112 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 20, 2021”

  1. Sometimes crooks get away with it for their entire career. I know at least a couple who did so, but they were small timers, making maybe a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand bucks over many years, selling moonshine. That was enough to enable them to have a nice car or truck and a good house, but they kept right on working a sweat shop job in town…… which is why they never attracted any attention.

    Now here’s the news about some crooks who ALMOST made it to retirement without getting caught, lol.

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/trump-organization-manhattan-district-attorney-investigation-update

    This sort of news is why I’m optimistic that the Democrats are imo likely to hold onto control in DC in 2024.

    The hard core trump voters won’t abandon the R’s, but I’m thinking enough middle of the roaders will be holding their noses by then, and hand the election to the D’s, because of this sort of news.
    It won’t really get the attention of the general public until the trials are under way, and some executives are sentenced.
    The slow wheels of justice ought to get there at just about the right time, in political terms, lol.

  2. any one else watching president trump rally in alabama this evening?

    1. Yeah, I feel sorry for him.

      He ran for president as a publicity stunt, and never expected to be elected. He got a job he didn’t know how to do and embarrassed himself. Now he’s trying to rescue his reputation and his finances by endless campaigning and fund-raising.

      That’s a painful position to be in.

      1. biden’s afganstan blunder is really kickin the liberals asses isn’t it? democrats are sunk in 2022 now.. plus all the to high gas prices an inflation..

        1. Except that it was Trump’s idea to get out of Afghanistan like this. He made a deal with the Taliban without getting anything in return.

          A bad deal.

          1. Trump blocked Biden from intelligence on Afghanistan for 2 1/2 month during the transition.

            Republicans are white supremacist fascist. It’s just Democrats cleaning up another Republican mess.

            1. All public confidence in Biden got lost in him FUBARing Afghanistan to the point where tens of thousands of refugees will now be forced on Americans. The GOP will win majority control of the House in next year’s elections and then promptly start impeachment proceedings in January of 2023.

            2. Biden has only been in office 7 months. Trump negotiated the Afghan exit and it’s timeline. It’s not clear whether the exit could have been better, and whether any failure was the fault of previous administrations or the military, but it wasn’t the current Occupant.

              On the other hand, any Afghan refugees will be smart, educated, motivated people: a loss for Afghanistan and a real asset for the US.

              If Republicans impeach Biden for no reason they’ll increase his popularity, as they did for Clinton.

    1. Funny! That reminds me of what the good (accomplished!) doctors over at the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (https://covid19criticalcare.com or simply flccc.net) are saying. Treat covid early (with ivermectin, vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc etc) because, it gets much harder to deal with when you get to the point that you have to seek medical attention. Once the damage shows up on the lungs, it’s too late to treat! Sorry Mike, I couldn’t resist. 😉

      By the way, new case counts over there in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India arev still below 30 while new case counts in Israel are soaring! Quite something, isn’t it?

        1. Mike B —

          Give give the poor guy a break. Quack medicine and divining for gold with willow branches give practitioners a great sense of superiority. Sort of like Hare Krishna and all the other religious fruitcakes.

        2. it’s, it’s not me! It’s just all these crazy ICU physicians I’ve been listening to! Nice story from my neck of the woods too!

          The tale of a 104-y-o COVID-19 survivor

          Surviving two major health events – critical surgery and COVID-19, which is killing younger patients – 104-year-old Isola Mamby’s family and doctors credit early home care as the main reason why she is still in good health.

          Mamby, a retired nurse trained at the Kingston Public Hospital, and who served in the New York health system, contracted the coronavirus in March while admitted at a major hospital in Kingston, after breaking her hip and had to have it surgically corrected.

          “When she was discharged about a week after the surgical procedure, I realised that she seemed to have contracted a respiratory infection, which turned out to be COVID, so I panicked because I said at her age with a pre-existing condition, and no vaccines at the time, she was not going to make it,” the centenarian’s daughter, Dr Jennifer Mamby-Alexander, told The Sunday Gleaner.

  4. She’s another vaccine “I’m just asking questions” blogger who believes Dr. Fauci is in on a big money-making scam. She’s another loony.

    1. She’s as dumb as a blinking traffic light. I saw her in person once.
      She does a canned presentation that’s plausible at the surface level, if you don’t know very much, and sticks to it. Nothing in it that’s original, nothing in it that requires any real insight or serious thinking.

      But it’s my guess she makes a living out of it.

      1. Hi, Mac. Anyone interested can get a short view of Gail’s end-of-times bugout digs here:
        https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/tournament-held-memory-golf-professional-killed-cobb-county-country-club/76SNMK5RKBBCRG2MRQCE6EENSI/

        Gail did a cameo on the news back in July:
        https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/cobb-county/victim-triple-killing-cobb-county-country-club-was-not-targeted-police-say/WYFHSNALKNBDFM27HUEMU2BNFM/

        About 44 seconds in. Keep watching for the closeups.
        Good to see Gail on top of things! Walking the walk, it seems.

  5. Well, I have no doubt Gail is detached from reality. She’s convinced that Peak Oil will cause us all to abandon modern civilization and go back to subsistence farming. She seems to think that manufacturing, and rail and water freight transportation, simply didn’t exist before oil. And, nothing will exist after oil.

    Oil is magic…

  6. Last I checked 70% of calls to Louisiana poison control hotline were for ivermectin side effects. Maybe Musk’s inspirational AI robot idea can keep America working, being that Americans can’t seem to anymore. Funny that; manual labor robots being touted by a fatso that doesn’t look like he’s ever done any, or could. At least Bezos and Branson look like they could do a push-up. I’ll give them that. This will not end well.

