Time to Ring Out the OLD!

CJ Hopkins, "The Year of the Gaslighter"

Well, it has been quite a year, 2022. I’m officially dubbing it “The Year of the Gaslighter.” I was going to dub it “The Year of the Mother of All Mindfucking Global-Capitalist Gaslighters,” but that seemed like a mouthful, so I’m opting for brevity.

Seriously, if there were an Olympics of Gaslighting, GloboCap (i.e., the global corporatocracy) would take the gold in every event. At this point, the majority of the global masses have been successfully gaslighted into a semi-conscious, quasi-cyclothymic state in which they oscillate, on a moment-by-moment basis, between robotic obedience and impotent rage. Those who are not still walking around in their masks and prophylactic face shields and injecting themselves with experimental “vaccines” for reasons they no longer even pretend to be able to articulate without gibbering like imbeciles are genuflecting at the feet of an oligarch huckster who they believe has come to deliver them from Wokeness.

If you were GloboCap, and in the process of imposing your new official ideology on the entire planet in a kind of global Gleichschaltung op, and otherwise establishing your “New Normal Reich,” and you needed the masses confused and compliant, you couldn’t ask for much more from your Gaslighting Division!

The gaslighting got underway in January, when the corporate media, health authorities, and other major organs of the New Normal Reich started suddenly “discovering” that the official Covid narrative was “inaccurate,” or, you know, a bunch of lies.

A series of limited hangouts ensued.

Suddenly, it appeared that the “Covid case” and “Covid death” statistics were inaccurate, or inflated, or had been fabricated. The “vaccines” didn’t work. They were killing people. Lockdowns had been a “serious mistake.” And so on. Duplicitous politicians, pusillanimous public-health authorities, perfidious pundits, and assorted other professional sycophants and lying weasels were shocked to discover they had inadvertently been part of the most insidious PSYOP that had ever been perpetrated on the masses in the history of insidious mass-PSYOPs.

The Last Days of the Covidian Cult were upon us! The Corporatocracy had overplayed their hand, and underestimated their opposition, and they knew it.

But the Cult was not going to go down quietly. In February, in Ottawa, Canada, thousands of truckers and other working-class people who had had enough of the Pandemic PSYOP occupied the streets outside the capitol and demanded an end to “vaccination mandates,” segregation of “the Unvaccinated,” and other “emergency health measures.” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian media, and their counterparts throughout the New Normal Reich immediately denounced the protesters as “treasonous, Russia-backed, transphobic, Nazi terrorists.”

This affront to the authority of the New Normal Reich could not be allowed to go unpunished, so Trudeau declared de facto martial law and unleashed a battalion of militarized police and other unidentified goons to beat and trample the protesters with horses (including one old lady with a “terrorist walker”). Then he went about hunting down and freezing the bank accounts of any Canadians who had donated to the protest, and otherwise attempting to destroy the lives of anyone who had disobeyed him.

This display of contempt for the rule of law and the ruthlessness of the New Normal Reich was one of the last of the bloody crackdowns on dissidents in countries all over the world that had been in progress for over a year by then, e.g., in Australia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, China, and other countries. These vicious “crackdowns” on peaceful protests were conducted “to protect the public health,” of course, and were not at all a display of brute force meant to intimidate the masses into obedience. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not fascists, or totalitarians, after all, and anyone who suggests they are is clearly a “Russia-backed, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing extremist,” or whatever.

Oh, and speaking of totalitarians, and fascists, and goose-stepping, Sieg-heiling neo-Nazis, the Gaslighting Cavalcade of 2022 reached a whole new level of gaslighting in March, when, after years of provocation, Russia finally invaded Ukraine, and all the Ukrainian neo-Nazis that the corporate media had been extensively reporting on magically vanished into the ether.

Yes, it was Springtime for the GloboCap Nazis! And not just for the GloboCap Nazis! Liberals, still struggling with withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline rush of the Covidian Cult, and the thrill of fanatically persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” suddenly had a new official narrative that they could mindlessly parrot and fanatically defend from the “conspiracy theorists” and “disinformationists.”

