60 Minutes Australia Interviews Antony Blinken

 

QUESTION: Your job is all about managing risk. Vladimir Putin is threatening nuclear war, and this month we've seen the hottest temperatures on this planet on record. What is the greater threat to humanity in your mind, war or climate change?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, you can't, I think, have a hierarchy. There are some things that are front and center - the wolf at the door - including potential conflict, but there's no doubt that climate represents an existential challenge to all of us. It's one of the reasons we're so gratified at Australia's leadership when it comes to combating climate change; that Australia is stepping up in the way that it is sends a very powerful message. It's both practical in what Australia is doing, but it also is the symbolism of an important country taking a clear stand and also taking action against climate.

So for us, this is the existential challenge of our times, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime there are not severe challenges to the international order like Russia's aggression against Ukraine. We have to multitask. Basically we're, for better or worse, in a growth industry right now. We've got a multiplicity of challenges and we have to be able to engage them simultaneously. It's again one of the reasons why having such a strong partnership and alliance with Australia matters more than ever.

The rest of the interview:  https://www.miragenews.com/60-minutes-australia-features-interview-with-1056543/

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Determining the Sex of a Human

There's been a lot of controversy lately about determining the sex of individual humans. Some people feel that one's sex is a mental thing that can't be determined through biological analysis. Others think that the presence of the reproductive organs that conform to the generally accepted definitions of male and female are sufficient. Some sports bodies determine sex by the level of testosterone in the blood.

Not long ago a grave from perhaps 100 BC on the British island of Bryher was opened. Oddities about the items found with what remained of the body led the archeologists to try to discover its sex. The bones were in such a state that a DNA test couldn't be made.

Instead, analyses were made of the remaining teeth and the dental peptides indicated with an accuracy of 96% that the grave's occupant was a female. So we now have an infallible means of determining sex. 

Elizabeth Nickson Jumps On Summit Carbon

 

elizabethjnickson.com

Elizabeth Nickson, an experienced and talented researcher and journalist, has now added the carbon capture swindlers to her list of evil. The Summit Carbon Solutions scheme is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist except in that the CO2 they're proposing to move around the country doesn't need to be produced by fermenting corn into alcohol for a motor fuel additive anyway. 

During the entire history of internal combustion engines experiments have been conducted with different substances to fuel them. Alcohol in varying proportions with gasoline was used as a solution to both air pollution and the "oil crisis" of the '70s and '80s.

Government mandates and subsidies have led to the construction of a total of 192 plants mostly in the  American midwest with a production capacity of 17,380,000,000 gallons annually. According to John Phipps at AgWeb.com an average ethanol plant produces about 150,000 metric tons of CO2 per year through the fermenting process itself. Only 43 US ethanol plants capture any CO2, the rest is vented to the atmosphere. Phipps says that a 500 megawatt coal power house produces about 3.5 million tons. What this comparison is meant to illustrate is a mystery. The production of a an electrical generating station and an ethanol plant aren't even remotely related.

Be sure and read Nickson's article linked to above.     

What Happened To Bad Fed Cop?

 

 

 

  Photo: John Minchillo/Associated Press 

Charles McGonigal leaves court

The news media was abuzz over the arrest and indictment of retired FBI counter-intelligence officer Charles McGonigal for, among other things, working for a Russian oligarch he was previously tasked with investigating. 

The buzz didn't last long. In only a few days what could have been, or maybe was, a colossal national security breach has disappeared from the click-bait media and its dead tree brothers. Every federal employee signs an oath that prohibits exactly what Mr. McGonigal is accused of doing. It amounts to treason, a punishment for which could be fatal. We shouldn't expect a daily record of the circumstances of this money-hungry weasel but it would be nice if there wasn't a conscious attempt to make this incident fade away.

Update:  Miranda Devine of the New York Post explores the financial connections between Biden child Hunter, McGonigal, and a number of East European politician/gangsters. The Washington Examiner goes into the Albanian connection. 

 

The Truth About Inflation

Even the highest circulation financial media can't seem to understand the reality of inflation. It's all about enpixelating money, it's not about prices. This exposition by Daniel Lacalle explains the whole thing.

421 parts per million CO2 in the world's atmosphere

The Associated Press is distributing the terrifying news that an increase of a harmless gas that makes up 4/100 of 1% of the earth's atmosphere is driving the uncomfortable warmth of some parts of world.   That would be akin to saying that the temperature of an Olympic swimming pool, which contains 660,430 gallons of water, would be raised significantly by the addition of 264 gallons of water. If the temperature of the water in the pool was 75F and the temperature of the added water was 85F the temperature of the pool water would increase an undetectable amount.  