    1. SURVIVALIST —

      “…70% of calls to Louisiana poison control hotline were for ivermectin side effects…”

      “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is urging people to stop taking veterinary drugs to treat or prevent Covid-19 after receiving multiple reports of patients who have been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses. Ivermectin, which is not an anti-viral drug, is generally used to treat or prevent parasites in animals. These animal drugs are often highly concentrated because they are used for large animals like horses and cows, which can weigh a lot more than a human. Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans.” the FDA update reads.

      https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stop-it-fda-warns-people-not-take-veterinary-drugs-treat-n1277371

      1. That’s strange! The following study was done by Cynthia A Guzzo et al at Merck Research Laboratories in 2002:

        Safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of escalating high doses of ivermectin in healthy adult subjects

        Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 200 microg/kg. All dose regimens had a mydriatic effect similar to placebo. Adverse experiences were similar between ivermectin and placebo and did not increase with dose.

        Must be something more than plain old ivermectin in them there horse dewormers! At any rate the doctors arguing for it’s use are not talking about the “Durvet Apple Flavored Ivermectin 1.87% Horse Wormer Paste” that you can get from farm supply stores or Amazon. Maybe if they just made the stuff in the picture below available over the counter like aspirin, people wouldn’t feel so desperate! It’s safer than aspirin (16 deaths in over 4 billion doses since 1988).

        Lots of factual information at the link below (Pubmed):

        Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective

        1. IslandBoy, You’ve quoted one paper from 20 years ago, and another from 10 years ago.

          You haven’t quoted the papers from last year and this year, providing evidence that Ivermectin has no convincing effect on Covid-19.

          Further up, you quoted flccc.net, but you didn’t mention that members of that medical group had questionable ethics and questionable scientific credentials..

          … Subsequent independent research failed to replicate Marik’s positive results, indicating the possibility that they had been compromised by bias. … A systematic review of trials in 2021 found that the claimed benefits of the protocol could not be confirmed.

          Marik was lead author of a journal article on the efficacy of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, … but which was subsequently rejected on account of what the publisher said were “a series of strong, unsupported claims based on studies with insufficient statistical significance” meaning that the article did “not offer an objective [or] balanced scientific contribution to the evaluation of ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19”

          In March 2021, Marik was reprimanded by the Virginia Board of Medicine and ordered to complete additional education in prescribing practices after it was found he had prescribed drugs, including phenobarbital, oxycodone, tramadol, alprazolam, and diazepam, to people who were not his patients.

          Evaluating sources is always a tough task.

          1. GERRYF —

            ON IVERMECTIN (dated Feb. 2, 2021)

            “Overall, the evidence for this topic is of low-moderate quality. As with other clinical topics on COVID-19 the research is often opportunistic and hastily done, with limited planning to minimize sources of bias. The body of evidence is at high risk of confounding, as many studies investigated ivermectin as add-on therapy to a cocktail of medications to manage symptoms and limit viral replication. Small sample sizes, performance bias, short follow-up time, inappropriate study designs, further limit the usefulness of the available evidence on ivermectin.”

            https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/ppih/if-ppih-covid-19-sag-ivermectin-in-treatment-and-prevention-rapid-review.pdf

            1. Thanks Doug.

              Yes, poor studies but with lots of hype. And frequently the people who initiated the studies recognize the limitations of their own studies but pursue them because there’s so little information out there. But once the hype machine gets it, they almost lose control of the narrative – at least among people who don’t check out the original source.

            2. Interesting. This is why we non-experts need to learn to shut up about studies. There are many qualified people out there going over the data for us. No need to pop off about shit we know little about.

            3. A few years ago there was a presentation at the AGU, and the presenter made a point of saying that his data did not in any way cast doubt on AGW and climate change, and he hoped the media coverage would reflect that. Everyone chuckled. Within an hour, there were media stories about how this study “demolished” AGW.

            4. On the plus side, it suggests that Republicans now believe in Global Worming.

          2. I brought up the old papers just to get the facts straight on this drug, in particular:
            1) It’s not just a horse de-wormer and new uses are continuously being found for it
            2) Merck, the company that is now questioning it’s safety, was the original developer and sponsored studies to prove that it is safe at up to ten times the recommended dose.

            I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to ivmmeta.com a web site that lists all the currently available studies (currently 63) and does a running meta analysis on them. Only three of the 63 do not show any benefit for the drug. The same web sit also lists 8 meta-analyses, all of which indicate benefit. The Kory et al meta-analysis is not the most positive.

            So yes, Marik is a bit of a maverick but, that’s why i like him. He developed a protocol for sepsis that produced good results for him. Subsequent trials have been unable to reproduce his results but, that is not exactly his fault. I watched his editorial response to the presentation of the results of the VITAMINS Trial and he was highly critical of the study calling it designed to fail.

            Pierre Kory, president of the FLCCC Aliiance has written a summary of the total evidence supporting the use of the drug here:

            https://flccc.substack.com/p/summary-of-the-evidence-for-ivermectin?r=nxypy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy

            “Evaluating sources is always a tough task.” Yup, sure is! One of the criteria I use when evaluating sources is profit motive. For those opposing the use of ivermectin I can identify lots of financial benefits for entities that may appear to have no connection or influence over those saying that the drug is not effective despite the possibility that there is “dark money” at work. I cannot come up with any windfall profits of the same magnitude for anyone if the advice of the protagonists were to be taken. If this drug were adopted for the prevention and treatment of this disease across the globe and made available “over the counter” in all corners of the world, who would make off like a bandit? Are there any entities that are reaping handsome profits (making off like a bandit) from the current state of affairs? We are living in a world where the truth has become subjective. “Trusted sources” can no longer be trusted.

            One source I certainly don’t trust is big corporations like the drug companies. Their track record suggests that they are inclined to bend the truth to protect their bottom line.