The only problem was, it didn’t make any sense. According to the new official narrative, those reports of Ukrainian neo-Nazis by virtually every mainstream media outlet and Nazi-hunting organization on the planet in the years leading up to 2022 were now, suddenly, just “Russian propaganda.” GloboCap hadn’t even bothered to scrub or visibility-filter those reports. They were all still right there on the Internet.

And, OK, the other problem was, in order to remain “New Normals in Good Standing” and keep their jobs and social contacts, liberals were now forced to actively cheer for swastika-tattooed, Sieg-heiling Nazis, and look the other way as Ukrainian fascists advocated the mass murder of children and quoted Adolf Eichmann on Ukrainian television.

The Spring and Summer were kind of a blur, or maybe I was just preoccupied with publishing The Rise of the New Normal Reich, a collection of my essays documenting the rollout of the New Normal in 2020 and 2021, which was an international Barnes & Noble and Amazon bestseller upon its release, and then was promptly banned by Amazon in Germany, The Netherlands, and Austria, and labelled with a “Covid-19 vaccine warning” advising readers to visit the CDC before purchasing and (God help them!) reading the book in every other Amazon market.

I vaguely remember something about monkeypox, but, mostly, when I wasn’t promoting the book, or struggling to keep my breakfast down after seeing another one of my liberal friends cheering for neo-Nazis on Facebook, I was focused on events here in New Normal Germany (which, yes, mask mandates are still in effect), and The Normalization of the New Normal Reich (which, no, is not over, but is just beginning), and attempting to start to emotionally recover from two solid years of official gaslighting, demonization, segregation, and so on.

Fortunately, in September, right on cue, as I was working through my emotional issues, i.e., how most of my former friends and colleagues had either gone silent and looked away as our constitutional rights were cancelled, dissent was censored and demonized, goon squads were dispatched to brutalize dissidents, experimental “vaccines” were forced on people, a social segregation system was implemented, and so on, or else, if they hadn’t gone silent, they had joined the shrieking fascistic mob … just as I was starting to process all that, as were a lot of other people, a prophet arrived on the “freedom” scene!

That’s right, as it turned out, I was totally wrong about the new totalitarianism, and how it works! I had stupidly assumed it was a political phenomenon … you know, a sociopolitical and cultural system imposed on the masses from above by force, but, according to Mattias Desmet, it’s actually a psychological phenomenon, a “mass formation” or “mass hypnosis”-type thing!

It’s possible that I’m not describing it correctly. As his devoted fans have repeatedly informed me, I don’t understand the nuances of Desmet’s theory. He explained it all on the Alex Jones show, while he was lying, which he does, repeatedly, but … whatever. I’m not a professor of psychology. The point is, the Covidian Cultists were all hypnotized! No one was threatening or gaslighting the masses! The poor confused things were doing it to themselves!

But that was not the end of the gaslighting. Globocap saved the best for last!

See, the problem was, there were all these people who hadn’t joined the Covidian Cult or any other part of the New Normal movement, and who were extremely angry about having been demonized, and segregated, and censored, and gaslighted, and so on, by their governments, global corporations, non-governmental governing entities, the corporate media, “scientific experts,” and the majority of the masses for two and a half years.

Something needed to be done about all that anger. It needed to be redirected somewhere. At something that wasn’t GloboCap, and that wouldn’t interfere with the New Normal program.

Emperor Elonicus to the rescue!

If Elon Musk wasn’t actually appointed by the global-capitalist ruling classes to redirect the pent-up anger of “the Unvaccinated” demographic, and the “Systematically Censored and Demonized” demographic, and everyone else who opposed the New Normal into a balls-out left/right shit-slinging contest … well, they couldn’t have found anyone better for the job.

Consider what he’s accomplished in the space of six weeks. After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, he bought himself a couple of independent journalists — because who could resist the Twitter Files? I certainly couldn’t have, had I been in their position — and is staging the most audacious limited hangout in the history of audacious limited hangouts. Whether it will work over the longer term is unclear — Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are already starting to become uncomfortable with being perceived and treated as Elon Musk’s employees — but, so far, it is going gangbusters!