Temperature Records: Minnesota State Fair

The Minnesota State Fair has been held during the last days of August and beginning of September since 1885 with a few exceptions for various reasons. As with other noteworthy nuggets, the fair administration has kept a record of the temperatures during the run of each fair.

 visitstpaul.com

Weather is an important factor in attendance.In ordinary circumstances the days are quite pleasant but of course there are exceptions. The record for high temperature was set in 1931, 104F. During the fair's eight day run that year the high topped 90F five times. In 1890 the high during the entire fair was 74F and the low was 33F. The 1965 fair had an average high of 67F and a low of 49F during its ten day run. An unremarkable .66" of rain fell in that time span.

The variation in fair temperatures from year to year doesn't seem to have changed much in the recent past. In 2016 the average high was 78F and the average low was 61F. Since 2016 the high hasn't reached 90F and the low has ranged between 72F and 52F.   

 

New York City Closing The Door To Migrants

New York mayor Eric Adams has pointed out to hopeful migrants that there's no more room in the Big Apple for foreign mendicants, according to this story.  If this is true, the financial capital of the western hemisphere has taken a first step back into the Medieval era.

 

At the end of the feudal times cities were surrounded by walls meant to protect the inhabitants from raiders, bandits and opposing armies. At sundown the gates were closed and guarded. No one was admitted unless the correct answers were given to the guards. As nation states developed, defenses were extended to the national borders. City walls remained but weren't as heavily defended until organized armies threatened. This was when siege warfare became important and the civilian population was an object of conquest as were the military forces. 

If Mayor Adams is serious about protecting NYC from hordes of impoverished aliens, he might try to stop them from entering the city at all. In fact, many smaller jurisdictions already are closed to strangers, gated communities, college campuses, various businesses, etc. Manhattan being an island that shouldn't be too difficult physically but there might be a constitutional problem. Since Homeland Security isn't enforcing immigration law, putting those bureaucrats in prison should be the first priority. 

 

UCI Changes The Rules On Transgender Bike Racers

 

 opoyi.com

Austin Killips, male cyclist, female racer.

 

UCI, Union Cycliste Internationale, the international governing body of competitive cycling has changed it's mind.   After allowing men who have kept their testosterone levels below 2.5 nanomoles per liter of blood for 24 months to compete with women, as of July 17, 2023 males competing in the female classes must have transitioned to female, whatever that means, before passing puberty. Males that consider themselves females can compete with other males or in an "open" class. A nanomole is 1 billionth of a mole, an amount that can't be determined visually and requires testing that has only been available in the last few years.

National federations are expected to follow the lead of the UCI, which determines who gets to compete in world championships and the Olympic games.

The UCI created considerable outrage when it established the nanomole formula and has created more by rescinding it. The few would-be females that will now have to race with members of their own sex are upset, evidently because it's unlikely that they will be as successful in the very competitive male races. Or maybe they just like to ride along with the ladies.  

Possibly Homeless

What's up with the adjective "homeless" used by the media in descriptions of violent criminals?  How do they know where and in what circumstances the perp in the situation spends his nights and week ends? 

And what does it have to do with the crime itself? Aren't other factors perhaps just as significant in telling the tale of how an ordinary person was damaged by the behavior of another? The attacker could be heavily tattooed, wearing a MAGA cap, a dirty hoody, a high school drop out or carrying a machete. Yet "homeless is the description of choice. 

Maybe the word "homeless" is meant to denote "crazy", since in Yankee land not having a genuine street address is evidence of mental issues. In fact, when the New York Post or other papers describe a person as "homeless" they actually do mean "crazy". 

Who Are They? What Are They Doing?

 

 nypost.com

It seems as though whenever a picture of a DC political figure being grilled  appears in the media it includes a platoon of people behind that individual. Why? Are they members of Kerry's $19+million staff? If so, don't they have other, more important things to do on the federal dime? What are their duties during this interrogation? It looks like a mass text messaging stunt for a bizarre Tik Tok video. 

Nothing in Washington happens by chance and this scene is a familiar one. Who is the choreographer? Kerry has many more staff members than those pictured. Is an appearance at a congressional torture session a reward for outstanding service, like a parking spot next to the boss in the commercial world? Will they physically defend him if some hick representative from Fly-Over Junction gets too close to the star of the show?

