There are some interesting developments regarding the SARS-like coronavirus epidemic in China.
On the Saker’s website, the majority in the comment section believes the virus is an American bioweapon.
This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s not that crazy once you look into it. First of all, the virus genome was analysed and it turns out it looks like someone combined SARS virus and HIV. I don’t know if that stuff can happen in nature, but it looks very much like something you would cook up in a lab if you wanted to make something deadly. Also, it supposedly preferentially attacks Asian males, which is what you would want a bioweapon to do, and Americans very notoriously collected samples of Russian genome, which is what you would want to do if you wanted to create a virus that would preferentially attack Russians, and then pretend it’s not a weapon of war and instead somethin’s wrong with the Russians if the virus is attacking them. If it’s actually a bioweapon, which can be proved or disproved by DNA analysis, it was very carefully designed and released to mimic a natural thing, and in the flu season when such things are expected.
The goal of such a thing would be to weaken China’s economy and to facilitate international isolation. Also, it would seriously harm China’s military. However, if this actually is a bioweapon, of which it’s hard to be certain because I’ve seen nothing conclusive so far, this is the form of genocide attack that’s answerable with nuclear weapons.
I read an article yesterday that comments something in the leftist media (called “main stream” despite the fact that nobody actually reads it), and apparently they figured out something that was quite obvious to the rest of us for quite some time now: American Moon landing and space programme were achieved by competent white men. Not by the diversity hires. Everybody in the mission control and in the capsule was a white man. The leftists are right in stating that this is not their achievement and that they have nothing to celebrate. If a man on the Moon is a purely white male achievement, what is theirs? What do the diversity people have to show as their achievement? A 12 year old who doesn’t know whether he’s he or she? A middle-aged man who identifies as a little girl?
The thing is, the NASA Moon landing project wasn’t all white and male because of racism, but because the most competent people happened to be male and white, which is a hard pill for the leftards to swallow. Actually, when the most competent people happened to be the former Nazis from Peenemünde, they were put in charge of the project. I even know of a Yugoslav engineer, Milojko Mike Vucelić, who was in the mission control. I saw a video with a black woman weaving the core rope memory for the AGC at Raytheon. A woman even wrote software for the AGC, so it’s not like the doors were closed for women and minorities; they just had to prove they can do the job better than everybody else. The management wanted to go to the Moon, not fill quotas; they wanted the best people, and if the best programmer happened to be a woman, great, she’s in. If you just defended the doctoral thesis on rendezvous in orbit, you got picked to actually pilot a spacecraft. True story.
The “diversity first” era started at NASA with the introduction of the Space Shuttle programme, which was supposed to “save money” and not “waste it on space when it’s needed here on Earth”. As a result, it achieved nothing, cost so much it drained money from all other projects, and was so dangerous it killed two full crews of seven. But it sure was diverse. It didn’t achieve anything, but all colors and genders were represented. With the introduction of diversity, America gave up on its dreams, it gave up on virtue and merit, and instead embarked on a long voyage to become an African banana republic. Right now, it appears that they are closer to that goal than ever.
So yeah, that’s one thing they would have been better off not reminding us of, because people might figure out who was it that actually cost us not only our Moon, but our civilization as well. This here and now is their civilization, the civilization of diverse races and genders. But our civilization created the atomic age and went to the Moon.
A new study conducted by a Finnish research team has found little evidence to support the idea of man-made climate change. The results of the study were soon corroborated by researchers in Japan.
In a paper published late last month, entitled ‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’, a team of scientists at Turku University in Finland determined that current climate models fail to take into account the effects of cloud coverage on global temperatures, causing them to overestimate the impact of human-generated greenhouse gasses. … Given the evidence presented in the study, the Finnish team rounded out the paper by concluding “we have practically no anthropogenic climate change,” adding that “the low clouds control mainly the global temperature.” … The results sharply cut against claims put forward by many environmentalists, including US lawmakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who argue not only that climate change is an immediate threat to the planet, but that it is largely a man-made phenomenon. Ocasio-Cortez, better known as ‘AOC’, has proposed a ‘Green New Deal’ to address the supposedly dire threat.
I had a simple anecdotal method of figuring out there’s no climate change. Like, watching things for 40 years and noticing that nothing changed. Sea level rise estimated from tidal markings on known places: zero. Average weather patterns: the same. If not for the hysterical communists, one would see no problem whatsoever.
I recently saw articles speculating about asteroids with high metal content and feasibility of mining gold, platinum and similar expensive stuff there. The calculations is basically that there must be a zillion tons of gold there and if we bring it to Earth the price of gold would plummet because the supply would suddenly increase.
I agree with Schiff’s analysis. However, I would also explore the details, as I once used the “gold is a discovery of a golden asteroid away from being worthless”. At first, this argument is sound, since the value of gold is based on restricted supply, and all the gold ever mined on Earth would fit in a cube with a side of 20 meters.
However, another argument is that gold is extremely abundant on Earth. Earth is unique among the planets because of its extraordinarily high metallicity. That’s why we have a magnetic field at the time where other rocky planets have cooled down and no longer have a core floating in a molten mantle. We have so much heavy elements, that nuclear fission and radioactive decay create over half of the temperature that keeps Earth’s interior molten. A significant portion of that are the elements we would deem precious, such as gold and the platinoids. Also, Earth’s crust contains quite a lot of gold. It’s quite easy to create heavy machinery assisted by human labour here on Earth, and create mining shafts and what not. Despite all that, mining gold is barely profitable.