Now, students of limited hangouts, whitewashing, and other COINTELPRO ops, really need to pay attention. Because the beauty of this limited hangout is that the “hangout” is actually a monumental story, an up-close look at the nuts-and-bolts processes of the global-capitalist Ministry of Truth. As Matt Taibbi reported in a recent piece …

“… the Twitter Files show something new. We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, ‘bounced,’ deleted or ‘visibility filtered’ by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons. The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion. These agencies claim variously to be concerned about election integrity, foreign interference, medical misinformation, and monitoring domestic extremism, among other things. As crises wax and wane, the building out of the censorship infrastructure to ever-bigger and broader dimensions has been constant, suggesting that creating and deploying the tool to manipulate opinion was always the real end.”

And this monumental story is being buried in shit … American red/blue partisan shit. With a series of ham-handed PR stunts, cheap provocations, attention-grabbing antics, and good old-fashioned diversionary shit-slinging, Musk is (a) whitewashing the new “free-speech Twitter,” which continues to censor and defame us with impunity, (b) burying the actual story under a steaming heap of partisan acrimony, and (c) driving a big blunt wedge into the supra-partisan coalition of forces that had aligned in opposition to the roll-out of the New Normal.

That, my friends, is some world-class gaslighting! And the wildest part is, he probably doesn’t even consciously realize what he’s doing. Nevertheless, by the time he’s done playing grab-ass with the freedom-of-speech thing, and getting revenge on Taylor Lorenz, and so on, corporate censorship will have been completely normalized. “Freedom of speech” will be a running joke, as opposing camps of hate-drunk hypocrites take turns applauding as global corporations and their governmental partners censor one camp or the other.

On that cheery note, I’ll sign off for the year, and go tend to all the irate messages I’m getting from abject Elon Musk worshipers, and the hate-email from assorted anti-Semites, and so on, and then hibernate until 2023.

Oh, yeah, and those “Covid Twitter Files.” I can’t wait to scroll through those with a nice glass of eggnog. I’m sure they will be coming out any day now, maybe even on Christmas morning!

Happy holidays to one and all!

More Proof that American Politics and Diplomacy no Longer Function

Meet the New Left...

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "How the Left Became What It Once Hated"

In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left! 

They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!

Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.

And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.

At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.

Is MSNBC Subsidized by the CfPB?

Who Pays for their Fawning Admiration of US Government Officials?

Progressive Non Sequiturs...

...The FBI Runs Twitter... the CIA Runs Google and Facebook... but there is no "Deep State"

Merry Christmas!

Happity Holidays!

Hopitty Halidays!

I Wonder What Lindsey's Ukraine-Omnibus Kickback Was...

Anybody Remember Lindsey's Speech BEFORE Russia "Invaded Ukraine w/o Provocation"?

...I'll bet that the McCain Institute gets a BIG FAT CHECK from Ukraine!

The 18 Republican Senators Deserving of Primary Challenges...

BREAKING: Here are the 18 Republican senators who voted for the $1.7 trillion omnibus:

Blunt, Boozman, Capito, Collins, Cornyn, Cotton, Graham, Inhofe, McConnell, Moran, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Rounds, Shelby, Thune, Wicker, Young.

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 22, 2022

Budget Parasites Descend Upon US Capitol Seeking Omnibus Earmarks

Jordan Boyd, "Here’s Everything Wrong With Congress’s Plan To Give Zelensky Cash For Christmas"

Despite the financial strain Ukraine has put on the United States, the swamp is ready to welcome Zelensky with open arms — and more money.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to receive a hero’s welcome in the U.S. capital today, just as Congress is poised to award him another $45 billion in its mammoth inflationary spending bill.

It may be Zelensky’s first time leaving Ukraine since the war with Russia began, but it’s not his first time appearing before an American audience to beg for more money. And it certainly won’t be his last. Already, Zelensky is prepared to use his congressional address to complain that the beaucoup bucks the U.S. has thrown at Ukraine in the last 10 months — more than $100 billion total if the omnibus passes — is still “not enough.”

Despite the financial strain Ukraine has put on the United States, the swamp is ready to welcome Zelensky with open arms. You wouldn’t know it from corporate media coverage, but that’s problematic. Here’s why.

Americans Simply Don’t Approve.  

Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s claims, spending taxpayer dollars on a proxy war in Eastern Europe is not high on the priority list for Republican or Democrat voters.

McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 20, 2022

If Americans overwhelmingly reject going to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, which polling since the beginning of the conflict has said they do, Congress shouldn’t be spending money that indicates the U.S. is willing to prolong a war by whatever means necessary.

Throwing Dollars at Ukraine Escalates Rather than Ends the War 

Nearly half of Americans want their government to urge Ukraine to negotiate a peace settlement. Instead of heeding the voters’ wishes, the Swamp extends Ukraine’s ability to fight with more funds, weapons, and verbal support. Money for Zelensky solidifies U.S. involvement in a war that Congress never voted to declare.

Cash for Ukraine Takes Away from Necessary U.S. Spending 

While Congress funnels tens of billions of dollars to protect the border of a foreign country, our country’s border is virtually nonexistent. Each day, thousands of illegal border crossers pour into the southern United States.

These migrants put a physical and financial strain on our immigration system and cities all around the nation. Yet Congress, specifically Senate Republicans, repeatedly refuse to leverage their influence for funding to secure our border.

Senate Republicans could stop this by demanding border security before voting for the Biden "omnibus." Instead, they are voting for a budget that *prohibits* Border Patrol from securing the border! https://t.co/ugDlDxxLQz

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) December 21, 2022

Funding an Overseas War When Americans Struggle to Afford Basics Is the Wrong Choice 

While Congress ships taxpayer dollars overseas, Americans can’t afford to live in the increasingly expensive homeland.

As retirement accounts dip into the negative, 1 in 4 U.S. parents reports they couldn’t cover basic needs such as food, shelter, and care for their families in 2022. That’s no surprise considering raging inflation has jacked up prices across the board. Americans now pay 49.1 percent more for eggs, 27 percent more for butter, and 14.7 percent more for milk compared to 2021.

Zelensky’s Handout Is Part of a Destructive Spending Package

The more than $45 billion Congress designated for Zelensky is part of a sweeping, inflationary omnibus bill that would fulfill Democrats’ spending wishes before the newly elected Republican House is sworn in.

The legislation was conjured quickly with hardly any time slated for review or criticism. Because of that, Senate Republicans like McConnell face threats of gridlock from members of the new GOP House.

There Are Bigger Foreign Policy Problems Than Ukraine 

As the world watches Ukraine and Russia duke (or possibly nuke) it out, China, our nation’s biggest threat, has been taking advantage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Thanks to the laxity of the U.S., China crept its way into a working relationship with Russia and created a hegemonic plan to expand its rule. The communist regime’s boldness in expanding its Marxism and reaching for Taiwan will only grow stronger as America drains its foreign policy budget on Ukraine.

Ukraine Is Not a Top Strategic U.S. Security Interest 

Not only is Ukraine not our biggest foreign policy problem, but it’s also not even a top strategic U.S. security interest. McConnell regularly justifies funneling dollars to Ukraine under the guise that the spending is part of “Essential Investments in American Strength and Security.” But the truth of the matter is that spending endless money on an indefinite war in Ukraine does nothing for Americans but create a national security threat.

The Biden Admin Is Incapable of Handling Problems Properly 

Americans don’t trust Biden to handle the Russia-Ukraine war because every problem the Biden administration touches turns into an even bigger disaster.

Not only does the White House exacerbate crises, but it also creates them. Take one look at the economy, the southern border, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the political war waged by the Department of Justice and FBI against Americans, and you’ll understand why our president shouldn’t be so eager to be a cash cow for a foreign country.

Ukraine Isn’t the Most Honest Country

Zelensky’s Ukraine is filled with anti-democratic practices and principles: a war on the free press, money-grabbing bureaucrats, and a broken justice system.

Congress granting a corrupt regime funds with little to no oversight doesn’t just undermine war hawks’ reasoning for supporting Ukraine. It could also quickly result in a “Taliban inherits American weaponry” situation.

Coming Soon - WokeScores and Digital Dollars

Say Goodbye to Democracy...

46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.

“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

On The US Intelligence Community and partner's "SCALE" Infrastructure...  and AI Tool development (Chatbot GTP, et al)

Apparently, the US Government believes itself to currently be on the Front Lines of a global AI War where "truth" is often the 1st victim.

How Democrats became America's "War Party"

I think that Julian is closer to the mark...