            1. Islandboy —

              Well, I can’t say I recall the last pandemic, but do remember when polio gripped the world. What did we do? We dutifully lined up at school to get our shots (without any howling of anti-vaxxers). As a result, polio was eradicated. Maybe you need to grow up and become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

            2. But there is no evidence that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid. That’s what it comes down to. Some people have suggested that it is a miracle treatment, but the data doesn’t show it.

            3. Well Doug, Since you brought up Polio, You might find the following interesting:

              Vitamin C and Polio The Forgotten Research of Claus W. Jungeblut, M.D.

              Unlike oral polio vaccination, vitamin C has never caused polio. Yet how many people have you met, physicians included, who know vitamin C has been known to prevent and cure poliomyelitis for nearly 70 years? It was never really a secret. On September 18, 1939, Time magazine reported that “Last week, at the Manhattan meeting of the International Congress for Microbiology, two new clues turned up. (One is) Vitamin C.” (9) The article describes how Jungeblut, while studying statistics of the 1938 Australian polio epidemic, deduced that low vitamin C status was associated with the disease.

              The above led to the paper linked to below

              The Treatment of Poliomyelitis and Other Virus Diseases with Vitamin C

              Which leads me to believe that ignoring inexpensive, non patent-able solutions to health problems is not something that is new.

              The web page linked to below provides support for my views on health care:

              A Timeline of Vitamin Medicine

              In relation to the current pandemic, there’s also this:

              Vitamin D deficiency: a worldwide problem with health consequences

              Ya think?

            5. Of course there’s a reason! Just might not be the one you are assuming it is.

  7. Yeah, Gail has been running an exercise in motivated reasoning on her blog for quite some time. Who the COVID fruitcakes turned out to be isn’t a big surprise for the most part.

  8. In defense of IslandBoy.
    He lives in Jamaica. There only 4.7% of the population are fully vaccinated as of today.
    So to be grasping at straws is sometimes to best option we have. Unfortunately.
    Poverty is real.

    And in the USA so is ignorance- thus only 52% of the population is fully vaccinated despite the supply availability to be well over 80%.
    Severe mental poverty is a cultivated condition.

    And speaking of fully vaccinated, we are in the early phase of a new definition of it-
    ‘Have you entered the window of time where a third shot is required to be considered fully vaccinated?’

    1. Thank you!

      One of the things that I have been trying to bring up here that is being roundly ignored is that there is more going on in this pandemic than meets the eye.
      China has avoided any serious outbreaks/surges for eighteen months. How?
      India has largely brought the surge caused by the delta variant under control with some regions doing better than others. What’s going on there?
      Is it really just that Africa is a bunch of $#!t#ol3 countries that can’t even count, why the pandemic appears to be a lot less severe in much of Africa?
      Similarly, new case counts are declining across much of South America. $#!t#ol3 countries again?
      The country that has the distinction of being the biggest $#!t#ol3 of all, Haiti, “One Of The World’s Poorest Countries Has One Of The World’s Lowest COVID Death Rates”. What?

      There is something that is containing and/or beating back this disease that ain’t the vaccines is all I’m saying. “The pandemic of the unvaccinated” doesn’t appear to be bothering the poorer countries nearly as much as it is ravaging the most affluent country in the world!

      1. India has just burned out the virus – in the slum regions most people had it, and then it got away. There is almost no possibility to prevent spreading in dense populated areas.

        The same in small villages – there are lot’s of reports about covid spreading there.

        Most of this isn’t counted – counting is only officiell tested cases.

        It was already the same there with the original virus last year. A group of scientists made tests in a slum region – more than 50% of all people had the antibodies.

        There are more dangerous things in India than covid anyway – getting strange illnesses is normal in India. For tourist and business people, too – you get a strange fever and have to endure / survive it.

      2. “that there is more going on in this pandemic than meets the eye.”

        That is just the nature of the situation.
        Where you and I depart direction in completely opposite direction is your ‘religious’ and conspiracy based approach to medical and public health issues.
        I work hard to sift through the data and news to maintain a fact-based/science based understanding of such things.

        Two questions-
        Do you have any formal science training?
        If you could get a Covid vaccine in your neighborhood today, would hurry down to get in line?

        I seriously do wish you well.

        1. I suspect that Islandboy is off-track with Ivermectin, and I strongly support vaccination, but our drug R&D system does have some structural problems with incentives.

          Drug companies can only make money from something that is on-patent. That means that they can’t spend much money on R&D for anything natural, or anything for which the patent has expired. Those statements aren’t controversial or up for debate: it’s just the current system.

          So…vitamins are obvious candidates for research, but there’s no money for it. Folk medicine is an obvious candidate for mining possible treatments, but it can’t happen. If something makes itself unusually obvious, drug companies have to create a synthetic version that can be patented: something that is very likely to be less effective and have more side effects.

          And old drugs are less attractive. They’ve been approved, so much of the expensive work has been done, but there’s no money to research new uses, or to promote them (which is very expensive!).

          When someone tells you that there’s no evidence for something, the question is: has anyone really tested it, with large, high quality (expensive) studies? Very often the answer is no.

          The obvious solution is public money for R&D, but drug companies really don’t want the competition so there’s little support in congress.

          1. Thank you Nick! The doctors that I am listening to (the FLCCC and Tess Lawrie from the UK) are complaining about the very set of circumstances you describe.

      3. Here’s a news story from last month.

        Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns
        https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns

        The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.

        Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”. This was concerning because two meta-analyses of ivermectin for treating Covid-19 had included the Elgazzar study in the results. A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies to determine what the overall scientific literature has found about a treatment or intervention.

        “Because the Elgazzar study is so large, and so massively positive – showing a 90% reduction in mortality – it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

        “If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomised control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed.”