They could be members of the general public, perhaps paying spectators whose admission fees help pay for the JP-4 that fueled the jet that belonged to his wife and has since been sold. 

Princeton's REPEAT Solutiion For AGW

REPEAT is an acronym that stands for "Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit", an effort by Princeton University's Zero Lab to centralize analysis of governmental, scientific and commercial attempts at carbon reduction in energy supply and distribution. This means an a priori assumption that CO2 is, indeed, a significant component of the as yet unverified heating of the planet by its increase.

The program is led by Princeton faculty member Jesse Jenkins, the principal investigator, who says: "One of the consortium’s goals was to pool funding and maximize the research that could be done in this area when supported by organizations with similar interests. The structure of the program and the flexible funding allow researchers to quickly pivot to tackle the most important and interesting research questions, without having to wait for specific funding cycles or proposal calls from grantmaking agencies. It also creates an opportunity for big players grappling with a clean energy future to connect, he said. Jenkins hopes in the future to recruit other members to round out the group, such as a private venture capital group focused on clean energy or the investment arm of a utility."

wiresgroup.com 

A superficial analysis of Princeton's Zero Lab is that it has the appearance of a financial vehicle for any particular program it might find interesting, a pool of available funds from wealthy benefactors with no definite direction except the elimination of carbon in ways that are profitable to those donors.

When Professor Jenkins says "quickly pivot" does he mean "rapidly abandon discredited theories" as well as "quickly take up relevant research"?   

World-wide Urban Rebellion

The commercial element of downtown San Francisco is throwing in the towel and leaving because of urban lawlessness. Every major city in the US has become a battleground involving its youth element and authority. Nocturnal youth violence is sweeping urban France, the UK and other European cities. The normal anarchy and violence of African and South American cities is trending upward.

This article takes to task France's Macron for blaming riots in Paris on social media and lack of parental responsibility. Well, sure, there were riots in the pre-digital, pre-smart phone era but it's obvious that better communication has increased the intensity of social rebellion. That's simply tactics, however. There's a bigger picture.

More apropos to the situation is this offering by "eugyppius". His analysis includes this:

It’s no surprise to find American soft power behind some of these episodes, but US influence is only one factor here. The postwar international order, founded around organisations like the United Nations and the European Union, bears the explicit mandate of counteracting nationalist politics, which are regarded as the root cause of the great world wars. Especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this globalist ethos has given rise to a whole world of densely interrelated political parties, NGOs and philanthropists, while also fostering an increasingly uniform and inward-looking elite political culture. These new elites hope to find in imported minorities a basis of popular support for globalism at home and a counterweight to the dreaded nativist right. Most major leftist and Green parties are mere instruments and expressions of this culture, as is any demonstration that is not immediately and brutally repressed.

This is about power and they don’t care. They’ll vaccinate billions and take years of heightened mortality in stride. They’ll burn whole cities to the ground if they have to. 

The fingerprints of the new elites are all over the muddy banks of the Rio Grande.

Matt Ridley Talks About The Advantages Of EVs

Matt Ridley, successful British science journalist, writes an article for the Daily Mail explaining why EVs won't be the answer for whatever the question is in Britain's quest for "Net Zero".

Volker Turk Says, "Our environment is burning. It's melting. It's flooding. It's depleting. It's drying. It's dying,"

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, an Austrian attorney who has been in various supervisory roles at the UN since 1991, Volker Turk has said that the world faces a dystopian future unless climate change is arrested immediately.

 merkur.de 

Mr. Turk frames climate change as a human rights issue, which apparently gives his office and the UN the right to make policy decisions that effect humans all over the earth. The fact that there is no empirical evidence of AGW matters not to an individual whose education and training is in the dimension of law, not climate science. His statistics on the effects of climate change, for instance that 828 million souls faced hunger in 2021 and that "projections" will put another 80 million at risk of hunger by mid-century, can't possibly be verified. Being at risk isn't the same thing as actually starving or even being ill-fed.In fact, now, as in the past, large scale famines have been the product of government actions, not climate vagaries.

While parts of Ukraine were under drought conditions in 1921-1923, it's evident that Soviet policies resulted in the starvation of millions in what was the most fertile area of eastern Europe. Presently there's a famine situation in Ethiopia, a product of the conflict between the Ethiopian government and Tigray rebels. 

If Mr. Turk is truly interested in human rights, however they might be determined, he could use his position to address political and government actions that immediately affect food supplies rather than demanding expensive and dubious efforts to arrest perhaps imaginary climate change.