James Billot, "New Evidence Confirm's the Blob's Hawkishness: Proximity to Washington leads to more support for military intervention"

Ideology based on employment status. Credit: Richard Hanania and Max Abrahms

Washington’s foreign policy circle is a famously tight network. Comprising government officials, academics, and think tanks, this group (known as the ‘Blob‘) has developed a reputation for hawkishness and support for high levels of military spending.

There are hundreds of think tanks based in Washington, making it difficult to tell where the policy comes from: the White House or unelected officials. During the Reagan era, for example, there were almost 200 employees at conservative think tanks who served as government officials or consultants for his administration. But what do they actually believe?

New research by Richard Hanania and Max Abrahms has found that think tanks are much more hawkish than International Relations scholars, even controlling for ideology.

Taking a comprehensive survey of the most influential scholars and top 20 think tanks, the two researchers discovered that the closer a think tank employee was to power (both geographically and professionally), the more likely they were to be militarily interventionist. According to Hanania and Abrahms, for all the think tanks located within three miles of Capitol Hill, every mile further away is associated with a -0.48 deviation in militant internationalism:

Militant internationalism based on geo-coded responses of think tank employees responding within 20 miles of Capitol Hill.

The researchers posit that the reason for this is the increased likelihood of socialisation with government officials:

These kinds of contacts can take the form of, among other things, panel discussions, interviews with the media, and access to social, business, and networking opportunities with influential figures…Those closer to the center of power are more likely to be part of the foreign policy community (Walt 2018). We do not expect to see a relationship between distance and political preferences within the category of professors, whose job description does not necessarily involve influencing public opinion, being close to media centers, and meeting with powerful figures. 

- RICHARD HANANIA AND MAX ABRAHMS

So why is the foreign policy community more hawkish generally? Hanania and Abrahms give three answers: self-selection, institution-selection and knowledge-based:

First of all, people who favor more hawkish positions might be more likely to seek out positions of influence and power. Second, institutions and governments might seek out those with more hawkish views, or perhaps pressure them into supporting a more aggressive posture for the United States abroad…Finally, the nature of the work and the focus of their research might encourage TTEs, who put more effort into studying contemporary and policy-relevant issues to adopt more hawkish views.

- RICHARD HANANIA AND MAX ABRAHMS

The Ukraine war has been something of a renaissance for the Blob. But this research should serve as an important reminder to Washington foreign policy officials that not everyone thinks alike — even if all think tank employees do.

Tax Broke, Baltimore's Dirty Secret

For 50 years, Baltimore city officials have trumpeted the use of tax subsidies for private developers as a way to catalyze economic development. As more and more public funds have gone into the pockets of the rich, the city’s prospects have only worsened. Hundreds of thousands of residents have left or been pushed out of the city, and numerous businesses have followed suit. In their new documentary, ‘Tax Broke,’ TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis team up with veteran Baltimore reporter Jayne Miller to tell the story of how capital has fed parasitically on taxpayer money for half a century. Stephen and Jayne join Rattling the Bars to share what their reporting in ‘Tax Broke’ uncovered.

Look for "Tax Broke" premiering on YouTube this January. 

The Modern Fragile Woke Society vs...

Sinema Defects!

Died Suddenly... RU Quadruple Vaccinated?

I'm told that much of this film has been debunked. I sure hope they're right.

Western Denseness on Energy Densities

Robert Bryce, "Siemens Power CEO Confirms the Iron Law of Power Density" 

Last month, the CEO of Siemens Energy, Christian Bruch, appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” to talk about the myriad problems facing the wind industry. And during his appearance, he confirmed the Iron Law of Power Density.

Bruch said his firm was “in the heart of the energy transition” but there were “challenges” in wind energy, particularly with regard to supply chains. And this is where his comments revealed what I call the Iron Law of Power Density, which says the lower the power density of a given source, the higher the resource intensity. Bruch said: “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material [compared to] ... what conventional technologies need...So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.”

Siemens and other companies that produce wind turbines are being hammered by huge losses. Siemens just posted a net loss of 647 million euros, which was up from a 560 million euro loss in the previous year. In October, GE announced that its renewable energy business will lose a staggering $2 billion this year. Those losses are being driven in large part, by the surging cost of metals like zinc, nickel, neodymium, and copper.