        1. yes, that Egyptian study has been discredited and retracted-
          “A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.”

          some will prefer to see this as a global pharma conspiracy to implant microchips or something.

    2. If you want some alternative ideas on what the basis of vaccine hesitancy in the USA is, check out the four minutes following the 17 minute 50 second point in the podcast at the following link:

      Trish Wood is Critical

      1. The 4 minutes after 1750 was a Republican hit piece. Trump made the virus political from the very beginning by not informing and than lying to the public. Which he had been doing with everything he talked about forever. Only an idiot would trust anything coming out of his mouth the months leading up to the 2020 election.

        Now the two thirds of American’s who have taken the vaccine needs the one thirds dose who refused theirs as a booster to protect themselves from the one third.

        1. The fact that it’s a Republican hit piece doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats weren’t so pro vaccine when Trump was at the helm but, quickly fell in line once he left office. For the Republicans the opposite is true, looking forward to the vaccines when their guy was in charge and vehemently opposed to them now that he’s gone. That’s the point Trish Wood is making, it has all become political. I have experienced being accused of being a Trumpite because of my approach to health issues. Even Dr. Pierre Kory, raised in New York and a registered Democrat was accused of having a political agenda by the ranking Democrat on the committee when he testified before a senate hearing on Dec 8, 2020.

          It’s all quite sad. Rational discussion being clouded by politics.

          1. Democrats weren’t so pro-vaccine when Trump was at the helm but, quickly fell in line once he left office.

            Islandboy, I simply don’t understand how you can get something so dramatically wrong. Democrats have always been pro-vaccine, strongly pro-vaccine.

            For the Republicans the opposite is true, looking forward to the vaccines when their guy was in charge and vehemently opposed to them now that he’s gone.

            No, most Republicans have always been anti-mask, and anti-vaccine. Trump pushed the development of a vaccine with Operation Warp Speed. But other Republicans were not in on the deal. They never jumped on that bandwagon. Democrats were always hoping for the quick development of a vaccine but most were pessimistic that it would happen.

            Neither Republicans nor Democrats changed their stance on masks and vaccines, or on alternative nut-case remedies when Trump left office. I repeat, concerning masks, vaccines, and nut-case remedies, nothing changed on January 20th.

            Republicans, in general, were anti masks, anti-vaccine and pro-nut-case remedies, both before and after the election. Democrats were the opposite both before and after the election. Of course now some Republicans are switching to pro-vaccine.

            Perhaps it’s because you don’t live in this country that is why you are so dramatically wrong on this point.

            1. Ron, he gets it wrong because he is desperately trying to spin a tale that helps his mind stick to his belief. Its about belief of preconceived notions regarding vaccines, medical care, vitamins and related topics. He is deep in it, and doesn’t even realize. Lots of Q people like that too.
              Maybe he thinks that the pharma industry invented covid to make money. He said something to this effect about Bill gates and Moderna recently, if my memory is correct.

            2. I haven’t been paying much attention to US media lately. Way too much “vaccines are the only way out” hysteria from the sources I usually get my news from (MSNBC etc.). Living outside the developed world also gives me a chance to have a different perspective on this pandemic. I can look at countries similar to mine and how they are coping with this disease.

              I can relate to the situations in these countries where health care resources are limited and fancy equipment is rare. When my dad was dying back in 2014 I had to put him in my vehicle and rush 20 minutes or so to the nearest hospital. No point in calling an ambulance. Don’t even know if the hospital had a working ambulance and even if they did it would probably have taken them half an hour to mobilize and get to us. He died shortly after we arrived at the hospital and the doctor said he was dehydrated. I had been trying to get him to drink something before we took him to the hospital but he refused to drink. I think he had decided it was time to go.

              My perspective causes me to look at many countries outside the developed world (G20) with a view to figuring out how they are tackling this virus. I see the countries that have had very limited access to vaccines, if any and look for the ones that have low case and death numbers and try to figure out what is going on. The numbers for many of these regions just plain defy explanation (Uttar Pradesh) and the only plausible explanations I have heard, have led to me being labelled as a nutcase. All I can say is you guys live in your (G20) bubble and I live in mine. Only time will prove how things will develop.

              We are just finishing the third of three consecutive “no movement” days (LOCKDOWN). Essential workers only allowed to go on the streets unless going for vaccination. No shops. offices, banks, bars open, restaurants open for delivery only. Severe restrictions on church services were eased slightly after outcries from the clergy. Only some gas stations and businesses that supply restaurants allowed to operate. No construction sites. That is driving me nuts, nothing to do but, troll! A shipment of ivermectin was cleared through customs today and will be delivered to the pharmacies tomorrow (the stuff pictured further up, not the horse de-wormer!). Looking forward to getting mine (just in case).

              Below are the results of doing a Google search for covid cases in Jamaica and Panama to the left and Haiti and The Dominican Republic (Hispaniola) to the right. The surges in Jamaica are due to easing of restriction, to facilitate election campaigning in the first case then for the Christmas holidays and most recently after the cohort that had got one dose of the vaccine started to get their second doses. The declines are due to re-imposition of restrictions. I have no idea what was happening in the other countries.

      2. Islandboy, among other things, your ongoing medical conspiracy bullshit is highly insulting to the hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who are working themselves to exhaustion (and putting their lives at risk) keeping unvaccinated Covid victims alive. Armchair medical experts are a dime a dozen.

        1. Good! As a general rule I have no use for doctors. I see most of them as drug industry pimps, pushing the products of big pharma. I liked the late Dr. Robert F. Cathcart and there are a few others but the doctors I like are frowned upon by mainstream doctors. Dr. Paul Marik is a good example.

          One of my favorite health web sites is doctoryourself.com

          I wish more doctors were like Cathcart but unfortunately they’re one in a million.

