Michael Shellenberger, who has been involved in breaking down some of the Twitter files releases, has posted a thread and an article about the World Economic Forum, ahead of its meeting in Davos this week.

Shellenberger says that the World Economic Forum is “fighting back against those who say it and its founder are seeking global domination through a ‘great reset’ aimed at stripping the masses of their private property, de-industrializing the economy, and making everybody eat bugs.” But Shellenberger takes apart that “defense.”

A WEF managing director claimed in August of last year that the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” meme was a conspiracy theory started by an anti-Semitic account on 4Chan. But that wasn’t true, since it was based on an article on the WEF website from 2016. The spokesperson mentions that article but downplays it as a “years old” opinion article.

The managing director also leaves out the subsequent video put out by the WEF in 2018 that makes it seem far less like a “years-old article.” While they deleted the page that had the video on their site, the video is still up on their Twitter and it’s a creepy, prospective look for 2030.

It was significant enough for them to put together this video that repeated the “own nothing” claim, as well as phasing down meat and eliminating fossil fuels. The video is a festival of all kinds of leftist aims in one place.

Shellenberger noted that if the WEF is calling on others to be transparent, why are they deleting their web pages and why aren’t they forthcoming about their own financial information?

How much can capitalism help address the climate crisis? This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

listmonk is a self-hosted, high performance one-way mailing list and newsletter manager. It comes as a standalone binary and the only dependency is a Postgres database.

The Prime Meridian is the universally decided zero longitude, an imaginary north/south line which bisects the world into two and begins the universal day. The line starts at the north pole, passes across the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and ends at the south pole. Its existence is purely abstract, but it is a globally-unifying line that makes the measurement of time (clocks) and space (maps) consistent across our planet.

The Greenwich line was established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC. That conference's main resolutions were: there was to be a single meridian; it was to cross at Greenwich; there was to be a universal day, and that day would start at mean midnight at the initial meridian. From that moment, the space and time on our globe have been universally coordinated.

Having a single prime meridian brings to the world's cartographers a universal map language allowing them to join their maps together, facilitating international trade and maritime navigation. At the same time, the world now had one matching chronology, a reference by which today you can tell what time of day it is anywhere in the world simply by knowing its longitude.

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Access to Energy is one of those rare newsletters that does not stop with just publication, but goes into effective action for the causes it espouses. The latest instance of this is the Petition Project - an anti-global warming petition signed by over 17,000 scientists - which exposes Al Gore's "scientific consensus" on global warming as phony. This Petition Project was funded by subscriptions and donations from the readers of Access to Energy. See Global Warming Debunking News and Views for more.

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Friday night, Ebright posted a Twitter thread of “nine facts about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that everyone needs to know,” and indeed, this information (which will not be news to RedState readers) needs to be spread far and wide. As Ebright noted at the end of the thread, he ended up listing 10 facts instead of nine.

4) Wuhan is located 1,000 km from the nearest wild bats with SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses.

5) Wuhan has labs that, at the start of the pandemic, conducted the world’s largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses, possessed the world’s largest collection of bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and possessed the world’s only sample of a SARS-CoV-2-like coronavirus.

6) In 2016-2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed a series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses that combined the spike gene of one bat SARS-like coronavirus with the rest of the genetic information of another bat SARS-like coronavirus and identified viruses that were able to infect and replicate efficiently in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells. In other words, in the years before the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had taken most of the steps needed to convert a natural bat SARS-like coronavirus to a novel human pandemic pathogen having the properties of SARS-CoV-2. //

7) In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to construct an expanded series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, this time using newly identified spike genes having affinities for human receptors that ranged from very low to very high; and proposed to insert furin cleavage sites — a feature that is present in SARS-CoV-2 but not in any of the hundreds of other known SARS-like coronaviruses and that is crucial for the high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 — into SARS-like coronaviruses.

In other words, just a year before the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to take the remaining steps needed to convert a natural bat SARS-like coronavirus to a novel human pandemic pathogen having the properties of SARS-CoV-2.

8) In 2016-2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed and characterized SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a level inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and inadequate to contain a virus having the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2.

9) From the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation…even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could have cleared their names through cooperation.

10) A preponderance of evidence, including both the scientific evidence (facts 1-3) and the documentary evidence (facts 4-9), indicates that SARS-CoV-2 likely entered humans through a laboratory accident.

All statements in all posts are demonstrable facts.

Here's the math behind making a star-encompassing megastructure.

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.