If your power plant requires 10 times more of those commodities than other forms of power generation, it’s readily apparent why the Siemens boss is saying his company is having “problems on the supply chain.” And those problems are a direct result of wind energy’s low power density. If you skipped high school physics as I did, you may not understand why power density matters. But it is perhaps the single most important metric when it comes to explaining the size and shape of our energy and power networks.

Here’s a quick primer. Energy (measured in joules, or Btu) is the ability to do work. Power (measured in watts, or horsepower) is the rate at which work gets done. As I have said many times, we don’t care about energy. What we want is power. We don’t care what form of energy (oil, sun, coal, or gas) that’s being used to power our car, run our television, or cook our quinoa, we only care that we have the power we need to do the work at hand.

Power density is the measure of energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume, or mass. Power density reveals how many watts we can get per square meter, liter, or kilogram from a given source. The concept of the Iron Law of Power Density is borrowed from author and University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr., who coined the Iron Law of Climate, which says that when forced to choose between economic growth and climate action, politicians and decision-makers will always choose economic growth.

The Iron Law of Power Density is a cousin of Pielke’s edict. If you are relying on a low-power-density source like corn ethanol (0.1 watt per square meter) or wind energy (1 watt per square meter) or solar (10 watts per square meter) you have to counteract those paltry energy flows with big inputs of other resources. For ethanol, that means using lots of land, fertilizer, and diesel fuel to grow enough corn to produce meaningful amounts of liquid fuel. Last year, Dave Merrill, an ace reporter and data analyst at Bloomberg, reported that “Two-thirds of America’s total energy footprint is devoted to...corn grown for ethanol. It requires more land than all other power sources combined.” Merrill determined that biofuels (mainly corn ethanol) use about 80,000 square miles, an area bigger than the state of Nebraska.

Like corn ethanol, the low power density of wind and solar requires huge amounts of land. But wind and solar also require vast amounts of steel, copper, and other things like polysilicon and neodymium. The staggering amounts of land required by those sources are fueling a raging backlash in rural America, and around the world, against Big Wind and Big Solar. I have documented most of those rejections in the Renewable Rejection Database. Since 2015, at least 373 government entities from Maine to Hawaii have rejected or restricted Big Wind. Since 2017, at least 103 solar projects have been rejected or restricted in the U.S. with 76 rejections this year alone.

Indeed, land-use conflicts, and material inputs, are the binding constraints on the expansion of renewable energy. In these pages in October, Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, admitted that the amount of land required to accommodate the roughly 800 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that his computer model assumes will be built due to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act would require “37,000 square miles for wind farms and 4,700 square miles for solar PV. That’s roughly the area of Tennessee, so no joke, or 15% of the area of Texas.”

No joke, indeed. The last time I checked, the U.S. doesn’t have a spare Tennessee to accommodate all that wind and solar. But I digress.

Now back to Bruch. He told CNBC that there is “still a way to go” in the maturation of the wind industry and that there are problems with distributing “risk along the supply chain in a world which is much more volatile, much more difficult, much more multilateral than before.” He continued, saying “if we don’t resolve it as an industry, we are missing a substantial part of the energy transition, and we’ll fail with the energy transition.”

While Bruch didn’t say it, the obvious way forward is to quit throwing money and staggering amounts of resources at land-devouring-low-power-density -- and incurably intermittent -- sources like wind and solar. As can be seen in the graphic above, which uses numbers published by the Department of Energy, the energy sources with the lowest resource intensity are natural gas and nuclear energy. Indeed, the graphic proves that Bruch is correct when he says that wind energy takes about 10 times more materials than conventional forms of generation.

There are many reasons why N2N, natural gas to nuclear, is the obvious way forward if we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions. Low material intensity is just one of them. Add the fact that both sources are proven, low- or no-carbon, affordable, and scalable, and it quickly becomes clear why I’ve been advocating for N2N for more than a dozen years.

In summary, the Iron Law of Power Density will not be repealed. While it’s great that the CEO of Siemens is underscoring wind energy’s fatal flaw, his warnings need to be

heeded by the policymakers, NGOs, and elite academics who continue hyping the dead end of wind energy.