          1. “I have no use for doctors. I see most of them as drug industry pimps,”

            This confirms it: you are a disgusting human being.

            Time to use the block button…

            1. “As a general rule I have no use for doctors. I see most of them as drug industry pimps”

              This statement doesn’t make Island a disgusting human being.

            2. Mike B,
              I have to agree, “Take your vitamins” is one thing, “Doctors are pimps” is crazy and dangerous.

            3. Explain that to the estimated 2 millions addicted to prescription pain pills in the states. Doctors are not gods in a capitalist system.

        2. Island Boy has made things clear-
          He is an anti-vaxxer, and has no plans to get a vaccine even when it is available.
          And anti-science, except if it fits his preconceived notions.
          Clearly not trained in science, which is based on the method of discover and then discarding the findings that have no merit- despite preconceived notions.

          Vit C for polio, Ivermectin for Covid.
          He ‘has no use for doctors’- I challenge you to stay away from hospital next time you are sick as hell, no matter what the cause, seeing as how you have no respect for doctors and medical science.

          As I said earlier, in the USA we have a low vaccination rate simply because many people have cultivated a strong dose of ignorance.

          1. Doug & Hickory, I am surprised there are so many shills for big pharma, here on this web site. Is that the industry y’all work in? Just because your a doctor doesn’t mean you know all the answers and you aren’t tryna push a corporate agenda to put profits over people’s health.

            1. Simply, in the biggest state of Calif over the past 6 months
              of every 200 people who have died of Covid only one has been vaccinated.
              The other 199 out of 200 deaths were unvaccinated people.
              A persons IQ doesn’t have to be very high to understand this.

              And I have known a person who got polio as a child overseas. It is no joke- for her it has meant paralysis and severe withering of one leg. Just try living that life before throwing around insults. People who get the polio vaccine don’t get polio, and to suggest that vit C is adequate for that purpose if a form of cruel ignorance.

            2. Hickory, in the collection of documents I linked to, one was a paper by Fred R. Klenner, M.D., of Reidsville, North Carolina, published in the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery, July 1949, Vol. 111, No. 7, pp. 209–214.

              In it he describes how he treated 60 children displaying the onset of polio before the polio vaccines had even been developed (1949). Every last one of his patients fully recovered with none of the debilitating effects of polio. I call that miraculous and humane not “a form cruel ignorance.” Now unless this Dr. Klenner was a big time Fraud, for his work not to have been heralded as one of the greatest discoveries in medicine was a great tragedy. Imagine how many people could have been spared from polio if his methods had been tested and found to work? The question is, was Klenner a fraud or not?

          2. I’ve only turned anti-vaxer for this pandemic and for these vaccines because:
            1) There has been an unwillingness to even consider the possibility that doctors should attempt to treat this disease. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the doctors who have tried to talk about treatment.
            2) I am very suspicious of this “one solution” narrative especially since it appears it is being done to the exclusion of all others.
            3) I am concerned about the lack of interest in the safety data as it relates to these vaccines. Have you seen the any of the data from the databases for reporting adverse drug reactions like VigiAccess or VAERS? These vaccines have more adverse event reports than any vaccines in history despite their relatively recent introduction. There is no long term, (multi-year) safety data.
            4) The demonization and bullying of the unvaccinated does not sit well with me, especially in the case of those at very low risk of severe illness (young, healthy people that are not obese) and those who have had the disease and recovered.
            5) The marginalization of the doctors that advocate treatment options “not approved by the WHO” is concerning. How could so many doctors from all over the world have “gone rogue”? Is it impossible for the WHO to be wrong? Is it impossible that the WHO is being influenced by big donors to serve private interests rather than the public interest?

            There are quite a few things happening that are completely without precedent.

            The link below goes to a presentation by a Dr. Lenny Dacosta of Goa, India as part of a Zoom meeting called “Doctors Unite” held a few days ago (Aug. 21) to discuss the crisis in Malaysia. He offers an explanation for how the virus was contained in Uttar Pradesh

            https://youtu.be/_CYdV_lJ9SQ?t=1976

          3. I just watched some more of the Malaysian Zoom meeting “Doctors Unite” and they are not a happy bunch. They obviously have no doubt that this drug should play a role in the treatment of covid and the reduction of transmission. They feel they are being hamstrung by those who are calling for extreme levels of evidence etc. and resent the harassment they are getting from their government agencies. It seems to me that they are making a very reasonable scientific case for their positions and I found their presentations extremely interesting and informative. I challenge everybody who thinks I’m a nutcase to go and view the video or even just a couple of the speakers and then come back and point out any weaknesses they find in their arguments. This was a meeting of doctors, people that are way more qualified than me to talk on these subjects. It seems this debate is pitting doctors that are anxious to save lives against doctors that want the “rules” to be followed.

            P.S. I am against some of the covid vaccines for myself only! (I would be more open to taking deactivated whole virus vaccines like the Sinovac)

            Getting vaccinated is a personal choice but, if you don’t trust those doctors that are saying ivermectin is effective and/or you don’t subscribe to high dose supplement therapy and/or you have any of the risk factors for severe outcomes and/or you have not been infected and recovered, do not hesitate to get vaccinated otherwise, it’s your choice.

            1. I am sorry to arrive here, but I am not at all interested in anti-vaxxer and other medical stuff discussions here as insisted by IslandBoy. I am come around for energy and environmental news/discussion.
              Not really interested in UFO’s and fashion either.

              So I will say goodbye, and I wish you well [ignore]

          4. Just found the VigiAccess data that I referred to earlier it compares the safety of ivermectin with two approved covid treatments, the covid vaccines and the tetanus vaccine. The covid vaccines are not like the vaccines I got as a child, not by a long shot!