But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere? //

Even if we were to coat the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels, we would still only capture less than a tenth of a billionth of all the energy our sun produces. Most of it just radiates uselessly into empty space. We’ll need to keep that energy from radiating away if we want to achieve Great Galactic Civilization status, so we need to do some slight remodeling. We don’t want just the surface of the Earth to capture solar energy; we want to spread the Earth out to capture more energy. //

For slimmer, meter-thick panels operating at 90 percent efficiency, the game totally changes. At 0.1 AU, the Earth would smear out a third of the sun, and we would get a return on our energy investment in around a year. As for Jupiter, we wouldn’t even have to go to 0.1 AU. At a distance about 30 percent further out than that, we could achieve the unimaginable: completely enclosing our sun. We would recoup our energy cost in only a few hundred years, and we could then possess the entirety of the sun’s output from then on. //

MichalH Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
62

euknemarchon said:
I don't get it. Why wouldn't you use asteroid material?
The mass of all asteroids amounts to only 3% of the earth's moon. Not worth chasing them down, I'd guess. //

DCStone Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,313
"But [Jupiter]’s mostly gas; it only has about five Earth’s worth of rocky material (theoretically—we’re not sure) buried under thousands of kilometers of mostly useless gas. We'd have to unbind the whole dang thing, and then we don’t even get to use most of the mass of the planet."

Hmm. If we can imagine being able to unbind rocky planets, we can also imagine fusing the gas atmosphere of Jupiter to make usable material (think giant colliders). Jupiter has a mass of about 1.9 x 10^27 kg, of which ~5% is rocky core. We'd need to make some assumptions about the energy required to fuse the atmosphere into something usable (silicon and oxygen to make silicates?) and the efficiency of that process. Does it do enough to change the overall calculation though? //

Dark Jaguar Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
11,066
The bigger issue is the sphere wouldn't be gravitationally locked in place because the sun is cancelling it's own pull in every direction. Heck even Ringworld had to deal with this flaw in the sequel. That's why these days the futurists talking about enclosing the sun recommend "Dyson swarming" instead.

Edit: A little additional note. You can't really get the centrifugal force needed to generate artificial gravity across an entire sphere like you can with a ring. A swarm doesn't negate this. If you orbit fast enough to generate that artificial gravity, you're now leaving the sun behind. Enjoy drifting endlessly! No, rather each of these swarm objects are just going to have to rotate themselves decently fast.

Creating a website doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. With the Publii app, the most intuitive CMS for static sites, you can create a beautiful, safe, and privacy-friendly website quickly and easily; perfect for anyone who wants a fast, secure website in a flash. //

The goal of Publii is to make website creation simple and accessible for everyone, regardless of skill level. With an intuitive user interface and built-in privacy tools, Publii combines powerful and flexible options that make it the perfect platform for anyone who wants a hassle-free way to build and manage a blog, portfolio or documentation website.

It's April Fools' Day, which means... a long, ludicrous poem about screens!

Much has been made here at RedState about the growing progressive rot permeating various film franchises, most noticeably comic book-based ones such as the MCU and Justice League. While the incessant preaching and corresponding drops in box office revenue are well worth covering, another omnipresent yet overlooked element warrants further examination. Filling this gap, Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s (FilmLadd on Twitter) latest installment of his excellent video series dissecting both pop culture and political grifters compares Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western “The Wild Bunch,” one of the first films made taking full advantage of the Hays Code’s discontinuation, with Joss Wheldon’s 2012 “The Avengers.” The latter comes out decidedly second best on multiple fronts. //

Ehlinger Jr.’s video focuses on how violence is depicted in each film, comparing “The Avengers” outlandish cartoon stylization to “The Wild Bunch” and its utilization of slow motion and quick cuts not solely for cinematic effect but also to depict as accurately as possible violence’s horrific consequences, the suffering and death that come with the real thing. As he comments:

There’s no violence in movies, video games, and the rest; only depictions of violence. It then becomes a matter of depicting violence in a moral or immoral way.

Ehlinger Jr. explains that while “The Wild Bunch” has vast quantities of spilled blood, it does so not to shock or titillate but to emphasize violence’s graphic, messy nature. There are no bloodless bullet holes or immunity to gunfire based on gender or age. Women and children bleed and die just as agonizingly as men. Ehlinger Jr. compares this to the cartoonish ways the humans in “The Avengers” pull off stunts that would, in real life, mean certain death without getting so much as a glorified paper cut. //

Peckinpah’s life was hardly a quiet one centered on Bible study and prayer. Yet ironically, his films are laced with a strong moral code straight from Scripture. What a person plants, they will always harvest. The Old Testament prophet Hosea said it best: They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind. As Ladd Ehlinger Jr. shows us, noting that which was done better in bygone days is not the sole prerogative of previous dusty generations railing against the wind. It is the raw truth. Ignore it at your peril. //

INTJ
2 years ago edited
So, Sergeant York or The Longest Day, both Hays-era films, never inspired violence? What's the difference? What about Psycho? The issue is much more complex and nuanced than is suggested. I would argue that the lack of societal consequences for acts of violence - think Soros D.A.'s - has a far greater impact. //

Cafeblue32 Real GOP 690
2 years ago edited
The avengers isn’t a moral tale? Of course it is.

