as suspicious. Fires, in March on the outskirts of Perth in WA, resulted in arrests made. There were also suspicious fires on the Sunshine Coast and the Whitsundays. In the Northern Territory one man was charged over 18 fires, with dozens more suspected, arson was reported in central NSW, with 24 charged. Fortunately, and unanticipated by BoM, rain stopped play!
50
Ezcussssssss,nMeee Loj YoumumAre not as drunkk as I am off
00
If all the arson fires were stopped, and non fuel reduction continues, we are just going to end up with mega fires anyway? It’s going to burn, the longer time without a fires is just adding to fuel load. There is never fuel reduction in national parks, and then it is so so sad when they go up.
10
There are sick puppies scattered all though our society, then there are fire bugs, some join the MFB or the Rural Fire Brigade to be closer to the action, and perhaps ‘respond’ to their handiwork.
It’s a real sickness and there’s heaps of them.
40
Mel Gibson – the conspiracy theorist on LA fires:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tEpCj_yvxU
Listening to this, I wonder if he voted for Harris or Trump.
10
Mel Gibson is a T W A T
20
Peter Dutton is dead right. We need migrants to integrate.
I did as a Pommy Barstard and married a Scottish woman.
LOL
50
Biden, Trump and the Meaning of Stupidity
In politics as in life, the stupid person causes others to lose and gains nothing for himself.
By Barton Swaim
Last year I picked up a little book titled “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” by the Italian economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla (1922-2000)
The copy I bought was published in 2019. On the back of this handsome edition are two epigrammatic quotations. The first is by Bertrand Russell: “The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” The second is by Donald Trump: “Trust me, I’m, like, a smart person.”
The Trump quotation is of course meant to be ironic. He’s “like, a smart person,” ha ha. We all know he’s stupid, nudge nudge.
Yet if the marketers had bothered even to skim this short volume, they might have realized that Mr. Trump, whatever else may be said about him, can’t possibly be considered stupid by Cipolla’s definition.
Cipolla divides people into four categories: helpless, bandit, intelligent and stupid.
In any normal interaction between two people, he contends, the helpless person suffers a loss while the other gains.
The bandit exacts a benefit while levying a loss on the other.
The intelligent person gains while enabling the other person also to gain.
The defining trait of the stupid person is that he gains nothing while obliging the other to take a loss.
Mr. Trump’s fans can argue with his despisers about whether he belongs in the category of bandit or intelligent, but he definitely can’t be classified as stupid according to Cipolla’s definition.
The astounding fact of recent years, however, is that Mr. Trump’s chief political opponent—Joe Biden—is a perfect specimen of Cipolla’s idea of stupidity.
For four years, Mr. Biden has made decisions and pursued policies that made his supporters, party, country and foreign allies worse off, and in almost every case he has gained nothing and very often suffered commensurate political losses.
You could make a cogent argument that Mr. Biden belongs in the category of helpless, so often do his decisions benefit his political adversaries, chiefly Mr. Trump, and not himself.
But those blunders—principal among them his insistence that he was capable of running for re-election—have exacted massive costs on the rest of the country.
61
This video of Joe Rogan predicting the LA fire devastation last year is now a top pic on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONwjYOrCBV0
It gives some of the background for relocating to Texas.
20
There is NO GOD, Get real
18
And I an still being JT
JR
00
Okay, it had to happen sooner or later.
Heard an article on AM this morning. Umm! I like an occasional ‘talking head’ while I have some Brekky. If I’m eating, then I’m not yelling at the radio. (It’s funny really, once upon a time, I seem to remember that the purpose of the radio was to ….. play music. Colour me old fashioned, but I wish that was still the case. Now it’s all just blah blah blah!)
The article was ostensibly about the largest religious gathering on the Planet, in India, the Kumbh Mela, where up to 400 million people gather to cleanse themselves in the Ganges across the 45 days of the festival.
The talking head ABC correspondent in Prayagraj (by population, 1.1 Million, the 42nd largest city in India) mentioned that number of 400 million was around a quarter of the population of India, and it revived something I’ve been (sort of anyway) watching over the last year or so.
So, I went and checked.
The population of India has now surpassed that of China, and now India is the most populous Country on the Planet.
India – 1.458 Billion people
China – 1.418 Billion people
Tony.
40
FWIW
I doubt that this will float many worry beads here!
“Peter Fitzsimons declares he’ll “call out” Australian Trump and Musk fans.”
https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2025/01/peter-fitzsimons-declares-hell-call-out-australian-trump-and-musk-fans.html
20
He should do what I recommend all Leftists do now that we are experiencing the end of Leftism and wokism as they will no longer have anything to do.
I would like to see them do something genuinely worthwhile.
He should go to a Third World country like Nepal (where I was recently) and personally pick up litter plus also teach the locals not to litter and to put rubbish in bins or collection points where it belongs.
They should continue to work at minimal or no wage until they are deemed to have worked off their debt to society for the huge damage that their promotion of Leftism and wokism has caused.
20
Curious how California had 3 dikes but no water.
/sarc
10
Prisoners are helping fight the LA fires.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-11/loophole-puts-prisoners-on-the-frontlines-of-la-fires/104801390
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