            1. Islandboy,

              I don’t think this data is comparable. The current data for Covid has not been reviewed or processed. This is raw data, and the actual death and adverse event rates will be much, much smaller once they are processed.

              Think about it: about 1.2% of people in the US die every year: that means that 11,000 people die every day. If every one gets a vaccination, 11k people will die the day of their vaccination and another 11k will die the day after. Some of those (gunshots, terminal cancer) will be clearly unrelated but many (sudden cardiac arrest, congenital dissecting aorta, etc) will be a mystery, and will be recorded as “possibly” related.

              Much noise, no hard data here.

            2. I find it hard to imagine that any amount of processing will get the number of 8,532 in eight months anywhere close to less than one every two years like the tetanus vaccine. Just saying this is not your mother’s vaccine!

              With that I think I’m done with this subject for a while. It’s been beaten to death!

            3. Well, 8,000 is right about the number one would expect from random coincidence.

              Remember, these are raw numbers: just things that happened to occur around the vaccination.

  9. How disappointing to see the folks at Automatic Earth have also lost their minds. More pseudo-intellectuals who think they know more than the experts.

  10. Not my field . This is a ‘ copy ‘ & ‘paste ‘ from pealoil.com . Reach your own conclusions .
    “Turbines contain a ton of neodymium and dysprosium, tens of thousands of turbines are made per year. On paper, USGS says there are centuries of rare earth reserves. If you limit it to these two then it’s probably a lot less.

    China dominates production. It has barley increased since 2005. Australia is the main contender looking to grow. However, it’s reserves are ten times smaller, and haven’t changed since usgs started reporting them in 1996.

    So far there are only scattered projections of shortage. Regardless, the wind industry is slowing. It’s claimed that America will retire 35,000 blades of its approximately 100,000 turbines in the next two years. This is, obviously, the death of the industry if it comes true.

    Neodymium recycling is complicated by the fact that it has to be magnetic. An NdFeB magnet melted down, rearranged, and remagnetized might mean megawatt hours of heating and chemistry. Currently nobody is doing this on a significant scale and it’s not clear if it would work.

    Ignoring the bump in 2020, the wind installation rate in China and America has been steady around 20 gw per year. At the 3% depreciation claimed, that means it will top out in 2050 at 600 gw in both places. This is about 3x what it is now. Furthermore China has odd problems, like only half its grid being connected. Combined with decommissioning in America, this might mean global wind capacity is pretty much at a standstill.

    Spain is straight up decommissioning turbines and not building new ones. Germany is less aggressive, but still expects to decommission a gigawatt range number. Solar is approximately the same situation in all counties, except no mention of decommissioning. Solar farms are presumably easier to shut down because everything is at ground level. There’s no particular reason solar would be immune to decommissioning, it’s just not reported.

    The cadmium and tellurium reserves are generally mediocre and haven’t changed either. The only metal which substantially changed reserves was lithium, because it’s useless, and the relevant part is carbonate which is too scarce to record. Cadmium is recyclable, although even a few percent loss is pretty serious given it’s rarity.

    So in conclusion, renewables are probably going to go into decommissioning next year. From there growth will stagnate and eventually go negative. Renewables were struggling before Obama, the ARRA gave them 3-7 years of bubble, now they are a declining industry heading into a wall of depreciation.

    1. There are again generators without rare earth magnets (all wind energy before 2008 was without rare earth magnets). There are experiments with superconductors, too.

      Rare earth makes the generators more compact – but when the price is too high, other technology will be used.

    2. Hole- the fact that you post this article means that you think it has accuracy and a valuable message.

      And that is sad/funny I think.
      Do you sense an agenda in the article?

      “So in conclusion, renewables are probably going to go into decommissioning next year. From there growth will stagnate and eventually go negative”

      Whoever wrote this, and whoever posted this here. is having a hard time adjusting to current events.

      1. Hicks , could be . For me the article is of no significance and I have clarified that it is ” copy & paste ” . What was of interest to me is the info on rare earths , nothing more .

        1. Since when does “copy and paste” mean “no significance”? Then the next sentence you explain your interest. Your full of crap like an asshole.

        2. Except that the info on rare earths is entirely unrealistic, like the rest of the article.

          This is a good example of a basic rule of evidence: if a source has a significant amount of bad stuff, it’s a waste of time to try to extract any good information from it.

          1. Nick G , etc , could be and I don’t really care . As I said ” Reach your own conclusions ” . No more response on this subject from my end . Last call , it is in no way beneficial to me or to humankind that IC ends in a disaster . If I had my way I would continue BAU to eternity , unfortunately ” Life is a party and all parties must end ” . Adios .

            1. could be and I don’t really care .

              Well, it would help the rest of us if you would care, and put some effort into verifying stuff before posting it.

    3. Wind turbine blades are subject to abrasion and lose efficiency over the years. The generators and the turbines are made up of a fair amount of moving parts that will wear over the years. Solar farms can be built with no moving parts. When they do have moving parts, it’s the tracking system that keeps the modules as close to perpendicular to the incoming radiation as possible.

      There are people looking at recycling turbine blades, as there are people looking at solar module recycling. I cannot see why one would decommission a solar farm. Re-powering with newer, more efficient components is the more likely option and that could only be justified if the increases in generation (revenue) will make the project feasible. It would be interesting to see which solar farms they think are up for decommissioning.

      Concentrating Solar Power plants are a different matter. All of them are basically huge experiments and many of them are already fraught with problems. Lots of moving parts, very high temperatures and the resultant fatigue from repeated heating and cooling cycles means they may be an even bigger maintenance headache than wind turbines. At any rate CSP only generates a tiny fraction of electricity generated by renewable sources in the US (0.394%) while solar PV generates almost 30 times as much (11.45%)

      1. Wind turbine blades are subject to abrasion and lose efficiency over the years.

        I haven’t seen any discussion of this, so I suspect it isn’t signficant. Do you happen to have a source for it?