Now let’s imagine we really do find out that there are significant amounts of gold on some asteroid. You know what would happen to the price of gold on the market? Nothing. Why? Because we still haven’t managed to bring home a sample of material from an asteroid. In comparison to mining asteroids, having a steady population on Mars is child’s play.
Operating a mine, which basically means crushing millions of tons of iron ore into dust, separating what you want to keep from what you want to discard, all in micro-gravity, high radiation and no atmosphere, no food for the workers, it’s such an enormous task, it could realistically be imagined by a Kardashev type II civilization, and we are not yet type I. You can realistically imagine us crushing asteroids for mining when it’s easy for us to terraform Venus and have six billion people living there, and have cities on Titan and Europa. However, at that point adding all the gold in the solar system still wouldn’t be enough to cover a GDP of the size necessary to run a civilization that mines the asteroid field for minerals and creates a Dyson sphere with the remaining material, just because they need the solar energy to operate the thing. Mining asteroids for minerals isn’t something that would be done by Earth. It would be done as a joint endeavour of Mars, Europa and Ganymede, by the Russians and the Chinese who would make up the population of the colonies; Earth would be too busy talking about genders to take part.
A Delta IV rocket launch costs $17,400 per kg delivered to lower Earth orbit (LEO). Falcon Heavy is supposed to reduce the cost to $1700 per kg. Essentially, you have to pay at least an ounce of gold to get a kilo of anything into orbit. This includes an entire asteroid-mining spacecraft, with human crew because a mine can’t be safely operated over more than half an hour delay due to light speed. If an AI could operate a mine in the asteroid field independently, then it would have a Kardashev type II civilization and you would be either apes in a zoo, or fossils. If remote operation is impractical because of the speed of light, AI operation is possible but then you have bigger problems, it leaves you with the simplest and the most practical option of maintaining a manned space station in the asteroid belt, supplying it from Earth, shielding it from radiation and impact in an area full of high-speed debris, dealing with rock and metal dust produced by crushing ore, in microgravity conditions, mining gold, shaping it into a sun sail in order to slowly reduce its orbital velocity and send it to Earth, catch it there by the second crew somewhere in Earth or Moon orbit, melt it into gold bullion and send it to Earth to be recovered.
In short, gold is going to become cheap once the AI running the solar system finds no use for it, but until then, or other cause or extinction, it’s the best place to store your life savings.
I was recently asked (in person) why I think the Americans are considering starting a nuclear war if nuclear weapons are obviously world ending. I answered that the Americans don’t see it that way, and this article shows I was right:
“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability” said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline (Steven Aftergood)
What was the reasoning behind my argument? I said that the danger posed by the nuclear weapons was incredibly overstated by the anti-war activists during the 1980s, for instance the entire “nuclear winter” argument is incredibly overstated and there is no reason whatsoever to assume a full nuclear exchange between three superpowers would produce global cooling effects that would be worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and mankind has seen much worse, for instance “the year without a summer” caused by Mt. Tambora eruption. The people who actually do the thinking for Pentagon have much better information than normal people do, and even better than I do, and I consider myself quite well informed in that regard.
The increase in all-cause mortality was 4.6 percent (relative risk [RR] = 1.046, 95% confidence interval, 1.020–1.074) and was statistically significant (p < 0.001). For malignancies, the elevation of mortality was lower—RR = 1.014 (0.96–1.068)—and was not statistically significant (p = 0.26). Similarly, leukemia mortality RR was elevated to 1.020 (0.75–1.39), but not significantly (p = 0.90) and by less than all-cause mortality. The increase in all-cause mortality did not appear to concentrate in any of the disease groups we considered.
TL;DR version for people with American-levels of attention span is that the Americans did a series of nuclear weapon tests in Bikini 1946, to see how nukes would influence surface ships. Everybody was exposed to radiation and all kinds of fallout including un-fissioned Plutonium, and when you read articles about it you expect everybody to have died from cancer within five years from the experiment. However, it turns out that, to quote Wikipedia, “one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months”. In the time-span of half a century.
The data from other nuclear mishaps including Chernobyl shows similar, quite surprising outcomes. Stress from relocation is the main cause of death. People who didn’t evacuate from the exclusion zone had better health outcomes than those who were evacuated. The data from the Soviet K-19 submarine, nicknamed “Hiroshima”, where the officers decided to re-route radioactive coolant of the reactor through an external pump, spraying everybody on the ship with super-radioactive coolant, stuff got into the ventilation system and everybody was exposed to high levels of radiation. Of the crew of 125, “twenty-two crew members died during the following two years” (Wikipedia). Having in mind that they were sprayed with and/or inhaled radioactive substance while sealed in a metal container, one would expect everybody to have died of cancer; however, I’ve seen survivors living to very old age.
Essentially, you can even survive the levels of radiation exposure causing acute radiation sickness and live to die of old age in your 80s. Radiation is quite deadly in extreme doses, but those extreme doses are actually extreme, the kind Pripyat firemen received during their unfortunate attempt of putting down a reactor fire in Chernobyl. However, there are strong indications that both wildlife and humans can be exposed to quite high levels of radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and live quite normally.
Also, the amount of radioactive fallout released during the Castle Bravo fuckup was so large, it’s what one would expect from a limited nuclear war with dozens of atmospheric MIRV warhead explosions, and guess what, we’re still here. So, having in mind what I know, there are very good reasons to believe that the Pentagon people know more. Knowing more, they fear nuclear war less. However, the potential for miscalculations is great. They may plan for a limited nuclear exchange within a tolerable range of outcomes, and things may escalate wildly and end up as something altogether different.