Shakespeare I believe pointed out long ago there are basically only six stories that are told to describe the human condition. I can’t remember what they all are now, but one is starcrossed lovers who find each other, or they almost find each other. There is the rescuing of the maiden, the slaying of the dragons, the fulfilling of the hero’s quest. All of it is based in morality or to otherwise reenforce values and ideas we used to commonly hold.

There is no neutral input to humans. Whatever we see and hear is internalized and filed away by the subconscious mind. We present tales of murder and violence to others and punishment for it so that we don’t do it in real life. Hollywood is doing its best to strip entertainment of moral considerations, and that is one big reason it sucks. If there is no overall stakes of losing right, wrong, justice and freedom, then there is no conflict, only bitchy people whining about not getting what they want. And the violence becomes a glorified street fight we aren’t invested in because it isn’t about us.

Hollywood removes the consequences of violence and produces movies where people are bloodfilled meat bags to be killed in various ways while we cheer the heroes carnage. They are seldom ever about a larger societal benefit. It is usually personal revenge, or restoration, or some other McGuffin that is their reason.

Violence in superhero movies is sanitized. What happened to all those people in those city buildings they so casually demolish? Or all the cars they smash, or bridges they destroy, etc? People play such a minimal role in the superhero genre anymore that the new Flash movie had him racing around city streets without a single car or person on them. We are just CGI representations of NPCs, bodies incidental to the action.

A committed, mutually sacrificial marriage is far less scary than intentionally going through life alone for fear of narrowing your options. //

Entered with the right perspective, marriage matures you and enables you to grow alongside your spouse, being used for each other’s sanctification and recognizing your need for grace — rather than postponing marriage until you have everything “figured out,” only to realize you never will. It’s a weighty and holy covenant that should not be entered into lightly, but it’s also a covenant designed for imperfect, unfinished people. If you expect to be done maturing by the time you say, “I do,” your marriage won’t be a happy one.

But upon reading the thoughts of Michael Harriot — a columnist for The Grio, guest on MSNBC programs, “board-certified wypipologist” and for our purposes “guy with 500,000 Twitter followers” — I was so dumbstruck all I could think of was Adam Sandler’s 1995 classic film, “Billy Madison,” which, underneath its farcical façade, is appropriately enough a clarion call for the necessity of quality education:

At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

To the extent I can pull a premise out of Harriot’s mess, it seems to be that classical education “doesn’t measure a student’s ability to learn or teach them TO LEARN. It teaches students to learn LIKE WHITE PEOPLE LEARN who have already been deemed smart because they know white things.”

While obviously there are cultural differences that can affect one’s learning environment, I, along with the vast majority of normal people, don’t happen to believe that basic knowledge and how you go about learning it is relative to one’s skin color. Yet educrats everywhere increasingly believe what Harriot is saying. For instance, a proposed California mathematics curriculum declares that focusing on students “getting the right answer,” asking students to “show their work,” and grading them based on their ability to do problems correctly is “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.”

Of course, it’s even worse in subjects that aren’t as literal as math.

A Rocha is a global family of conservation organizations working together to live out God’s calling to care for creation and equip others to do likewise.

Nature conservation
Through residential field study centres and our site-based projects we carry out ecological monitoring and research in areas of high value for wildlife.

Church engagement
We support Christians for environmental action through conservation projects, resources for churches and involvement in global networks.

Environmental education
We encourage appreciation of nature and participation in its conservation, through environmental education and community outreach.

Progressives often cite Canada as a glorious utopia of good health and freedom.

Those of us who get our news from more reliable sources know that the opposite is the case.

But, personally, I did not have the return of the scourge of 15th-century sailors on my 2024 bingo card either.

Research by a young Canadian doctor working in Hamilton suggests that scurvy, a disease we mostly associate with life on sailing ships centuries ago, may be more prevalent in modern Canada than we might have thought. //

It also takes very little vitamin C to prevent scurvy. A single orange has five times the daily dose of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy.

The summer of 2023 may be remembered as an important point in human civilization as the threat to critical and efficient energy supplies began to recede.

Sweden’s government has ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil! Specific wind farm projects began to topple due to strong economic headwinds because the cost of the electricity to be generated was deemed too high. //

A little closer to home, Deep Blue California has recently announced the state is delaying the closure of 3 fossil-fuel-based power plants.

The reason? The green energy fantasies are not compatible with actual power realities. //

As has long been the case, the largest single source of electricity in California comes from natural gas.