        1. Leading edge erosion on wind turbine blades is a known issue, Rain drops primarily.
          https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4442/9/6/60/pdf
          One study here:
          https://energy.sandia.gov/programs/renewable-energy/wind-power/blade-reliability/leading-edge-erosion/
          Various mitigation strategies are being considered/tested/used:
          https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/swim-cap-extend-the-life-of-wind-turbine-blades

          On the other hand, hydro and stream turbines get worn out and need to be refurbished. We had a business transporting (hot shotting) large power plant components to/from a GE facility in Chamblee, GA, back in the late 89s and 90s. Nothing much lasts forever (except stupidity 😉
          I just semi-retired some PV panels (my first). 75 watt Siemens built in 1994. They have pretty much been in continuous service since 1995. Out of four panels, three are still producing around 20-30 watts @ 17 volts. Still fine for trickle-charging batteries or somesuch. I’ve been using them to pump water for the last 8-10 years. New panels are so cheap these days that I’m upgrading my older arrays as time passes.

    4. >“Turbines contain a ton of neodymium and dysprosium, tens of thousands of turbines are made per year

      This is false. [Wind] turbines do not use permanent magnets. They use induction generators that do not require them.

      As for decommissioning, it happens all the time in all areas of industry, because machines don’t last forever. But machines with few moving parts last longer than machines with lots of moving parts.

      As to your claim about wind power in Spain, it is also simply false. The industry is growing in Spain, although it did pause for a few years.

      https://www.evwind.es/2021/06/23/wind-energy-yearbook-2021-an-analysis-of-the-current-situation-of-wind-power-in-spain/81445

      My conclusion is you don’t know what you are talking about, and seem oddly desperate to publish bad news.

      1. “My conclusion is you don’t know what you are talking about, and seem oddly desperate to publish bad news.”
        Exactly, and this pertains to most of what he has to say.

  11. “No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot”
    — Mark Twain

    1. “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
      ― Mark Twain

      1. This reminds me of a saying about wrestling with a pig. Apparently it’s very old:

        “The earliest strong match for the modern (pig) saying located by QI appeared in the January 3, 1948 issue of “The Saturday Evening Post” within a profile of Cyrus Stuart Ching who was the head of the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The ellipsis is in the original text: 2

        A man in the audience began heckling him with a long series of nasty and irrelevant questions. For a while Ching answered patiently. Finally he held up his big paw and waggled it gently.

        “My friend,” he said, “I’m not going to answer any more of your questions. I hope you won’t take this personally, but I am reminded of something my old uncle told me, long ago, back on the farm. He said. ‘What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy . . . and the pig likes it.’”

        https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/08/pig/

        1. Same thing about arguing with a building inspector.
          He not only likes it…. he’s getting PAID to like it.

          1. I always had something small that was clearly in violation, and visible.
            They are going to have some violation, no matter what.

            1. Yeah, this is the old old trick. A very old trick.

              There’s a joke out from the medival age ( I try to translate) :

              A town major awaits every year the inspector from the king. On his settlement every year is the position “One new green hat, to meet the inspector”.

              Every year, the inspector deletes this position.

              Asked years later when he was retired why he always did this he answered: He didn’t find all the other stuff…

    1. I was in Eugene,OR this past weekend and stopped by the Arcimoto headquarters .
      Impressive to see their vehicles in action. They are up to 200 employees with very rapid/early growth.
      Wouldn’t be at all surprised if they get purchased by a larger player in the next year or two.
      Its a new niche in transportation- small electric vehicles that can handle the neighborhood and the highway.

      https://www.arcimoto.com/

      1. Nice that looks like the ELF Organic Transit makes, used to be based here in Durham but moved out west, which honestly is a better location for them. Arcimoto looks more like something I would actually use.

        https://organictransit.com/

    1. Sort of old news. Here in the Southeast we’ve been battling this stuff (“Super Pigweed”) for years. I beat it by giving up; Just let the whole place go fallow for about 5 years. Native plants out-competed it and I haven’t seen any for a couple of years.
      Pity the farmers who have big bank payments.

      1. Hi Ghung, I’m sure that would work. I don’t think letting the Midwest breadbasket go fallow for five years is an option without mass worldwide starvation however.

        The interesting part of the article, and I admit it’s quite long (but interesting!), is that this type of pigweed has rapidly developed means to neutralize even newly developed pesticides on its leaves before they can enter the plant and kill it. Farmers are going back to spraying multiple pesticides, up to six, on the amaranth and nothing is happening, it just keeps growing. It gets 12′ tall and even can shade out corn crops. Each plant produces hundreds of thousands of seeds that then get mixed in with the seed corn and/or soybeans and spread to other farms.

        The good news is this plant is native and edible. I’m not sure it works as a feed crop however, at least not in the way industrial agriculture is currently set up.

        1. The herbicide resistant variety (Amaranthus palmeri) can actually be toxic, especially if grown in nitrogen rich soils. I had a neighbor who lost a couple of goats that got into the stuff during a drought. If goats can’t eat it, it’s a problem. I took a class with the Ag dept a few years ago and the ‘experts’ admit they are stumped.

  15. Exxon’s Imperial Oil outlines plan to produce plant-based renewable fuel
    https://www.saltwire.com/halifax/business/exxons-imperial-oil-outlines-plan-to-produce-plant-based-renewable-fuel-100627076/

    “Calgary-based Imperial aims by 2024 to construct a hydrotreater and use fossil-fuel derived blue hydrogen to process feedstocks such as canola and soybean oils into 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) of renewable diesel, it said. ”

    “Imperial’s production process would capture and store underground about 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, Exxon said in a statement. ”

    “U.S. refiners including Valero Energy and Marathon Petroleum are utilizing U.S. and state incentives to produce renewable diesel.

    “If all renewable fuel projects were complete, U.S. renewable diesel production would total 330,000 bpd by the end of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, equal to about 7% of 2020 diesel output according to Reuters calculations.”

    1. Hey, that’s all we need. That is to turn more agricultural land into producing motor vehicle fuel. Of course, we will need a lot more agricultural land to do that. But we can always clear more forest land. After all, those damn trees do not do anyone any good. And who needs all those damn animals that live in the forest. They can all just go extinct, who cares?

      1. From the article..

        ““U.S. refiners including Valero Energy and Marathon Petroleum are utilizing U.S. and state incentives to produce renewable diesel.”

        I think it’s the incentives driving this. I’m not up on the industry, but i always thought agricultural based fuels had poor finanacial and energy metrics.

      2. It will be going back to the 19th century.

        In this time, round about 30% of all land usage was biofuel here, too. Food to feed the horses, donkeys and mules.

        1. Topsoil can be the last fossil fuel if we want it to be. You harvest it via biofuels. Once you burn that up, you are truly and forever screwed.

          1. You can do biofuels by fermenting the harvest remainder and bringing the mash then back to the field.

            Or plant fast growing trees on more bad land and harvest them every few years.

            You don’t need to do it as strip mining – you get less then in the short term but more in the long term.

            It won’t solve all energy need. At least you can use fermenting (for methan gas) to all agricultural waste.

        2. Eulenspiegel, sorry but I believe that is a slight exaggeration. Most pasture land and feed land were for milk cows, beef cattle, pigs and chickens and still is. I would believe 10% of total agricultural land was for horses and draft animals, but not 30%. But if you can find a link with the percentages, I would be willing to believe another figure. But not without evidence.

          That being said, the population back then was but a fraction of today’s population.

          1. The number of horses peaked at just over 25 million animals around 1920
            In 1915, an estimated 93 million acres of cropland (27 percent of the total harvested acres) were used to grow feed for horses and mules.
            [these are quotes from Ag history sources- without citation]

            Keep in mind that all land is not equal- good land like you see in Lancaster County PA can feed many more strong horses, pigs, and people than the average lands in much of the country.

          2. Hi Ron,

            I not a real historian of any sort, lol, not even of my own industry.

            So I can’t really say what percentage of land was devoted to producing feed for draft animals on a national or world wide basis prior to the arrival of tractors and trucks. But ag historians generally agree that thirty percent is good enough for government work, lol.

            Here in the southeastern part of the USA, thirty percent was certainly in the ball park.
            That’s in line with what my grand parents did. I knew them all well, although they all passed on many years ago.

            Horses and mules needed a lot of pasture, and when the pasture wasn’t producing much, they got corn mostly, as a supplemental feed, because it was easier to raise and store corn than hay, believe it or not, if you had good corn land, and you had to raise a lot of corn ANYWAY, to have it for corn meal and to feed the horses and mules when working them. The corn was sometimes left right on the stalk, and all the stalks cut and gathered and tied in shocks in the field, but mostly the grain was stored in cribs.

            You could harvest hay by hand with a scythe, and people did that in some parts of the country, but around here….. only rarely. The grass was allowed to cure on the stem, and consumed right in the field, until grazed down to a nub.

            It took a lot of feed to supply horses hauling freight from farm to town, and hauling every thing else that didn’t move by water or train. More feed for saddle horses on top of that. Horses and mules just don’t get it done eating hay and working in harness. You either feed grain, or they go downhill fast, working in harness hours at a time, days at a time.

            Hauling hay just didn’t work, except for very short distances. You’ve heard about moonshine of course, and unless I’m mistaken, partaken, lol.

            People well out in the backwoods in those days couldn’t haul grain to markets more than twenty miles away, maybe a little farther. So they made moonshine out of it…… which was not only worth a lot more money but a hell of a lot easier to transport.

            It was an all day job, from can’t see until can’t see, in the summer, for my grandfathers to haul a load of produce to town with a team, buy a few things, and get back home. The round trip was about twenty five miles to thirty miles, give or take a couple, depending on just where they went.

            Corn brought enough money to justify the trip. Hay didn’t.

    2. Canola is a polite Canadian word for rape, which is already widely used in Europe for this purpose. It’s a terrible idea. Putting solar on that land would generate vastly more energy.

      1. Years ago there was some discussion where they described photosynthesis as about 2.5% efficient, and compared it to solar at 20%.

        1. The same area of land would power vehicles for roughly 100x as many vehicle-miles as plants:

          “100% sunlight → non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
          53% (in the 400–700 nm range) → 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
          37% (absorbed photon energy) → 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
          28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyll) → 68% is lost in conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
          9% (collected as sugar) → 35–40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
          5.4% net leaf efficiency.
          Many plants lose much of the remaining energy on growing roots. Most crop plants store ~0.25% to 0.5% of the sunlight in the product (corn kernels, potato starch, etc.).”

          And that produces chemical energy which is about 25% as useful as electricity for powering vehicles.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

  16. Apologies if this is a repost:

    Siberia’s massive wildfires are unlocking extreme carbon pollution
    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/siberias-massive-wildfires-are-unlocking-extreme-carbon-pollution

    “Siberian wildfires now cover more ground than all of the globe’s blazes put together”

    I believe this is the first time smoke has reached as far as the north pole in recorded history.

    The next El Nino event we have here in Australia might trigger record breaking bushfires once again.

    Seems like the time interval between record breaking weather events are lessening.

    1. Townes Van Zandt mentioned that lithium.
      This is going to get even more interesting.

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