The amount of natural gas in the state’s mix of energy resources has been reduced by about one-fifth in the past 10 years, falling from 130,995 gigawatt-hours in 2012 to 104,495 in 2022. //

CommoChief in reply to DaveGinOly. | September 1, 2023 at 8:34 pm
One way to actually help the environment is cut down on additional transmission lines. How about limiting imported electricity in each State to 10% of peak demand and tying that to the ability of the State to receive any waivers? So if CA isn’t generating 90% of peak electricity demand (they ain’t) then CA no longer gets to set their own more stringent standards for fossil fuels, types of appliances, airborne particulate matter, fuel efficiency in vehicles and so on. All they gotta do to regain their current ability to disrupt national markets is be willing to generate 90% of their peak electric demand. Maybe add in State refining capacity for special fuel blends as well; not just from already ‘cracked’ product imported from elsewhere but from crude oil. Surely CA would want to do that in their State with their enlightened and virtuous environmental safeguards? Since they’re so much smarter, better, virtuous and more caring than the rest of us. /s?

Two days after the Cuban foreign ministry claimed that the island's regime discovered a human trafficking ring responsible for impressing Cubans into military service under Russian command in Ukraine, The Intercept posted excerpts from documents hacked from an email account belonging to a Russian military officer.

A large percentage of Americans don’t know or outright disagree that marriage builds stronger families and is linked to better well-being for children, according to the annual American Family Survey. This is despite the fact that such benefits have been proven time and again. These attitudes may be due in part to nearly half of all U.S. children today spending at least part of their childhood in a non-intact family.

Overall, the majority of U.S. adults have a positive view of marriage, agreeing it has benefits for individuals and society. Still, a significant portion of respondents seem unclear about the value of marriage. For example, 54% of people didn’t agree that society is better off when more people are married, with 19% disagreeing and 35% being unsure. As to the questions about family stability, 48% didn’t agree that marriage is needed to create stronger families and 46% didn’t agree that marriage makes families and children better off financially.

As we grapple with the twin challenges of energy security and energy reliability, revisiting Nixon’s vision offers valuable lessons. //

In the annals of American energy policy, few moments stand out as boldly as the unveiling of Nixon’s nuclear agenda. His plan, set against the backdrop of the 1973 oil embargo, was both a response to the immediate crisis and a long-term strategy for the nation’s energy security. One allure of nuclear power was its potential to diversify America’s energy portfolio and market, providing a backup in case of a crisis in one sector. Nixon envisaged a future where America’s cities and industries would be powered by the atom, reducing domestic risks associated with dependence on foreign oil. //

However, several factors derailed Nixon’s nuclear dream. During the Cold War, concerns about nuclear proliferation were already mounting, particularly around civilian nuclear programs that could lay the groundwork for weapon development if nuclear energy expanded into politically unstable regions. These proliferation concerns, combined with environmental fears intensified by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and later the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, significantly dampened public and political support for nuclear energy. This climate of skepticism led policymakers to impose regulatory hurdles on nuclear plant construction that ultimately proved insurmountable.

Researchers at Qualys refuse to release exploit code for five bugs in the Linux world's needrestart utility that allow unprivileged local attackers to gain root access without any user interaction. //

The little tool is available separately and in various Linux distributions, and as Abbasi highlighted, is present by default in Ubuntu Server, at least. //

Needrestart is installed by default and was introduced in version 0.8 more than ten years ago. All versions of the utility before 3.8 are considered vulnerable and attackers could execute code as root. Versions after 3.8 have the fix applied.

A successful engine relight demonstration would pave the way for future Starships to ascend into stable, sustainable orbits. It's essential to test the Raptor engine's ability to reignite in space for a deorbit burn to steer Starship out of orbit toward an atmospheric reentry. //

The second change SpaceX will introduce on this test flight involves the vehicle's heat shield. These modifications will allow engineers to gather data before future attempts to return Starship to land at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas.

Perhaps as soon as next year, SpaceX wants to bring Starship back to Starbase to be caught by mechanical arms on the launch tower, similar to the way the company recovered the rocket's Super Heavy booster for the first time last month. Eventually, SpaceX aims to rapidly reuse Super Heavy boosters and Starships.

"The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles," SpaceX wrote on its mission overview page.

SpaceX installed catch fittings on the Super Heavy booster to allow it to be captured by the launch tower's catch arms. The ship will need similar fittings jutting out from its heat shield.

"The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles," SpaceX said. //

SpaceX seeks to fly Starships as many as 25 times next year, so cutting down the turnaround time between flights is fundamental to the company's plans. Making Starship capable of sustained orbital operations—something the in-space engine relight should enable—is a prerequisite for launching Starlink satellites or refueling Starships in orbit.